“The Notebook [is] the standard by which all romance films are judged in popular America since it was released.” So says Marty Bowen — who, as the producer behind the Twilight series and The Fault in Our Stars, knows a few things about film romance.
And up until the record-breaking success of The Fault in Our Stars this past weekend, The Notebook held the mantle as the most significant love story of the last decade. With two relative unknowns (Rachel McAdams and Ryan Gosling) as the younger versions of two established actors (Gena Rowlands and James Garner), it grossed $115 million worldwide on a $29 million budget — a stellar number for a “female-oriented” film, especially one not released on Valentine’s Day. Over the last 10 years, it has sold an astounding 11 million DVDs — a sales number usually unique to Disney films, Harry Potter, and superhero films.
The Notebook is classic Nicholas Sparks, which is to say that it follows a pair of good-looking protagonists who resist each other until, under the slanting light of the coastal Carolina magic hour, they don’t.
But The Notebook also has two things that render it spectacular: There’s the genuine chemistry and charisma between all four of its leads, including the revelation of Ryan Gosling. Yet it also takes the traditional Sparks narrative to a second, more profound level. The soul of the story is Noah and Allie’s courtship: all of the parts with McAdams and Gosling. But the true heart is the secondary, shadow narrative of the aged Noah caring for Allie as she descends into Alzheimer’s, attempting to rekindle the memories of their enduring love before, at film’s end, they die, peacefully, in each other’s arms.
By setting the initial story so far in the past, we’re able to see the fruition of their love in the present. Unlike the rom-com, which cuts to the credits at the very beginning of a relationship, The Notebook proves that the romance went on far beyond the ending credits. Not just a year beyond, or a child beyond, but decades upon decades and a sprawling family beyond. In this way, The Notebook offers both the Sparks hypothesis — “true love conquers and endures all” — and its proof.
New Line Cinema / Via tumblr.com
That — and the exhilaration of watching McAdams jump into Gosling’s arms — is what makes The Notebook so addictive. The potential danger, however, is that the version of love proffered by the Sparks narratives — of which The Notebook is the apotheosis — might also be a form of what can only be called emotional pornography.
And yes: The Notebook and the rest of the Sparks genre are escapism. They’re melodramatic. But they’re also a coping mechanism, and an expression of frustration with a world that’s increasingly difficult for women — and men — to safely navigate.
If the contemporary rom-com is filled with the stresses of urban life — text messages, high heels, workplace drama, stylish high-rise apartments, shopping montages — then the Sparks love story is rooted in an almost pre-digital arcadian space, a stone’s throw from the ocean, filled with ancient trees bathed in golden light, and nary a computer or smartphone in sight. In the city, it’s all concrete and stoplights; in the Sparks utopia, it’s always 70 degrees and sunny, except when a thunderstorm comes and cues a love scene.
The rom-com focuses on the contradictory and frustrating demands that structure the lives of twenty- and thirtysomething women; the Sparks love story, however, offers a fantasy space in which money and race are invisible and the past — and any trauma associated with it — can be cured by the love of a good man. The rom-com has to be comedic in order to distract us from its implausibility, and the Sparks narrative is replete with tears in order to tether us to its emotional core and overarching message: Namely, that in the end, it’s love, not romance, that matters and endures.
Sparks himself has been adamant about the difference between his work and the “romance”: “I haven’t written a single book that could even be accepted as a romance novel,” he told Mediabistro. “I mean, there’s a completely different voice. They've got very specific structures; they've got very specific character dilemmas; they end completely differently; and they've got certain character arcs that are required in their characters — I do none of those things.” Sparks has been criticized for attempting to distance himself from the feminized genre of the romance novel and, indeed, his distinctions are, at bottom, a matter of semantics. Sparks’ works are certainly love stories, but what makes them powerful — and so successful in our contemporary moment — is their embrace of melodrama.
Melodrama, however, isn’t a genre so much as a mode: a register in which you render the world. Today, we mostly think of the word in pejorative terms — “stop being so melodramatic” — but melodrama has a rich and complex history that, when applied to narratives like the Sparks oeuvre, helps illuminate why otherwise preposterous narratives hold so much sway.
