Asklemmy

Poverty is not romantic.

Because it's easier to be impulsive and generous in a luxurious romantic setting if you've got cash.

There are some great romantic tales about people sharing when they don't have much - or when they're well off... the middle ground is rarer because the middle class essentially doesn't exist and it's not as fantastical or compelling.

It is escapism. Romance usually has very few things that's real. I mean that most romance stories are more alike to a fairytale than reality.

Most movies and books are 98% predictable with the well-known cliches. And that makes them work. Beig wealthy is just an other thing that makes it going.

Most girls were raised on the price charming idea, and a rich, wealthy and emotionally available person fits the bill.

Reality of barely making rent and having no money to fix your car or even just daily struggle to find childcare for a date would break the dream.

When you are watching romance you want the fuzzy feels, the safe environment that everything going to be alright and happy ending is guaranteed. Love, money, heath and safe environment - with tons of loving friends and family - now that's what people want to dream of.

Buried into a lot of romcoms is a sense of fantasy. People don't fantasize about being poor.

What’s the escape in watching two people in the exact situation as you eat at McDonald’s and go for a walk in the park over and over again?

These films are meant to be a fantasy escape from real life. They are not meant to be realistic or to show any real struggle. They are supposed to show you a beautiful dream world including the big and real love and an otherwise carefree life.

Note that (some, not all) rom coms also involve a Cinderella story - a poor or middle class woman falls in love with a wealthy man and she is plucked from obscurity into wealth, where she “belongs”. Money is part of the fantasy.

More concerning is that so many romantic movies contain an element of cheating.. IE the main characters meet while one or both are seeing someone else and often don't break it off with the other person. In the comedies they are often sneaking around and not getting caught is played for laughs.

Rom-coms are aspirational fantasies. They're modern-day fairy tales of getting swept off your feet by a handsome prince and living happily ever after, never wanting for anything ever again. Material comfort is always a factor in these stories. If it's not overt, as in Pride and Prejudice where the main character betters their station by ending up with the mega-rich guy who seemed like a dick but turned out to have a heart of gold, then it has to be implied by the setting and the lifestyles of the characters. If the material wealth of the love interest isn't going to be a factor in the story then it has to be demonstrated that those financial needs are met in some other way.

You're probably never going to see a rom-com where the main character gets their one true love, but being with them condemns them to a life of struggle and poverty. No matter how you try to spin it so it's ok because at least they have each other, that would never be a truly satisfying ending in this type of movie. Material needs to be taken care of too. Even in movies like Overboard where the whole point of the movie is Goldie Hawn learning to be a human being by struggling through a working class lifestyle, they still have to end up rich at the end for the story to feel fully resolved.

It's polite to pretend that money doesn't matter, and a lot of rom-coms try to down-play it, but it does. It does matter. And it always shows up in one way or another.

I'd say a good-sized part of it is simply the American preference for watching beautiful, weathly people doing beautiful, wealthy people things. Hollywood rom-coms and US TV shows in general clearly skew towards upper middle class settings when compared to the equivalents from, say, the UK.

In other words, I reckon US media prefer their fictional characters to be aspirational whereas other cultures prefer theirs to be relatable.

Producers are rich, and don't find poor people problems sexy, but rather inconveniently guilt-inducing. When they do show poverty it has a way of being pretty theme-park, too.

I'm not a big rom-com consumer, but of course there's probably exceptions to the rule.

From a showrunner perspective, you want to have a diverse set of sets, activities, and situations you can perform in. That leaves you either with wealthy characters, who can justify doing these things in these exotic places. Or poor characters who behave wealthy inexplicably.

Ie friends where people working dead end jobs had housing better than most millionaires.

I was complaining about this on [email protected]

About 10% of pop culture stories, maybe more, are about billionaires. Are 10% of people billionaires?

And even in a medieval fantasy settings, it's about gold-decked kings: the billionaires of the setting.

It's to perpetuate a class bias.

If you are watching a rom-com about some unrealistic storybook relationship, why wouldn't you want to watch these people in an equally unrealistic financial situation. People watch them to escape reality, not watch more of it.

Because financial issues only keep the plot from moving forward.

Do you really think a guy that breaks his back all day in a construction site has time or energy to be romantic or chase girls? Is actually very realistic these rich fucks are the only ones who manage to get some romantic company and very creative lives

Also what no one has said yet, if you put two identical people next to each other, same mindset, same character, same visuals etc etc, but the one is wealthy and the other is poor, for 99% of people the wealthier one is more sexually attractive. Our brains view access to resources as a desirable quality.

And so, why would a rom com that is literally supposed to be about attractive people, make them purposefully less attractive? There's basically no reason.

I think of it as being similar to the fantasy genre - which often has things like oarks, trolls, etc. Billionaires are the oarks of romcoms. 😉

Considering the majority of them also take place in California, I'm not surprised.

People saying it's escapism inadvertently proving that it's working as intended, because it isn't there for escapism, it's a distraction, a very deliberate choice to do with keeping poor people "aspirational".

It's about reinforcing the lie that is "The American Dream" (or the "trad life"), and the idea that the people watching really are just the temporarily embarrassed millionaires they've been made to believe they are, that are actually just Christian white supremacist patriarchal capitalism doing what it needs to to maintain its control - promote the "perfect" cis-heteronormative nuclear family, living in the house with a white picket fence (now evolved in to a McMansion), with 2 cars in the drive, not only as an ideal, but as the norm.

The idea that a movie can't provide escapism if the people in it aren't rich, again, just goes to show just how well this specific brand of propaganda works.

They're made by people who are wealthy

Frankie and Johnny is a romance about a couple of poors who work in a diner together but now that i think about it it wasn't a comedy and also i hate that film

You can be a hot sexy millionaire too, just look at all these examples in film.

Corpo propaganda

One of the cliches in a lot of rom coms involves a woman who's too busy with a career to have ever fallen in love. To make this work, usually the woman has a high paying but long hours job like lawyer or executive or something like that. It would be the kind of job that people would like to have because of the money and the power. Having the woman be something like a janitor wouldn't work because a. it doesn't pay well and b. it isn't a job most people would dream about having and most certainly wouldn't sacrifice love for. I think that's part of the reason why a lot of rom coms depict wealthy people.

It's a movie trope to make storytelling easier since no one wants to think of their every day problems

Because then it'd be a romantic tragedy.

That's what I asked Annette.