(photo from PBS)
In her recent HuffPost piece, Jeanine Basinger, author of a new book on marriage in the movies, seems to suggest yes:
Marriage became a screenwriter’s nightmare. It was a finish line, not a starting place. It had no built-in story arc. It just went on, day after day, month after month, year after year.
In a piece yesterday at Atlantic online, on the hit PBS series Downtown Abbey, Jennie Rothenberg Gritz says no:
…That’s why the current season of Downton Abbey is arguably the most interesting of all. We’re no longer wondering whether Matthew and Mary will ever walk down the aisle. And so far, no one of noble blood has run off with a chauffeur or kissed a housemaid. But we’ve seen the young Crawleys learn how to maintain respect, and even passion, as they bicker over money. We’ve seen Lady Grantham let go of a fierce grudge against her husband and allow him to share her grief.
Categories: Marriage
I would say marriage is a more difficult plot to write. It has the potential to be more inspiring and dramatic than the falling in love and getting married part, but it’s much harder to handle.
First, people falling in love are usually young and that makes it easier to do a movie. Somehow our culture has a hard time dealing with the idea that older, un-airbrushed people have the same feelings about love and romance as anyone else. (Remember the brouhaha a while back when a young journalist blogged that she was disgusted by two fat people kissing on a show?)
Then, falling in love is exciting. It’s something everyone can identify with and remember. And you can give it a happy ending – they get together!!!!
Staying married is something that is less glamorous. It takes longer (another issue in making a movie). Some of the day-to-day stuff is boring.
But in real life, you deal with some pretty big things, in-laws, money, children, illness, death. When you look back, those are things you really remember in your life. They’re important and dramatic.
However, it is harder to make them into a movie.
The final challenge to making a movie about marriages lasting is that they don’t have a good ending point. The arc of a romance is meet each other, face some sort of obstacles, get together at last. The ending is upbeat. The ending to a good marriage is one of you dies. (Ugh.) That’s extremely depressing, to say the least. But if you end earlier, you may have a sort of unsatisfied feeling – did they work things out? did their problems come back? Some problems take years to resolve, how do you show that?
Nevertheless, I would like more movies about marriages lasting. When I read the book review, I liked the idea of older movies where a couple faces some crisis and then comes through it. I think that’s actually true-to-life and I’m sorry if movies don’t do that anymore.
From the article:
“And so far, no one of noble blood has run off with a chauffeur or kissed a housemaid. ”
I assumed Sybil was of noble blood. She has run off with the chauffeur. Am I mistaken here?
I think they mean this season. Last season Sybil did run off with the chauffeur
That explains it.
I really liked this quote from the blog:
“good marriages are dynamic. Each one is filled with tiny challenges and mood shifts, and couples are always making micro-adjustments, like drivers speeding down the highway with their hands firmly on the wheel. It may be more dramatic to watch two lovers veer off into a ditch, like the doomed Anna and Vronsky. But the Levins and Kittys of literature remind us how nuanced relationships can actually be.”
I definitely appreciate shows and movies that explore the varied dynamics of marriage relationships, not just courtship. Positive marriage relationships often show up as emotional centers (though sometimes not acknowledged as such) in shows — for example Wash and Zoe in “Firefly” and Rory and Amy in the “Doctor Who” reboot (there’s some really fascinating commentary/a> being written about how the world of the domestic is handled in “Doctor Who”; warning for spoilers). I have often thought that it is largely out of laziness that writers imagine life after marriage is without narrative potential, since obviously the people involved in the relationship are no more static after marriage than they were before! They continue to grow and change and the relationship must grow and change with them, just as it did before.
I’m surprised no one mentioned The Sopranos. Granted, it’s not a happily-ever-after story (and people still argue about meaning of the ending; my own take is that it represents “more of the same”, as in the dysfunctions of that family just go on ad infinitum), but marriage was definitely a major theme (and more time was spent on that than on…Tony’s work. Which is to be expected…after all, the genius of The Sopranos was to use “The Family” as a foil for “the family”. Not to mention the title itself…singing like a canary (about familial dysfunction) against the cultural demand of omerta). David Chase is a genius.
I never watched the Sopranos. I have a feeling I would get hooked. I should see if its on Netflix.
You should!! But yes, it is addicting. It was “where I was” on a Sunday evening for years. I would even watch the credits just to see all the Italian and Sicilian names. There are a few things to remember when watching: (1) this is not a show about the Mob, (2) David Chase spent the entire series working out the issues from his family of origin, (3) the characters are deeply dysfunctional, flawed people—nevertheless, they love one another and honor their obligations in their own broken way, from their own (toxic!) upbringing, (4) the show’s guest writers, directors and actors are a who’s who of Italian Americana; Chase wasn’t the only one working out family issues during the course of the series. No other show examined family—really got in there beneath the surface—like this one did.