Tuesday, September 14, 2010

The Silver Screen Versus the Street Scene

“In 1924, projectionist Harry C. Williams coated the white cloth screen (movies were viewed on) with silver paint to better reflect the light of the movies.**”

As an industry, Hollywood has painted the men silver. They have changed their DNA to appeal to women.

Namely, romantic comedies have a handle on how to portray love and they sell it ingeniously. The men in the movies are almost always drool-worthy, and if they aren’t they have some sort of major redeeming quality (like grandiose gestures or cute/sweet rhetoric) I could cite a billion movies while writing this, but the idea is simple. The basis of romance should not spur from watching these movies…unfortunately, it does.

The silver screen shows us life how we would want it to be - not how it is. There’s a happy ending…a heart-wrenching speech…a chase to declare love. Out in the real world, these things don’t happen. Men don’t ramble on about their feelings, they don’t scramble around screaming they love you, and they certainly don’t all have perfect abs. To top it off, finding a man that fulfills those criteria (in the real world) is damn near impossible to locate. There’s a common thread in silver screen men though…something that differentiates between a silver screen male and a street male: that’s femininity. Men in movies tend to possess some feminine qualities. They like to talk, they say how they feel, they emasculate themselves to please the lady…they are also can be extremely masculine: they have good builds, they can be jerks, they drink, the have man caves, etc… They do all this seamlessly and simultaneously to form what we think is ideal.

It’s the combination of these two extremes -the synthesis- that create the perfect male for women, the one that doesn’t exist (or rarely shows his face). Because we (women) want the man to be sensitive, but we also want him to be full of testosterone. No woman wants a man who just simply fulfills the ‘feminine’ side of the spectrum. It’s unnatural, too needy, and just down right annoying. On the same side of the token, it is unnatural for many men to be both feminine and masculine. There’s a reason we’re different and attracted to our opposites. “So, now what?”, you may be thinking. Well, now you just have to sit back and accept the fact that everyone is human. It is hypocritical of us to expect them to be perfect when we are not. And although theses movies have taught us that men should be chasing us around the world to woo us back to them…they are just that, movies:fiction, an escape from reality not an extension of it. Every now and then something exceptional will happen in your life, a man will do something out of character and special…cherish those moments. The more you appreciate them, perhaps the more they will occur.

Love, M

**Read more: What is the origin of the term “Silver Screen”? | Answerbag http://www.answerbag.com/q_view/6512#ixzz0zNaljXqj

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