Media Genre

So despite the assignment to write about a 'favorite' genre in film or television, Rebekah and I wrote about romantic comedies. I was amazed when we started discussing them how trasparently formulaic these films are. This not (necessarily) to say that they are bad, but rather that they, like pop music, are developed and polished to elicit a certain affective response. What we found right away was the prominance of certain characters from film to film. Generally the main characters are a hunky guy, a pretty (but not too pretty) female, and another less attractive, but more agreable male. Most plots revolve around the classic girl meets boy, they fall in love, something bad happens, then they get back together. Woo-hoo.
Many of these films also share a setting. The most often that we thought of were: the big city (a chance enounter!) and a wedding (all this love around, and I'm, oh so, lonely.) The most disturbing thing that we found when we looked at this genre were the underlying assumptions of this genre. Most important among these seemed to be that life (or a person) is incomplete without a mate. This assumption seems to lead to quite a few people feeling inadequate after seeing one of these films. Although this may be changing a bit, we also noted that the only relationships that are valued in these films are heterosexual. There is so much to say about this genre, but really, I'd rather leave it to someone else... I really hate these films.