The Hollywood romantic comedies of the 1950s and early 1960s fashioned sex and marriage from the struggle between dapper playboys and prudish career women. In the twenty-first century, the dominant mode of the genre forces a similar heterosexual life narrative through a refigured struggle between immature male slackers and sexually liberated career women. Why would such similar romantic comedy cycles emerge in such distanced and dissimilar contexts? In employing a research based, cultural studies approach to the above question, this dissertation engages the surprising generic and ideological intersections between the midcentury sex comedy and the raunch/romantic comedy hybrid known as the millennial “brom-com,” in order to gain a more nuanced understanding of the power struggles informing the dominant intimate culture in the twenty-first century.

Each chapter compares the key representational strategies and thematic conflicts between a sex comedy (e.g. That Touch of Mink, The Tunnel of Love, Send Me No Flowers) and a brom-com (e.g. The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, I Love You, Man), as situated in relation to the films’ respective historical contexts. Such a comparative engagement demonstrates that while the specific figurations of the immature male, the heterosexual couple, and the broader socio-political landscape may change, the cycles’ overlapping thrills, anxieties, and limitations present a similar set of heteronormative expectations rooted in the postwar breadwinner ethic.

In reinventing the sex comedy’s flirtations with false liberalism and male regression, the brom-com suggests that such expectations are deeply unsatisfactory. The brom-com’s male revolt against these gendered expectations is especially evident in the cycle’s celebratory, albeit nervous indulgence in the queer-straight form of male homosocial intimacy popularly known as “bromance”—a prominent yet unnamed phenomenon in the sex comedies. Despite the brom-coms’ spirited stagings of revolt, however, the cycle remains curiously resistant to detaching from the patriarchal fantasies of postwar optimism.

My dissertation argues that, during the second decade of the twentieth century, adolescent girls helped shape America's film fan culture. Though many film histories address the contributions of female audiences during the silent era, seldom are girls recognized as an independent and vital target demographic. In my dissertation, I propose that seminal conceptions of affective movie fandom and film consumption are interlaced with the emergence of a new life- stage: that of female adolescence. In 1904, American psychologist G. Stanley Hall defined adolescent girls as highly susceptible, romantic, and rabid consumers. A decade later, popular newspapers and fan magazines represented the typical "movie-mad" fan as a white female consumer in her teens. Surveying early-twentieth-century psychology and educational literature in tandem with press depictions of screen-struck girlhood, I propose that the birth of a commercial film fan culture is intrinsically linked with the rise of female adolescence.

However, I also suggest that the relationship established between the first generation of adolescent girls and a burgeoning film industry was rather complex and symbiotic. Exploring the letters girls sent to the press in tandem with their unpublished fan archives--private movie scrapbooks, journals, collages, and correspondence--my work sets out to document the voices of the first movie girl fans. To reclaim a marginalized history of girl agency and authorship, I privilege previously unexamined autobiographical materials--such as personal diaries, published collages, and suicide notes--authored both by individual girl fans and girls-only film collectives during the 1910s. By examining girls' first-person fan testimonies side by side press representations of movie-loving girlhood, my research seeks to challenge a long-standing, albeit constructed notion, that early Hollywood was built fundamentally on male agency and mature labor. Marked by material loss, much of our contemporary understanding of American silent cinema has been biased by surviving accounts relayed by renowned filmmakers and film critics, most of them adult males. However, as my archival research evinces, during this transitional decade adolescent girls' fan practices, their affect, and their craft labor importantly impacted the ways American film was produced, promoted, and consumed.