My favourite film aged 12: The Notebook
Continuing our series revisiting childhood movie passions, we look at a romance that could’ve been schlock, if not for Rachel McAdams and Ryan Gosling’s chemistry
Flash back to the summer of 2007: Spider-Man 3 was in theatres. Two of the top five most viewed YouTube videos were by the band My Chemical Romance. And The Notebook, a movie starring Rachel McAdams and Ryan Gosling as star-crossed teenage lovers who reconnect as adults, was three years old. The famous re-enactment of the film’s climactic lift-and-kiss at the MTV movie awards by its stars, then a real-life couple, was two years old. I was 13 years old and, true to sheltered oldest child form, didn’t know about any of this. And so one sleepover night in my friend’s basement, I faced at least three aghast faces: “You haven’t seen The Notebook?!?”
The Notebook probably has fans outside my demographic – it’s an adaptation of a Nicholas Sparks romance novel, a book/author/genre marketed to middle-aged women – but for girls in middle school (or, at least, my middle school in suburban Ohio) between 2004 and 2008 or so, it was a foundational text. It was the romantic movie of choice, a portal into couple-shipping YouTube and, later, Tumblr holes, a benchmark for years of unrealistic dating expectations. You wanted to know what sex was “supposed” to look and sound like AND tell everyone you bawled at the profound idea of love transcending old age? You watched The Notebook.