Matrimony Month(s): The Notebook versus The Wedding: Love As Tragic Farce In Nicholas Spark’s Mild Kingdom

The late 0’s to the early 10’s were an odd time.  Spurred on by war, famine and fear on all fronts, weary Americans turned toward simplistic, homespun entertainment to comfort them.  All of a sudden, and completely out of the blue, romances were all about tradition, and all about weeping again.

The quintessential weeper of the 00s was The Notebook, a Nicholas Sparks film built upon the Classic Misunderstanding.  We’re presented with Noah, a working class kid of the 40’s, and Allie, an upper-class, strait-laced girl.  They meet and fall in love over a series of outrageous, death-defying stunts (he climbs a ferris wheel and threatens to let go unless she agrees to go out with him in an act of romance’ that could be seen as severe manipulation).  It’s lust at first sight that doesn’t get consummated for years because Allie’s mother disapproves of Noah’s poverty.  Allie then has a relationship with a stalwart ex-soldier who exists like a male character in a Rebecca Welles novel; good, true, and completely disposable.  Allie and Noah have a swell life – until we’re smacked across the face with their unhappy descent into illness and old age.  In a twist that we’re supposed to find touching, they pull toward death together, no longer individuals with separate wants and goals, and uncaring of their adult children they leave behind.  For Allie and Noah, marriage has become a symbiosis, a total merging into a single being, and it’s impossible for one to live life without the other standing guard.  Some find this point of view romantic – I find it downright creepy and co-dependent. 

The follow-up, all about the couple's daughter, gives us a less fraught journey than Noah and Allie faced, but for what Allie and Noah lacked in stability Wilson and Jane make up for in stolid, wooden cliché.  Their drama sparks up around their approaching twenty-fifth anniversary.  Wilson realizes that he’s been neglecting Jane and decides to make up for it by holding a joint wedding/vow renewal ceremony with their daughter, who wanted a simple ceremony in her parent’s backyard.  Jane and Wilson’s problems aren’t nearly as soapy as her parents’ were – they’re the staff and chaff of every marriage in the universe, which is why their story is so unforgivably dull and ridiculously stuffy. At least they get to ride off into the sunset, happily married, and hopefully unlikely to deal with the strife and pain visited on her parents.