And A Stereotype Shall Emerge For All

This weekend, the boyfriend and I went to see He's Just Not That Into You. The previews looked charming enough and a silly, light, romantic comedy was exactly what we needed, and since this was the latest and greatest (and since Ben Affleck was in it) we gave it a shot.

The movie itself was exactly what we thought it would be: easy-to-comprehend, light, funny, romantic. Nothing out of the ordinary for the typical Hollywood romance. We both enjoyed it and left completely satisfied with the $22 we spent to sit in a crowded theater. The more I think about it though, there was something that bothered me the whole time: the blatant use abuse of stereotypes.

A lot of Hollywood flicks rely on stereotypes. Ok, just about all of them do to one extent or another. This movie may have just taken the cake though. Observe the stereotypes:

All men are pigs
All gay men are queeny
Men are afraid of commitment
Women can't control their emotions
Women are clingy
All contractors are Latino and illegal immigrants/undocumented workers
All married men will cheat on their spouse
All women blame themselves when their man cheats
Gay men are a financial "market" to be tapped
Every woman's ultimate goal in life is marriage
Husbands are slovenly beasts that must be cared for by women
Wiccans are all crazy, socially malfunctioning people

I'm sure there are more, but those are the ones that pop to mind with just a quick pass threw of the plot. That's pretty annoying! I understand that some characters in a story must be static, and therefore rely on some form of stereotype, do all the characters need to?

Putting that annoyance aside, somehow the director and writer were able to put together an entertaining movie all-in-all. By the end of the movie, some of the above stereotypes were broken for the even greater stereotype of every romantic comedy: People will change for Love. Not all of them, mind you, just the straight, white people…

OK, getting off my political soap box now. Somehow, through all the utter BS the movie threw at me, I still came away enjoying it, which is pretty much a contradiction of what I believe in. Maybe it's because it managed to be funny. Maybe it's because it had a sick sense of reality to it. Or maybe it's because my boyfriend really liked it, and like the characters in the movie, I'm just a bit more malleable because of love than I ever thought I could be.