Modern Romance (1981)

directed by Albert Brooks

Jenny Montooth

“She said we had to break up or get married, so we got married.”

A lot of movies love to have this quote from a man. He’s usually around the age of 35, and he’s miserable in his routine. Even though his wife is the most amazing woman on the planet, he can’t stop thinking about the wistful, cheerful woman he’s just met who has clearly never gone through any trauma in her life. Even though it is a long patriarchal tradition in our society that the straight man has to propose to his partner in order for marriage to happen, when his simple dream girl spins around a streetlight and asks him why he’s married, he will always make it sound as though he had a gun to his head and he’s been a prisoner ever since. He will project every fantasy on this woman who is now seen as his escape from his seemingly already perfect reality.

Movies love to portray men as simple-minded doofuses that don’t make their own decisions, but I think movies tend to neglect exploring a man’s internal behavior. Is it not normal for everyone to panic that we’ve chosen our forever partner and will never have the chance to date again? Haven’t we all met someone we had a connection with, and wondered what it would be like if we met this person before the one we got married to? Haven’t we all started clinging to a crush because we need an escape from our reality—even if we like that reality? It is easier to portray men in a film as horny assholes.

These thoughts are in no way excusing the behavior of men, but I wish movies also portrayed how difficult it is for men to convey their feelings, because a patriarchal society makes it almost impossible for them to do so. They’re left to let things simmer in their heads and not become normalized. Men don’t have places to turn for support when they get these feelings, and out of fear of conflict they don’t bring it up to their partners. It leads them to make rash, intense decisions that they usually regret.

I recently saw Albert Brooks’s early ‘80s classic Modern Romance, and I was shocked at how timely the movie still feels. Not just because the fashion is back, but the plot revolves around a neurotic man named Robert (played by Brooks) who breaks up with his girlfriend Mary because he doesn’t think she’s the one. After breaking it off, Robert comes home and lies in bed, where he slowly starts to panic at the thought that he’ll never meet someone as good as her again. He then obsesses over getting her back and gets overcome with jealousy at the thought of Mary getting attention from other men. Even though the theater I was sitting in shared a lot of laughs over his ridiculous behavior, it was clear that the women sitting around me started squirming uncomfortably in our chairs, groaning and becoming more uncomfortable with this character as his behavior went too far—like when he insisted to take her away from her male co-workers and taking her to a faraway cabin for the weekend. After pestering her and annoying her for the whole car ride (he says “kisses are more important than life” like a million times), the whole theater gasped and shrieked “NO!” when he proposed to her and to all of our surprise she said yes.

Cringing in the theater while watching Modern Romance, we were all so angry at Mary for saying yes to Robert’s proposal even though he was acting insufferable and jealous for their entire relationship. But was she too terrified of being alone? I truly appreciated that Albert Brooks showed jealousy, neuroses, and clinginess through the perspective of a man. We see these traits too often only portrayed negatively from women in movies, but we all deserve further analyses of men’s traits too—it’s more than being horny assholes, as Hollywood likes to show. Well, sometimes it’s more than that.

 The only thing that makes a person feel worse than being trapped is being alone.

It brought me back to all of the times I have been through this emotional whirlwind with men. When I was 19, my first true, serious boyfriend called me at 3 am to tell me that he had slept with someone else and that we needed to break up. We had dated for over a year in 2010 while we still lived in our hometown while commuting to college. Then at the end of August, he transferred to Penn State, and reassured me that we could make it work long distance. He was making an exciting leap towards freedom for the first time, and meanwhile I was still stuck in our  hometown, going through terrible grief after having a falling out with my mom. He was on top of the world, and I felt like every piece of stability in my life was gone. I had to move out of my childhood home, and bounced from friend’s house to friend’s house after that, usually staying in an old bedroom of a friend who had already left for college. I was always surrounded by old photos and soccer trophies, and it was a cruel reminder that everyone was moving on while I was trapped in grief.

Todd called me after his first day of class, excited to say that the girl next to him in class called him hot, and that I should be proud of him for not engaging with it.  Over the next two months, I noticed him bringing her up more in conversation and receiving phone calls from her at all hours of the day. It only took him two months after moving to college to sleep with someone else, but as I look back on it now, I really can’t hold any anger towards him. I know he was also scared about being on his own for the first time, and perhaps both excited and relieved that other women would be interested in him without me. I also couldn’t ask for a 20-year-old college boy to carry the abandonment trauma I didn’t even understand. He was in an impossible situation.

I was completely shattered after we broke up, but I also felt a lot of freedom in my mind that wasn’t spent stressing about a long-distance boyfriend. My trauma led me to almost immediately cling to someone else. Todd broke up with me right before Thanksgiving in 2010, and by Christmas I found comfort with a friend named Chris—suddenly I realized that I had never even loved Todd the way I loved this person. When Todd found out, he left his finals early to come back to our hometown and show up at the door of the latest home I was staying in. He told me that he blocked all communication from the girl he was seeing in the hopes of winning me back. He couldn’t fathom the idea that I had moved on with someone else. He told me that he wanted me to be his girl again. When I said I wasn’t sure, he screamed and punched the wall. I had never seen him act this way before—it was like jealousy led him to a long-term blackout. The fear of being alone activated his nervous system in a way that made him a different person from who I knew.

Suddenly it was on me to pick who I would end up with, and the fear of losing Todd or Chris led me to secretly see both of them at the same time for a while. Most people who know this story celebrate me for being empowered to sleep with both of them at the same time without the other knowing, while deeming Todd an asshole for cheating on me just months before. But we had the same emotions, didn’t we?

I remember when I finally broke it off with Todd and gave him back the sapphire necklace he gave me. I had a sense that I was giving up a real sense of security, one I really missed since my life had changed so drastically just a few months prior. But I was also overcome with the excitement and confidence that I had the strength to make a decision to be without him. We are used to seeing these empowering endings in modern films as well, ones where both the wives and the mistresses break it off with their asshole husbands and start a new chapter on their own. I think this is why we were all so shocked when Modern Romance ended with a proposal.

It’s easy to portray these emotions in movies for laughs. This movie is a brilliant comedy, as are many that depict these feelings.The real challenge is to show these emotions for what they are and hold grace for them when they happen.

Jenny Montooth is a writer, photographer and science communicator in Washington, DC. She received her MA in Historical Studies at UMBC, where she focused on the Black Power Movement. Follow her on Twitter and send her a joke @jenn_montooth.