Posted: August 1st, 2023

Romantic movies are supposed to provide an avenue to escape the real world

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Romantic movies are supposed to provide an avenue to escape the real world- to help people stroll into a world that is colorful and better where no love barrier is too great to trounce. Except when one ponders about it, some of the conduct depicted as romantic in these films is, impartially, disturbing. For example, the Love Actually sign guy was completely inappropriate; he stalked the wife of his best friend and saw nothing wrong about it. To him, it was a romantic gesture. Rational individuals are aware that rom-coms are not what love is actually like. However, these films still construct a picture of passion that trickles into the atmosphere and may cleverly influence society’s views and anticipations of love.
Romantic movies have regularly portrayed stalking as a form “pursuit.” As a result, the society may view this act as normal part of romance as it is a demonstration of a person’s quest to get the partner of their dreams. This may even explain why stalking has increasingly been closely associated with several cultural beliefs and values, as suggested by aphorisms like “persistence pays,” “try again if you do not succeed the first time,” “you can attain anything,” and “Do not take no for an answer” (Kostoulas et al., 2017). It is for this reason that grand gestures of rom-coms (such as appearing with several love signs, as it happens in Love Actually) are normally perceived as clear indications of true love. Certainly, they may be viewed as replicating one of the big cultural myths of passionate love: “no matter the size of the barrier, love will overcome all.”In this sense, the line between romantic pursuit and stalking becomes blurry, problematizing cultural understandings of stalking as a crime.
Romantic comedies can also encourage victims of stalking (especially women) to ignore their instincts. This is a big problem since research demonstrates that instincts can act as powerful cues to aid in keeping people safe (Gale, 2019). In his study to establish women’s perceptions about rom-coms, Lippman (2013) discovered that women who watched movies like Management and Crazy, stupid love that featured persistent romantic pursuit are more likely to be accepting of the so-called stalking myths and more likely to be accepting of violent male conduct. Stalking myths are untrue and exaggerated beliefs regarding stalking that minimize its seriousness, which means that a woman who more strongly endorses these has a tendency of taking stalking with the seriousness it deserves. For this reason, women who believe they are being stalked tend to brush off these feelings and try to convince themselves that the stalker is just a love interest trying to express their feelings.
Romantic films influence the society to view stalking as a compliment. There is the stalking myth that is common in most of the romantic comedies: “A person who resorts to the stalking extremes must actually be deep in love with his/her love interest.” He stalked you just because he loves you very much. It is romantic. For this reason, the victims are prompted to view stalking as a compliment. For them, this person could not have gone to such extremes if they did not love them; as such, the victim should be flattered. According to Lippmann (2018), the society expects men to be persistent and women to be flattered by it. Society teaches that persistent pursuit is romantic, and as such, women should desire this from men because it means they are attractive. And who does not want to be desired?

References
Gale, J. (2019). How To Analyze People With Dark Psychology: Blueprint To Psychological
Analysis, Abnormal Behavior, Body Language, Social Cues & Seduction. Healthy Pragmatic Solutions Inc.
Kostoulas, T., Chanel, G., Muszynski, M., Lombardo, P., & Pun, T. (2017). Films, affective
computing and aesthetic experience: Identifying emotional and aesthetic highlights from multimodal signals in a social setting. Frontiers in ICT, 4, 11.
Lippman, J. R. (2013). Learning to Stalk? The Relation Between Media Exposure and Beliefs
About Stalking (Doctoral dissertation).
Lippman, J. R. (2018). I did it because I never stopped loving you: The effects of media
portrayals of persistent pursuit on beliefs about stalking. Communication Research, 45(3), 394-421.

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