Tropes
In the summer of 1998, my best friend and I went to see the film City of Angels. We had each just turned 16, and were relishing the sudden ability on our parts to escape our parents' houses with borrowed vehicles. If we'd known better, I'm sure we would have chosen to see a better movie, but at the time, both of us were hopeless romantics. (Emphasis on "hopeless"; "romantic" is debatable.)
I didn't care much for this movie when I first saw it, nor did I warm up to it seeing it on basic cable a few years later. I couldn't put my finger on why, but I have a better sense of it now. If you don't know the story, Nicholas Cage plays an angel who falls for a woman on earth (played by Meg Ryan) and he ends up rescinding his status as an angel, becoming human flesh and blood, so he can be with her.
There's enough to dislike about the film based on this brief description alone, suffice it to say that it's not a whole lot better in its execution. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense that a man with no background story, no job, no last name, and no grasp on reality could ever convince a woman he isn't creepy. But what I really didn't like about the film was Cage's character and the manner in which he was able to worm his way into this woman's life. He's not a credible character, and certainly can't be believed to be capable of winning the affections of a woman.
Why can't I believe in him? Simply put, he's a person who has no inner life. He hasn't struggled to find his place in the world. He never had parents dump tons of emotional baggage on him that he had to work to sort out. He hasn't had his heart broken, or broken anyone else's. Even though he's the main character at the center of this story, he seems to exist merely to serve the whims and needs of the woman he loves. She's happy to go along with it, and why not? It's uncomplicated. Collectively, this seems to be what our culture longs for romantically.
This same trope cropped up in Garden State. Zach Braff plays an ever-somnambulistic, over-medicated twenty-something who wanders through life with no purpose. His faith in and enthusiasm for life is rekindled when he meets a girl (played by Natalie Portman) who shows him that life is worth experiencing despite all the pain that goes along the human condition, if only you have the whimsy to explore...and go off all of your psychiatric medication. As a character, she's slightly more developed than Nick Cage's angel, but not by a whole lot.
A character like this has been coined a manic pixie dream girl. (There is a male counterpart with the same name.) The most unforgivable of clichés in the literary world would be those that reduce central characters to mere plot devices. It's one thing to do this by accident; perhaps we can forgive bad writing. But to do this intentionally is just being lazy about how you are constructing a story.
At best it's poor entertainment, but at worst, it sets up unreasonable expectations about what we can expect from the world. I've only recently started digging into the entertainment I consumed when I younger, auditing the awful biases wrought upon me by Disney films and shitty romantic comedies when I was much younger and much more impressionable. The power of story is massive, akin to splitting the atom. In the century of celluloid, it's clear we've been just about responsible and irresponsible with the art of the story as we have using the energy derived from splitting nucleons.
I didn't care much for this movie when I first saw it, nor did I warm up to it seeing it on basic cable a few years later. I couldn't put my finger on why, but I have a better sense of it now. If you don't know the story, Nicholas Cage plays an angel who falls for a woman on earth (played by Meg Ryan) and he ends up rescinding his status as an angel, becoming human flesh and blood, so he can be with her.
There's enough to dislike about the film based on this brief description alone, suffice it to say that it's not a whole lot better in its execution. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense that a man with no background story, no job, no last name, and no grasp on reality could ever convince a woman he isn't creepy. But what I really didn't like about the film was Cage's character and the manner in which he was able to worm his way into this woman's life. He's not a credible character, and certainly can't be believed to be capable of winning the affections of a woman.
Why can't I believe in him? Simply put, he's a person who has no inner life. He hasn't struggled to find his place in the world. He never had parents dump tons of emotional baggage on him that he had to work to sort out. He hasn't had his heart broken, or broken anyone else's. Even though he's the main character at the center of this story, he seems to exist merely to serve the whims and needs of the woman he loves. She's happy to go along with it, and why not? It's uncomplicated. Collectively, this seems to be what our culture longs for romantically.
This same trope cropped up in Garden State. Zach Braff plays an ever-somnambulistic, over-medicated twenty-something who wanders through life with no purpose. His faith in and enthusiasm for life is rekindled when he meets a girl (played by Natalie Portman) who shows him that life is worth experiencing despite all the pain that goes along the human condition, if only you have the whimsy to explore...and go off all of your psychiatric medication. As a character, she's slightly more developed than Nick Cage's angel, but not by a whole lot.
A character like this has been coined a manic pixie dream girl. (There is a male counterpart with the same name.) The most unforgivable of clichés in the literary world would be those that reduce central characters to mere plot devices. It's one thing to do this by accident; perhaps we can forgive bad writing. But to do this intentionally is just being lazy about how you are constructing a story.
At best it's poor entertainment, but at worst, it sets up unreasonable expectations about what we can expect from the world. I've only recently started digging into the entertainment I consumed when I younger, auditing the awful biases wrought upon me by Disney films and shitty romantic comedies when I was much younger and much more impressionable. The power of story is massive, akin to splitting the atom. In the century of celluloid, it's clear we've been just about responsible and irresponsible with the art of the story as we have using the energy derived from splitting nucleons.