Valentine’s Day is just around the corner, and in short time we’ll see a surge in the buying of roses, candy, and gold, along with all of the problems associated with it. According to at least some reports and surveys, condom sales will jump 20 to 30 percent, with home pregnancy test sales peaking shortly thereafter. And all of this is connected to expressions and ideas of love.
Love is one of the most omnipresent concepts in society, whether it be romantic love, or love of family, or love of country, or self-love (e.g., self-interest is a core component of many economic doctrines). But the definition of what love is can also be nebulous. Is love just a behavioral byproduct of oxytocin? Or is it destined in the stars? Most people believe their relationships, especially those defined by passionate desires, are much more than a biochemical reaction, whether true or not.
A famous movie quote goes “love is never having to say you’re sorry.” Really? So this has me wondering: What are the best love stories? And which are the most contrived and ridiculous?
In most movies and television programs, we are taught that "love conquers all." In most love stories, persistence and patience eventually open people's eyes to the love of others that they couldn't see. Even if they at first reject you, if you just stand outside their window playing In Your Eyes or show up at their front door with cue cards, they'll eventually see that you're destined to be together.
However, that's also dangerously close to the mentality of most stalkers.
Almost all romance stories use tropes common to fairy tales.
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The unnoticed girl: The beautiful girl who no one recognizes as beautiful until someone gives her a makeover (see also "Beauty = Goodness").
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Love at first sight: It takes only a brief encounter for the characters to know fate wants them to be together, and they should devote every bit of their life to making the relationship happen.
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Forces attempting to keep true love apart: The Evil Stepmother (a.k.a. Lady Tremaine) and her two brats play this role for Cinderella, but in modern stories this could be a jealous ex, a rival who wants to steal the significant other away, etc.
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Love hurts: This is usually toned down in most modern romantic comedies, but a common element in a lot of fairy tales is the female character undergoing abuse because of her beauty, or as a price of her love for a prince. Most modern stories achieve this by showing the female character's life at the beginning as either miserable because of her job, her social position, or, like Cinderella, the way she's treated by her family. The love story then either serves to break the character from the cycle or exacerbates it, and the abuse gets worse before it gets better.
This also touches on how women are seen when it comes to sex. And how those views mix with moralistic concepts in society.
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Women that like sex are scary and weird: Back in 2013, The CW series Reign cut a scene from the pilot of a woman masturbating. However, in the very same episode, there was a mildly graphic sex scene and a beheading. When it was announced that The CW was cutting the scene, there was a little debate over whether it says something about how differently we look at sex with a partner, versus sex with your hand or a dildo. Or was it because a woman was masturbating? Usually when masturbation is depicted on TV or in film, it's as a joke. It's a young male that's hiding it from his mother, girlfriend, or wife, and high jinks then ensue. But in the past, there have been more than a few instances where female pleasure is judged differently than male satisfaction. For instance, the movie Boys Don't Cry almost received an NC-17 rating from the MPAA because a scene depicting a female orgasm went on too long.
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Men always like having sex, and if they don't there's something "wrong:" This gets into sort of ingrained gender roles, but men are usually depicted as the "aggressive" party in any relationship or sexual act. While there is truth in television to this kind of notion, with many women attracted to the confidence in men, the trick comes in with not making the female characters submissive and fragile compared to the men. And where things can go completely off the rails is with how TV and movies depict men who don't like sex. If a guy refuses sex from a pretty girl in a story, you can bet that he's going to be a gay character nine times out of 10. It is almost always used in a "coming out" story. If in the off chance it's not a coming out story, it will probably signal the guy has a fetish or is disturbed in some way.
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Singles have dirty, wild, sweaty sex, while couples in relationships are boring: If the characters are a couple in "true love," their sex will be sweet, slow, probably in the missionary position, and the very essence of romantic. If it's two singles having a night of fun, they will rip each other's clothes off and can't wait to get to a bed and fuck. They will have sex in the closest available place, like a public bathroom, and do it while bent in all sorts of contortionist ways. Because God knows that nothing sets the mood for sex like the aromas and smells you find in a bar or club's toilet. Finally, Hollywood almost always depicts married couples as having boring sex. Because if a film or TV show is showing married people sex, they're usually setting up a reason for why one of the partners is tempted to stray and get single-person "fuck me silly" sex.
