Ope Pardon, No. 5: Chemistry

A thing that may surprise you about me, because STEM vs. humanities is one of our culture's most enduring and ill-founded personality binaries and I have always been much more publicly an arts-and-letters person, is that I love(d) chemistry.

(I also loved algebra and calculus, but that doesn't function quite as well as a starting point for a newsletter about rom-coms.)

What I enjoyed most about chemistry was the task of solving and balancing equations. There was a clarity and simplicity to explaining a physical reaction with a combination of logical and unambiguous rules that I found at least as satisfying as piecing an argument together out of 10 random facts about the Franco-Prussian war. I like a good debate and am intimately aware the world is one big grey area, but it was — is — pleasing to know that some things, like sodium and chloride, work together simply because nature says so and you don't need to argue a reason why.

If this sounds like a basic read on chemistry, that is because approximately 82 percent of chemistry remains sheer inexplicable alchemy to me. I liked chemistry but not enough to ever take another class of it after high school. Still, I enjoy the framework of the chemical equation. I like the promise of simultaneous transformation and preservation, of something becoming entirely new without losing its elemental self. I also like that there is a logic to chemistry and rules about what and how things react: The combination of two or more elements can create something new and magical, but you can't just throw any old thing together and expect fireworks.

I doubt whoever first decided to use the word chemistry to colloquially refer to the romantic spark, sexual tension or otherwise copacetic energy between two (or more) people was thinking through the metaphor this extensively when they did so, but, setting aside an entirely different essay that follows the analogy of transformation down IRL relationship lines, some of the recent casting choices coming out of Hollywood suggest it might do us all well to take the science of chemistry a bit more seriously.

It's not that people aren't talking about it: I've seen a lot of discussion (i.e., tweets) over the past couple years about the startling drop-off in casting for chemistry, specifically but not exclusively in rom-coms. I have yet to see a good, definitive article on the problem, and I am certainly not the person to write it. (Writers who have made careers out of studying the genre of romance like Bolu Babalola or Alanna Bennett — she of this essential thread on the importance of a man's ability To Look — would be good choices if I was still in a position to commission things; or someone like Angelica Bastien who has the sharpest eye and deepest well of Old Hollywood knowledge of any film critic on my radar.)

Further, the split reaction to the Entertainment Weekly (RIP) video cover of Robert Pattinson and Zoe Kravitz suggests that, like most things in life, you aren't likely to find a consensus on what the chemistry we're lacking on-screen actually looks like. It is both a know-it-when-you-see-it and a different-strokes-for-different-folks kind of thing. Which is just to say that, despite what this looks like, I am not attempting to offer any kind of definitive account of what is and isn't on-screen chemistry, mostly I am just musing on a subject that interests me while I wait for someone smarter with greater expertise to tackle the matter.

‎In any case, last weekend, I saw a great number of tweets bemoaning the lack of chemistry and general miscasting of Marry Me, the new Jennifer Lopez/Owen Wilson rom-com. Not having seen Marry Me, I was nonetheless on a parallel journey of state-of-the-rom-com angst after watching a small Amazon Prime movie called I Want You Back, starring Jenny Slate and Charlie Day. I would not call it a good movie — the best parts are in the trailer, unfortunately — and the fact I laughed out loud any time Charlie Day said anything is more evidence it's time for me to watch It's Always Sunny start to finish than it is an endorsement of this movie. It is highly predictable, which in and of itself is not a problem, but as believable as Day and Slate are as best friends, they don't have the right chemistry to pull off the friends/co-conspirators-to-lovers plot. (The essential promise of art that operates in genres with established tropes, such as the rom-com, is that it will be funny/charming/hot/entertaining enough to compensate for the predictability. It's not art powered by plot twist or novelty, and that's fine, better even, but it makes it all the more critical that it nails the fundamentals.) The other characters — exes and the new love interests of the exes — are played by Gina Rodriguez, Manny Jacinto, Scott Eastwood and Clark Backo. Every single actor in this movie is attractive and most of them have been shown to have great chemistry with other people in other work, but there is exactly nothing going on between any of them in this. (The one possible exception might be Eastwood and Day, who have great friend chemistry. On-screen chemistry does not have to always be romantic or sexual, arguably the chemistry between Daniel Ings, Johnny Flynn and Antonia Thomas as friends on the excellent rom-com series Lovesick is stronger than that of Flynn and Thomas as a romantic pairing. But anyways that's not what we're talking about here.) It is both notable and unsurprising that I Want You Back's big romantic denouement doesn't involve the lead couple kissing and, more to the point, you, the viewer, aren't even all that mad about it.

In contrast, I also recently watched The Mummy, a movie with fittingly supernatural levels of chemistry between just about everyone, including the titular Mummy. I then watched Nightmare Alley and while Cate Blanchett and Bradley Cooper are two people who have chemistry with almost anyone including each other, I was mostly thinking about how much more chemistry Blanchett had with Rooney Mara in Carol and Cooper had with Lady Gaga in both A Star is Born and, perhaps even more thrillingly, on the A Star Is Born press and award show circuit.

