Romantic comedies give viewers a way to divulge themselves into the story line of other individuals. It allows for an interpretation of an entire culture to be made based on the film itself. With "It happened one night" rash decisions were made in order to preserve the love between a couple, while "My big fat Greek wedding" showed how culture influences marriage and love.
Romantic Comedies
Love has been portrayed in many different fashions in film. From love being the destruction of all, to love being the reason why a positive event occurs, it is all about interpretation. The films, It Happened One Night (1934) and My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002) both depict the love between two couples and how that love for each other overrides all barriers to in the end allow couples in love to maintain a relationship with each other.
It Happened One Night (1934) depicts the love story between a woman and a man who fall madly in love with each other and get married. However, the woman does not take into account that her father does not want her to marry this man, so after they secretly get married, the woman's father gets the marriage annulled. Love in this culture is defined by practicality and not necessarily by love. The father sees his daughter's marriage to someone that he does not like as being an impractical choice as his daughter deserves better. The daughter however, being young and naive, ignores her father's desires and leaves her hometown to go looking for the person that she believes is the love of her life. After she goes to New York City looking for her love, she meets another man that helps her look for the love of her life, but she then falls in love with that man. The underlying concern that viewers get from this movie is the questioning of whether love is real, or whether it is just a result of feeling like there is no other option.
Our culture views relationships as being a direct result of the love between two individuals. However, at times that is not the best choice, nor the best pillar from which to rely on in a relationship. The film, It Happened One Night (1934), shows that love in our culture can be fickle. Although the main female protagonist feels that she is madly in love with the man that her father so intensely refuses to accept, she ends up falling in love with a completely different man, making the viewer's question whether she was ever truly in love to begin with. This film makes love in our culture seem like a feeling that women seek in order to escape from their environment. Once the female escaped her father's grasp in search of her love, she was able to escape to find her true love: freedom. This film depicts men and women's different perspective on love. While women are more emotionally driven, men are more practical in their search for love. The female protagonist makes rash decisions based on how she feels at the moment, while the male protagonist makes a decision based on how he thinks their relationship is more likely to survive. This is representative of our culture and society in respect to the feeling of love.
Unlike the film It Happened One Night (1934), the film My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002) depicts a different type of love, one that it embedded within cultural expectations. This film depicts the life of a woman who has not lived up to her cultural expectations and by the time she is thirty, she realizes that she is getting too old to find love. She then meets a man whom she falls in love with, but the problem lies in his not being from her same ethnic and cultural background. This creates turmoil among her extremely traditional family. Her father refuses to accept her new fiance, but insisting that she is in love, she gets her family to accept a non-Greek individual into their family. Unlike It Happened One Night (1934), My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002) shows how culture influences love in our civilization.
The relationship between these two individuals, demonstrates how much love means in our society. The underlying concern in this case is how two different cultures could unite to form a mutual one where everyone is happy. The film itself is about the relationship, but the underlying message is that acceptance could come in various forms. Love drives emotions, and these emotions could lead to a resolution among individuals that do not seem to have anything in common. With the growing diversity in the world, different cultures are constantly being joined to each other by means of marriage. This film demonstrates that with love, acceptance is also possible. The external factors in this film did not influence the couple's decision to be with each other.
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