Chick Flicks: The Root of All Evil

Caution to All Women, It’s Not Your Man Who’s Disappointing You, It’s Your Movies.

The very phrase “Chick Flick” implies a light, care-fee substance.  Women migrate in flocks to the premieres of these movies with the notion that they will spend a night free of the barbaric men they are used to dating in this little place called reality and fall into the realm of Dempsey’s Pitt’s and Clooney’s.  This is the first mistake.  A movie that Real men don’t want to see should never be considered something that happens in the real world. In fact, the phrase “Chick Flick” should instead send off a flashing red light complete with sirens, screaming “STAY AWAY” in a women’s head, just as it does in a man’s.

We go into these theatres, and while we all say that we know it’s “just a movie”, secretly in our hearts we still yearn for that Jerry Maguire ending.  We want someone to complete us just as much as Renee Zelwegger does and the truth is, until we find it, we’ll always be just settling, praying that there really is someone out there who needs us to be a whole man.  While I’m not saying that on very (very) rare occasions, something similar to this never happens, what I am saying is that usually, it doesn’t and won’t. 

If you don’t believe me, take a look at your own lives.  Count the number of women you know and think about their relationships?  Are they single? Married? Divorced?  Sure they might be married, but are they happily married?  While many of us get married, only about half of us remain married, now imagine how many are actually happily married.

The Shoe Doesn’t and Will Never Fit!

Let’s try to identify the root of this problem.  We don’t come out of the womb believing in happy endings or fairy-tales.  The desire for perfect love is not instinctual.  If it was, animals wouldn’t breed just to breed.  The very beginning of our skewed perception are the fairy-tales read to us and the Disney Movies shown to us as children.  In most cases, our mothers, aunts or grandmothers introduce us to these, hence continuing the most underrated cycle of viciousness out there.  We become acquainted with these beautiful, perfectly designed princesses who fall in love with these wonderfully amazing princes and we assume that someday our princes will come too.  As we grow up, we realize that we will never live in a castle, and we will never have a man climbing up our hair, but that doesn’t mean we stop believing in fairy-tales.  We moderate the fairy-tales to fit our own lives.  Instead of the prince rescuing the princess from a fire breathing dragon in an enchanted castle and then riding off into the sunset to live happily ever after, the princess is in a 9×9 cubicle in a dead end job and the prince pulls out a Tiffany’s diamond and they drive off into the suburbs in his new Mercedes Convertible.  Don’t tell me you haven’t thought about some version of that fairytale.

The worst kind of Chick Flick is the Chameleon.  The movie that pretends to be a comedy that makes fun of Sappy ones, but in the end, is exactly what it sets out not to be: A Chick Flick.  Some examples are: “Wedding Crashers”, “He’s Just Not that Into You” and the recently released “The Ugly Truth”.  When one watches the trailers for these blockbusters, they are enlightened witty and sometimes crude humor that seems to take a stand against happily ever after.

He’s Just Not that Into You…I’M SERIOUS!

For example, let’s dissect “He’s Just Not that Into You”.  (Spoiler Alert for those who haven’t seen it)  Basically the first half, or three quarters of the movie make the audience believe that romance is just the icing on the cake of Sex.  I really enjoyed it up to this point because finally I thought that someone was going to tell us the truth!  Men really don’t want to get married, men will cheat and women will continually make fools of themselves hoping that they’ll change.  Just as I started to really believe in this movie, it took the inevitable turn down the yellow brick road.  This reality was brought back into fantasy land where Ben Affleck proposes to Jennifer Aniston after seven years of dating, and a refusal to ever get married and the “player” in the movie, Justin Long, admits his undying love to the neurotic, (bordering on psychotic when it comes to men) Jennifer Goodwin.  This one really killed me.  All that hard work on a satirical comedy is destroyed in a ten minute ending of Hollywood bullshit.

I know this may sound harsh, and if you’re still reading this far down, I thank you.  Most, I’m sure stopped many paragraphs ago and think that I am a bitter, twisted, demonic dream killer who was jolted at the altar.  I will honestly tell you that nothing like that has ever happened to me.  I’m young and really haven’t had any traumatic experiences that would account for my dark perception of love.  In fact, I used to be the most avid chick flick junkie out there.  I couldn’t get enough of them.  But after a while, ones that used to make me laugh made me cry and I couldn’t understand why.  After a lot of thought, I realized that my brain and heart has become inundated and overloaded with these false notions for too many years and I’ve reached my breaking point.  I will still go to see the movies, but it’s not a necessity anymore, and I have finally accepted that they aren’t real.

I’m not saying that these stories should no longer exist, all I want is for women to understand that they are just that: stories.  Maybe if we can wrap our heads around that than we can learn to be happy with “settling”.  Maybe we won’t even consider it settling anymore.  This will never be easy.  It will make you change your entire concept of happiness.  But what I’m hoping is that in the end, the fairy-tales will go away because we’ll be happy with our reality, that might not be perfect, but good enough.