Photo: Rosalind Russell isn't buying Walter Pidgeon's line in Man-Proof (1938)
What IS a chick flick? Any movie that features women, or just the weepy love lost-and-found fests?
I believe my answer is that a chick flick allows me to fall in love again, or lose love again. In short – to feel the urgent rush of vital, intimate connection, vicariously.
Most of us only get the actual high of real love once, twice, maybe half a dozen times in our lives. Surely the deep kind doesn’t pop up every day – even for someone as adventurous as Madonna or Jay Z. The real thing – the hormonal flicker of attraction, the gradual unfolding of another’s mystery, the shaky wonder of self-confidence that their attraction gives you, and the inevitable, gorgeous resistance before surrendering to no-longer-aloneness – that rivets us to new love, and we crave its highs and lows, even when we’re much further down the path – four, fourteen or forty years into the same relationship.
Our loves grow deeper, wiser, stronger, but as we get further and further away from our beginnings, I believe we’re constantly looking back at our original sparks, re-examining them, reliving them as we retell the stories of how we fell in love. We ask our new acquaintances, “How did you two end up together?” “What made you know she was the right one?” “How did you ask her to marry you?” We watch gossip shows about celebrities getting together, breaking apart. We buy magazines which promise the juiciest stories of intimacy and heartbreak. Our connection to others’ stories, and our craving for them, feeds our need for the experience of falling in love again.
Do I really care whether Brad Pitt left Jennifer Aniston for Angelina Jolie? Does it have any bearing on my life? Not even the tiniest bit. But that doesn’t matter. I’ve already fallen in love with all of them, or hated them, sometime on the screen. Whether larger than life in a movie theater, or on home video-size in my living room, those faces have asked me in. I sympathized with Jen in “Good Wife,” whistled at Brad’s bottom in a dozen films since “Thelma and Louise,” and laughed myself sick as Angelina as “Mrs. Smith” – in a minivan – outmaneuvered four carfuls of assassins while bickering with her husband for being thoughtless and less than emotionally truthful. I loved all those films, and I wouldn’t have if I didn’t fall in love with the people in them.
That’s the great trick of the movies: perfect strangers allow me – no, beg me – to live with them, see them say the wrong thing to the boss and finally figure out what to say the cute guy in the next cubicle. I’m not arrested for voyeurism. I’m thanked for being a loyal fan. Watching the story is the next best thing to being in the story. And the beauty of it is, I can enjoy it alone or with friends. Either way, it’s a shared experience. It’s between me and the folks onscreen, first and foremost. When Mandy Patinkin at last tracks down the evil Count Rugin, I scream with glee as Inigo announces, “Hello! You killed my father! Prepare to die!” But when my boyfriend or roommate or sister scream along with me, then we can laugh about it later, together – a real shared experience of a manufactured one.
I don’t think this is unique to the world of romantic comedy, or even the broader term ‘chick flicks.’ This is what any good movie does. When my husband got bad news at work – the kind that would drive me to “A Room with a View” and a box of Girl Scout Cookies – he waited for me to be gone, fixed himself a steak and a beer, and cleared his schedule for his entire boxed DVD set of “Band of Brothers” – the gritty, realistic World War II series which follows a paratrooper company as they bond – and get obliterated, one by one – across Europe. When I came home late that night, he had found his calm. “Makes you realize you really don’t have that bad,” he explained.
So maybe a chick flick is just the kind of emotional experience that appeals to a large number of women vs. men. I can appreciate “Band of Brothers,” but my friends and I don’t usually feel closer after bouts of random violence together. We weren’t allowed to play tackle football or be on the wrestling team; certainly, we couldn’t beat each other up without becoming social pariahs. Upset? Got a gripe? Want to kill someone? What to do? Talk.
Therapy is talking, right? Women socialize each other, by and large, to practice it from Day One. “Do you feel okay today, honey?” “Don’t feel bad about it.” “Tell me how you feel.” Just listen to any conversation between women – mother and daughter, best friends, even a random bank teller and her female patron – and see how often that word “feel” gets used. Then listen to men have an equivalent gab session, and do the math. I’ll bet the women’s “feel”ings outnumber the men’s fifteen-to-one.
