Reality vs Archetype — The Two Types of Romcom
What When Harry Met Sally shares with Dostoevsky
What's the difference between When Harry Met Sally and Just Like Heaven? To your average Joe there might appear to be no difference. Once you'd informed them that they are both romcoms they will both be placed squarely in the same box and quickly dismissed.
But as someone who, despite my corruption by Red Pill Pickup Artistry and leftist degeneracy, has become something of a connoisseur of the romcom, there is a major difference — something that cuts to the core of art, literature and human psychology. Those of you who have read the recent channel update will know I've been going through a minor existential crisis since 2024 got underway and what I've discovered is that the form that my bottoming out takes is not whisky or weed but romcoms.
Of course it's not simply enough to gorge myself on them but I have to find some meaning in this whole romcom-watching arc and so I of course still find myself philosophising and what I've been philosophising about in this bout of romcom action is a theme I've noticed in these romcoms that I've previously noticed in literature. It's the difference between the writings of Dostoevsky like Crime and Punishment or The Brothers Karamazov and the writings of Alexandre Dumas like The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo.
On the one hand we have the peak of literature. Dostoevsky has been held aloft by philosophers like Nietzsche, René Girard and Camus as an unparalleled psychological genius. Nietzsche said that Dostoevsky was "the only psychologist from whom I've anything to learn" while Camus said that "The real 19th century prophet was Dostoevsky, not Karl Marx".
On the other hand we have Dumas. And while there's no doubt that his works are considered among the classics there's no great philosophers of intellectuals out there edgily proclaiming Dumas to be a master of the psychological. The Count of Monte Cristo is the greatest revenge fantasy in the history of world literature while The Three Musketeers is a tale of heroism and friendship. And both of them are also love stories of course though it's not the main element.
Between these two writers I see the same distinction as I see between When Harry Met Sally and Just Like Heaven. The difference is reality.
The True vs the Fantastic
What When Harry Met Sally shares with the works of Dostoevsky is that both of these types of art take place in the real world that we inhabit everyday. They succeed insofar as they are believable. They try to be as true to our world as possible though they take particularly interesting contours of this reality as their subject matter.
These stories are not the norm by any means but they are true to reality and there is something satisfying and elevating about that. This psychologically accurate form of art leaves us with a sharper understanding of our world.
Turning to the other genre however we notice a very different relationship with reality. This type of art is better described as fantastic. In Just Like Heaven — spoiler alert — the female protagonist — a workaholic doctor played by Reese Wetherspoon is a ghost. But here's the twist — she can only be seen by the male protagonist — a recently widowed garden architect turned drunken puddle of grief played by Mark Ruffalo. And as the story progresses we find out that she's not actually dead; she was in a crash and her body is in a coma and as we discover only he can save her. And of course in turn she saves him and brings him back to life.
Now aside from the deliciously sappy romcom themes that animate this story let's compare it to When Harry Met Sally. When they graduate from college Sally drives Harry — her friend's boyfriend to New York where the two of them are moving. The two of them are insufferable in their own ways and they do not get along and end up parting ways upon arrival with Harry saying that it's not possible for a man and woman to be friends because the sex thing is always there. Fast forward five years and Harry's married and Sally is going out with a lawyer or something. They sit beside each other on a plane and once again they do not get along. Five years later they meet again — Harry is divorced and Sally recently broken up with the guy. This time they've both matured — i.e. Harry now believes me and women can be friends while Sally — the first woman in our culture to be called "high maintenance" — has loosened up a little and sure enough they become great friends.
And this is where the movie takes place. It's the progression of their friendship as they get closer then one night they sleep together Harry gets weird about it then they have a fight and the friendship is over and then on New Year's Eve Harry realises that he's in love with her and goes and finds her for midnight where he tells her:
"I came here tonight because when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible."
And movie ends and happily ever after. So it's not quite the harrowing wreckage of a Dostoevsky novel. But notice something about this story: there's nothing unrealistic in it. It's just the story of two people with opinions you could find by stopping random people on the street. There's nothing magical or unrealistic about the whole thing. It's a perfectly believable story and that is what gives it its power. It works because it's such a lovely and believable story and we can imagine ourselves having such a story. And of course the dialogue is incredible and the commentary on life and relationship and society is just delightful and these are the reasons it's considered the greatest romcom ever.
The Fantastic as Archetypal Dynamism
Turning back to Just Like Heaven, the power of the movie doesn't come from its realism. There's nothing possible about us finding a star-crossed lover who we are tied up with by destiny. Ghosts don't exist or at least they don't appear in the lucid conversational form of Reese Wetherspoon. And if a ghost tells you to stab a man in the chest and shove a bottle pourer in the wound please please don't do it. And then at the end it's the Sleeping Beauty kiss that brings her out of the coma. Now the movie isn't a total fantasy. The man is aware that what he's doing is mad. But the thing is the world he inhabits isn't our reality. It's a reality where ghosts fall in love and kisses bring people out of coma's. This isn't the real world. But — for some reason: it works.
