The adventures (and misadventures) of a girl who thinks too much for her own good...

Saturday, September 4, 2010

Romantic Movie Rant

I just finished watching 500 Days of Summer, which, for what it was, is a pretty decent movie starring the cutie Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel. What really pisses me off is the complete and utter role reversal of this movie and all romantic-type movies where the guy is the poor hapless victim and the girl is the villainess bitch.
In the movie, the main character, Tom, falls madly in love with this girl (Summer) from work who flat out tells him she doesn't believe in love, she doesn't want to be anyone's girlfriend, yada yada yada non-commitment bullshit. They have a pretty good run for a few months and then she breaks up with him. He's destroyed. They keep bumping into each other, he thinks there's hope, and then he finds out she's getting married. Long story short, he gets over her and moves on.
In my life experience, as limited as it is, women are rarely the commitmentphobes in any relationship. Do female commitmentphobes exist? Undoubtedly they do. But according to Hollywood, it's the guy who is the hopeless romantic, and the girl who is an evil succubus, 99% of the time. From personal experience, and from all sob stories I've listened to over the years about girls getting mistreated by dirtbags who refuse to put a label on their relationship, this is NOT the case.
The only possible explanation I can come up with is the fact that many screenwriters are men, and dorky, insecure ones at that. It's plausible that they've had their hearts broken before, and their stuff is semi-autobiographical. Fine. But it creates a completely unbalanced portrait of real life when there are 100 movies out in a year with this same exact plot, and 90 of them have male protagonists. Not only does it make it seem like guys in their late teens and 20's are extremely interested in serious, marriage oriented relationships, but also that they're very thoughtful, considerate, and in touch with their feelings. Again, in my experience, this is not the case. It's so super rare to find a young guy who isn't terrified of commitment and marriage. I'm still amazed I actually found and am marrying one myself; I worry that I'll suddenly wake up one morning and Ethan will have been a friggin' figment of my imagination.
I realize in my frustration I'm being completely unfair and biased and all things lame. One can't generalize about the frequency at which men are dumped by cold women or vice versa. I just wish that pop culture didn't perpetuate this gendered imbalance at such an alarming rate. It seems like the only movies that reflect the female point of view are solely produced by Drew Barrymore. And while Drew is great, she's one woman in a male dominated industry. I just want to be able to identify with a female protagonist dammit! One who isn't a total dork who wants to go out with the football star (SO OVERDONE), one who isn't a girl who has everything and then finds out her man is cheating on her only to travel abroad in her despair and find an even hotter European man, one who isn't a bitch who sees the error of her ways and falls for the nerdy guy. I want just a small smudge of reality in a story line: girl likes boy, boy likes girl but is a fucking asshole and mistreats girl, girl is heartbroken, girl moves on, boy falls into a ditch and dies. Well, that's an extreme, you you catch my drift.
Rant over.

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