There has been a lot of hullabaloo recently that romantic chick flicks are undermining women’s ability to date and have real relationships, since women are clearly stupid and can’t separate real life from fiction. Romance novels get the same bad rap. All that spectacular sex, and no real life man could ever live up to it. Men and therapists fear our discontent. We’ll become unhappy and start questioning the quality of our lives. We may start leaving our mediocre husbands in order to be readily available for when Brad Pitt shows up in a tux; or worse, we’ll start having affairs with our gardeners. I mean, look how well that’s working for the housewives on Wisteria Lane.  

I get great enjoyment from watching chick flicks. They make me happy. And call me crazy, but in this stressed-out, hurry-up, tech-saturated world where if you’re not multi-tasking six things at one time, you’re not living up to your full potential, I need happy. I need the pure escapism that $8.75 can buy me. I love books, but much of the time, it’s so much easier to get lost in a romantic comedy. I need to know that there is an Everywoman heroine who also feels invisible, underappreciated and also not living up to her full potential. Only in two hours, I see how she managed to do something about it.

Who is this killing anyway? Why is it so wrong to want to watch something that makes me feel happy, a little more in fellow-feeling with the human race, and heck, maybe even a little more generous to the male species? 99% of the time when I’m watching a romantic comedy, I’m not thinking, “Gosh, my life isn’t like that. I’m unhappy. Where’s my gardener?” Nor am I bitterly thinking, “No man would ever say something like that.”

Okay, part of me thinks “No man would ever say something like that.” Because it is awful rare you get a speech like that. But think about it: how many speeches is this romantic heroine actually getting anyway? One. She’s getting the great speech. Now tell me, is that really too much to ask?

I don’t think One Great Speech is too much to ask from a guy; and movies certainly don’t imply he’s going to be making these speeches every other week. He gets kissed, then the cameras pull out for us to see they’re now married and living in an unwitty everyday sort of life. No more speeches needed. He’s already done the Great Speech.

The Great Speech is the summary, the summation of what everyone learned. And let’s be honest, it’s usually the guy who has to learn something. I can count on one hand the movies where the woman is giving the Great Speech: 27 Dresses, Bridget Jones’ Diary…yeah, those are the only ones I can think of. There’s a snarkism that can be made there, but I’ll save it.

I’m a fan of the One Great Speech because it makes the whole book. Just like how one line can make a whole movie. One great speech from a guy, and you’ll remain married to him for the next fifty years. He’s leaving his dirty socks six inches from the hamper and you’re thinking, “I could bury him between the gardenias” but then you remember the Great Speech, and you remember why you love the guy. He snores in complete oblivion.

I watched the remake of Sabrina Friday night. Absolutely painful to watch, mainly because I think Ormond and Ford have zero chemistry. But I do love that line at the end, when Sabrina’s father tells Linus “you don’t deserve her”, and Linus says: “I don’t, I know. But I need her and I don’t need anything.” There you go: it’s a Great Speech and the theme of the story all in thirteen words. That’s his best line. Hell, when he gives his actual Great Speech to her, it’s far more stilted and pathetic. I mean, I haven’t heard a more real-life Great Speech, it was so pathetic. I’m convinced to this day she just took him back out of pity, not because his speech was any good.

So sue me for wanting to escape into a movie for two hours, in which the ending invariably turns out that the man figures out he’d rather be with her than without her and he apologizes for being a schmuck. Even if he doesn’t really think he did anything wrong. Love is not never having to say you’re sorry (right); love is not rubbing your lover’s nose in it when he realizes he’s wrong, but graciously accepting his stilted Great Speech and giving him a big old Welcome Back kiss.

So CNN and NBC and KOMU, stop telling me I’m a big delusional spinster and saying men aren’t capable of doing any of those things that happen in romantic comedies. They might not be capable of doing them all at the same time, in a mere two hour period, but they are capable of it. Believe me, men love to give Great Speeches. (Usually about football, but they can give them about other things too.) Stop underestimating men. Give them a little credit. They may surprise you with a Great Speech. Or a few garbled pathetic words. Whatever. We love them anyway.

So what is your favorite Great Speech from either cinema or novels? And do you have any real life Great Speeches to make us all swoon with envy? Anyone else a huge fan of the Great Speech as I am?