We all know that Kate Hudson is on a mission to find out how many multiplexes she has to stink up before studios will stop paying her to do it--perhaps in some kind of ultimate homage to her mother, the star of Protocol, Wildcats, and Overboard--but did you know that she's also destroying your chance for romantic happiness? It's true! Scottish researchers have concluded an enquiry into effect of exposure to the cliches of formula romantic comedies, and the results are not encouraging. "We have this idea," says psychologist Bjarne M. Holmes, "that out of six-and-a-half billion people, we're somehow going to meet our predestined soul mate, who happens to live in the same neighborhood or work in the same place. I love how that always happens." (If this were a romantic comedy, Dr. Holmes would be the wisecracking best friend played by Joan Cusack. Tip your hat.) The Los Angeles Times reports that "In the study, recently published in the journal Communication Quarterly, Holmes and fellow researcher Kimberly Johnson selected 40 top-grossing romantic comedies released from 1995 to 2005 -- including such titles as What Women Want and You've Got Mail -- and analyzed their content, cataloging each scene of romantic action such as gift-giving, kissing, declarations of love, weddings, involvement with exes and even acts of deception in the pursuit of love."
In the process, they seemed to find "a correlation between the preference for such entertainments and the students' curdled concepts about love." People who watch enough of the things seemed to take as gospel some of the more dubious "messages" that are repeated over and over in movie after movie: the "predestined soul mate" concept; the always helpful idea that the strongest relationships are those built on lies and deception, and even that these relationships, after a brief spell of soul-searching, will only grow back stronger after your loved one discovers that you understand him so well because you've been reading his mail and also that you're now really the long-lost Princess Anastasia; the clinically idiotic concept that your partner should be able to divine your deepest thoughts through some kind of lover's ESP, which means that your relationship would be sullied if you stooped to actual, straightfroward communication; the inexplicably popular notion that men and women are totally different species and that the secret of romantic success is to crack the gender-based code of behavior that governs each of us. (This last one has apparently gotten a big boost from He's Just Not That Into You, despite the fact that it is universal knowledge that anything that comes out of Justin Long's mouth has got to be horseshit.) Researchers also failed to find a single successful marriage that involved an incident of one partner blurting out a lengthy declaration of undying love to the other in full view of a bemused crowd while breaking up their wedding to an unamused third party or after a mad chase to the airport.
Read More...