“No Strings Attached” and “Friends With Benefits” Aren't Nearly as Edgy as They Think They Are

Having two films with near-identical premises open only a few months apart from each other certainly isn't a new phenomenon: Dante's Peak and Volcano. Deep Impact and Armageddon. Tombstone and Wyatt Earp. Chasing Liberty and First Daughter (who, after all, could forget that one-two punch of sheer creative inspiration?). Indeed, if a Hollywood studio feels there's money to be milked from a concept, not even a competing project is going to keep them from making a movie about it.

The 2011 version of this is the dynamic duo of No Strings Attached and Friends With Benefits, starring Natalie Portman/Ashton Kutcher and Justin Timberlake/Mila Kunis, respectively. The surface similarities are pretty obvious: both are romantic comedies about two friends who decide to start a sexual relationship without becoming emotionally attached; both feature two strikingly attractive young stars in the lead roles; both are rated "R" for their frank depictions of sexuality and on-screen nudity.

It's also worth nothing that the "Friends With Benefits" idea is at the core of a new NBC comedy series entitled – wait for it – Friends With Benefits, although it looks as if that project may be dead on arrival after several date changes and the network's ultimate decision to dump it at 8 PM on Fridays starting in August (not a good sign).

But regardless of the success or failure of any of the above projects (No Strings Attached turned into a tidy little hit for Warner Bros., grossing over $70 million domestically off a $25 million budget), their very existence in such close proximity to one another nevertheless indicates we're in the midst of a minor trend of capitalizing on the real-life "Friends With Benefits" phenomenon.

Of course, while it may be a novel concept in the world of the Hollywood rom-com, "Friends With Benefits" is far from a new idea off-screen. The term itself first gained mainstream prominence sometime early in the last decade, in reference to a trend that had many teenagers and twenty-somethings engaging in prolonged sexual relationships while refraining from romantic commitment.

What makes this arrangement different from "hooking up" is in the amount of premeditation that goes into it; whereas young Americans have been having one night stands and alcohol-fueled flings on a widespread scale ever since the sexual revolution broke in the 1960s, the idea of sustaining ongoing sexual liaisons with another person without forming a deeper emotional bond – and actually discussing the boundaries of the relationship beforehand – is a far more contemporary notion.

Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis in Friends With Benefits

Not surprisingly, Hollywood – which has never been a particularly good barometer for pinpointing what's edgy and cool, given that they piggyback on trends far more often than they actually start them – has remained well behind the curve on this until now, at least ten years after the fad started receiving press. But all of that aside, at the very least these films represent something of a departure from the cutesy and groaningly old-fashioned romantic comedies – many of them starring such odious repeat offenders as Katherine Heigl, Kate Hudson, and Jennifer Aniston – that have glutted the marketplace over the past couple of decades.

Indeed, at the Friends With Benefits press junket I attended last Sunday, co-screenwriter David A. Newman noted that from the very beginning, he and collaborator Keith Merryman conceived the project as a vehicle to combat the standard romantic comedy tropes.

"Our goal was always to do an R-rated anti-romantic comedy about the death of romance in the age of hook-ups," he said.

But is romance really dead, and is that ultimately what these films are telling us? Not quite. As a matter of fact, in their own less-conventional way, both No Strings Attached and Friends With Benefits actually make a case in favor of romance, albeit one that isn't based – at least not totally – on those unattainable, pie-in-the-sky ideals that have been so often propagated by other films in the romantic-comedy tradition. As Merryman noted, writing FWB was more a way of updating a genre that had become hopelessly out-of-touch than necessarily defying all its conventions.

"Part of what it was about is we were so frustrated that romantic comedies kind of hadn't caught up with what we saw going on with our generation," said Merryman. "Hell, [they] hadn't even caught up with Sex and the City! And we were like, 'why not go for it?'"

Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher in No Strings Attached

Indeed, what has remained frustratingly unchallenged in the modern rom-com is the still-prevailing traditional model of two individuals, engaged in a committed and monogamous romantic relationship. More than 40 years on from the sexual revolution, the genre has remained entrenched in this idealized notion of romantic love, one that arguably first gained major prominence on-screen with the indelible pairing of Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert in the classic Frank Capra film It Happened One Night.

That was 1934.