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Essay about Happy Endings & True Love

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" `Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl'... organises, indeed

constitutes, the classical American cinema as a whole."

-Raymond Bellour (Bellour, 1974, 16)

"You don't want to be in love - you want to be in love in a movie."

-Becky, Sleepless in Seattle

"Reality and love are almost contradictory to me."

-Céline, Before Sunset

This essay is primarily concerned with the concept of the Hollywood romance happy ending. On a broader scale, it is also concerned with addressing the relationship of these endings to something which (I think it is fair to say) most believe Hollywood seldom attempts to do: depict romantic love `realistically'. Ask most if they consider, for example, Hollywood's current romantic …show more content…

But what exactly is it that is `unrealistic' about it?

No one can deny that in the real world people do, every day, exactly what the characters in each and every romantic comedy do - that is: meet, court, and fall (however briefly or lastingly) in love. The problem arises when a film depicting this has to navigate the obvious requirement which all narrative art faces: it must choose a point at which to end. The decision traditionally inbuilt into the romantic comedy is to end at the moment of the central couple's union (or sometimes reunion), often with the obligatory embrace and kiss as the final moment of closure. Ending in this manner sends the audience out of the cinema with an image of unproblematic happiness that one assumes will (since we are shown nothing to disprove the theory) last forever. As Rick Altman says: marriage, or the promise of marriage (for which we may read any depiction of the united final couple) is, at least in the Hollywood musical (Altman's point of departure and a genre whose narratives share a great deal in common with those of the romantic comedy) "that beyond which there is no more" (Altman. 1981, 197):

It arrests discourse and projects the narrative into an undifferentiated

`happily ever after'. The comic equivalent of apocalypse, marriage

represents a timeless, formless state in American mythology.

(ibid, 197)

This "timeless" happy ending perpetuates the myth

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