If you were living in the Western world pre-Enlightenment, your understanding of the world was guided by one thing: the church. The church composed the outer edges of the moral universe, dictating what was right and wrong, sinful and righteous. The world was filled with mysteries — what happened inside the body; what was the sun; was the earth a flat plane and were we going to fall off of it — and the spread of the church, and Christianity in general, was a manifestation of its ability to provide explanations, however vague, for those mysteries.
But the Enlightenment and the various scientific revelations that accompanied it undercut the church’s authority. The seasons, for example, didn’t happen because God willed them; they happened because we rotated around the sun. It’s easy for us to be blasé about these type of truths, but try to imagine just how seismic they would’ve been at the time. To be clear, it wasn’t as if droves of people were suddenly fleeing the church and taking up atheism. But if before, the moral compass was fixed, then post-Enlightenment, it began to spin wildly. Thus: the proliferation of some of the most influential philosophers of the last 500 years, many of them attempting to articulate new terms and negotiations of morality.
But not everyone in the late 18th and 19th centuries was up to reading a little light Voltaire, Rousseau, Hume, or Kant. So where’d the masses find their solace? The stage, which began to develop narratives, gradually deemed “melodrama,” that offered clearly discernible good guys, bad guys, and narrative resolution: a world that was morally legible and, by extension, cathartic and comforting.
Melodrama, however, wasn’t a genre so much as a mode — a register in which you render the world. There’s the basic genre (romance, tragedy, action, comedy) and the melodramatic mode imposed upon it: In a romance, for example, you still have all the same tropes (man, woman, love notes, angry parents, rings, kisses, weddings), but the arrangement of those tropes, and the truths they elucidate, are firmly rooted within the moral legibility that characterizes melodrama. In a melodramatic romance, for example, the woman who compromises her virtue must either suffer or die; in a melodramatic action film, the righteous hero will vanquish the deceptive villain. You left these productions secure that the world made sense.
With melodrama's basic modality set in place, it manifested over the next century in everything from “blood and thunder melodrama” on the stage, early silent film shorts involving women in peril, and the women’s film of the 1930s and ‘40s. It was in the “wet, wasted afternoons” of films like Stella Dallas and Now, Voyager that melodrama began to accumulate its pejorative, feminized connotations.
These melodramas aren’t always happily after ever, but they are, at bottom, morally ever-after. And that, above all else, is the appeal of the melodrama: It may not be realistic, it may seem facile, or overblown, or filled with acute highs and lows, but it’s always offering an escape — not to a world that doesn’t exist, but one in which, even amidst the horror and ennui and confusion, the moral compass stays true.
All melodramas represent a fractured world that can, ultimately, be righted. And that’s the overarching narrative thrust of the Sparks love story: The contemporary world may be filled with sadness, anger, and distrust, but that world, once blessed with love, can be transformed — and everyone else along with it. As the complications of real life fade away, the clarifying righteousness of enduring, self-sacrificing love remains, a guiding beacon in an otherwise morally murky world.
It’s easy to see how that sort of story would be appealing. But it doesn’t quite explain the incredible popularity of the Sparks oeuvre, which has grossed more than $740 million worldwide.
So what makes some of us keep watching? Part of the answer lies in predictability: The Sparks narratives are all slight variations on the selfsame themes. The protagonists’ ages, vocation, and locations vary, but only superficially — and the same goes for who dies, and for what reasons, and at what points in the narrative. They’re formulaic, but so are superhero movies, rom-coms, Westerns, and the rest of the films that top the box office. The formula is part of the solace; “genre” is nothing but a contract with the viewer, a promise that things will go as expected and desired.
Sparks thus follows the basics of the genre — there’s a man and a woman, something that separates them at first and brings them together at the end — and just modifies the attributes that structure the narrative, always keeping within a very Sparksian rendering of the world. Setting, characters, plot, and resolution — the details of each are crucial to the Sparks fetishization of the traditional American dream.
If the popularity of the Sparks oeuvre springs from a desire to return to the spirit of the pioneering American dream, it makes sense that the majority of his novels take place in the settings that come closest to that nostalgic ideal: the South, where time has stood mostly still — at least as depicted in the Sparks movies. Life moves slower, seems smaller. People care about their neighbors, and kids run free through the streets.