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No prep or lube required: Both men and women have no problem performing oral sex on complete strangers they just met, and have no idea how clean or where the genitals may have been. And in a “don't try this at home” move, at the very most spitting on a penis is all the lube people need to have anal sex in films. Also, most sex scenes show couples in incredibly uncomfortable positions akin to a game of Twister. Because if you're going to show sex, the sex can't be dull. If condoms are shown it's for comedic effect (i.e. the guy can't find a condom or get it on) or to set up the condom's failure. And all couples climax at the same time, unless the point of the sex is to show one character's selfishness. Otherwise, one character gets their enjoyment, while the other is left wanting (or faking it) in order to set up their eventual move to someone else.
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Affairs never work: Depending on your perspective, this might be truth in television. However, in most stories, a love triangle predicated on a passionate affair that has one partner straying from an relationship is almost always depicted as being wrong and fails. Instead of ending up with the adulterer or more realistically no one at all, the cheater usually returns to their original partner and things start over, which has some unfortunate implications of its own.
And mixing women, sex, and sexual desire in a story typically reduces the female characters to three basic archetypes that are repeated across most movies, television shows, and literature.
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The Ingénue: A young, virginal woman whose untainted "purity" is a feature of why she's desired, and her deflowering is a lure of the plot. The woman's innocent spirit is a character attribute which will "save" her male partner from his depression, dysfunction, and problems. The problem with this character is she only really exists to serve the goals of the male, without any real agency. So many times the characters can fall into being "appealing props to help mopey, sad white men self-actualize."
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The Adulteress: A woman in either a stagnant or unhappy relationship who finds happiness with someone else and is ultimately disciplined for it by karma. Both the recent Addicted, based on a best-selling novel by Zane, and Tyler Perry's Temptation use this basic plot. In both films, the female characters are unhappy and sexually unsatisfied. In both films, they pursue their desires. And in both films, they are punished for it. Now I'm not going to argue it's a great thing to cheat on your partner, but it is a bit much when two movies, which were aimed at African-American audiences, both have messages which basically lecture a morality play that people in despondent relationships should stay loyal—otherwise they may die. Yes, Tyler Perry's film argues "that if you cheat on your spouse, you deserve a terrible disease."
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The Seductress: Ever notice the trait usually shared by femme fatale killers in thrillers and mysteries? They're sexually aggressive. In most works, if a woman likes to have sex, she will almost always either be vapid, treated like a whore, or ultimately fall into being depicted as the "crazy bitch" in the story. The first time I saw Adrian Lyne's Fatal Attraction as a teen, I thought Glenn Close's Alex was a monster, and that she's tormenting this poor guy and his family. Now, every time I see it I see how awful Michael Douglas's Dan is, and how he exacerbates the situation. He cheats on his wife and knows on day two that he fucked someone who is very unstable. And when confronted with the knowledge that she's pregnant, he does everything he can to sweep it under the rug and/or browbeat Alex into going away. There's a great case to be made that for the first two-thirds of Fatal Attraction, Alex is a victim of the story. But everything changes after the bunny rabbit on the stove. From that point on, the audience wants her dead.
Some of the common elements that are trotted out in most love stories:
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Someone who was there to hold my hand: Even though society and pop culture place a lot of weight on appearances, standards of beauty, and sex, some of the best love stories eschew those aspects for a deeper emotional connection. And more often than not, if it’s “true love” in a story, beauty is considered superficial and largely irrelevant. The “married life” sequence from Pixar’s Up is an example of how a love story can be told in 4 minutes, without a single word of dialogue, and still be extremely effective in getting across the idea that love is about a shared journey of people who are there for each other, in good times and bad.
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"Damsel In Distress" and "Stalking = Love": Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series has long been criticized for being centered for what many see as a subservient to abusive relationship. I've had a fan of Twilight explain the series to me as a sexless, teen version of romance novels. Her argument was that Bella connects with female readers because women can relate to the awkwardness the character feels about herself. However, the flip side of that is the depiction of Bella in both the books and the films is that of an idiot who only exists to be fought over by vampires and werewolves. If you leave aside the sparkling vampires that play baseball in thunderstorms and other things that have been the source of many jokes for a second, and just judge the story of Twilight on its own terms, the romance plot is HORRIBLE. As a character, Bella is constantly miserable and needy, requiring constant reassurance from the men in her life, and she's indecisive between two men who are willing to do anything for her. As she straddles between risking her life for a high school crush (Edward, who basically stalks her) and being anti-social, she feels sorry for herself whenever one of her boyfriends isn't around. She has no drive, and no higher goals in life. And because Bella is such a vacuous character with no agency, there's no reason for either of the two men in the story to connect emotionally to and fight over her, except only as an object to possess for the purposes of the story. Even Bella's wedding (in Breaking Dawn) is not really about her, since she's only marrying Edward to have sex with him, and even then she has to beg him to do it.
