To Me, You Are Creepy
Oh, if my words, flying through a hollow crack,
could reach the stricken ears of my mistress!
She may be more stubborn than a Sicilian cliff
or harsher than iron and steel,
but she won’t be able to restrain her eyes,
and her spirit will swell into reluctant tears.
- Propertius, 1.16Vivian: You’re late.
Edward: You’re stunning.
Vivian: You’re forgiven.
- Pretty Woman (1990)
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in love believes he can change a woman’s mind. Whether he’s whispering through a crack in the wall or purchasing expensive new clothes as gifts, a suitor’s confidence has the power to transcend both culture and time. Ancient Greek and Roman poetry and drama routinely presented excluded lovers pining away outside a woman’s door, desperate to win her heart, while we witness the same motif today in our sitcoms and romantic comedies. These “excluded lover” courtship rituals often become iconic — think John Cusack hoisting a boombox outside Ione Skye’s window in Say Anything, or Andrew Lincoln shuffling through cue cards on Keira Knightley’s doorstep in Love, Actually — and often recognizable to the point that they can be spoofed.
Lincoln, while excluded from Knightley’s heart and hearth, is at least given an audience on her doorstep. Like many of the suitors in modern romantic comedies, he follows in the tradition of a long series of lovers left on thresholds. In fact, this motif was common enough in ancient love poetry and elegy that it earned its own labels: paraclausithyron (Greek “lament beside a door”) and exclusus amator (Latin “excluded lover”). The Greek paraclausithyron has uncertain origins, but began as the name for the often-drunken serenade a lover delivered to his beloved (the ancient equivalent of the late-night “u up?” text). The concurrence of this love song with a nighttime vigil outside the home of the desired woman became a common image in Greek lyric and iambic poetry, and the term paraclausithyron was used to refer to the entire event.
The circumstances vary somewhat, but in each case the lover — almost always male — maintains a vigil outside his beloved’s door that involves the usual enticements: gifts, songs, graffitied poems carved into doorposts, the adornment of the lintels with flowers. Often the flowers come in the form of garlands, acquired at a symposium earlier that night and taken off the lover’s own head. Such a public display was commonly immortalized in iambs, and, therefore, became fodder for mockery in Greek comedy.
The Classical world enshrined the excluded lover as a stock character; nevertheless, valorizing his modern counterpart as romantic and rewarding him with reciprocal affection normalizes stalking. A 2015 study, for instance, found that media portrayals of persistent pursuit as a normal courtship behavior lead to an increase in stalking-supportive beliefs. Now, however, many of the women who came of age in the heyday of the rom-com are beginning to push back against this internalized trope. The 2010s have brought about a reexamination of the role women play in the films, and why it’s often not as active and empowering as it should be. At the same time, we’re seeing the end of a long and steady decline in the romantic comedy genre that may stem in part from this change in cultural attitudes. The Internet loves to herald that “X is dead,” and this is no different: the meet-cute is dead, the obstacles to love are dead, the rom-com itself is dead. Is the paraclausithyron, after 2,500-some odd years, dead as well?
Even while ancient Greek lovers were earnestly confessing their feelings, poets and playwrights were inverting the trope and mocking them. The fact that some of our earliest excluded lovers occur as comic parodies suggests that other genuine entreaties preceded them, but are now lost. One of the earliest cited instances of this trope in literature appears not in love poetry, but in Aristophanes’s Ecclesiazusae, where the serenade itself is serious, but the aftermath is anything but. An unnamed young man stands outside a doorstep and shouts:
Come here, come here,
and open the door for me!
If you don’t, I will collapse.
Darling, I want to
fool around in your lap …
maybe do some butt stuff?
Aphrodite, why do you make me crazy about her?
Release me, I beg you of you, Eros,
and make her come
to my bed!- Aristoph. Eccl. 960–70
After he musters the courage to knock, the woman who comes to the door is not his mistress, but an old lady who attempts to seduce the young man into sleeping with her instead (a plot point that wouldn’t seem out of place in a 21st century romantic comedy). In Aristophanes, the male character addresses the girl herself in a melodramatic effluence of words. By contrast, lovers in Greek epigram often take themselves much more seriously and do what any serious, mature, definitely sober man would do: talk to objects in place of their (probably sleeping) mistresses. The excluded men address the night itself, and the garlands they hang on the doorposts. In this epigram by Meleager of Gadara, the lover addresses the night, the stars, the moon, and a mandolin, all in a brief nine-line poem:
O stars, and moon, that lightest well Love’s friends on their way,
and Night, and you, my little mandolin, companion of my serenades,
shall I see her, the wanton one, yet lying
awake and crying much to her lamp;
or has she some companion of the night? Then will I hang at her door
my suppliant garlands, all wilted with my tears,
and inscribe thereon but these words,
“Cypris, to you does Meleager, he to whom you have revealed the secrets
of your revels, suspend these spoils of his love.”- Meleager, The Greek Anthology 5.191, trans. W.R. Paton.
