Over the course of an outstanding screenwriting, producing and directing career in Hollywood that is now approaching its fifth decade, Nancy Meyers has long been a name synonymous with romantic comedy. Through the 1980s and 1990s, she co-wrote and co-produced a number of star-studded romcoms, including Baby Boom (1987) and I Love Trouble (1994), continuing to work in the genre after moving to directing. With a cumulative box office of over $1.3 billion to her name, it is striking to note that two of Nancy Meyers's six films as a record-breaking director – The Parent Trap (1998) and The Holiday (2006) – have centred on transatlantic romances. Both films have also enjoyed a decidedly enduring visibility, their success marked not just by their box-office receipts on release but by the devoted fan followings that have fostered the films’ afterlives since then, ardently attended to, for example, through Tumblr pages, event screenings and social media memes. While The Parent Trap is recalled particularly fondly as Lindsay Lohan's film debut, The Holiday has carved out a special place as a ‘Christmas movie’, widely (re)watched annually by fans in an affectionate seasonal ritual. But beyond the specificities of the particular allure each holds, the shared trope of the transatlantic love stories at their centres potently underlines the enduring and, indeed, highly commercial appeal of ‘mismatched’ US–UK couples to the romantic narratives of popular culture, as this whole collection vividly attests.

To date, the bulk of the scholarship around romantic comedy has tended to focus on matters of character, narrative and plot, often as a means to note the genre's predictability and political and intellectual bankruptcy. In this chapter, however, I want to address this inclination to overlook matters pertaining to aesthetics and place in the genre by examining how Meyers crafts the visual terrain of romance and transatlantic space in these films, and through this to reach a more thorough comprehension of the pleasures her films offer. The films’ visual and spatial landscapes have been central to their success, demonstrating the genre's part in mythologising the ‘special relationship’. They perpetuate particular fantasies of national difference, in which a vision of traditional, ‘old’ England sits alongside the upscale and verdant homes enabled by wealthy West Coast American entrepreneurialism, both of these marked by white privilege.