It’s not that men don’t have them, but they don’t encourage each other’s feeling therapy like we do. Who has to, when you’re allowed to just haul off and smack someone – or thing – every once in a while? “He had it comin’.” “Everyone loses it now and then. Don’t worry about it.” “Wanna go hit a few?” And when you can’t really go get in a brawl, like my husband, you can just watch other guys doing it for you.
I am far from the first person to try and peel this label off a film and see what it really means. Joanne Weintraub in Milwaukee’s Journal Sentinel this month argued that “Mama Mia” didn’t even have a shot at industry respect, regardless of healthy box office, because of its feelings-oriented, female goofiness, but critics – still largely male – don’t see “Dark Knight”’s over-the-top moments as detractions – because they’re about violence and power – pet topics for the boys’ club. (http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=786021)
Manohla Dargis in the New York Times argues that Judd Apatow has taken over the chick flick genre by casting neurotic, pudgy men in the traditionally female leading roles of romantic comedies. Seth Rogen replaces Bridget Jones. (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/movies/moviesspecial/04dargi.html)
What do you think? Are you a sucker for the feelings flicks? And if so, why? Only in certain moods or anytime? Do men you know value movies as emotional tools? What makes a movie just female-targeted versus a chick flick? Are men replacing us as the new hapless romantics onscreen? COMMENT away!
I believe my answer is that a chick flick allows me to fall in love again, or lose love again. In short – to feel the urgent rush of vital, intimate connection, vicariously.
Most of us only get the actual high of real love once, twice, maybe half a dozen times in our lives. Surely the deep kind doesn’t pop up every day – even for someone as adventurous as Madonna or Jay Z. The real thing – the hormonal flicker of attraction, the gradual unfolding of another’s mystery, the shaky wonder of self-confidence that their attraction gives you, and the inevitable, gorgeous resistance before surrendering to no-longer-aloneness – that rivets us to new love, and we crave its highs and lows, even when we’re much further down the path – four, fourteen or forty years into the same relationship.
Our loves grow deeper, wiser, stronger, but as we get further and further away from our beginnings, I believe we’re constantly looking back at our original sparks, re-examining them, reliving them as we retell the stories of how we fell in love. We ask our new acquaintances, “How did you two end up together?” “What made you know she was the right one?” “How did you ask her to marry you?” We watch gossip shows about celebrities getting together, breaking apart. We buy magazines which promise the juiciest stories of intimacy and heartbreak. Our connection to others’ stories, and our craving for them, feeds our need for the experience of falling in love again.
Do I really care whether Brad Pitt left Jennifer Aniston for Angelina Jolie? Does it have any bearing on my life? Not even the tiniest bit. But that doesn’t matter. I’ve already fallen in love with all of them, or hated them, sometime on the screen. Whether larger than life in a movie theater, or on home video-size in my living room, those faces have asked me in. I sympathized with Jen in “Good Wife,” whistled at Brad’s bottom in a dozen films since “Thelma and Louise,” and laughed myself sick as Angelina as “Mrs. Smith” – in a minivan – outmaneuvered four carfuls of assassins while bickering with her husband for being thoughtless and less than emotionally truthful. I loved all those films, and I wouldn’t have if I didn’t fall in love with the people in them.
That’s the great trick of the movies: perfect strangers allow me – no, beg me – to live with them, see them say the wrong thing to the boss and finally figure out what to say the cute guy in the next cubicle. I’m not arrested for voyeurism. I’m thanked for being a loyal fan. Watching the story is the next best thing to being in the story. And the beauty of it is, I can enjoy it alone or with friends. Either way, it’s a shared experience. It’s between me and the folks onscreen, first and foremost. When Mandy Patinkin at last tracks down the evil Count Rugin, I scream with glee as Inigo announces, “Hello! You killed my father! Prepare to die!” But when my boyfriend or roommate or sister scream along with me, then we can laugh about it later, together – a real shared experience of a manufactured one.