But the Sparks films take place in an even more specific version of the South: either North Carolina (Message in a Bottle, A Walk to Remember, Nights in Rodanthe, The Last Song, Safe Haven), South Carolina (Dear John, The Notebook), or Louisiana (The Lucky One). The Carolinas offer all the picturesque qualities of the ocean without the connotations of wealth affixed to living next to the sea anywhere else: In California, you live next to the sea because you’re a fancy snob; in the Carolinas, you live next to the sea because you’re a landscape painter, or you run the corner store, or your family always has. That’s not true, of course, but that’s how the Sparks universe works.
It’s also a South wholly removed from any specter of racial struggle or history. All Sparks protagonists are white; when there is a character of color (Viola Davis as the inn owner in Nights in Rodanthe; Al Thompson as Shane West’s best friend in A Walk to Remember), their race is never mentioned. The Sparks South, then, is a South absent its history and, in most cases, stricken of any visual reminders of its fraught past.
The Boone Hall Plantation, which doubles as Allie's summer home in The Notebook.
Rennett Stowe / Via Flickr: tomsaint
Wormsloe Plantation, aka Will's family home in The Last Song.
Chuck Redden / Via Flickr: redden-mcallister
Indeed, many of the most striking Sparks settings are, in fact, old plantation homes: In The Last Song, the Wormsloe Plantation doubles as the home of Will (Liam Hemsworth); in The Notebook, the Boone Hall Plantation is Allie’s summer home; Beth’s ex-husband’s family lives in the Housmas House Plantation in The Lucky One; and Savannah’s family home in Dear John is the Cassina Point Plantation. Granted, the owners of these grand structures are almost always antagonists: barriers to love, or stricken by the lack of love. Not because their money most likely came from a history of exploitation and racialized violence, though — but because they’re rich and therefore blind to the powers of love.
Sparks films take place almost entirely en plein air. On the beach, of course, but also at the fair, in the stables, at a construction site, going canoeing or, in so many cases, eating a meal (a picnic, a fancy dinner, attending a family gathering) under the moonlight or at twilight. Even the interior spaces — usually family homes and churches — have so much light as to feel outdoors. And if the outdoors is our natural state, then the Sparks setting places us firmly within it: When we’re outside, the cares of civilization melt away; only the most essential cares (love) remain.
Relativity Media / Warner Bros.
Sparks films are also, without exception, in close proximity to a large body of water: usually the ocean, but a lake or lazy river will do as well — as will a tremendous rainstorm. Water functions as a clarifying narrative catalyst, the place where characters let down their guards and become their truest, most honest selves. In the beginning of several narratives, characters spend significant amounts of time staring at the water, as if desiring that sort of honesty but not quite ready to give themselves to it. Somewhere around the end of the 45-minute mark, the character is persuaded to revel in some body of water — in The Last Song, Will takes Ronnie scuba diving in the aquarium; in The Notebook, Allie and Noah frolic in the waves; in Safe Haven, Katie gets invited to a family outing to the beach — and, in the process, let down his or her guard.
But it generally takes a rainstorm for the real emotional revelation to happen: most famously in The Notebook, but also in Dear John and Safe Haven. In The Lucky One, the figurative rain comes from an outdoor shower; in Message in a Bottle, the storm takes place just outside the window; in Nights in Rodanthe, it’s a veritable hurricane, threatening to take down the entire house.
In the Sparks film, the abundance of emotion is too much for any character to articulate; the unspeakable thus overflows into the mise-en-scène, manifesting itself in the imposing form of the plantation, the roiling sea, the thundering sky. These filmic tropes are the descendants of classic melodrama: a way to communicate emotions too abundant to put into words.
The South, the water, the easygoing familiarity of rural life: They’re all backdrop, but they’re a backdrop that amplifies the personality and actions of the Sparks character types — of which there are approximately five.
1.) The Woman
If the rom-com heroine is the postfeminist paragon, obsessed with shopping and sex — always put together, always walking with a purpose — then the Sparks heroine is her casual inverse: She looks great in cutoffs and a tank top, and her hair looks best when misted with the sea air. The rom-com heroine rarely has children, although she feels her biological clock silently ticking; the Sparks heroine is either a single mom — and a good one — or naturally maternal.
Touchstone Pictures / Relativity Pictures
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