Use in Film
Film, which supplanted the novel as the most popular narrative form in the 20th century, did not abandon this innovation of the novel. Rather, the marriage plot has enjoyed a continued efflorescence, visible to this day in the popular film form known as the "romantic comedy". At its most formulaic, critics have asserted, the conventions of the marriage plot, with the cathartic closure that its marriage ending delivers to its believers, ultimately renounces politics and engagement in the world in favor of privacy and domestic bliss. We may see this, for instance, in the film You've Got Mail, which resolves the political opposition between mega-bookstore boss Tom Hanks and bookshop-around-the-corner owner, Meg Ryan, by uniting its lead characters in a union that effaces the unequal distribution of capital that originally put them at odds.
Read more about this topic: Marriage Plot
Famous quotes containing the word film:
“All the old supports going, gone, this man reaches out a hand to steady himself on a ledge of rough brick that is warm in the sun: his hand feeds him messages of solidity, but his mind messages of destruction, for this breathing substance, made of earth, will be a dance of atoms, he knows it, his intelligence tells him so: there will soon be war, he is in the middle of war, where he stands will be a waste, mounds of rubble, and this solid earthy substance will be a film of dust on ruins.”
—Doris Lessing (b. 1919)