I don’t think this is unique to the world of romantic comedy, or even the broader term ‘chick flicks.’ This is what any good movie does. When my husband got bad news at work – the kind that would drive me to “A Room with a View” and a box of Girl Scout Cookies – he waited for me to be gone, fixed himself a steak and a beer, and cleared his schedule for his entire boxed DVD set of “Band of Brothers” – the gritty, realistic World War II series which follows a paratrooper company as they bond – and get obliterated, one by one – across Europe. When I came home late that night, he had found his calm. “Makes you realize you really don’t have that bad,” he explained.
So maybe a chick flick is just the kind of emotional experience that appeals to a large number of women vs. men. I can appreciate “Band of Brothers,” but my friends and I don’t usually feel closer after bouts of random violence together. We weren’t allowed to play tackle football or be on the wrestling team; certainly, we couldn’t beat each other up without becoming social pariahs. Upset? Got a gripe? Want to kill someone? What to do? Talk.
Therapy is talking, right? Women socialize each other, by and large, to practice it from Day One. “Do you feel okay today, honey?” “Don’t feel bad about it.” “Tell me how you feel.” Just listen to any conversation between women – mother and daughter, best friends, even a random bank teller and her female patron – and see how often that word “feel” gets used. Then listen to men have an equivalent gab session, and do the math. I’ll bet the women’s “feel”ings outnumber the men’s fifteen-to-one.
It’s not that men don’t have them, but they don’t encourage each other’s feeling therapy like we do. Who has to, when you’re allowed to just haul off and smack someone – or thing – every once in a while? “He had it comin’.” “Everyone loses it now and then. Don’t worry about it.” “Wanna go hit a few?” And when you can’t really go get in a brawl, like my husband, you can just watch other guys doing it for you.
I am far from the first person to try and peel this label off a film and see what it really means. Joanne Weintraub in Milwaukee’s Journal Sentinel this month argued that “Mama Mia” didn’t even have a shot at industry respect, regardless of healthy box office, because of its feelings-oriented, female goofiness, but critics – still largely male – don’t see “Dark Knight”’s over-the-top moments as detractions – because they’re about violence and power – pet topics for the boys’ club. (http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=786021)
Manohla Dargis in the New York Times argues that Judd Apatow has taken over the chick flick genre by casting neurotic, pudgy men in the traditionally female leading roles of romantic comedies. Seth Rogen replaces Bridget Jones. (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/movies/moviesspecial/04dargi.html)
What do you think? Are you a sucker for the feelings flicks? And if so, why? Only in certain moods or anytime? Do men you know value movies as emotional tools? What makes a movie just female-targeted versus a chick flick? Are men replacing us as the new hapless romantics onscreen? COMMENT away!
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4 comments:
YES! When I feel down or in need of an emotional fix I turn to "An Affair To Remember"(Cary Grant & Debra Karr). No matter how many times I see it, I still cry as he makes the connection when he sees his painting in her apartment. For some reason, adding tears for the characters, rather than tears for ouselves is helpful. I can always add tears to "The Notebook" as well and even cry at "Love Actually". One of my most recent big cries was for "Atonement". Ahhhh, the aches of love, that are not my own still bring tears to my eyes and yet it is rejuvenating.
Great post. Women don't have a monopoly on feelings flicks. I loved Before Sunset/Sunrise. And all they did was talk about their feelings. But if I had to sit through Mama Mia, I'd also have to gouge my eyes out to stop the pain.
Oh, Lisa, I love a good cry!!! Can't get near the Joy Luck Club without gobs of tissues!
And James, your comment encapsulates the male viewpoint, I think! (which I think is: men can enjoy the crossover flicks, just like women can from the action/western genres. I love "Silverado" for instance, but there's a lot of women in it!)
Perfectly stated my dear. I might add that some of the best chick flicks are also about feeling like you can get your own back while still being a girl. Everafter would perhaps not have been as rewarding an experience if Drew had to wait for the Prince to save her. Instead she saves herself and gets the guy. Warm fuzzy with while still being in charge.
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