It was just my (bad) luck that I managed to stumble upon one disturbing romantic comedy after another in the last few months. Not to say they're not all cheesy, but sometimes, they're cheesy in a positive and funny way (really, TPTB tend to forget the "comedy" part in "romantic comedy" way too often). And sometimes, they're just... well. They don't work.
I'll rant about three films here, namely Letters to Juliet, The Accidental Husband, and Leap Year.
No worries, I'm not planning to bore you with summaries. I'll just focus on what they all have in common, and why it bothers me.
So, the issue. In all these films, the woman is:
a) engaged to a man;
b) about to get engaged.
But—are these films about marriage? About the weddings? No, of course not. They're all about the woman meeting this new guy, the infuriating type she absolutely cannot stand, only—*gasp*—she falls in love with him after all. Now, I love a good romance, but seriously, people? Seriously? Let's show a story where we make people cheer for the new guy, make them hope the heroin will leave her fiancé because he's a douchebag anyway, because true love has to win in the end, right?
Sure... How about the tragic part of the story? There are two people who love each other so much they want to spend the rest of their lives together and are about to say "yes". Great. Except their love is nothing like the epic romance the plot is built on, and therefore can't compare, and this is the part that makes me look for a plastic bag to puke into.
People don't just decide, oh, I'm bored today, let's get married. They don't. They go through crap and they make it through, together. They know each other, they love each other. They make plans for the future that they want to spend together. All this is devaluated by the so-called epic romances in the films. Yes, maybe some hot guy comes along, and maybe it would be really great to fall in bed with him or just have long midnight talks, but these heroins have been in a long-term relationship. How stupid would it be to abandon their boyfriend/fiancé for some guy they've known for a week? Who does that?
But of course Hollywood shows this as if it were completely normal. Better yet, they make us root for the new guy. They make us wish the woman cheated, undermining every value we're supposed to have. What kind of a message is that, telling us that:
a) something we've worked for is worth throwing away for a promise of an adventure just like that;
b) cheating is okay;
c) engagements don't mean anything;
d) trying to fix the issues in a relationship is overrated;
e) etc.
Another thing worth mentioning is that in all these films, the already-existing relationships are actually pretty bad. Either the partners don't understand each other, or they lost what they'd had in common, or maybe their ideas for the future differ too much. There's always something to make sure they don't have a solid, loving relationship. All right, I can understand such couples would fall apart more readily, but the fact still remains that those people want to get married. Why? How? If they don't understand each other, why would they get engaged? If they do understand each other, why would they break up without batting an eye? It's contradictory.
I just hope screen writers will start thinking about more than how pretty that kiss would look in front of a sunset in the future...
(My hopes are not really high, though. Ugh.)
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