Seen through a modern lens, classic Hollywood love stories lose a bit of their luster

Dustin Hoffman in the 1967 film “The Graduate.”

Have we grown too cynical for love stories?

There was an article in the New York Times recently about people who, inspired by the new movie adaptation of “Wuthering Heights,” had finally decided to read the novel. And one of the things they were discovering was … well, just how much they disliked the lovers at its center, and the romance that defines them.

“Toxic,” one reader witheringly called it.

It made me wonder how many cinematic love stories could withstand the scrutiny of modern audiences, raised on generations of self-help books, self-empowerment seminars and relationship therapists. Has “passionate” now become a synonym for “destructive”? The very fact that “relationship” — a rather cold and impersonal word — long ago replaced ones like “romance” and “love affair” says a lot.

Seen through modern eyes, certainly many of the movies I’ve always held dear would be — to fall back on another coldly therapeutic word — “problematic.”

I admit, I have always had a partiality for love stories that end badly. “Lips that taste of tears, they say/Are the best for kissing,” as Dorothy Parker once wrote. Give me stories about flawed, difficult people who have loved, and lost. If you want to see a romance with a happy ending, go watch a romcom. I’ll take “The Way We Were,” thanks.

Still, I wonder how many Hollywood love stories could stand the test of our current, romantically correct times?

Bette Davis in “Now, Voyager.”

“Now, Voyager,” for example. For me, it’s a hugely satisfying story of an ugly duckling becoming a swan, a woman coming into her own — and a beautiful love that can never be truly, openly fulfilled. Add in the ever-charming Paul Henreid, a silky supporting turn by Claude Rains, and Bette Davis’ best wardrobe ever, and you have an audience-pleasing classic.

Or, had. Because Bette’s willingness to stay in this relationship, even help parent her lover’s child when she knows he will never marry her … she’s a bit of a martyr, isn’t she? Just negating herself and her own needs for his sake? (And if her self-sacrificing enabling wasn’t icky enough, how about all that cigarette smoking?)

Or “Gone With the Wind.” Put aside the movie’s awful, Confederate-friendly view of the South, for starters. And even if you can get past that … what’s going on with Scarlett and Rhett? She makes it clear from the start that her preoccupations are Ashley Wilkes and her plantation — and not always in that order. Meanwhile the roguish Rhett isn’t really in love with anything — except her.

This isn’t the story of a healthy, egalitarian relationship. It’s a tale of mismatched obsessions, two people fated to never really get what they want — and it would be a hard sell to audiences today.

These are, of course, movies from more than 70 years ago, pictures our parents, or even grandparents, might have gone to as teens. Perhaps we can’t expect these movies’ idea of love to have aged any better than their view of enslaved people.

But films from my own youth have their problems, too.

For example, I loved “The Graduate” when I first saw it on television, a few years after it came out. I was still in 8th grade, and I was knocked out by the clever filmmaking, the Simon & Garfunkel songs, and its air of creeping discontent and fitful rebellion. (Knocked out by Katharine Ross, too, to be honest.)

I still love it, but now I see the seduction scene that starts it off — Mrs. Robinson’s clumsy move on Ben — as something less than funny and more than sad. How desperately lonely this woman is. How painful it must be later to see her young lover move on to her daughter, Elaine, instead. How little everyone thinks of her — we never even learn her first name. (Even in bed, Ben still calls her “Mrs. Robinson.”)

Of course the love story we’re supposed to love in “The Graduate” is the one between Ben and Elaine, and I do. But there is a fine line between persistence and creepy obsession, and Ben’s pursuit of the young college student — moving to Berkeley, where he spies on her, follows her around town and even waits outside her classes — crosses that line in a single bound.

That is perhaps the biggest change in Americans’ attitudes towards movie romances: Characters we once excused as lovesick we now often see as simply sick, and potentially dangerous. Men who, after a disastrous first date, respond by delivering flowers, daily, to your office? Find ways to “coincidentally” bump into you? Stake out your apartment? Once, a best friend might tell the object of this devotion “He’s sure got it bad for you.” She might even say it with a bit of envy. Now she’d counsel “Get a restraining order.”

John Cusack in “Say Anything.”

Do audiences still feel as moved by the scene of John Cusack in “Say Anything,” standing outside Ione Skye’s bedroom with his boombox, serenading her with a Peter Gabriel tune? Or do they agree, with her father, that he’s a bit of nut, and likely to derail her life?

Can they still get carried away with Joseph Gordon-Levitt as he dances down the street, goofily in love with Zooey Deschanel, in “(500) Days of Summer”? Or do they think both of them are pretty immature and probably not particularly great dating material?

Is there any character in “Love Actually” they wouldn’t steer towards some intensive therapy?

These are all, of course, movies about heterosexual romance, designed to appeal to a mass market; audiences for gay stories, and foreign films, seem more open to messy characters and downbeat narratives. But having watched them at home or in classrooms with 20somethings, I have to tell you … these films don’t play as well, or at least as innocently, as they used to.

And maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe it’s a healthy development that people no longer buy into cinematic fairy tales. Because in the real world, it’s actually a dangerous sign when a suitor won’t take no for answer. It’s a potentially perilous choice for a woman to throw over everything else in her life because of the attentions of one man. (Really … how do you honestly think Ben and Elaine’s lives worked out after they impulsively ran away together?)

No, it’s probably good that we’ve moved past Hollywood’s romantic myths.

But it’s sure made it hard for Hollywood romances.

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