Romance is a sturdy and flexible serial form, allowing for a theoretically endless series of encounters (which explains its usefulness in superhero comic books and why the Indiana Jones and Star Wars movies "naturally" produce sequels). Romance doesn't have to be set in the middle ages, it doesn't have to contain all of the elements (and the chivalric form isn't the only configuration of them), and it doesn't have to be Christian. Interestingly, it doesn't even have to feature righteous characters engaged in noble action. There is also ironic romance, one in which the values are inverted.
Arguably the greatest example in American movies is Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976), from Paul Schrader's script, in which Travis Bickle, an alienated, psychotic loner, develops an evangelical disgust for the daily dirt and corruption of New York. To assuage his feelings he tries to assassinate a presidential candidate but fails and so turns his energies to rescuing a 12-year-old prostitute instead. Romance, while the genre most openly hospitable to the supernatural, doesn't even have to be fantastic--Taxi Driver, based in part on the diaries of Arthur Bremer, the man who shot George Wallace, shows with naturalistic detail how Travis fills his empty days and ends up in the headlines, a hero to the papers (which is part of the irony). Though he does save the girl (who doesn't, however, want to be saved), we know he's doing it for more wrong reasons than right ones.
Romance is how Travis shapes his boiling frustration and blocked sexual feelings into a course of action. Schrader and Scorsese understand the enormous difficulty of conveying the story of someone like Travis and so use the romance form almost against itself, suggesting how that highly stylized genre can distort the narrative it's telling. That's why it's so appealing to Travis in the first place, it turns the nothingness of his life into a quest. The cinematography is at times hallucinatory but the movie remains lucid: we can see things from Travis's perspective without thinking we're meant to adopt it.
A simpler and more common form of ironic romance would be heist pictures and most film noirs--anything in which black has been substituted for white in the moral scheme. Yeah, we identify with the people pulling off the crime, but all the movie has to do is acknowledge somehow its reliance on our suspension of disapproval, so that we always know which way is up. The formal way of doing it in underworld settings is by having the criminals fail--in John Huston's Asphalt Jungle (1950) we see them killed or arrested one by one; in Stanley Kubrick's The Killing (1956) the money blows away in the wind. Failure is usually combined with an air of fatalism, as in the adaptations of James M. Cain books, Double Indemnity (1944) and The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), an air that by itself tells you no good can come of these sociopathic shenanigans. You could say that these movies appease our disapproval after having served their own ends by making us root for the criminals. But they also let us get close to humans whose ways of life we probably wouldn't want to know about first hand. In that sense they enlarge the audience's experience.
![Asphalt Jungle [VHS]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/21WQT2N69TL._SL120_.jpg)
Article comments
1 - peter
Great review, thanks a bunch. It's not everyday that I find a review of a movie that I agree with so much. I'm glad you pointed out the moral issues which heist movies have in abundance and also the predictability of the movie. I waited until the end of the movie only because I thought there would be a clever plot twist in the end...I thought maybe they would pull off the final heist just like the "italian job" and possibly have all the mini's as a distraction from where the gold really is. Or I thought that the 'damsel' would run away with the black knight and take the money with her. I was really looking for an interesting twist or plot change to make the rest of the film worth it, but I was horribly disappointed. Also, the line dialogue, especially between Norton, Wahlburg and Therone was especially terrible. The entire "date" scene was absolutely pathetic. In my mind, the *only* redeeming parts of the movie were the scene you mentioned with Statham and Green or the running "Napster" joke with the cameo from Shawn Fanning. Also, the second time I watched it (not by choice exactly..) I noticed that Spiderman makes an appearance in the movie. I took some screenshots and posted them on my webpage if you're interested: peterswift.org.
Anyhow, great review, I enjoyed it.
2 - jadester
this is exactly why i don't wish to see it. The original was cool - and no, it didn't really portray the criminals as being characters the viewer should be sympathetic to.