Vindication
Written on December 16, 2008
It has been my opinion for a long, long time that romantic comedies are no good thing.
Hollywood romance bothers me because the people involved are not real people.
They are fantastic in nature yet crafted in common-place settings. Blurring fantasy and reality can be dangerous. Romantic comedies deal exclusively in the way we wish things were. We wish women to be pretty and men, dashing. We dream that tragic flaws could be washed away in the name of true love and we imagine a world where none of our needs go unmet. The world we wish for is not our world.
The last great romantic film I saw was “A Beautiful Mind”. It treated its characters like real people (shock! they were).
Reinforcing a concept of happiness that has no ground in reality is setting yourself up for pain. It’s okay to wish for something that *could* happen. Even better is wishing for something that is likely to happen.
The happiest that we can be is when we wish for things that *will* happen.
Oh Boy!! Maybe I’ll get to eat some salt beef tonight while I’m vacuuming my living room!!!
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