From Utne Reader:
Hollywood’s romantic comedies aren’t just innocuous cinematic tripe. They’re actually warping children’s minds (pdf), according to new research from Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh. The films, including Notting Hill and You’ve Got Mail are skewed portrayals of relationships with “both highly idealistic and undesirable qualities,” the researchers write, where romantic problems or transgressions “have no real negative long-term impact on relationship functioning.” The films tend to focus on the early stages of relationships, but the characters displayed emotions that generally develop over time, including deep feelings of love and emotional support. Adolescents sometimes use these films as models for their own relationships, which could lead to unrealistic expectations and disappointment.
(Via: MarriageDebate.com)
March 1st, 2011 | 10:49 am
My girls loved “Notting Hill”, but found “You’ve God Mail” contrived. They aren’t miserable. I suspect that people who are miserable after watching these films have more deep-seated issues than unrealistic expectations created by cinematic depictions of romantic relationships.
Would 19th century readers of Bronte bodice rippers not have developed similarly unrealistic expectations?
March 1st, 2011 | 11:09 am
Depends on the movie – I’ve been married almost five years (not that long, I know), but I still enjoy Notting Hill and Sleepless in Seattle.
I do think movies like When Harry Met Sally and the better romances by Woody Allen are very helpful because they do show broken people finding love in spite of their problems, and the problems never go away. That’s a much more realistic protrait.
March 1st, 2011 | 12:32 pm
The real problem here isn’t the romantic comedies. It is the belief that it is somehow normal for adolescents to be forming their ideas about relationships (and one’s own identity) from images in the media, in a world where, increasingly, the authority figures are encouraging kids (directly and through media) to ignore their parents, ignore their family, and go with the fantasy-image that is constructed for them.
Kids left alone with only media images to construct an identity out of are going to make bad choices.
March 1st, 2011 | 12:35 pm
Bronte bodice rippers? There were, perhaps, some complex relationships in some of the Bronte novels, but the sisters all wrote like Victorian ladies, despite their masculine pseudonyms.
March 1st, 2011 | 1:00 pm
“Bronte bodice rippers? There were, perhaps, some complex relationships in some of the Bronte novels, but the sisters all wrote like Victorian ladies, despite their masculine pseudonyms.”
You’ll never convince me Wuthering Heights isn’t anything other than a Harlequin Romance with pretensions. Jane Eyre is a little better, but only in that it is less cloying. How many young girls swooned for Mr. Rochester, despite his dotty wife up in the attic?
I’ll take Jane Austen any day of the week (and my daughters have played the BBC version with Colin Firth so often that the DVDs are getting worn out.
March 1st, 2011 | 3:22 pm
Well, you might mean something different by “bodice ripper” then, than the words themselves imply. Jane Eyre didn’t go through all that suffering because she couldn’t wait to get her bodice ripped — she could have had Mr. Rochester on terms she wasn’t willing to accept, long before that.
Wuthering Heights is admittedly rather more….melodramatic.
March 1st, 2011 | 3:46 pm
Not “Notting Hill!”
One of favorite not-very-guilty pleasures. I guess what appeals to me, long no-longer-young, is that The Relationship — of Grant’s and Roberts’ characters — takes place within the context of a set of relationships: of friends.
It’s not a boy meets girl movie. It’s a boy-with-true-friends meets girl-seeking-true-friends movie. That’s different. And, somehow, more real than the other kinds of idealization.
March 1st, 2011 | 4:34 pm
It’s unquestionably true that most mainstream romantic comedies give kids a strange set of messages- but the studied you link to concentrates on relatively trivial matters.
For instance, the study points to a highly romantic gesture made by Reese Withersppon’s fiancé in “Sweet Home Alabama” (he gives her dozens of rose petals) and frets that such gestures may lead girls to EXPECT such grand gifts from men. In reality, that’s the LEAST of the problems with “Sweet Home Alabama.” Remember, Reese DUMPS the sweet, kind, thoughtful fiancé who brought her those rose petals, choosing instead to remarry a man she has nothing in common with, a man with whom she’s contantly fighting.
And that is NOT atypical of the romantic comedy genre. In a standard romantic comedy, the hero or heroine (often both!) already has a boyfriend/fiancée who’s kind, stable, loving and attentive but… well, just a bit dull. And the movie tells us to ditch the stable people who actually care about us so that we can pursue a PASSIONATE romance with someone who’s all wrong for us.
Meg Ryan has a fiancée (Bill Pullman) who adores her, but she sneaks around behind his back to stalk Tom Hanks in “Sleepless in Seattle.” It’s Meg Ryan, of course, so her unforgivable betrayal of a man she’s pledged to be faithful to is presented as cute!
That’s par for the course in romantic comedies. Dump the person you’re committed to, and pursue your soul mate, Hollywood tells us. And who is your soul mate? Why, the person who seems to hate you most! If you’re a stable guy with a good job and are engaged to a nice girl… well, obviously yur life needs to be shaken up. You need to dump this girl and take up with a free spirit that you’re hopelessly incompatible with.
March 1st, 2011 | 4:52 pm
If you’re a stable guy with a good job and are engaged to a nice girl… well, obviously yur life needs to be shaken up. You need to dump this girl and take up with a free spirit that you’re hopelessly incompatible with.
The folks at The Onion AV Club have labeled this strange, inhuman archetypal character the Manic Pixie Dream Girl.
March 1st, 2011 | 5:47 pm
“That’s par for the course in romantic comedies. Dump the person you’re committed to, and pursue your soul mate, Hollywood tells us.”
And do so in the space of a few days. Because that’s all it takes to know “it’s for real.”
March 1st, 2011 | 6:09 pm
I’d never heard the expression “Magic pixie dream girl,” but I like it. There are definitely a lot of crazy, free-spirited characters in movies who seem to exist solely to show staid, conservative guys how to loosen up and embrace life.
Clementine, Kate Winslet’s character in “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” starts out as exactly that type of character. She SEEMS like the kind of magical girl who’d make staid Jim Carrey much happier and more mellow, in a more conventional rom-com. Instead, they make each other miserable- which is probably what would happen to such a mismatched couple in real life.
March 8th, 2011 | 3:59 am
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