Fragile feeling

Abstract

Abstract Where analyses of the city as a landscape often visualize 'urban-ness' through images of tall buildings and concrete, this article thinks about how the genre of romance might turn our attention to other genres of city-as-landscape. I offer Johannesburg from this orientation through a reading of its history as a 'Secret Garden'. Most romance genres rely on a temporal closure of 'happily-ever-after', but here I am interested in other possible endings. This reading of romance I draw from David Scott's (2004) account of romance as a temporal relation to anticolonial struggle. The article examines Kagiso Lediga's 2018 film, Catching Feelings. The film is framed around the narrative of the 'cuckold', which I argue articulates the libidinal economy between the protagonist Max and his friend, Heiner. This libidinal economy is also presented through the landscape of the city. While more accurately defined as a film within the genre of 'bro' or 'lad lit', what Lediga's film does share with chick lit is the way that it borrows from the form of the fairy tale. Through this fairy tale, I locate emergent and continuous forms of masculinity in a history of Johannesburg's landscape through the visual language of the domesticated forest. Through the cuckold as a fairy tale, Lediga offers the city not simply as the place of the action, but as an object of desire, or of fantasy that makes his fragile protagonist 'strange'.