On some of
the idealized and the more realistic depictions of love and marriage in our
contemporary popular culture.
It’s been
said by literary scholars that one of the origin points for the realistic
novel, in the mid-19th century, was when authors began seeing
marriage as the starting point for, rather than the endpoint of, their novels. Obviously
literary history is a good deal more complex than that, but it’s certainly
interesting to note the overarching shift from novels that end with variations on “Reader,
I married him” to those in which unhappy marriages
form a core plot device, and the ways in which individuals and societies respond to them
a core element for
characterization, setting, and theme. Yet it’s more accurate still to say
that the realistic novel allowed for these different narratives—of marriage as
a romantic ideal and of it as a practical reality—to co-exist in literary
texts; one of the greatest American novels about marriage, Kate Chopin’s
The Awakening (1899),
focuses on the conflict of precisely those different narratives in its central character’s
perspective, identity, and communities.
While our
21st century popular culture has become so expansive that it’d be
foolish for even the most daring American Studier to argue for any dominant
threads, I’d certainly argue that this conflict between idealized and
romanticized images vs. realistic and practical depictions of love and marriage
continues to form a core theme for our cultural texts and conversations. I’m
not sure if I can think of any romantic comedy film, for example, that doesn’t
end with either the marriage of its focal couple or at least the sense that
said couple is moving in that direction; at the very least, the arc of every
romantic comedy depends on us rooting for the couple to overcome the obstacles
that life (often aided by themselves) throws their way and achieve that happy
ending. At the same time, some of the most successful and awarded independent
films in recent years have depicted with brutal and unflinching honesty the
hardest realities of married life—I’m thinking in particular of the at times almost
unwatchably painful Blue Valentine
(2010), with its non-chronological structure that contrasts Michelle Williams
and Ryan Gosling’s romantic young love with their disintegrating marriage.
If
contemporary films tend to focus on one narrative of marriage or the other,
television provides for a different possibility, one more akin to the realistic
(and, specifically, the serial) novel: the opportunity to present both ideals
and realities of love and marriage within a single text. Since the birth of my
older son in December 2005 I’ve watched exactly two shows that don’t feature talking
animals or adorable preschoolers, and neither of those (24 and Lost) spent too
much time depicting married couples; but I get the sense that many of the
best-received and most enduring recent shows have indeed had such complex
couples at their core: The Sopranos, Friday Night Lights, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and more. Even some of the best-loved sitcoms of the
last couple decades have relied heavily on couples at once hugely realistic and
yet ultimately idealized: Marge and Homer Simpson, Ross and Rachel (and
eventually Monica and Chandler), Jim and Pam, and many more. In each case,
there’s a great deal to be said about the portrayals of love and marriage on
their own terms—but I’d also stress how fully they consistently depend on an
audience’s interest in the best and worst of marriage, on the romantic ideals
for which we all still strive and the more realistic lives that we all come to
inhabit.
Changing
gears this week with the next guest post! See you then,
Ben
PS. What
do you think?
6/8 Memory Day nominee: Frank Lloyd Wright, the architect, designer, writer and
philosopher, educator, and American legend whose legacies have informed countless aspects of contemporary
society and life.
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