The purpose of this research is to examine the plot structure of the motion picture How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, a romantic comedy. The plan of the research will be to set forth the pattern of ideas and events in the film and then to discuss the means by which the ideas and events are elaborated, with a view toward identifying the attributes of the arc of comic romance and resolution.
How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days provides an entry into what Frye might refer to as the fictional ethos of the comic romance. It is in the region of romance, in Frye's formulation (367), because it presents an idealized mise-en-scFne--the Manhattan of glamour jobs and the careerism of beautiful yuppies meant for each other but obliged to travel through a not-very-smooth course of true love. Meanwhile, and underneath it all, Ben has the emotional anchor of a supportive middle-class family, and Andie turns out to be much more vulnerable and decent inside than she thinks she is in the halls of New York publishing.
The film is fictional, under Frye's definition (365-6), because its characters fully inhabit their milieu, not being linked to any particular rhetorical resonance, still less an arguable social problem. It has a comic ethos because, consistent with Frye's views, the characters are operationalized in a particular setting that has its own logic, i.e., the fancy (idealized) New York world of high-powered advertising and high-powered magazine publishing. And of course the action is resolved satisfactorily, with emotional integration of the principals made complete.
Reference to the pattern of events in the film charts the path to resolution. Andie is an aspiring serious journalist who has written her way to the "how-to" column of Composure, a premier woman's magazine that is an invented proxy for Cosmopolitan. When her colleague Michelle, a serial failure at maintaining romantic relationships, gets dumped, her boss comes up with the idea of a how...