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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Because it’s easier to be impulsive and generous in a luxurious romantic setting if you’ve got cash.
There are some great romantic tales about people sharing when they don’t have much - or when they’re well off… the middle ground is rarer because the middle class essentially doesn’t exist and it’s not as fantastical or compelling.
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.
Zack and Miri Make a Porno is this movie.
2 broke girls?
Nah they are just room. Oh.
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 of course there’s probably exceptions to the rule.
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.
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).
Even our “relatable” characters never deal with housing insecurity, and their cars may have rust and dents but they’re reliable.
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.
Because financial issues only keep the plot from moving forward.
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.
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.
