With the arrival of the Enlightenment, and its accompanying secularisation of Western society, humans gained certain freedoms but, in the process, lost the religious structures that had so often made the ‘meaning’ of their lives clear. (And that is, of course, to put centuries of history, philosophy and anthropology across cultures rather simply.) In this short, the US video essayist Evan Puschak (aka The Nerdwriter) connects this somewhat academic framework to something perhaps unexpected – the trope of characters sprinting to confess their love at the end of romantic comedies. Tracing a line from the explosion of romantic novels in the 19th century to the romantic comedies of the past century – including The Graduate (1967), When Harry Met Sally… (1989) and Notting Hill (1999) – he details why this cliché resonates so strongly with audiences living in our complex, postmodern world.
