Romantic comedy and the virtues of predictability

While cinematic narratives are often evaluated and enjoyed in terms of their ability to captivate through suspense and revelation, in this essay, I mount a defense of narrative predictability. I take the genre of romantic comedy, arguably the most critically derided for its formulaic nature, as a case study, arguing that not only are there virtues to predictability but that the negative values that have been attached to it are often masculinist and politically suspect. More specifically, through a close reading of Nelson Lyon’s 1971 film The Telephone Book, I consider what romantic comedy shares with pornography, another genre that trades on the knowledge – evident from the start – that characters will, in the end, come together.