The Zugzwang of Desire
How What’s Your Number? Reveals the Horrible Undead Fundament of the Romantic Comedy Genre.
In his Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, Alexandre Kojeve provides the groundwork by which Lacan will later determine lack to be the foundational character of the subject. Kojeve writes: “To desire Being is to fill oneself with this given Being, to enslave oneself to it. To desire non-Being is to liberate oneself from Being, to realize one’s autonomy, one’s Freedom. To be anthropogenetic, then, Desire must be directed toward a nonbeing—that is, toward another Desire, another greedy emptiness, another I.” Desire, therefore, never attaches itself to being, except fictionally through the mediation of another subject—another lack. This means that the subject can never truly make-whole its desire, can never totally circumspect the object desire takes because this desired object can never be such. Instead, desire do-si-dos another desire, circling back to back and blind to the lack that motivates its movements.
No film I’ve seen in the past year has understood this relationship better than Mark Mylod’s What’s Your Number?* which poses the question of the centrality of lack in the production of desire—as well as the desire to turn that lack into Being. By reducing the accidental content of the Romantic Comedy to rubble, Mylod tears the genre down to the bone—revealing the terror at its foundational level. Counterintuitively, by reducing the material of the genre to pure objective presence, the lack at the heart of the subject becomes all-consuming, tries even more desperately to attach itself to Being, and resolves itself ultimately in the acknowledgement of its own vacuous momentum.
The film opens with Anna Ferris** asking, “how many relationships do I have to have before I meet the right guy?” As my partner noted after watching the trailer, this question is at the heart of every rom-com produced today, it’s just that most films have the good manners not to come out and state the stakes so blatantly. This is the (accidental?) genius of WYN? that the accidents that make up the content of most rom-coms are swept away to reveal the horror of the fundamental premises of the genre. It’s not surprising, then, that Ferris’ question is given a quantitative answer: 20. As in, you can have 20 relationships before you’ll be precluded from ever finding the right guy. This is the desire of the subject in relation to his own desire, that is, to produce it at the level of the matheme. This trope is sprinkled throughout the fraught history of the rom-com, as in 27 Dresses (2008), titled for the count of Katherine Heigl’s bridesmaid dresses—an eschatological sign of the limited opportunity for her to find a husband of her own. Or My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997), where juvenile Julia Roberts sets the age of 28 as the outer limit of her willingness to look for a partner. Or The Proposal (2009), where Sandra Bullock’s character must wed Ryan Reynolds by the end of the year to avoid deportation and, by extension, a lifetime of misery. This pattern is nothing more than the means of signifying that material about which desire circles: the death drive. However, WYN? is exceptional in that it treats this representation as objective truth. All other films maintain a sense of play, of accident about the conditions under which limits are placed on the potential of desire. Anna Ferris is not offered this flexibility—her fate is written in the liberation/sheer terror of the object as such.
The expression of the death drive as the romantic limit is not the only feature of the rom-com genre that receives this treatment from Mylod’s film. The number 20 as the fixed maximum of lifelong sex partners is received from a Marie Claire article—an article that the female characters of the film are eager to validate as scientifically supported (“A researcher from Harvard” is invoked to end all speculation over the veracity of the figure). The presence of woman’s-magazine-as-legitimating-trope used so sincerely and without question can’t help but draw attention to the dozens of films where female protagonists’ emptiness and lack of interest in anything other than men is hidden behind the veil of a profession writing for women’s magazines and other such media. Examples include Never Been Kissed (1999), How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days (2003), Knocked Up (2007), The Ugly Truth (2009), Sleepless in Seattle (1993), The Holiday (2006), and on and on and on. The pretense of career interest dissembles the fact that what is at the heart of these characters is lack, a lack that attaches itself to the lack of desire in the men that these women ultimately pursue through the accidental presence of “article ideas.”
The film concludes when a wealthy businessman proposes a European vacation to the unemployed Ferris, who quickly turns him down. “I wouldn’t be myself,” she explains, which is to say, she would have to cover up her lack in order to take on the role of his girlfriend/wife. The audience pauses, because WYN?—unlike other films of the genre—hasn’t done the necessary work to demonstrate that the handsome rich man is evil. In fact, if anything, he seems less reprehensible in his treatment of others (and especially women) than Chris Evans. But as the presentation of genre qua object, the film simply relies on the expectation that the rich man will be proven irredeemable and be fairly rebuked. Not so here. It is rather because he has interests, has identifications to distract from his central longing, that Anna Ferris realizes she would have to take on some of the same in order to exist with him. So she explains that she has a better offer: the offer of the nothing waiting at her apartment, where she doesn’t have to leave the bed, doesn’t have to be interested in anything other than the ceiling-fan-like monotony of her desire circling another’s.
This is the terror waiting at the end of the film: the lumbering, groping gait of an empty vessel slouching towards eternity. If my description of the love relationship is zombie-like, it’s no accident. What’s Your Number? makes clear where the true heart of the Romantic Comedy genre rests: in the space Lacan called “between two deaths.” With the momentum of the drive, but none of its attendant satisfaction, the two run mindlessly again and again into their inability to become one. Mylod has created a monster, to be sure, but a monster that can’t help but make us acutely aware of the distance we’ve gone awry from the promise of the Screwball Comedy. No longer passionate, no longer motivated, no longer imaginative. Just a number and its hunger.
*With the obvious exception of Kiarostami’s Certified Copy, but let’s not split hairs.
**In order to draw attention to the vacuity of the concept of “character” left to the Romantic Comedy genre, I will not be using character names.
†One result of this mise-en-abyme is the amount that the characters consume. As Zizek has said, taste in its sensual material has become abstracted from the nourishment of food, has become a “nothing” that forms the basis of the desire to eat. It makes perfect sense, then, that when Ferris asks the foundational question “how many relationships do I have to have before I meet the right guy?” her mouth is full.
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sure if serious…
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