Leading Losers

Lloyd Dobler should pay my therapy bills.

I was in sixth grade when Cameron Crowe's "Say Anything" came out, and probably saw it a dozen times before high school. By then, I thought John Cusack's oddball, lovelorn portrayal of Dobler, poor, guileless, vulnerable Lloyd, was a great blueprint for meeting girls.

Eventually, I reconsidered, realizing that holding my boom box over my head outside a girl's window was going to win me a restraining order, not a date.

The movies can offer great role models in a lot of fields -- I bet every young boxer has thought about "Rocky" while training, every reporter wants to be Woodward and Bernstein from "All the President's Men," every would-be sleep-away camp maniac looks up to "Friday the 13th's" Jason Vorhees.

The leads in romantic comedies offer no such guidance, except as indicators of what not to do.

They generally fall into two camps. In the first, there's the Lloyd, the guy who will go to enormous lengths, suffer humiliation and even completely rearrange his life for the sake of a girl who often is not necessarily all that interested in him. Examples include Ben Stone (Seth Rogen in "Knocked Up"), Ted Stroehmann (Ben Stiller "There's Something About Mary), Alex Hitchens (Will Smith, "Hitch"), The Prime Minister (Hugh Grant, "Love Actually"), Ian Miller (John Corbett "My Big Fat Greek Wedding," who is so mild-mannered that he changes religions to please his fiancee's family, giving it about the same level of consideration one would give to trying a new flavor of gum.) The lesson of the Lloyd -- you show a woman you love her by acting bonkers and doing everything you can think of to impress her.

In the second camp, we have the Harry, after "When Harry Met Sally's'" Harry Burns (Billy Crystal). Now, I love "When Harry Met Sally." It's the first and only movie I ever rented, watched, rewound, and watched again. But, let's face it -- for all of his charm and humor, Harry is kind of an awful human being. The Harry characters (Harriers?) trudge through life, pessimistic, neurotic, straight-laced and unhappy, until a beautiful, "wacky" woman comes along, and despite the fact that they are wildly incompatible, teaches him some very important lessons about life, love and laughter. Examples of the Harry include Alvy Singer (Woody Allen, "Annie Hall," the modern prototype for the character), Reuben Feffer (Ben Stiller, "Along Came Polly"), Charles (Hugh Grant, "Four Weddings and a Funeral"), Edward Lewis (Richard Gere, "Pretty Woman")... you can go at least as far back as Cary Grant in "Bringing Up Baby" (1938). The lesson of the Harry -- self-pity, insecurity and gloom make you irresistible to hot free-spirited babes.

Two quick asides:

1) If they were not allowed to play these types of characters, you would hear a lot of "I haven't seen Ben Stiller in anything since 'Zoolander,' " and "Hugh Grant has really fallen off the map since 'Sense and Sensibility.' "

2) Charlie Kaufman's script for "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" is so brilliant because it shows what happens when most romantic comedies end, what happens after the Harry and the zany girl get together -- they make each other miserable. They're completely incompatible. He's not nearly fun or spontaneous enough for her. She's unreliable and makes him jealous and insecure. And, in fact, Clementine (Kate Winslet) even warns Joel (Jim Carrey) that she's not the answer to his problems: "Too many guys think I'm a concept, or I complete them, or I'm gonna make them alive. But I'm just a [deleted]-up girl who's lookin' for my own peace of mind; don't assign me yours."

When it comes to leading men, I know what you're thinking, that of course I'm not going to like any of these guys because women are the target audience for these films.

In order to test this theory, I conducted an informal poll of about a dozen female friends, asking them to choose from a selection of characters and tell me which ones they would or would not date in real life, and why. Obviously, this is just anecdotal, and not every woman has seen every film. Still, the results are interesting.