Netflix’s Love Hard is an Accidental Cuffing Season Cautionary Tale for the Algorithmic Age
By Lila Ablimit
*Spoiler-heavy—not that people are racing to stream this wildly cerebral, game-changing, avant garde-Netflix original.
Netflix’s 2021 romantic-comedy Love Hard, directed by Hérnan Jiménez, deviates from the Hallmark Christmas movie formula to offer its viewers an online-dating fairy-tale to believe in, if they’ve lost all hope during these trying times. Nina Dobrev, playing Los Angeles-based dating columnist Natalie Bauer, is paired with Asian-American comedian Jimmy O Yang (playing Josh Lin) as romantic leads in the film. The writers have decided that the only conceivable plot in which these two (2010s it-girl and self-deprecating short king) could develop a mutual attraction is if Nina Dobrev’s character was duped.
After experiencing a love-at-first-match, Natalie decides to fly to Josh’s picturesque village in New York state to surprise him for Christmas—only to find out her cyber-boo is a catfish. Online, Josh was hunky and outdoorsy. In real life, he was none of these things—and in some ways, even infantile. The real Josh is a case study of what psychologists call “extended adolescence.” At age 30, he lives in his parents’ basement and his standards for decor and cleanliness are on par with a college dorm at best, amplifying the signal that he may lack the capability to provide for a grown woman like Natalie, let alone the ability to charm one.
Josh introduces Natalie to his “crib,” where the “magic happens.”
Josh tries to right his wrong with another wrong by helping Natalie land the man he catfished as, who is (conveniently) a fellow villager and not just a random stock photo model. This man, by the way, is aptly named Tag. I liked this a lot, actually. It's entirely plausible to me that an American Eagle Outfitted, Thoreau-idolizing, rock-climbing man would possess an aura that screams “My name is a verb!” (like the more common “Chase,” for example). This is the kind of regular, athletic man that Nike makes “JUST DO IT” performance T-shirts for. He’s a catch—chill, crunchy, and a Northeast convention for masculinity—but that same promising predictability becomes his downfall once Natalie realizes his worldview may also be fixed at factory settings. And that’s an obvious turn-off for the modern, educated woman who’d rather carve out her own cosmopolitan path than accessorize a man’s lifestyle in the boonies.
As such, Natalie gradually realizes through this unrewarding deceit that her heart was captured long ago by Josh’s personality, over text. While he’s no casanova, Josh is a gentle man who shows emotional availability and takes genuine interest in Natalie’s interiority as well as her appearance. With this recognition, she looks past Josh’s serious betrayal and initiates a romantic partnership via a Love Actually-style cue card confession. Josh accepts her feelings and reciprocates, writing “YIPPEE KI YAY, MOTHERFUCKER” on the back of her final card.
By the end of the movie, these two unlikely lovers (both in their third decade of life) have finally come of age, demonstrating mastery of the “be yourself” lesson that on-screen people of the past typically learn as teenagers. In a pivotal rebellion, Josh confesses to his dad he doesn’t want to take over the family shop (like “DaD, I WannA GO to FASHIon ScHOOL” without the angst). Meanwhile, Natalie learns that love is as simple as refining her dating search filters to just one trait: the ability to share intellectual intimacy with a romantic partner. In this sense, the film implies her life-long struggle to find love is cured by learning to de-prioritize the superficial. This is the somewhat poignant yet not-quite-feminist take home message I gleaned from watching the absurdly inflated importance of Josh and Natalie agreeing that Die Hard is a Christmas movie.
But is it really so unbelievable that two people could become infatuated with one another, let alone fall in love, over a cultural reference? Given how content-saturated the internet is, I suppose it could feel cosmically ordained if another hot single shared your one-in-a-million opinion about a niche article. (“I love The Smiths”…) Mathematically speaking, “one-in-a-million” is arguably no longer a terribly rare degree of relatability in the statistical context of global media digestion, but I digress. I’ll let these fools love live (for now)
Thus, Love Hard emulates a new, uncontroversial ideal for lateral dating within the pop-culturally inclined middle-class: “True love is when you find someone you can bang and be couch potatoes with.” The person who satisfies these standards will complete you as the avocado to your toast. Surely, this mantra exists in real life, probably etched onto a $3.00 coaster sold at TJ Maxx.
Curiously, this minimalist mantra does not explicitly promise a “happily ever after”—likely because it skips the kind of future-oriented accounting people use when sifting through dating prospects. In this way, it silences the noise that usually reminds women to stay focused on their security and quality of life (e.g., “what if this random Tinder man from Lake Placid, N.Y. turns out to be an axe murderer—or the kind of guy who abandons his wife when she’s diagnosed with cancer?”). Then again, maybe this simple standard is a privilege reserved for mundane, homogenous relationships—ones in which matters like finances, race, religion, politics, etc., are non-issues to the lovers themselves, and consequently trivial to the relationship’s viability. With that in mind, it becomes even clearer why the dramatic conflicts and gender performance standards of classic fairy-tales would feel out of place in Love Hard. After all, Cinderella, Aladdin, and The Little Mermaid all center inter-something relationships, where overcoming division brought about by that something (such as class or species) is actually quite significant to the couple’s destiny.
With all this said, I do not believe Love Hard is a particularly smart movie—nor that it ever intended to be. What it is however, is cheerful propaganda for consumer data sharing, disguised as a Christmas rom-com. Like children receiving perfect gifts from Santa in reward of year-long good behavior, Natalie and Josh are brought into divine union by an equally mystical, omniscient force: a dating app algorithm. The two lovers appear vacuous to us because the algorithm has already done all the emotional and logistical labor of falling in love for them.
If an honest prequel to Love Hard were ever made, we’d finally get to know Josh and Natalie beyond the scraps of information offered in their dating profile taglines. We’d watch a montage of their user profiles being constructed—diligently assembled over years of consumership and many skimmed Terms and Conditions. This is the long-term cooperation that data-driven technologies like dating apps depend on, so their seemingly imperishable fruits can arrive by Christmas morning with a “For you, From Hinge” memo attached.
At the end of the movie, Natalie and Josh kiss a few times in a last-ditch attempt to convince viewers their chemistry exists. We’re told this is true love, yet these moments of physical intimacy feel more like a rite of passage than well-earned bursts of passion; the payoff feels cheap. Where pleas from educators fail to sell people on the real personal and societal-level trade-offs of long-term algorithmically-assisted thinking (critical thinking is, unfortunately, unsexy), Love Hard offers the public a compelling and much-needed picture of a future we do not want. Change your habits, Love Hard says—unless you want to become boring and end up kissing… like that.
Overall Rating: Degrassi/10. A must-screen for the new high school health curriculum.
