Paging Meg Ryan
| Mon Dec. 29, 2008 9:08 AM PST
PAGING MEG RYAN....Something I've long suspected has finally been Proven By Science: romantic comedies are bad for you:
According to a few enterprising social scientists at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, romantic comedies can raise unrealistic romantic expectations among fans and may therefore set them up for personal failure and a lifetime of disappointment.
....After sifting through 200 of the top-grossing romantic comedies to come out of the Big Six Hollywood studios between 1995 and 2005, [Bjarne] Holmes and his colleagues found some interesting common denominators: In the movies, new relationships are portrayed both as exciting, as most tend to be, and offering the intimacy that usually takes years to develop in real life. Past transgressions are easily forgiven. (You cheated on me with the mailman? Big deal! I still love you; let's live happily ever after!) And finally, older, more committed relationships are frequently portrayed in a negative light, with couples bickering and backbiting. More often than not, married couples are depicted as long-suffering.
Sounds right, though I'll confess that Holmes's research methodology strikes me as absurdly thin, even by the usual standards of these things. In academic-speak, he says:
Using 294 undergraduate students, an exploratory study found an association between preference for/like of romance-oriented media and two relationship-as-destiny-oriented beliefs, belief in predestined soul mates (β = .27, p < .001) and that "mind reading is expected in relationships" (β = .21, p < .001).
In English, this means that people who liked romantic comedies also tended to idealize romance. Shocking, isn't it? Still, here's the good news: Holmes and his colleagues at the Family and Personal Relationships Lab have a continuing online project dedicated to this subject and you can participate! Just click here.
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Comments
I always date wacky, busty, spontaneous women who have serious, accomplished sisters that are faintly more attractive and desirable upon further scrutiny. That way I know I'll be getting laid, have a nice place to live and truly be a happier person after breaking up with the ditz with the tits. Of course none of that works out until I've taken in a lovable stray dog. And made complete hash of a wedding. And made a drunken, naked fool of myself in front of several of their elderly relatives. For sure in front of their parents. And clumsily wooed both sisters as they unknowingly stayed in adjoining hotel rooms in a tropical locale. Really. It happens all the time. Just like I said.
Submitted by Julia Grey (not verified) on Mon Dec. 29, 2008 9:44 AM PST.
You forgot the MOST important element in romantic comedy: the Major Misunderstanding, most commonly the result of mistaken identity/pretending you are someone you're not.
I don't know how one could develop "excessive expectations" in that area.
Yeah, well, the central insight in Flaubert's Madame Bovary(1856) was, pretty much, "You mistake your life for romance fiction at your peril"...
C'est la meme chose, la plus ca change...
Of course, most folks can't distinguish actors from the part they play, so this shouldn't be a surprise.
Submitted by Max Kennerly (not verified) on Mon Dec. 29, 2008 10:16 AM PST.
You could just as well argue that dramas create unrealistic expectations about how interesting real life is.
Just imagine the ideal movie according to the researchers: married couple happily, but not excessively happily, married for years.
Is that the kind of movie you want to see? Might as well watch an action movie about a man who hears a noise and calls the cops, who peacefully arrest man loitering on street, who is later released without being charged. Whoop-dee-doo, give me my money back.
I vaguely recall that the "purpose" of drama in ancient Greece was primarily as catharsis -- one might be shocked and grieved and even fascinated by Oedipus, but you probably left the theater with a sense of relief that however disappointed by life you may be, at least you weren't likely to end up as a blind man being pulled around by the children you had with your mother after murdering your father.
When you leave the average Hollywood romance you are likely to go home thinking, "why can't my life be like that?" and then even more so when you compare your kitchen and the rest of your house to the ones featured in the movie.
Submitted by Julia Grey (not verified) on Mon Dec. 29, 2008 12:34 PM PST.
When you leave the average Hollywood romance you are likely to go home thinking, "why can't my life be like that?" and then even more so when you compare your kitchen and the rest of your house to the ones featured in the movie.
Hey, you don't have to go to the movies to get that feeling. Read any house-life magazine. Look at the smiling families posing in their immaculate digs and feel the burrrrn.
Romantic comedies (especially Hollywood ones) are evil. As someone up thread said, you see them and think "why can't my life be like that?". Those movies actually make you more depressed.
Watch Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage for a realistic and cathartic depiction of relationships.
Submitted by Scott Supak (not verified) on Mon Dec. 29, 2008 1:06 PM PST.
People with unrealistic romantic expectations just love romantic comedies, huh?
The only time I can recall being actually angry after a movie is when I got dragged to Sleepless in Seattle while I was separated from my first wife. I made it my goal to make everybody else who saw it hate it as much as I did. I was pretty unpleasant.
You mean, I'm not a CTA worker who has [chastely] lusted after an anonymous City worker, who then has the glorious opportunity to save his life after he's been mugged onto the tracks ... and then must keep up a facade of 'fiancee' during the holiday season with his family over the comatose body, even after his obviously-my-type brother shows up, makes a rocking chair that is oh-so-comfortable, and mistakenly identifies me as pregnant in front of all my co-workers, before confusing Joe Junior's fantasies with reality and accusing me of sleeping with my landlord's son, all before he (as the Best Man) interrupts my wedding with coma-guy-awoken and we ride off on the back of a CTA train? You are seriously saying that this isn't my life?
Oh drat. Life was never that orange, even in retrospect.
Let's clarify things -- current romantic comedies are bad for you. If you want good examples of the genre, go back some 70 years to the likes of "The Awful Truth," "Hands Across The Table," "Libeled Lady" or such. Meg Ryan is okay, but not in the league of Carole Lombard, Myrna Loy, Irene Dunne or their '30s brethren. These days, it's next to impossible to find a good romantic comedy on a channel other than Turner Classic Movies.
