In Guilty Pleasures, Alice Guilluy examines the reception of contemporary Hollywood romantic comedy by European audiences. She offers a new look at the romantic comedy genre through a qualitative study of its consumption by actual audiences. In doing so, she attempts to challenge traditional critiques of the genre as trite -escapism- at best, and dangerous -guilty pleasure- at worst. Despite this cultural anxiety, little work has been done on the genre-s real audiences. Guilluy addresses this gap by presenting the results of a major qualitative study of the genre-s reception, based on interview research with rom-com viewers in Britain, France and Germany, focusing on Sweet Home Alabama (2002, dir. Andy Tennant). Throughout the interviews, participants attempted to distance themselves from what they described as the -typical- rom-com viewer: the uneducated, gullible, overly emotional (American) woman. Guilluy calls this fantasy figure the -phantom spectatrix-. Guilluy comp