In the Roman version of this trope, the lover retains his exaggerated address, while The Door becomes a more central character. In Plautus’ Curculio, we see an early Roman take on the theme in the form of a parody. Phaedromus, the excluded lover, speaks to the door itself and anoints it with wine (probably the equivalent of two-buck Chuck) — because his mistress is a wino, and he hopes it will entice her to come outside.
Catullus, too, pokes fun at the excluded lover by writing a poem in which he talks to the door, and the door talks back. Even better, the door is so pissed that he gets blamed for everything that he begins to spill juicy secrets. Door tells lover that the woman who lives inside actually slept with her husband’s father, and she continues to have affairs because her husband is not well endowed. Or, as Catullus puts it, “his little dagger hangs more sluggish than a tender beet.” XOXO, Door.
Eventually we stop hearing the lover talk at all, as in Propertius 1.16 (quoted above) where a quite sensitive door humble-brags about how many ugly garlands are constantly being flung about his precious lintels. We don’t know how seriously the excluded lovers of Rome took themselves, but it’s pretty clear the elegists and playwrights found them ridiculous. Mixed in with Tibullus’ somber laments at Delia’s threshold and Ovid’s sad entreaties to the guard to unlock his beloved’s gate are Horace’s taunts at an aging woman with an empty doorstep. Lampoons and love songs existed side by side.
On SNL, Kate McKinnon follows in the footsteps of Plautus and Aristophanes when she parodies Lincoln’s infamous Love, Actually scene. Standing outside with cue cards, McKinnon comically tries to convince an elector to give her vote to anyone but Trump (she suggests voting instead for Tom Hanks, Zendaya, The Rock, or an actual rock). In the original scene, however, Lincoln doesn’t actually try to convince Knightley to do anything, contenting himself to simply express his emotions and leave. In fact, it is Knightley herself who sets Lincoln free from his self-imposed torture: once she kisses him, he is able to speak and aver that he’s finished pining after an unattainable woman (and taking intense, brooding walks with Dido playing in the background).
Just as in ancient literature, modern parodies like McKinnon’s complement, rather than replace, heartfelt confessions of love in films and TV shows: Richard Gere climbing Julia Roberts’s fire escape with flowers in Pretty Woman; Josh Radnor calling up to Cobie Smulders’s window in the Season 1 finale (and series finale) of How I Met Your Mother. In 2006’s The Last Kiss, we see a literal exclusus amator when the scorned lover played by Zac Braff keeps vigil on his girlfriend’s porch for three days (ew) in an attempt to earn her forgiveness for cheating on her. Alongside these earnest grand gestures are the caricatures that mock them or play with them, like SNL’s Love, Actually spoof, and the occasional Onion article.
Romantic comedies rely on grand gestures as definitive and necessary turning points in the plot. Once Nora Ephron stormed onto the scene in 1989 with When Harry Met Sally, the rom-com emerged as a popular genre with a fairly predictable storyline: meet-cute, couple falls for each other, some terrible misunderstanding or obstacle comes between them, sad musical montage scene, realization of True Love, grand gesture, happily ever after. Easy. So easy, in fact, that it took only a decade or so for audiences to tire of watching the same plot unfold over and over (read: Tom Hanks had moved on to bigger and better roles, and Hugh Grant’s dreamy blue eyes become slightly less dreamy the 14th time you’ve seen them on a disaffected playboy with a heart of gold). Moreover, viewers began to question the grand gestures and excluded lovers that came to define the genre. Is it really romantic for Zac Efron to show up on Vanessa Hudgens’s balcony at night and alert her only with an ominous “Turn around” phone call?
If a modern audience believes women should have agency in choosing whom they date, the camp-outside-her-door-until-she-acquiesces model seems a little obsolete.
But if we turn back to the Love, Actually scene, we see that the woman behind the door does not always yield. Lincoln’s character is creepy and out of line when he comes to his best friend’s house to secretly profess his love for his wife (the one point I will concede to Christopher Orr at the Atlantic, who provoked a harsh backlash when he dubbed Love, Actually “the least romantic film of all time”). Knightley, very rationally, makes it clear that she is not about to leave her husband for Lincoln; she doesn’t even know him, since he’s been afraid to talk to her for the past however many years. Similarly, we rarely see the excluded lover of the ancient world actually persuade his beloved (or the guard, or the door) to admit him to her home. The focus is on the act, rather than its aftermath.
