In Defense of Poppery, XI: Movies based on self-help books.

Pop Example: Movies based on self-help books, such as "He's Just Not That Into You" and "The Ugly Truth"

What redeems it: I’d intended to defend movies based on self-help books a few months ago, when I saw “He’s Just Not That Into You,” but I let it go – until this week, when I saw “The Ugly Truth.”

To be clear, some movies based on self-help books are better than others, and “He’s Just Not That Into You” is better than “The Ugly Truth.” But that may be part of why this subgenre of film deserves our attention: These films offer a bit of a book review in advance of our actually buying copies of books to live our lives by. It would be like seeing workout videos used and populated by people on the South Beach diet, or Atkins, before trying those diets out on your own digestive system, or watching a video of a Weight Watcher’s meeting that would help you understand both how supportive and how excruciatingly boring such meetings can be in advance of paying for the plan. This is all useful information.

In the case of movies based on self-help books, though, plots are necessary. What would normally be a list of Do’s and Don’ts has to be put into narrative practice for a Hollywood blockbuster – a recitation of principles would amount to an instructional video, and nobody past their first day at Drugstore USA wants to watch a whole bunch of those.

Self-help movies, then, end up showing a Hollywood version of how these books would theoretically work out in “real life” – in other words, they espouse the harsh critique of male-female relations the books they’re based on do, but then they undercut that message with a Hollywood happy ending.

Thus, self-help romantic comedies end up critiquing the books they’re based on – but because the majority of the movie is intended to narrate and support the principles of the book, the movie also critiques itself.

At the end of “He’s Just Not That Into You,” for instance, Justin Long’s character realizes that the girl who according to the book’s principles should stop obsessing and just get a life (Ginnifer Goodwin), is right. He is, in fact, THAT into her, and he needed her to point it out in order to realize the truth.

At the end of “The Ugly Truth,” Katherine Heigl and her “Ugly Truth” host (Gerard Butler), who’s been spouting an “everything is sex and sex is everything” view of men (and women), realize they’re in love with each other. He admits that it’s happened for no reason, which just makes her happier. Apparently, love is beyond reason – even beyond the reason of the self-help book the movie is based on.

And that’s the crux of the matter, the answer to the questions “how did that couple in that movie end up together?” and “what are principles I can live my life by in order to trick love into finding me?”: It’s a mystery. Nobody knows. It seems astonishing yet inevitable when it happens, and no two stories of how it happened are the same.

In the end, the one consistent message these movies send, despite themselves and despite the books they’re “based on” is that you might as well just keep being yourself. Ultimately, that’s what’s most likely to make you happy and get you into a satisfying relationship.

I can buy into that.