In most films it's not easy, or attractive, to be single
American movies do right by a lot of things -- war, westerns, young women running for their lives. The lives of single people, meanwhile, are a different story.
Bridget Jones, she of the stammering, self-doubt, and face-first collapses, is what passes for a sophisticated representation of being single: the bachelorette as Jerry Lewis. Bridget, now at ''The Edge of Reason," is the natural byproduct of a medium that's never quite known what to do with unmarried characters other than marry them off. Or kill them.
Back in 1977, when Diane Keaton went ''Looking for Mr. Goodbar," the search ended in blood. And Julianne Moore, the ambitious and nosy friend in ''The Hand That Rocks the Cradle," died a grisly death as she closed in on Rebecca De Mornay's plot to conquer a suburban household.
So if Bridget Jones doesn't have a husband and she's not dead, then there's only one place for her to go: crazy.
This would make her a legitimate but hardly excusable relative of other blond crazies, like Glenn Close's psychotic single in ''Fatal Attraction" -- a woman who seemed so possessed by the old saw about all the good men being married or gay that her only alternative was to stalk an adulterer.
There's a nice descriptive scene in which Close, having followed Michael Douglas out to his sprawling new suburban home, watches him wow his wife and daughter with a bunny. The sight makes her vomit. Out of envy, or disgust? The movie never says, but before she loses her mind, she seems to want the rabbit and the house, too.
''Fatal Attraction" is often read as a salvo on cheating husbands, when really it's one of the most brutal films ever made about being single. (Douglas, after all, gets to keep Anne Archer and their Volvo.) The movie owes a huge debt to Alfred Hitchcock, who seldom met a single woman he didn't enjoy teasing or terrorizing on film: Janet Leigh in ''Psycho," Tippi Hedren in ''The Birds" and ''Marnie," and plain-Jane Barbara Bel Geddes in ''Vertigo," who so lusts for James Stewart that she has to sublimate her desire with the binding bras she sketches.
Why is it so hard to believe that being alone when the credits roll could constitute a happy ending? Maybe television is to blame.
TV made it a lot more difficult for the movies to take dating seriously. A series has a story arc that can last for years, allowing Mary Richards or Molly Dodd or Carrie Bradshaw to stay single yet hunt for love from here to eternity.
Movies believe in a much more definite sort of closure. Singleness is a condition waiting to be cured by a formula -- boy meets girl, etc. Love is the reward for having endured the narrative.
Nora Ephron, the author of ''When Harry Met Sally," ''Sleepless in Seattle," and ''You've Got Mail," deserves to have her films studied in the same courses that dismantle the novels of Jane Austen and the Brontes. Not because they're as good (they're not), but because they're interesting for what they tell us about what a women needs from a man and what she'll put up with and sacrifice to be with one.
In ''You've Got Mail," Meg Ryan notoriously ends up in the arms of the man who destroyed her business. Ephron is shrewd enough to make us think this is OK by having Tom Hanks play the guy.
In the trajectory of her career, Ryan makes a vivid poster woman for modern single women in the movies. She started out believing in the purest imaginable love, then mutated into a woman who felt entitled to it, eventually turning bitter and skeptical. It doesn't matter which man she ends up with at the end of these movies. The search is perpetual; the next film begins with her worn out and doubtful all over again.
So ''Sleepless in Seattle" gives way to ''French Kiss" and ''Addicted to Love," which is followed by ''Kate and Leopold." Here a bilious Ryan is so sick of romantic fantasies and the realities of dating that she agrees to live far back in time with knightly Hugh Jackman. As a single professor in last year's ''In the Cut," she made rough love to Mark Ruffalo and fled a serial killer. The killer missed, but Ryan was telling us that a part of her was already dead.
If the single woman is alienated from herself, the travails of the single guy are often played for sport. From ''The Pick-up Artist" and ''In the Company of Men" to ''Whipped," ''20 Dates," and the new ''Alfie," women aren't dated, they're scored. Last year's ''How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days," in which Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey take dual bets to drive each other nuts, is an equal-opportunity exception: a his-and-hers date movie.
A date movie, however, is not necessarily a movie about dating. A dating movie (an effective one, anyway) is a movie you want to avoid on an actual date. If someone invites you over to watch Paul Mazursky's ''An Unmarried Woman," Woody Allen's ''Crimes and Misdemeanors," Nicole Holofcener's ''Walking and Talking" or Todd Solondz's ''Happiness," consider yourself warned.
Not coincidentally, one of the best relationship movies ever made is about dating: Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman's ''Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind." Told from the man's point of view, it's more or less the story of two people who meet, fall in love, break up, and then pay a company to erase their memories of each other.
Told with no particular fidelity to chronology, ''Spotless Mind" personifies the pain of loving someone without over-emoting. This is the rare movie that makes poetry of the minutia of a relationship, its highs and its lows.
Even when the embattled couple seems to have worked it all out, you're not entirely convinced the relationship will survive a week. Unlike most Hollywood endings, this one is only sort of happy.
Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com. 