My wife has been on a rom-com binge over the last year or so and something I’ve noticed when I’m vaguely paying attention or walking past is that almost every single rom-com features people who are, at the very least, middle to upper-middle class. These characters all live in gigantic houses/apartments, have beautifully sparkling brand-new cars, take month-long vacations to their beachfront properties… it’s just so unrealistic and out of line with the life that the vast majority of us lead.
I understand some concepts - large rooms are easier to film in, rich people own nice things that set a beautiful scene, it’s not interesting to discuss financial issues all the time etc. but this seems (from my anecdotal perspective) to almost be a rule of the genre.
Some more food for thought:
https://www.digitalspy.com/movies/a867107/rom-coms-diversity-wealth-income/
Because then it’d be a romantic tragedy.
Do you really think a guy that breaks his back all day in a construction site has time or energy to be romantic or chase girls? Is actually very realistic these rich fucks are the only ones who manage to get some romantic company and very creative lives
Idk, the romance in Rocky is believable. Not a romcom, i know, but it’s romance. The creative bankrupt is really the issue with writers these day.
Not really. Good movie but it’s a huge fantasy. Very idealized working class idea, rocky is a brute creep that somehow gets the “ugly” Hollywood girl. For me is as fantastic as 50 shades of grey but thankfully way less cringe
Maybe not real for you, but from my perspective it’s believable. I myself are a blue collar working 6 days a week and with paid of the lower income group, still get the time to date someone for two years few years back. Sure, it doesn’t worked out, but it happened. I can see the same with other blue collar i know.
Also, i feels like the problem here is you focus on how they looks rather than focused on who they are. Rocky is a debt collector that’s friend with Paulie, and Adrian work as a store keeper for a pet shop. Not sure how’s that “idealised” working class.
I’d say a good-sized part of it is simply the American preference for watching beautiful, weathly people doing beautiful, wealthy people things. Hollywood rom-coms and US TV shows in general clearly skew towards upper middle class settings when compared to the equivalents from, say, the UK.
In other words, I reckon US media prefer their fictional characters to be aspirational whereas other cultures prefer theirs to be relatable.
Yeah, the whole observation needed the adjective American.
Long so I noticed US soaps we’re all wealthy people being miserable, while British soaps were all working class people being miserable, but Australian soaps were all working-class people being happy (after resolving some minor difficult situation).
What’s the escape in watching two people in the exact situation as you eat at McDonald’s and go for a walk in the park over and over again?
I’d watch that for the novelty at least. Two people working 2 jobs trying to find love on their one and only day off that they somehow always have on the same day. Would be so bittersweet.
2 broke girls?
Zack and Miri Make a Porno is this movie.
From a showrunner perspective, you want to have a diverse set of sets, activities, and situations you can perform in. That leaves you either with wealthy characters, who can justify doing these things in these exotic places. Or poor characters who behave wealthy inexplicably.
Ie friends where people working dead end jobs had housing better than most millionaires.
It is escapism. Romance usually has very few things that’s real. I mean that most romance stories are more alike to a fairytale than reality.
Most movies and books are 98% predictable with the well-known cliches. And that makes them work. Beig wealthy is just an other thing that makes it going.
Most girls were raised on the price charming idea, and a rich, wealthy and emotionally available person fits the bill.
Reality of barely making rent and having no money to fix your car or even just daily struggle to find childcare for a date would break the dream.
When you are watching romance you want the fuzzy feels, the safe environment that everything going to be alright and happy ending is guaranteed. Love, money, heath and safe environment - with tons of loving friends and family - now that’s what people want to dream of.
Entirely escapism, most romantic movies involve felonies lol.
Stalking is the most popular, harassment, sexual harassment, assault, lack of consent.
