Someone asked me if I watched only action/adventure/sci-fi/fantasy genres. No. I watch every genre if I think they are promising from the trailers or word-of-mouth referral. All except chick flicks. As you can tell by my choices of films I’ve watched/reviewed this year, it's perhaps less frequent than once a year.
So why don’t I watch chick flicks? The short answer is that
I am a guy. The long answer? Well, we have to first look at what we define what
is a chick flick, as the few times I have said I sort of liked a ‘chick flick’,
it turns out they were actually Romance Comedies, or Romedies as goes the urban
slang, and as corrected by some female friends of mine.
Wikipedia defines chick flicks as films “mainly dealing with
love and romance designed to appeal to the female audience…typically young
women”. The common themes or issues these films tend to deal
with include loneliness, peer acceptance, unrequited love, betrayal, vanity and
the ambitious ones might also deal with coming-of-age issues, again from the
female’s perspective.
There is an ongoing debate regarding whether chick flicks
are a genre in itself, or simply a collection of films that fare better with
girls than guys regardless of which genre they are really a part of. For
example, Titanic is technically Historical Fiction with strong romance/drama
elements, but girls liked it far more than guys, who liked it as well but to
the point of re-watching it on DVD a dozen times and managing to empty a tissue
box every time, so some people often declare it a timeless chick flick.
In fact, I would argue that chick flicks could emerge from
almost any genre, even action films. White Chicks is by far the best example of
this, as it is a buddy cop film that is more often referred to as a chick
flick. If you’ve never seen this film, and told you that the plot of this film
was about two cops who go undercover disguising themselves as heirs to a
business magnate, you probably wouldn’t have imagined African American guys
disguised as a white chicks singing Vanessa Carlton’s “A thousand miles” in a
convertible with their girlfriends.
As such, I think chick flicks are not a genre in itself, but
rather an emergent trait which is recognised only by a film’s overall appeal to
the viewer. In other words, a film that may be considered a chick flick to one
girl may not be for another, just as one person may consider a film good when
another considers it god awful.
I think I’m sidetracking and getting too bogged down with
semantics; I’m here to explain why I don’t watch chick flicks in general, not
trying to submit a dictionary entry.
Let me list some films I have viewed in my adolescence that I
consider a chick flick, whether coerced by my sister or by female friends
who says it’s their turn to pick the movie for an evening hangout (feel free to
correct me if you think any of these films aren’t chick flicks):
- Bridget
Jones’ Diary (2001)
- Legally
Blonde (2001)
- The
Princess Diaries (2001)
- The
Notebook (2004)
- Confessions
of a Shopaholic (2009)
- Twilight
Saga (2008-2012)
Films like Bring It On, 10 Things I hate about you, The Girl
Next Door, Mean Girls and She’s The Man are often considered chick flicks but
they are more teen flicks. They address a generation more than a gender. There
emphasise stereotypes and tend not to age well should you try to watch them as
a young adult.
And this brings me to the first reasons why I don’t like
chick flicks. Until very recent movies and television shows, chick flicks
enforces the idea that guys need to be ‘projects’ to be attractive. What I mean
is that the guy female protagonists tend to fall in love with are either
the school bully with a heart of gold, or a quiet new student who has a tragic
backstory or is misunderstood due to his demeanor, or is like 15 years older
and thus is a form of forbidden love.
So what is wrong with falling in love and being with a guy
who is smart, average looking, a decent person with no significant personality
flaws or secret history? Nothing! However in many of these films the girl always chooses the guy who
is the cause of most of the film’s drama, thus promoting the idea that if guys
want to be the one the girl chooses in the end, they can’t be normal. Perhaps the idea is that the girl isn't normal either but then again she is often sold as the role model for girls to behave and think like.
I speculate that the emergence of a 21st century
phenomenon known as the “Nice Guy syndrome” many guys face in their young
adulthood, is a direct result of their female peers being influenced (probably
subconsciously) by the desire for their boyfriend to be a project rather than
simply a companion who is reliable, loyal and consistent. This effect tends to
diminish after the age of 25 when most people mature and gain more perspective
into real love, but I feel that before that point, chick flicks has destroyed
some girls’ capability to date normal guys for their teen years and young adult
years.
Sadly the other extreme of some girls’ ideal boyfriend is
something akin to a Disney prince, probably influenced by those catchy songs
and mesmerising scenes in Disney films. But even in those cases the male
protagonist tends to be a project to the girl (e.g. Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, Pocahontas, Hunchback of Notre Dame).