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What now?: For its 30th anniversary, Roger Ebert re-reviewed The Graduate. A typical reading of the film is that it’s about a young man disillusioned with life, rebels against the expectations and monotony of adulthood, is seduced by an older woman, and then finds true love and maturity from the experience. However, Ebert did not think the film really supports that reading of the material. The love story between Benjamin (Dustin Hoffman) and Elaine (Katharine Ross) is wafer thin. There’s not one meaningful conversation between the two characters in the movie. This plays into the ambiguity of the final scene, where after escaping the church and boarding the bus, the looks on both characters’ faces are not of happiness or joy, but a realization that an unknown road lies ahead.
It is a movie about a tiresome bore and his well-meaning parents. The only character in the movie who is alive--who can see through situations, understand motives, and dare to seek her own happiness--is Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft). Seen today, "The Graduate'' is a movie about a young man of limited interest, who gets a chance to sleep with the ranking babe in his neighborhood, and throws it away in order to marry her dorky daughter … As Benjamin and Elaine escaped in that bus at the end of "The Graduate,'' I cheered, the first time I saw the movie. What was I thinking of? What did the scene celebrate? "Doing your own thing,'' I suppose.
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Characters Who Don't Deserve Love: In ABC’s Scandal, the show wants us to care about the president's love life, but he's such a horrible person we probably shouldn't. The way Kerry Washington plays Olivia's love affair with Fitz (Tony Goldwyn) is by her resisting Fitz's advances, but eventually giving in to having passionate sex in the shower, floor, or on top of the Resolute desk. A lot of TV critics have latched onto the power imbalance in the relationship, and see it as either a passionate affair among two people who would be much happier living in a cabin in Vermont, or a horrible relationship in which the president of the United States crosses the line into being stalker-ish and abusive. Both Mellie (Bellamy Young) and Olivia deserve so much better than Fitz, and would probably be happier if they would let go of their fantasies involving him.
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Relationships Built Out Of Hate: This is basically when any relationship in a film is based on the characters treating each other like crap for most of the film, only to realize in the final minutes that they're soul mates. A classic example of this trope is a movie from the mid '90s called Reality Bites, which starred Winona Ryder, Ethan Hawke, and Ben Stiller. It was a Generation X comedy about 20-somethings realizing they weren't kids anymore. The film is largely centered around the love triangle between Ryder, Hawke, and Stiller. Hawke's character doesn't have a steady job, is a total asshole to everyone around him, and insults Ryder's character throughout most of the movie. However, by the end of the movie, for no particularly good reason, we're told that Ryder and Hawke should be together. Usually in most movies with love triangles, the writers will offer up some sort of flaw that disqualifies one of the suitors in the audience's eyes. The only disqualifying quality offered up in Reality Bites is that Ben Stiller's character is a successful television executive (i.e. that means he's sold out). And that is a bigger negative than Hawke's character being a miserable, out-of-work asshole.
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"Manic Pixie Dream Girl" and the "Sensitive Misunderstood Man": Usually both of these types of characters are paired with each other. The term "Manic Pixie Dream Girl" was coined by the A.V. Club's Nathan Rabin for his description of Kirsten Dunst's character in Elizabethtown. It's a female character who's stunningly attractive, high on life, full of wacky quirks and idiosyncrasies (generally including childlike playfulness and a tendency towards petty crime), who may have her hair dyed blue or purple. As described by Rabin, she is a magical girlfriend that "exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures." A perfect example is Natalie Portman's character in Garden State. The flip side of the "Manic Pixie Dream Girl" is the "Sensitive Misunderstood Man," who is a good guy, unlucky in love and life. As a character, he's the "nice" guy that attractive women dismiss and leave, who may have a traumatic past. Spike Jonze's recent film Her in a lot of ways deconstructs the fallacy of this type of character. The fact that women may not want to be with a sensitive, misunderstood man may not be about superficial factors, but the fact remains that the sensitive, misunderstood man may have issues that make a relationship difficult.
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For never was a story of more woe than this of Juliet and her Romeo: Generally considered one of the preeminent examples of a love story in the Western canon, Romeo and Juliet is probably Shakespear’s most popular and widely known work in modern culture. However, is it really a love story? The standard reading of the story is of a love at first sight that falls victim to family grudges and impossible odds. The alternate interpretation of the story is that it’s not really about love at all, but of young, foolish infatuation and/or lust. And since this is a tragedy, part of that tragedy is two young people not understanding what love truly is and making horrible decisions because of it.