Unrequited Love and Cinema.
A boy and a girl meet at a bar, like each other, meet again the following day, and the following one, until a relationship begins. After six months they move in together. They introduce each other to their families and after two years, they get married. She hates some of his habits and he hates her demands. The relationship has problems but soon they become parents. They raise the kids and take care of them until they leave the house. Does this story sound worthy of a box office release? Most likely not. Reason? It doesn’t fulfil the basic rule of a cinematographic script: There is no conflict.
Instead, what would happen if the boy was a rich heir, betrothed to another girl and she was just a poor employee? What if there were stuck in political, religious or racial conflicts? What if one of them had a terminal illness that is diagnosed only when it is too late? What if he was an alien? Now that sounds like a hit. It has scope for unrequited love, tears, separation and sizzling romance.
This is how cinema sows the seeds of love in the hearts of unrequited lovers. As I have written in my blog Unrequited Love and Karma, one reason why unrequited lovers continue to get involved with karmically unclear people is social conditioning. Most of us are conditioned to fall in love with the knight in shining armour. Whoever is capable of creating that effect on you, is capable of making you fall in love with him, without you thinking about metaphysics or Karma. At that time, you don’t think about the truth of the situation, visible differences between the two of you, about your heart, emotions or feelings. You are just following examples that you have been watching in the movies or reading about in romantic novels. Later, when you face rejection in love, you sit back and think “what did I do wrong”?
Romantic Movies and Their Narrative Model
Art does not always reflect real life and cinema is a form of art. It is mostly a reinterpretation of reality with the purpose of communicating a message. The goal of an industry is to generate revenue. As a result, there has to be a conscious manipulation to ensure marketability. Is there a better way to market than by using the universal language of love? No script would work if there were no feelings involved.
Let’s take an example – Titanic (1998) has the second top grossing box office revenues in the history of world cinema, however, it has one of the most torpid scripts ever. In the plot, a poor young painter falls in love with a beautiful girl from affluent society. From there, all the topics in romantic cinema meet- class struggles, a strict mother, an evil and jealous man, tacky sequences and a final sacrifice. The argument is basic and we understand that there is no way that it could have been different. Why? Because when someone spends two hundred million dollars in making a movie, it is logical that they will attempt to reach the widest possible audience.
Due to its status of being an important source of mass communication, cinematographic art creates and maintains societal models of conduct. Hence, it is interesting to make a critique on the behaviours imposed by the cinema about romantic relationships. Regarding romantic effect our movies are fed by myths originated in traditional books such as the Bible, the Greek culture and the Medieval culture. These books normally convey the idea of a life partner, fate and the eternal, exclusive, unconditional, unrequited love.
TheTrick
Remember that happy ending is a trick. It is important to notice that romantic movies always leave the story unfinished. We easily fall into the trick of happy ending when the couple ends up falling in love with each other. Otherwise, one of them dies, contributing to the idea of eternal love.
Do we go and check if these couples will stay together loving each other for eternity with the same intensity? Does anyone believe, for example, that the woman and the millionaire in “Pretty Woman” were going to get married thereafter? Most likely not. This kind of movies are actually testing your character. Are you a dreamer or a cynic? Are you an optimist or a pessimist?
Choose not to let these characters rule your decisions in real life. Choice is a matter of freewill, but the consequences of our choices are not freewill. All that appears to be chaotic in the world, is a result of freewill; the collective creations, and relative realities. There is also an absolute reality which is relative to the absolute principles of human consciousness. You can read about this in detail in my blog Choose Well. In the physical world we are simply learning and evolving these absolute principles; so act wisely.
In my next post I am going to write more about the effects of cinema on lovers. Please share your experiences in the comments section and I will add them in my future posts.