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/
It’s a movie trope to make storytelling easier since no one wants to think of their every day problems
I was complaining about this on !noyank@lemmy.ml
About 10% of pop culture stories, maybe more, are about billionaires. Are 10% of people billionaires?
And even in a medieval fantasy settings, it’s about gold-decked kings: the billionaires of the setting.
It’s to perpetuate a class bias.
I mean, if the bias was based on skin-colour or sex, would you feel differently about it?
I think of it as being similar to the fantasy genre - which often has things like oarks, trolls, etc. Billionaires are the oarks of romcoms. 😉
Corpo propaganda
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.
They’re made by people who are wealthy
Because financial issues only keep the plot from moving forward.
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.
People saying it’s escapism inadvertently proving that it’s working as intended, because it isn’t there for escapism, it’s a distraction, a very deliberate choice to do with keeping poor people “aspirational”.
It’s about reinforcing the lie that is “The American Dream” (or the “trad life”), and the idea that the people watching really are just the temporarily embarrassed millionaires they’ve been made to believe they are, that are actually just Christian white supremacist patriarchal capitalism doing what it needs to to maintain its control - promote the “perfect” cis-heteronormative nuclear family, living in the house with a white picket fence (now evolved in to a McMansion), with 2 cars in the drive, not only as an ideal, but as the norm.
The idea that a movie can’t provide escapism if the people in it aren’t rich, again, just goes to show just how well this specific brand of propaganda works.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
