What is the chief obstacle that must be overcome in most modern-day big-screen romcoms? Lack of attraction? Misaligning schedules? Or, perhaps, heteromonogamy? If that wasn’t the dominating norm of human relationships, many movie plots would be much swifter to resolve. What if Elizabeth Olsen didn’t have to choose between Callum Turner and Miles Teller in Eternity? Or Twilight allowed Bella to be in a throuple with Edward and Jacob? Even though both films have fantasy narratives, their predestined outcome is as real as it gets – a man and a woman (re)marry and live happily ever after.
For a long time, alternative relationship structures were relegated to fan fiction, undeserving of mainstream fictional representations where conflict and resolution are both inscribed in coupledom. Even the films that challenged mononormativity, such as Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, sustain the cautionary tale: opening up your relationship will eventually break it. As a practising non-monogamist, I yearn to see my values represented on screen as something more than a cautionary tale. Recently, the love triangles of Past Lives (implied) and Challengers (consummated) have suggested that perhaps Hollywood itself may be opening up. Then came The Invite, a poly-romcom just in time for the Week of Visibility for Non-monogamy.
In The Invite, Angela and Joe (Olivia Wilde and Seth Rogen) have raised a child and, in the course of their marriage, lost their spark. Their guests for the evening – a suave Edward Norton and a dazzling Penélope Cruz, playing upstairs neighbours Hawk and Piña – seem the exact opposite, having an excess of NRE (new relationship energy) and loud, bed-shaking sex. “We are non-monogamous,” they say, and the offer for shared play seems like a perfect deus ex machina for every dry spell. The die is cast and the flame can be rekindled, but for a viewer identifying as polyamorous, it doesn’t come naturally to root for Angela and Joe.
Regardless of which couple you relate to, The Invite is a rip-roaring viewing experience. The film toys with thriller genre conventions, amping up the pressure as the dinner party goes from bad to worse, to then recast it as sexual tension in the same domestic setting. Meeting a new partner is uncharted territory. It’s scary, like inviting a pair of very attractive strangers into your pristine home.
As an umbrella term, non-monogamy describes an array of relationships (including polyamory) involving multiple intimate, romantic or sexual partners, with the full knowledge and consent of everyone involved. In the US and Canada, one in five people have experience with non-monogamy, while the numbers surveyed in the UK show a third of heterosexual men and 11% of women as open to having more than one long-term partner. According to Ruby Rare, intimacy expert at the dating app Feeld and author of The Non-Monogamy Playbook, on-screen depictions of non-monogamy are many people’s only frame of reference. “Only 27% of people outside the Feeld community consider alternative relationships normal, compared with 72% within a community that understands them first-hand. The stereotype isn’t based on reality; it’s based on what we’ve been shown.”
With the rising popularity of alternative relationships, polyamory can become a testing ground in reality, not only on the big screen. Therapists such as Esther Perel, who consulted on The Invite, have highlighted how values such as trust, openness and abundant care often fall by the wayside in mono relationships. Hawk and Piña offer not only glimpses of their shared sexual adventures, but also substantiated reflections delivered with impeccable comedic timing. It’s no surprise that their prompt becomes a catalyst for Angela and Joe to see their relationship anew.
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That said, the comedy of it all is disarming: fits of bellowing laughter fill every screening room I’ve watched The Invite in, as the comedy of manners transforms into a cinematic playbook for the polyamorous. When Piña explains the meaning of “compersion” (the joy of your partner’s pleasure shared with someone else), it’s funnily mispronounced by the newly initiated as “compression”, and when “preference sheets” are mentioned, Angela gushes about the innate reference to Below Deck. Explaining the vocabulary of non-monogamy in such an anti-didactic way opens up space for discussion and the excitedly humorous input can seem innocent and eager. Laughing in recognition is vulnerable and no wonder that particular “ha-ha-ha-aaah” we all know well is what the director cherishes the most.
I can’t help but see a parallel in the way society treats comedies and non-monogamy as “less serious” than their dramatic counterparts. Whether it’s due to the socioeconomic benefits, conditioning or personal preference, monogamy still determines how most of us envision our romantic futures as devotedly coupled. Even more, fidelity and love are treated as one and the same, validated by the compulsory sacrifice of desire for others. Monogamy has great dramaturgy and that’s why it’s the norm.
It’s not the proposal at the heart of The Invite that makes or breaks a couple, nor is the film supposed to be a manual for non-monogamy. Even though the existing contradictions are not magically reconciled, watching it all play out feels cathartic. We laugh identifying with the screen, experiencing the thrills at a remove. With that, The Invite’s elements of comedy and thriller mirror the experience of entering the undeciphered, non-monogamous space, without complying with the conventions of a hero’s journey. Instead of reducing non-monogamy to an obstacle or a fetish in the initiation journey, Wilde’s film depicts it as a space of quiet revolt and shared exploration. And perhaps, a new kind of dramaturgy: the more, the merrier.