And the reason it works is completely different to When Harry Met Sally. It works because of its fantastic element. You don't read The Count of Monte Cristo to get an accurate measure of someone's psychology. You read it for passion. What is happening isn't a rational pleasure it's not the appreciation of a Picasso which requires the intellect. To read The Count of Monte Cristo is to be filled with a raw energy of life.
To put it in Jungian terms it is an archetypal experience. Now obviously I'm being playful when I compare these romcoms to classical literature. And many of you might have guessed that this is a palette cleanser to remove some of the bad taste of the Culture Wars from my mouth and scare away people who are looking for "important" work here. And more than that there's the fun of thwarting pretentiousness by incongruously placing a romcom in the same category as Dostoevsky. Romcoms are about playing out a certain romantic theme — they are about love and you know the couple are going to end up together. But all this boring context aside I should also add that I'm not being completely facetious; there really is a point worth making here.
And that point is that there is something similar going on in Dostoevsky and When Harry Met Sally that is completely at odds with what is going on in Dumas and Just Like Heaven. The measure of success in the case of the Realistic genre is the degree to which it reflects the world we live in. If the characters are off or the world is off then the entire effect fails. It stops being believable and falls down. The characters need to be believable as people; their dialogue has to give us a sense of possibility that we might meet this person in 20th century New York or 19th century St Petersburg.
The Power of Archetypal Storytelling
The Fantastic genre however succeeds insofar as it evokes passion in us. It succeeds to the extent that it captures that libidinal energy and plays with it. It is hyperreal — that is to say it is more real than reality. Porn is also hyperreal in that it evokes the sexual drive despite being unlike real sex (though admittedly that is beginning to change as reality imitates art).
The Fantastic genre takes leave of reality and in doing that it opens up an infinity of opportunity. In doing so you could end up with spaghetti monsters in the sky but what would that evoke? The point isn't to depart from reality but to utilise the freedom from reality to capture passion in a way that reality can't.
This is what myths and fairytales do. They are hyperreal. Their realities aren't real but the feelings they leave us with are. The feeling we are left with is beyond what a regular story could have evoked in us. The gap between hearing someone else's story of winning the lottery and our own is massive. It is one thing to witness and another to experience it ourselves. The hyperreal storytelling of the Fantastic genre can cross that gap by breaking the rules of reality in storytelling. As well as porn, myths and fairytales we can also think of fantasy novels like the The Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter or the works of Brandon Sanderson but also a lot of sci-fi like Firefly or Stargate or the million and one superhero comics and movies.
The Fantastic genre fails to capture reality and for that it is often dismissed by critics. But I think they just don't get the purpose of it. It's a theme that recurs again and again in the biographies I've read. In his biography of Elon Musk Ashlee Vance talks about Musk's obsession with fantasy, sci-fi and comics as a kid. Alexander the Great was obsessed with Hercules; Bob Dylan loved adventure stories and was fascinated by Teddy Roosevelt; Teddy Roosevelt in turn was obsessed with hero stories when he was a bed-ridden kid; and where others turned to the Bible in times of trouble, Hitler — who had a collection of over a thousand hero stories — apparently turned to the cowboy stories of Karl May.
And so what we get out of these Fantastic stories of which Just Like Heaven is a classic example is motivation in the purest sense of the word. That is to say we get an archetypal force moving in us like the breath of a god. We are filled with an energy of life that lasts long after we have left the silver screen or the last page behind us. That's not to say that getting hooked by the Fantastic genre makes the world a better place just that it brings more life into the world. The point of the fantastic isn't to inspire good action but to inspire something greater than what we are.
Of course after spending time in the inflating archetypal forge of the Fantastic we could probably do with the reality check of a Dostoevsky novel. We could do with coming back down to earth and being more shrewd about our own motivations and energies and those energies of others.
But while I admit that this is true, I strongly believe that we've lost touch with the fantastic in the Postmodern age. We're too busy using irony to justify our departures from reality. The only colours we seem to have left are cringy earnestness or ironic detachment. But we all need a drop of the hyperreal. The ancients had their Homers and Virgils and Ovids. The Medievals had their religious prophets, saints and messiahs.
It might not be critically cool but I think it's essential. The Realistic genre is wonderful and it's hard to beat When Harry Met Sally but there's something in Just Like Heaven that reanimates the soul.
Please find some references which provide elaborations on the significance of his appearance here, his relationship to both Buddhism & Hinduism and the depth and scope of his Luminous Wisdom Teaching
http://www.adidam.in/forerunners.html
http://www.adidaupclose.org/Adidam_In_Perpetuity/dawnhorse.html#ashvemedha
http://www.adidaupclose.org/FLO/karmapa.html
http://www.integralworld.net/reynolds38.html
http://beezone.com/2main_shelf/tableofcontents-5.html
Re the last sentence of your second last paragraph what if a more-than-prophetic voice has actually appeared in this time and place who has accounted for understood and surpassed the collective Wisdom etc of all the past prophets etc.
Such is the case with the author and artist who wrote and/or created this Trilogy
http://www.adidaupclose.org/Literature_Theater/skalsky.html
And wrote all of the books featured on this site:
http://www.dawnhorsepress.com