For immediate release: NOVEMBER 15, 1999
Pls call Kevin McCaffrey/ Mount Holyoke College/ 413-538-2987 [email protected]
NEW STUDY LOOKS AT UNLIKLEY LOVE, MOVIE ROMANCE & SOCIAL MORES
Unlikely Couple's, Movie Romance as Social Criticism (Westview, 1999), a new book by Tom Wartenberg, explores cross-class, cross-race, and homosexual couples in 10 popular films and looks at how these films---wittingly or not---undermine or question prevailing social mores. Wartenberg, a professor of philosophy at Mount Holyoke College, contends that this sub-genre of romance films often challenges the prevailing view that narrative cinema always supports dominant societal structures.
Wartenberg looks at a series of popular romantic films from the 1930s to the 1990s to explore what romances between unlikely couples have to say about societal mores and prejudices.
What are unlikely couples? Wartenberg sets unlikely couples into three broad categories. Cross-class couples, such as Dr. Henry Higgens and Eliza Doolittle in the 1938 film Pygmalion (based on Bernard Shaw's play and later transmuted into the musical comedy My Fair Lady) bring together couples from different economic strata. Cross-race couples involve couples who brave American society's prohibitions against interracial romance, as do the two leading characters in Spike Lee's 1991 Jungle Fever. And, homosexual couples step outside the standard heterosexual paradigm. An example here is the 1986 film The Crying Game , which depicts the relationship between a male Irish Republican Army operative and a male transsexual.
For Wartenberg, the depictions of these unlikely couples and their struggle to love within a hostile society offer criticism of the standard social hierarchies based on class, race, and
gender. Whether or not the directors of some of the ten films Wartenberg discusses were fully conscious of the subversive nature of their efforts, it is clear that each film provides an implicit or explicit critique of prevailing attitudes. "People often are surprised by my contention that popular films can be socially critical," says Wartenberg. "But if you look at these films carefully and sympathetically, I think it becomes clear that they really do question the legitimacy of our social structures and practices."
For example, Wartenberg writes that in portraying the affair of a black urban professional architect and a working-class secretary of Italian descent, Spike Lee's Jungle Fever raises a host of issues: from black and white myths concerning members of other races as romantic partners to the possibility of successful integrated couples--and, by extension, of integration itself--within our society. "I'm not saying that all of these films are equally successful as social criticism," says Wartenberg. "Indeed, I'm critical of films like Pretty Woman and Jungle Fever for the inadequacies of their perspectives, for their failure to live up to the genre's potential."
Unlikely Couples represents the most recent chapter of Wartenberg's fascination with the intersection between philosophy and popular culture. With a special interest in the politics of film, he has written on issues in the philosophy of film, as well as on a wide range of topics in social theory and in the history of philosophy. He is coeditor of the anthology of Philosophy and Film (1995), and is the general editor of the Thinking Through Cinema book series for Westview Press. He is also the author ofThe Forms of Power (1990) and is the editor of Rethinking Power (1992).
Please contact Kevin McCaffrey, at the Mount Holyoke Office of Communication -- 413-538-2987, [email protected] -- for a copy of Unlikely Couples or to get contact information for Professor Wartenberg.
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