Speaking of Cooper and Gaga, the ability to spark rumors of IRL affairs or at minimum concern for the actors' partners — as happened after a clip of Oscar Isaac nuzzling Jessica Chastain's forearm on a red carpet went viral last fall — is a good indication that the actors have ungodly levels of chemistry. (I actually never watched Scenes From A Marriage so I can't attest to whether that chemistry is there on-screen too.) Mr. and Mrs. Smith will forever be the quintessential contemporary case study in "that can't just be acting" chemistry (and it wasn't), though you can also find other on-screen examples with slightly less suspicious but not entirely clean cut previous-partner timelines — I am personally fond of Matthew Rhys/Keri Russell on The Americans and various magazine spreads related to the promotion of the show. (Interestingly, and adorably, Kirsten Dunst and Jesse Plemons specifically waited until after they were no longer working together to start a relationship because they didn't want the on-set intensity to cloud their judgment of their feelings.)

TV is arguably doing better than movies with chemistry these days, but to be fair, TV has the advantage of being able to adjust arcs relatively easily around the chemistry that becomes apparent between actors after casting and the benefit of actors being able to build chemistry exponentially over a longer run-time. Still, there's evidence to suggest TV is also doing better right out of the gate: One of my all-time favorite TV critics, Caroline Framke, recently argued the hottest couple on TV right now is Carrie Coon and Morgan Spector's robber barons on The Gilded Age. With TV, great chemistry can inspire storylines, like with Kieran Culkin and J. Smith Cameron on Succession, but other times, it's just a chaotic little casting treat, like Kieran Culkin and Justin Kirk on Succession.

As with the rom-com, good chemistry is also more fundamentally important for shows that weave will-they-won't-they arcs into their primary plots. Good chemistry can sustain a show, like Hart of Dixie, which is an otherwise perfectly fine CW joint with hot-as-the-flames-of-hell chemistry between Rachel Bilson and Wilson Bethel. Or Good Girls, a fun show that started strong but mostly became a vehicle to watch Manny Montana perfect The Look at Christina Hendricks. Sometimes, chemistry actually can't sustain a show, but can fool me for at least four episodes, as was the case with Run, which I desperately tried to convince myself was good based on the chemistry between Merrit Wever and Domhnall Gleeson and also my love of trains. It can also be instrumental in the proliferation of fandoms, particularly those that grow around fan fiction — Supernatural and Hannibal come first to mind. In short, chemistry is an extremely powerful tool for not only telling a story, but also shaping the emotional and cultural reaction to that story.

Taking a quick sidebar into sports, a common refrain I saw during our quadriennial cultural turn to Olympic figure skating was an abiding curiosity about whether the pairs skaters, but specifically the ice dancers, had any kind of, how do you say, history. Figure skating is a sport with a high artistic/performance element and so for the pairs part of that element is selling the chemistry. It's why so many pairs skate to music from romantic tragedy musicals and why it's always a little bit super weird when the pairs are siblings. (Shout out to perhaps the horniest to ever to do it, Virtue and Moir, who had a lift at the 2018 Olympics they had to tweak because it, uh, looked too much like oral sex; the one in the clip below, at 2:30, is considered the family-friendly version.)

Chemistry comes from a wide array of elements that, luckily or not, the unhinged world of women's magazines has reported on extensively. Contributing factors include eye contact; physical touch, but not too much touch; something called reciprocal candor; "personableness"; intimacy (defined as a combination of reciprocal candor and personableness); and a bunch of other personality-related things that feel less relevant to how its recreated on-screen but you are welcome to Google. I don't have much more to say about this list, besides the fact it oddly kind of explains how a Valentine's Day tweet from an Americans fan account asserting that the peak of romance was Philip removing Elizabeth's tooth with a pair of pliers can be both absurd and true. The moment has intense eye contact and physical touch but not too much and exhibits a high comfort and trust level between the two. It's all there! But in any case, if you were to write it out as an equation, chemistry is probably some combination of psycho-emotional connection and proximal separation, a tension between feeling — or, in the case of acting and ice dance, conveying — intense closeness and insurmountable distance. In practice, whether TV, movies or sports, a key indication that you are watching actors or anyone with chemistry is the desire to scream at the screen, "just kiss already!!"

Anyways. Casting is a fascinating profession to me. I remember reading a book maybe 15 years ago by a casting director and the sliding doors of who could have been cast in what will always be interesting trivia to me. Further, I have to believe that anytime two big names with zero chemistry are cast in a production that hinges on chemistry, it's not due to casting negligence but rather coming from some higher-up. But the problem remains and the last thing I will say is that I have extremely high hopes for The Lost City because Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum are both exceptionally charismatic and funny actors, well-suited to these roles, and I want, nay need, to believe they have the right chemistry.

‎In the meantime, if you have any recommendations for TV or movies from literally any decade with good chemistry, let me know. Otherwise, it's just going to be The Mummy Returns for me.