"Every woman has the exact love life she wants," says Nick, the brooding male escort in the film (and the Elizabeth Young book) The Wedding Date.
This quote seems to get as much treatment by the movie critics as the
whole rest of the film. The statement is described as everything from
misogynistic and Republican to condescending, disturbing and maudlin.
According to several reviewers, over 90% of those who watched the film
in theatres were women. Most of them either loved it or loathed it,
though even a lot of its fans gave it only a 6 or 7 out of ten, as if
they were embarrassed by it. This timidity, and a block of 1-out-of-10
ratings by outraged viewers who mostly ranted that the plot didn't make
sense, reduced the average IMDb rating for the film to 5.3. Ninety
percent of the (mostly-male) film critics panned it.
I loved it, but then I'm a sucker for romances. I also loved these films (IMDb average ratings in brackets):
- Ever After (6.9)
- Home for the Holidays (6.3)
- How to Make an American Quilt (5.7)
- Loving Evangeline (5.6)
- Mr. Wonderful (5.8)
- Mystic Pizza (6.0)
- Stealing Beauty (6.2)
These
films have the following in common, besides being romances: (1) The
leading protagonist is an adult female, (2) Action and plot is
secondary to character and relationship, and there is no dependence on
violence for drama, and (3) They were written (or at least co-written)
by women.
Lots of romances, some of them quite good, are
written by men, and they almost invariably get better reviews. The
average rating of all movies on IMDb is 6.9. For some reason
implausible plots don't seem to be as much an issue when the main
protagonist of the film is a male, or when the story was written by a
male. Take a look at IMDb's top 50 romance films of all time and you'll look in vain for a single film
written by a woman in the last half-century. While this is largely due
to the long-standing patriarchy in Hollywood, it is also due to an
inherent bias among movie-goers against what are disparagingly called
"chick-flicks".
In most of the above films, the males are a
little two-dimensional, and this clearly riles a lot of critics and
reviewers. (No matter than in 90% of mainstream movies, the female
characters are one-dimensional.) The point
of romances is to explore the feelings and relationships of the main
characters. A film doesn't have enough bandwidth to richly develop a lot of
characters, so by necessity some of the characters need to be left
underdeveloped. That doesn't mean they are stereotypes: It is left up
to the imagination of the viewer to fill in the details as they wish.
(Remember when moviegoers were actually required to use their imagination?)
As I mentioned in my article last month on the bias against women's literature,
part of the value many women reportedly get from fiction is "guidance"
(men instead read mostly for "excitement"). While the majority of men
separate their reading and movie-viewing into 'information'
(non-fiction) and 'entertainment' (fiction), many women look for and
find both in a single vehicle, and one such vehicle is romance fiction.
When I watch these films, I find they inform me about how women think
and what women want, and they also teach me about how people deal with
unhappiness, with problems, with loneliness and tragedy and self-doubt.
Dealing with these things is extremely difficult, women appreciate
that, and good romance writers understand the rules of story and fable. Accordingly, romances invariably have a happy ending, because the protagonists have earned it -- the moral encourages women to keep fighting the good fight, to accept and understand but not despair.
Why
don't most men get this? I think it's because to them, a film is almost
a purely visual feast. The action, the special effects, the female
eye-candy are all there to sate the hunger for retinal-visceral
stimulus, the addiction to adrenaline. They find the plot holes
distracting and unsettling -- the plot is the continuity vehicle that
sustains and justifies their gorging on non-stop visual overload. And
they entirely miss the aural and body language messages of the film.
This is far too subtle for them. They aren't paying attention to the tone of voice, the eye language, the facial expressions and body contortions that convey so much. They aren't listening to the words. No wonder they find films like this so unsatisfying. They learn nothing.
I
have never been a Debra Messing fan, but I found her performance in The
Wedding Date riveting. She displays far more breadth of emotion here
than her stereotype TV sitcom role allowed. She imbues her character
with depth, sensitivity, and fragility, and delivers every line with
nuance and power. I was just blown away. If we could just get more
roles like this, written and directed and performed by women with such
talent, we might even be able to save Hollywood from its long decline
into banality and irrelevance.
But women's voices, wisdom and ideas are not just suppressed and unheard in the movies.
They are under-represented and under-appreciated in business and in
politics, where most decisions are made. This is a tragedy because most
women seem to understand, better than most men, the difficulty of
changing things, that things are the way they are for a reason, that
acceptance is a sign of wisdom, not laziness or cowardice, and that
most issues in life are complex.
Because of that appreciation, they would almost undoubtedly be better
decision-makers than men in both business and politics. Their decisions
would be better balanced and nuanced than the decisions that are being
made now in corporate head offices, legislatures, courts of final
appeal, back rooms and war rooms by a mostly-male cast.
The
paradox is that, perhaps because women understand that most decisions
made by upper echelons of hierarchies are doomed to failure (because
such decisions attempt to apply simple or complicated solutions to
complex problems), women tend not to aspire to such decision-making
authority (and many women who do, seem to emulate predominant male
worldviews and thinking styles).
Women know no one is really in control
of complex systems, so they are less likely to aspire to positions of
control, power and authority in such systems. They know wars don't
solve anything and usually make situations worse. They know
centralization breeds bureaucracy, dysfunction and waste. They know
small is beautiful, and more effective. They know growth is not
sustainable. They know edicts don't work, and that the only way you
change minds is by showing people a better way. They know how important
it is to listen, and to pay attention to non-verbal messages if you
want to really communicate. They appreciate the value of conversation,
of consensus, of presence.
How do they come to know this, when
so many men remain ignorant of it? Perhaps they are, either
biologically or by education, more 'sensually acute' and grounded, and
hence less prone to be distracted by abstraction, and therefore live a
more 'real' life in the real world, here, now.
Perhaps they have learned from history that power corrupts and idealism
leads to demagogy, and that therefore it makes sense to be realistic,
modest and practical rather than ideological, aggressive, and ambitious.
Or
perhaps they have just observed that, in the long run and despite all
appearances and mythologies, real enduring change comes from open,
honest one-on-one exchange of ideas and information, and not from anything else.
That is what we see in romance films -- small changes, modest important
learnings, and making the world just a tiny bit better by paying
attention, being real, working hard, and doing what you can.
Followed by happy endings.
I give that approach a 10 out of 10. |
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
