I'm getting sick of 'love at first sight' crap where the girl is so devastatingly beautiful that the man is absolutely lost. Now in some cases the guy plays it cool and builds a foundation with the girl, like Brooke Burgess or Mr. Rochester, but for others like Romeo or Marius the man is just absolutely lost and is proposing marriage based solely on the fact that the girl has a rather fine visage. Call me a pessimist or a realist, but all that is crap. Anyway, in case you don't believe me, here's a smattering of famous "I loved you from the first moment I saw you" situations.
Sleeping Beauty
Snow White
Aladin
Cinderella
The Little Mermaid
Brooke Burgess with Dolly (from He Knew He Was Right)
Mr. Stanbury with Nora (from He Knew He Was Right)
Every Bollywood movie ever (specifically Om Shanti Om, Swades, Saawariya)
Colonel Brandon with Marianne (from Sense and Sensibility)
Romeo and Juliet
Cosette and Marius (from Les Mis)
Tamino and Pamina (from The Magic Flute)
Rhett Butler with Scarlett O'Hara (from Gone with the Wind)
Mr. Rochester with Jane Eyre (from Jane Eyre)
Tristan with Isolde
Henry VIII with Anne Boleyn (from Henry VIII)
Henry Tilney with Catherine (from Northanger Abbey--debatable, but come on, she's a moron, it had to be love at first sight or else he would have been completely turned off once she opened her mouth)
And then there's the whole, "Even though I tried to marry someone else, I'm sure I've loved you my whole life" line that men also feed women in literature, probably most notably from the examples below:
Little Dorrit (Oh I'm so glad my being a complete airhead didn't in any way deter you from loving me)
Mansfield Park (That Miss Crawford was just a fling, I REALLY loved you Fanny, my WHOLE life)
Emma (I realized I loved you since you were 12 when Frank Churchill almost stole you away!)
I'm not saying that I don't enjoy some of the above pairings, I just almost roll my eyes out of my head when I get to the "She's so beautiful, it must be love!" parts of these stories, but what are you going to do?
More realistic stories:
You've Got Mail
Pride and Prejudice
Persuasion
While You Were Sleeping
4 comments:
I think with the Little Mermaid it was more of a "I loved you from the first moment I heard you." and sleeping beauty too...kind of.
In any case, I somewhat dislike the situations as well.
I'm pretty sure Swan Lake is in there
You already acknowledged it yourself, but I'll remind you of the point of all this:
The vast majority of stories that follow the highly unrealistic "I loved you from the first moment" are intensely stylized. You obviously realize that none of these films are meant to reflect actual romance and that love at first sight is a perfect tactic to fit an entire romantic cycle into an hour and a half format. For those Romantic novels that drag this out interminably, these too were stylized and meant to fit genre expectations for escapist purposes, not to imbue silly girls with notions of romance "ought to be". Think about the women who wrote these things!
Anyway, of course you already get all this. As for the more "realistic" examples (did you mention P&P?), need I remind you that Jane Austen (among others) was making social commentary, NOT writing romance that she actually believed in? I can't speak for all (or any) of Hollywood, but I like to think that the people churning out this tripe are much more focused on the "I loved the dollar at first sight" principle, which is what fuels them to churn out nonsense that will bring women (men don't go for this stuff) flocking to the movies.
Ok, ramble over. This is what happens when we're separated for a week.
This is too true, how do you figure out these things?
Anyway would this happen in real life? no.
So your point is true :-)
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