Cinecism: On Splitsville, The Threesome and Hetero-Optimism for the Cynical Soul?
Words: Maia Wyman
Cinecism is our new monthly film column from our culture critic Maia Wyman, also known as Broey Deschanel. You can read our interview with her here.
At the heart (no pun intended) of romantic comedies is a war between love and society. From the repressive class stratification of the Georgian landed gentry to the encroaching corporatization of human connection, romance often pits the timelessness of love against a problem du jour. Today, that problem is hetero-pessimism.
Hetero-pessimism (now re-named “hetero-fatalism”) is a term coined by Asa Seresin back in 2019 to describe a rise of “performative disaffiliations” occurring among straight people in recent years. By this he means that people, most often women, in the heterosexual dating scene have become fatigued with the many ways that heterosexual romance produces a gendered dynamic of women wanting and men avoiding. This, for Seresin, results in expressions of giving up altogether, without ever actually doing so. It’s a temptation to which I myself am not immune - phrases like “men suck” and “I wish I was a lesbian” make frequent appearances in our group chats.
As contemporary society becomes ever-more addled by dating apps, gender parity, and AI girlfriends, it’s no surprise that human bonds are becoming ever looser. And for those seeking connection today, this can be incredibly frustrating. If there was ever a call for the romantic comedy to answer, this was it.
Studio greed placed the rom com on a long hiatus over the past decade, so the recent phase of the romantic comedy, kicked off by the likes of Anyone But You and No Hard Feelings, is still in its infancy. But this year has seen a remarkable uptick. In the past few months alone, three rom coms have been released which take aim at the fickleness of modern romance: Oh, Hi!, the latest Logan Lerman vehicle; Splitsville, an ensemble comedy by relative unknown Michael Angelo Covino and the second rom com this year to star Dakota Johnson; and most recently, The Threesome, which stars rom com regular Zoey Deutch as a “difficult” woman embroiled in a complicated pas de trois. But of the three, Splitsville is the only movie to have a convincingly optimistic approach to the contemporary romantic landscape.
Oh, Hi! taps into truths about dating culture, both endemic and personal, that will get a rise out of the viewer on either side of the conversation. It’s an attempted subversion of the “good-for-her” flick - allowing our main character, Iris (Molly Gordon), to exact punishment on a dreamy man, Isaac (Logan Lerman), who gives her all the implicit promises of a relationship and then takes it all away with one short “I’m not looking for anything serious” conversation. But no sooner than this hyperbolic punishment begins that the movie opts for realism, and instead spends the rest of its time punishing our heroine for her actions. She ends up alone. He ends up alone, like he wanted. On both sides heteropessimism is reaffirmed: Women are attached, men are avoidant, and it’s on the woman to sit back and accept that she can’t have it all.
Oh, Hi! is genuinely funny and enjoyable in its own right. But the tonal confusion leaves you feeling quite bleak. It’s a ‘good for her’ gone wrong that offers no catharsis.
“It forgoes attempts to propagandise straight culture’s attempts to “queer itself” through sex nerd polyamory, and instead sends its characters on a precocious merry-go-round of desire and betrayal that spins so fast as to equal the playing field.”
The Threesome, with its incredible dialogue and characterisations, felt much more promising, but not for long. The film builds towards a convincing and even exhilarating romance between soft-boy Connor (Jonah Hauer-King) and brash Olivia (Deutch), but over time I began to despise Connor. Released into a post-Roe universe, the film starts with a threesome between Connor, Olivia, and a quiet, friendless girl named Jenny (Ruby Cruz). Then has Connor pressuring Olivia into keeping her pregnancy, only to find out he knocked up Jenny, who he slept with and subsequently ghosted the morning after the inciting threesome. He then gets angry at Olivia when he finds out that she, like him, also slept with someone else during their brief time broken up, and then abandons her during labour when he finds out that her baby is the other man’s - the baby that he pressured her to have in the first place. To top it off, the movie ends with Olivia begging his forgiveness - putting one man’s romantic fantasy over the very real, very heated, very gendered dimensions of reproductive politics. If there was anything to reignite my heteropessimism, this was it.
Seresin says that because heteropessimism allows women to dissociate themselves from traits of attachment and oversensitivity, it has an “anesthetic effect.” A flaccid ouroboros of pathetic gendered dating cycles, the problem only begets itself. And thus, according to Seresin, heteropessimism is “anticathartic.” In a New York Times essay, Jean Garnett wonders whether there’s a way forward for those condemned to heterosexuality. Recounting her own tribulations with dating men, she imagines the creation of an “intersubjective third” - “a space in which your needs and mine, your desires and mine, recognise and accept each other without competing for dominance.” For Garnett, to arrive at such a space, we must reach a point of mutual surrender.
Our third film, Splitsville, is about a man named Carey (Kyle Marvin) who is rather abruptly dumped by his hot wife Ashley (Adria Arjona) after an admission of infidelity, and then subsequently sleeps with Julie (Dakota Johnson), the wife of his best friend Paul (Corvino), with whom she enjoys an alleged open relationship. With the couples now destabilized entirely, the film descends into a tailspin of non-monogamy. Carey and Julie strike up a relationship. Ashley and Carey strike up an agreement wherein she brings various assortments of boyfriends back to their shared home as long as Carey can be friends with them. While Paul desperately flings himself at any woman worthy enough to make Julie jealous. Spiltsville is not a perfect movie, but it’s the only one to indulge Garnett’s suggestion that maybe an “intersubjective third” is the way forward. It forgoes attempts to propagandise straight culture’s attempts to “queer itself” through sex nerd polyamory, and instead sends its characters on a precocious merry-go-round of desire and betrayal that spins so fast as to equal the playing field. The film tries out every imaginable configuration of romantic partnership, and ends with its characters so worn out by all the choice as to finally acquiesce to each other. In a scenario where everyone sucks, but you love them anyways, there’s nothing else to say other than “okay fine, get on with it then.”
All three movies question the authenticity of their central relationships, and both The Threesome and Splitsville attempt to metamorphosize these traditional relationships by completely breaking their structures, introducing a third (or fourth, or fifth) person, and building them back up again as something entirely new. But Splitsville is the only one that seems to reach actual catharsis. As I exited the theatre, I had a placid smile on my face.
In the midst of writing this very column, a guy who broke my heart a few years ago walked into my neighborhood coffee shop. As he came over to say hi (oh, hi!), I failed to realize that in full view was the Google doc I was working off of - with the title of this article at the top in large font and below it a link to Garnett’s article, titled “The Trouble With Wanting Men.” Still, he was amiable. We hugged and said goodbye, and as I watched him walk away I was reminded of the pessimistic stupor that dominated my past few years as a single woman. I continue to imagine my own “intersubjective third,” but I think the spell is somewhat broken.
