I have a three year old son who, although he loves Bob the
Builder and Handy Manny, hasn’t completely worked out gender stereotypes. He says that pink is for girls and every
other colour is for boys and that Disney Princess is for girls, but some Disney
films are acceptable no matter what gender.
So, watched Tangled the other day and I found myself rather involved in
the romance and then it struck me: this is exactly why young women are
disappointed by the reality of grown up relationships.
Flynn is a bad boy with a sharp tongue, he is
Disney-handsome, but once Rapunzel has secured his confidence (while in
peril)we realise that he has a back story.
It turns out he isn’t shallow, irreverent, avaricious and without
scruples: he is Eugene and comes from a difficult background. He realises that there’s more to life than stealing
for money, that his dream of having an island of his own and bathing in
enormous piles of money, is not enough for him any more now that he has learned
to love. Ahhh. And yet, when the credits rolled, I couldn’t
help but wonder what Rapunzel would have thought of Eugene once she’d been
around him for a few years, once he’d bought her pickled onions for her
birthday, or once he'd started leaving his dirty clothes on the bathroom floor
with the belief that a fairy (Disney fairy) would pick them up for him.
If our expectations of romance stem from Disney, or how
romance is represented in novels and 80s movies in particular, then we might
become disillusioned by the reality of what romance really is in the real
world. We have a girl (always
gorgeous-and who doesn’t know it) and a devilishly handsome, dimple-chinned guy (who
has more to him than simple good looks) who chases aforementioned girl, but
there’s a complication, which drives the plot, until they get together in the
end. As the credits roll, we witness
their first kiss, or their wedding, or their first foray into the bedroom. And that satisfies us because we are not
asked to think about what might come afterwards-the empty platitudes, the
awkward let down: “It’s me. I’m just not ready for intimacy.” Sigh.
What we want is for someone
to fall in love with us so completely that they don’t even notice that
we’re a mannequin, or that we’ve just been whoring it up on Hollywood
Boulevard. Even a hard-hearted, hardnosed
businessman can fall in love and chase a prostitute while riding a horse. If he can do it… (!) Here is a funny article, posted to Facebook
by a great friend of mine:
It made me laugh. I
blame Shakespeare and Romeo and Juliet, where young teenagers defy their
families, marry in secret, Romeo commits murder, is banished and then,
ultimately kills himself, and so does she because she’s a follower. (Don’t worry, I love this play and there’s
more to it than that, but it’s much more amusing to mock the bare bones of the
story.) Wuthering Heights: love lasts beyond death, just like in Ghost. If only
Heathcliff had a Woopie Goldburg the tale might have been quite different. But, we realise, too, that not only is this
all fiction, it is mostly ridiculous, too.