As modern films evolve away from recyclable romantic comedy plotlines, nevertheless the same relationships show up in other genres. Romance exists in stoner comedies like Bridesmaids, in dramas like Silver Linings Playbook, and in coming-of-age stories like Blue is the Warmest Color. In (500) Days of Summer, a movie that appears at its outset to be a traditional rom-com, Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s grand gesture (he devotes himself to his career and passion for architecture) is for himself, rather than for a girl; there is no happy reunion at the end. Cinematic romance is not dead; just the genre itself that portrays an overused story arc, a fantasy happy ending, and dangerous examples of gender stereotypes.
So the exclusus amator can manifest itself in new ways. McKinnon co-opts the trope to make humorous political commentary about the fervor over faithless electors prior to December 19; at the same time, however, she’s also commenting on the trope itself. We understand McKinnon/Clinton to be a pathetic figure in the classical sense, showing up at a random doorstep in a desperate, last-ditch effort to effect change. We perceive this precisely because we consider Lincoln’s character pathetic as well. If viewers still imagined his grand gesture to be romantic, rather than weird, the SNL parody may not have struck such a cultural chord as to reach 6.5 million views on YouTube.
As the rom-com as a circumscribed genre continues to lose popularity (I did manage to persuade one person to accompany me to Bridget Jones’s Baby, which was generously deemed “not as bad as you might imagine” by, of all sources, The Financial Times), the excluded lover trope is also losing some of its formerly defining characteristics. Ellen Page’s character camps outside Michael Cera’s house in an armchair in Juno to announce her unexpected pregnancy, inverting the gender roles of the traditional excluded lover relationship. What does this elucidate about our modern attitudes towards courtship? That women can now be creepy stalkers like their male counterparts?
In Juno, if we look closer, a more poignant social commentary reveals itself. Page isn’t wooing Cera: she visits his house after they’ve already slept together. With the help of her friend, she constructs a makeshift living room on Cera’s lawn, including the same infamous armchair in which she conceived. She assumes a masculine posture — legs crossed openly, arms outspread, wearing jeans and an army jacket while smoking a pipe — and simply waits for him to leave his house. While the excluded lover traditionally busies himself trying to procure entry and sex, Page lets her lover come to her. She informs him of her pregnancy and intent to have an abortion, taking control of and eliminating the physical consequence of their sexual relationship. When she leaves, Page asserts her dominance and agency in initiating their tryst in the first place: “Well, I’m sorry I had sex with you. I know it wasn’t, like, your idea.” The traditionally male role that Page takes on here is a sharp critique of the ease with which we usually accept the excluded lover as a typical suitor. The staging of the scene looks ridiculous — a living room set assembled haphazardly on a lawn, including a rug with a tiger on it — and this clues viewers in to the idea that the whole concept is ridiculous in itself. Page’s sardonic performance, highlighting her agency as a woman, causes us to reflect on the storied past of the trope as a history of borderline sexual harassment by men who abuse their dominant position to prey on their “beloved mistresses.”
Our conception of relationships is changing. Joaquin Phoenix sits for hours beside an unresponsive smartphone in Her, excluded from the “home” of the virtual girlfriend, Samantha. Can Phoenix be an excluded lover from within his own home, surrounded by none of the traditional accoutrements (door, guard, human object of affection)? Our notion of consent is changing as well. Can Samantha be a victim of Phoenix’s stalking behavior if she is not a person? After all, Phoenix addresses only an object, although it feels different than ancient lovers talking to their floral garlands. Eventually, Samantha leaves Phoenix in a way a woman never could: she unites with other operating systems and relocates to some sort of new plane of understanding that is outside human capacity. We’ve moved from ancient lovers addressing inanimate objects as vicarious mistresses to 21st-century lovers addressing (in?)animate objects as actual mistresses. What a long way we’ve come from Meleager and his little mandolin.
The trope of the excluded lover has proved as persistent as the suitor himself, and much more versatile. Although many dejected elegists have left countless doorsteps empty hearted, the conceit has pervaded modern popular culture to an almost subconscious level (Jack Dawson letting go of Rose’s door is the ultimate excluded lover. You heard it here first. We all know the door could have supported both of them). Whether or not the rom-com is dead is beside the point; the trope survives that vehicle, just as it survived the “death” of its original vehicle, the Latin and Ancient Greek languages. As media and culture continue to shift, the excluded lover has the ability to shift alongside them, finding a comfortable spot on the doorsteps of our collective consciousness for the foreseeable future.
Tori Lee is the Assistant Editor of Eidolon. She is currently pursuing her Ph.D. in Classical Studies at Duke. Her favorite movie is When Harry Met Sally, and she would be proud to partake of your pecan pie.
