In today's reading for class, Zipes goes through many different feminist retellings or new creations of fairy tales. Among all these different variations, he mentions at one point how, even to this day, much of our culture still exhibits remnants of fairy tale motifs. He specifically mentions movies in this. At first, I felt like this was a stretch, but last night as I was looking at my movie collection to see if this was true, I was surprised to find that his assertion was somewhat justified.
Many of the movies that I own that were released in recent years, and in particular comedies/romantic comedies, had one fairy tale motif in common - getting married and living happily ever after. Some of the most successful ones from recent years (American Wedding, Wedding Crashers, The 40 Year Old Virgin, etc.) all have this common theme. In each of them, the main couple always ends up coming through a ridiculous amount of drama, and once the wedding is completed, it is portrayed that the rest of their life will be nothing but bliss. I mean hey, why would it matter that Jeremy and John are lying about their identities, and have been for years, to have sex with as many women as possible at weddings? They seem like pretty upstanding guys. And hey, a guy has been lying to you about his reasons for not wanting to have sex with you (he never has) and is instead trying to make you think that he is just doing it out of respect for you (debatable). And American Wedding has too many issues to even list off here, but hey, once they're married everything is suddenly perfect.
While it is nice to think that this is how the real world works, in reality around half of all marriages end in divorce. While that shouldn't discourage someone from getting married, it is purely ignorant to think that suddenly all your worries go away. And I think most people know that. The fact that fairy tales can still have this much influence in pop culture was just surprising, and interesting, to me.
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The relationship between romantic comedies and fairy tales is one we seem to flirt with a lot in class, but never delve deeply into. What's the connection here? What deeper phenomena might they both draw on?
ReplyDeleteDan makes a great point in this post, namely that marriage does not automatically make a couple’s problems magically disappear, and subsequently nearly half of all marriages end in divorce, with the numbers even higher for those where at least one person has already been through at least one marriage. That said, I think he may be misunderstanding the appeal of the romantic comedy’s happy ending. I don’t think it is necessarily that people are associating the happiness of a marriage at the end with the mythical ‘Happily Ever After’ of the fairy tale genre. Contrarily, I would say that the point is rather that some happiness can happen in the end, regardless of the path it takes to get there. I could be wrong, but I don’t believe any of those films mentioned in the post (Wedding Crashers, The 40 Year Old Virgin, or American Wedding) actually reference what life is like after the initial bliss of the wedding and/or honeymoon. I think that the romantic comedy, despite the ‘issues’ mentioned in the original post, is actually more realistic than a fairy tale (wow, never thought I’d say a romantic comedy was more realistic than anything). Although you may find many aspects of the romantic comedy similar to the fairy tale, the romantic comedy’s tendency to not give evidence after the initial wedding makes it much more believable. Indeed, this avoidance of post wedding detail is best seen in Along Came Polly, where the male star gets his girl in the end, but does not even get married. So while the romantic comedy may strike many of the same cords as fairy tales, I think there is a difference. Fairy tales promote the idea of eternal happiness, while romantic comedies take into account the old adage “A wedding is only a day, a marriage is forever.” If you want to show happiness, you show the wedding, because not everyone can make it to ‘forever.’
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