…. But it’s all portrayed as romantic. You want to talk about rape culture? The romance films are peak “rape culture”
Twilight vampires secretly watching you sleep without your consent? Hawt! The guy refusing to take no for an answer? How devoted! The guy just grabbing you and kissing you out of nowhere? Swooooon! My ex inserting herself into my current relationship to wreck it and get back together with me? It MUST be true love. . I assure you, those things are unpleasant in real life, but I’m really curious as to how people think they’re romantic in movies. I don’t get it.
The Notebook is notorious for this.
It’s “hero” has big stalker “I’ll kill myself to punish you if you dont love me” kind of vibe.
Lots of women fucking love this movie and it makes me sick because the relationship is SO unhealthy.
price charming
I like this.
I was complaining about this on !noyank@lemmy.ml
About 10% of pop culture stories, maybe more, are about billionaires. Are 10% of people billionaires?
And even in a medieval fantasy settings, it’s about gold-decked kings: the billionaires of the setting.
It’s to perpetuate a class bias.
I mean, if the bias was based on skin-colour or sex, would you feel differently about it?
Rom-coms are aspirational fantasies. They’re modern-day fairy tales of getting swept off your feet by a handsome prince and living happily ever after, never wanting for anything ever again. Material comfort is always a factor in these stories. If it’s not overt, as in Pride and Prejudice where the main character betters their station by ending up with the mega-rich guy who seemed like a dick but turned out to have a heart of gold, then it has to be implied by the setting and the lifestyles of the characters. If the material wealth of the love interest isn’t going to be a factor in the story then it has to be demonstrated that those financial needs are met in some other way.
You’re probably never going to see a rom-com where the main character gets their one true love, but being with them condemns them to a life of struggle and poverty. No matter how you try to spin it so it’s ok because at least they have each other, that would never be a truly satisfying ending in this type of movie. Material needs to be taken care of too. Even in movies like Overboard where the whole point of the movie is Goldie Hawn learning to be a human being by struggling through a working class lifestyle, they still have to end up rich at the end for the story to feel fully resolved.
It’s polite to pretend that money doesn’t matter, and a lot of rom-coms try to down-play it, but it does. It does matter. And it always shows up in one way or another.
You can be a hot sexy millionaire too, just look at all these examples in film.
Corpo propaganda
I think of it as being similar to the fantasy genre - which often has things like oarks, trolls, etc. Billionaires are the oarks of romcoms. 😉
People saying it’s escapism inadvertently proving that it’s working as intended, because it isn’t there for escapism, it’s a distraction, a very deliberate choice to do with keeping poor people “aspirational”.
It’s about reinforcing the lie that is “The American Dream” (or the “trad life”), and the idea that the people watching really are just the temporarily embarrassed millionaires they’ve been made to believe they are, that are actually just Christian white supremacist patriarchal capitalism doing what it needs to to maintain its control - promote the “perfect” cis-heteronormative nuclear family, living in the house with a white picket fence (now evolved in to a McMansion), with 2 cars in the drive, not only as an ideal, but as the norm.
The idea that a movie can’t provide escapism if the people in it aren’t rich, again, just goes to show just how well this specific brand of propaganda works.
Considering the majority of them also take place in California, I’m not surprised.
This is something that influences a lot of culture. Like most people when they think of style and decor in the 1980s, are thinking of Los Angeles in the 1980s. The rest of America was not always neon pumps, leg warmers, and thin piano ties.
These films are meant to be a fantasy escape from real life. They are not meant to be realistic or to show any real struggle. They are supposed to show you a beautiful dream world including the big and real love and an otherwise carefree life.
Are they? As the article OP shares suggests, these films quietly make us compare our lives to what is portrayed on screen. This is advertisement 101: display people in enviable positions to portray a sense of longing for a lifestyle that one would not normally seek. A food commercial isn’t selling you a product, it’s trying to make you hungry.
If all you wanted out of these rom coms is the portrayal of a carefree life, you could just watch pharmaceutical, banking, or insurance ads.
They’re made by people who are wealthy
