Thursday, January 1, 2015

Hollywood's favorite romance script and rape

     I have been thinking about Game of Thrones lately. In particular about the rape incident with Cersie and Jamie. I was wondering how the producers, directors, writers did not see it as troublesome. And it occurred to me that they way the view scenes like that is heavily influenced by the very pervasive Hollywood  romance script. They didn't set out to write and produce a rape scene,  I believe they were sincerely influenced by this romance script that is often unconscious but a huge part of our cultures ideas about gender roles. I think they believed they were writing this classic romance script/scene and because of cultural influences they didn't see anything wrong with it. They had probably been taught to see this type of scene as romance, as love.

The script:

     Feisty Heroine meets her opposite.  There is conflict then the hero solves everything and saves the day by finally convincing the heroine that he knows her mind better than she does, and that she wants him. Often this scene comes about after an opposites attract conflict where the two first seem to hate each other. The hero usually decides to just kiss the heroine at this point because she should just stop resisting him. However she might resist and fight him off, but this is all part of the opposites attract script. We are told and shown that the heroine doesn't really mean it when she says "no" because look at how she ends up being kissed and giving into the hero. He knew what she wanted all along, and her "no" was just part of the opposites attract tension and drama.




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