Money: the single most important cause of marital stress.
Keep in mind that this is “according to Hollywood”.
Based on her watching hundreds of movies about marriage, here are the seven issues of marriage that keep recurring. I’ve always loved Basinger’s obsessiveness…mostly. The Hollywood focus has mostly been on persuading the audience to affirm the marriage bond. The meaning of the title, incidentally, is that marriage movies end in one of two ways, the marriage is affirmed (I do) or it’s destroyed (I don’t). But even I was gobsmacked by the number of films about marriage that I had never heard of. Just like interior design tomes, suitable for coffee table display, function as wish books…possessing the book, or buying a ticket, becomes the magical equivalent of owning the dream.īasinger’s technique is to pile on the details. It tries to persuade moviegoers that seeing glamorous clothes or beautifully appointed rooms is the existential equivalent of having them. Hollywood operates by a kind of materialist sleight of hand. Basinger also notes the interesting sub genre of the wedding movie, which covers plans for the ceremony, the clothes, the families, but which stops short of peering into the marriage itself.īasinger points out that an important meme in marriage movies has always been furniture and clothes. Hollywood almost always markets movies about marriage as if they were movies about romance, even if the couple are already married when the film opens and the movie is really not about courtship. I’m a fan of Basinger’s, having read her book, The Star Machine, which is an account of how the studio and post studio systems manufactured stardom. To gain perspective, I took the opportunity to pull down a never read book from my shelf, I Do and I Don’t A History of Marriage in the Movies by Jeanine Basinger. Recent events have led me to wonder when, and indeed if, same-sex marriage will be a theme taken up by Hollywood.
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