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/
Buried into a lot of romcoms is a sense of fantasy. People don’t fantasize about being poor.
That’s what I asked Annette.
More concerning is that so many romantic movies contain an element of cheating… IE the main characters meet while one or both are seeing someone else and often don’t break it off with the other person. In the comedies they are often sneaking around and not getting caught is played for laughs.
This bothers me too. In movies, when women cheat, it always turns out that the guy they were with is somehow bad for them or also cheating after the woman has already cheated, but that apparently doesn’t matter, and completely absolves them of any guilt or responsibility
This has always bothered me. They write it so you want them to cheat.
Poverty is not romantic.
Mickey and Minnie’s Gift of the Magi says otherwise
I think it’s even worse: It’s just shit writing.
i think it is
If you are watching a rom-com about some unrealistic storybook relationship, why wouldn’t you want to watch these people in an equally unrealistic financial situation. People watch them to escape reality, not watch more of it.
Producers are rich, and don’t find poor people problems sexy, but rather inconveniently guilt-inducing. When they do show poverty it has a way of being pretty theme-park, too.
I’m not a big rom-com consumer, but there’s probably exceptions to the rule, of course.
Note that (some, not all) rom coms also involve a Cinderella story - a poor or middle class woman falls in love with a wealthy man and she is plucked from obscurity into wealth, where she “belongs”. Money is part of the fantasy.
I don’t watch a lot of romcoms but one that I’ve seen and like is “While You Were Sleeping.” It starts out like how you describe but then there’s a little twist to it and she ends up with the bluecollar guy.
Also what no one has said yet, if you put two identical people next to each other, same mindset, same character, same visuals etc etc, but the one is wealthy and the other is poor, for 99% of people the wealthier one is more sexually attractive. Our brains view access to resources as a desirable quality.
And so, why would a rom com that is literally supposed to be about attractive people, make them purposefully less attractive? There’s basically no reason.
Frankie and Johnny is a romance about a couple of poors who work in a diner together but now that i think about it it wasn’t a comedy and also i hate that film
Because financial issues only keep the plot from moving forward.
Because then it’d be a romantic tragedy.
One of the cliches in a lot of rom coms involves a woman who’s too busy with a career to have ever fallen in love. To make this work, usually the woman has a high paying but long hours job like lawyer or executive or something like that. It would be the kind of job that people would like to have because of the money and the power. Having the woman be something like a janitor wouldn’t work because a. it doesn’t pay well and b. it isn’t a job most people would dream about having and most certainly wouldn’t sacrifice love for. I think that’s part of the reason why a lot of rom coms depict wealthy people.
They’re made by people who are wealthy
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.
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.