So that’s reason number one why I don’t watch chick flicks.
I do not really want to support movies that don’t appeal to my gender, and in
fact plays a role in undermining the typical guys’ chances at finding love
during adolescent and young adulthood years.
The second reason is to do with how small the worldview
chick flicks tend to have. I will use Twilight to explain this. In this story
we have Bella who is your typical boring teenage girl with no noticeable
personality or interests, who becomes deeply embroiled in a secret world of
vampires and werewolves when she unwittingly falls for the 120+ years old
vampire Edward. This film could have such a potentially interesting
universe, but focus is always about Bella’s thoughts and feelings towards
Edward, and rarely about her thoughts of vampires and werewolves and lore. The
universe is just coincidental, all that matters is the people around her. Even
in the final film, which I considered a decent film, we only get a total screen
time of less than 30 minutes which involve the Volturi and the other vampires.
The rest of the time we have the cameras fixed on Bella and essentially her
inner voice.
Compare this saga to Pirates of the Caribbean, where
Elizabeth Swan gets engulfed in the clashes between the pirates, the British
Navy and the mythical underworld because of her relationship with Will Turner and Jack
Sparrow. It is clear that Will and Jack are large factors in her relationship,
but she is also influenced by the world of piracy around her. She is able to
function and interact naturally and realistically even when the plot doesn’t
centralize on her. This is something Bella obviously couldn’t do, since in the second
Twilight film (New Moon) when Ed temporarily dumps her she literally shuts
herself in the room and we get an extremely boring second act of watching her
commit suicide and forcing Jacob to reveal his true nature to provide a
distraction.
The climax of each Twilight movie tends to take place in
locations that have nothing significant to the audience, such as an abandoned
warehouse, some icy plains, grassland etc, places that were neither built up
nor significant to the characters; just coincidental.
In stark contrast, the climax of each Pirates of the
Caribbean movie takes place in the location that their respective films have
built up to. Such as the Isle de Muerta (the location of the cursed treasure)
for film 1, aboard the Black Pearl for film 2, aboard all three key ships in
film 3 and at the Fountain of Youth for film 4. Nothing was by accident, and
thus a large amount of anticipation and suspense can be built up not just
because of the characters, but be cause we want to see this place they’ve been
talking about or alluding to the whole movie!
So you can see, I like films which places characters in an
interesting world, with characters interacting with each other and interacting with the world around
them, thus allowing us to experience and immerse ourselves in it through their
lenses. If I wanted to see characters interacting with characters, only dealing
with small issues and having little to no world awareness, I would watch TV
soap like Neighbours which has wonderful sets such as your mum’s kitchen, in
the grocery store, at your workplace etc. Chick Flicks don’t sate me because
they don’t give me a world I can explore. They give me characters which are
just trying to deal with personal issues and have no genuine concern about the
world around them; it is all coincidental wherever things happen or people are.
The third and last reason I don’t watch chick flicks is that
they are generally poor quality movies to watch anyway. This is how I would
test whether a movie is all-round good. If you were asked to run a movie for
your work colleagues, would you show it? If you were hanging out in a group
with both genders (not just a girls night/slumber party), would anyone
seriously object to watching it?
I would dare to say that most people wouldn’t be able to
answer ‘yes’ to these questions when it’s a chick flick. While there will
undoubtedly be some groups who would have chick flick marathons, and they may
love it to death, but it is strictly an in-their-own-world movie, kind of like
comic book/superhero movies used to be before Marvel came along, and showed us how
to effectively reach a larger audience.
In retrospect, I don’t think I actually like any pure chick
flick movies. The chick flick movies that I enjoy tend to have more to offer
than just stereotypes dealing with other stereotypes. Suddenly 30 is one that
pops to mind now and then because, while it is very girly it does throw her
into the world of fashion magazine, and of adulthood which she cannot ignore; she has to learn and adapt to this new environment before she is able to
interact with the other characters in the story.
I implied at the start with my short answer that guys in
general don’t like chick flicks. And I think the three reasons I’ve given are
all gender-related. Guys don’t like being stereotyped in those films and being
designated as the one who won’t get the girl, they prefer movies with bigger
scopes and larger worlds they can explore and fantasise in (that’s one reason
we tend to play video games, especially Role-playing games), and we are less
forgiving to films that aren’t executed well or don’t make sense within the
context of its own story.
So if you like chick flicks, good for you, but should you be
watching one at my place I’ll probably be playing DotA on my laptop or
something. :)
