‘It doesn’t make me feel the way you do’: Reading dating apps and digital intimacies in Smiley (Netflix 2022)

This article examines Smiley (2022), a Catalan- and Spanish-language LGBTQ+ romantic comedy on Netflix, as a critical intervention in debates over digital intimacies and platform-mediated relationships. As both romcoms and relationships themselves become increasingly platformized, the article analyses how the series visualizes the digital enclosure of dating through split-screen aesthetics and palimpsestic overlays, formally mirroring the fragmented, gamified nature of dating/hook-up apps like Grindr. Smiley dramatizes the affective labour and disorientation inherent in data-driven matchmaking, interrogating tensions between somatic and cyber-mediated intimacies. Reflecting broader trends towards physical, flesh-and-blood sex in Netflix romcoms, amid the post-romantic, heteropessimistic turn in screen productions, it balances queerer modes of interface design, digital affect and embodied sex with traditional genre discourses of the Soulmate and The One. While offering a nuanced critique of quantified, marketized love, Smiley ’s prioritization of corporeal, monogamous, (homo)normative connection over multiple, virtual encounters reveals both the constraints and possibilities of contemporary (LGBTQ+) courtship and social bonding.