Love in Contemporary Cinema: Audiences and Representations of Romance

Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
	Paddling at the edges of the philosophy of love
	The process
	Analytical premises
	Gender, class and films
	Romantic love in film and audiences
	Identity and film audiences
1. Celluloid love: Romance, ideology and self-commodification
	Psychoanalytic theory and eros
		Eros and Plato
		Narcissism, identification and difference
	Feminist and queer theories on love
	Historical and sociological approaches to love
		Denis de Rougemont and the foundational myth of romantic
love
		Intimacy in contemporary sociological approaches to love
		Self-commoditised love
	Romantic identity
		Projective identification
	Ideology
		Gramsci and counter-hegemony
		Liminality and ideology
	Conclusion
2. Audience research, audiences of romance
	The incorporation/resistance paradigm and the ethnographic turn
	From the women’s films and melodrama to the bromance
	Romantic audiences
		New orientations in audience research
		New (studies of) romance
		Today’s audiences
	Conclusion
3. Love and technology: Control, affordances and prejudice
	Introduction
	Commodified love, commodified subject
		Intimate subject
	Romantic affordances
	641
		Numbers and female purity
	Conclusion
4. A class apart: Love, expectation, and the middle-class construction of self
	Introduction
	Production and characteristics of Blue Valentine and Once
	Of realism and ‘not-meant-to-work’ romances
	On characters of a romance and discourses of romance
	Platonic love in the era of globalisation
	A studio for love
	A motel or the classed rules of the game
5. Of happy endings and new men
	Introduction
	‘How many times can you fall in love before you can’t anymore?’
	And then it ends
	Beyond the happily ever after
		Anxiety and masculinity
6. Conclusion
	Introduction
	Affordances, expectations and commodified reality
		Commoditisation of love and self
		Classed love
		Teleology of romance?
		Masculinities
	Achievements and ways forward
Index