Meet The Parents - Themes

Themes

"But I was trying to have in a kind of forties-farce way, the opportunity to create realistic characters, but heighten the comedic situations and predicaments a bit so that they're still very funny and there is still some very broad humor, but you would connect to the characters and completely identify with Ben Stiller's anxiety about not only meeting Robert De Niro's character and all, but the kind of characters from his past that come with him."

The protagonist Greg Focker is a middle-class Jewish nurse whose social and cultural position is juxtaposed against the Byrnes family of upper-class White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs). With respect to Greg as a Jew and a nurse when compared to the Byrnes and Banks families, a distinct cultural gap is created and subsequently widened. The cultural differences are often highlighted and Greg is repeatedly made aware of them. This serves to achieve comedic effect through character development and has also been commented upon as being indicative of thematic portrayal of Jewish characters' roles in modern film as well as being a prime example of how male nurses are portrayed in media. Speaking about character development in Meet the Parents, director Jay Roach stated that he wanted an opportunity to "do character-driven comedy" and "to create realistic characters, but heighten the comedic situations and predicaments."

Vincent Brook observes mainstream Hollywood cinema's tendency since the 1990s of incorporating Jewish liminality and "popularizing the Jew." He explains the "manly Jewish triumph" of characters like Jeff Goldblum's David Levinson in Independence Day and labels it as a "certain answer to America's yearnings for a new Jewish hero." This stands in direct contrast to the schlemiel or "the Jewish fool" which was seen to have been revitalized in the mid 1990s after faltering since the 1960s. The schlemiel, Brook explains, is an anti-hero in whose humiliation the audience finds supreme pleasure. Within that context, Brook describes Greg Focker's character as "the quintessential example of the postmodern schlemiel." The repeated embarrassing encounters that Greg faces with his girlfriend's all-American family is compared to the example of Jason Biggs's character Jim Levenstein of the American Pie film series where Levenstein is often the comedic centerpiece due to his repeated sexual embarrassments.

Anne Bower writes about Jewish characters at mealtime as part of the broader movement she believes started in the 1960s where filmmakers started producing work that explored the "Jewish self-definition." She postulates that the dinner table becomes an arena where Jewish characters are often and most pointedly put into "conflicts with their ethnic and sexual selves." She describes the example of Greg sitting down for dinner with the Byrnes family and being asked to bless the food. In this scene, Greg attempts to recite a prayer by improvising and, in doing so, launches into a recital of the song "Day by Day" from Act I of Godspell. Bower notes this scene as "particularly important for establishing the cultural distance" between the Jewish Greg and the Christian Byrnes. She also noted that the social gap is further widened next morning at breakfast when Greg is the last person to arrive at the breakfast table; he shows up to breakfast wearing pajamas while everyone else is fully clothed. Here Greg is shown as the only person eating a bagel, which Bower argues as being a clear signifier of Jewishness.

Based on common misconceptions and stereotypes about men in nursing, Greg's profession is repeatedly brought up by Jack Byrnes in a negative context and the character of Greg Focker has come to be one of the best known film portrayals of a male nurse. Even though men dominated the profession in earlier times, there has been a feminization of the nursing profession over the course of the last century which has caused men in nursing to often be portrayed as misfits by the media. A common stereotype is that of a man who accepts a career in nursing as an unfortunate secondary career choice, either failing to become a physician or still trying to become one. Such stereotyping is due to a presumption that a man would prefer to be a physician but is unable to become one due to lack of intelligence or non-masculine attributes. Jack Byrnes is often seen openly criticizing Greg's career choice per his perception of nursing being an effeminate profession. In their book Men in Nursing: History, Challenges, and Opportunities authors Chad O'Lynn and Russell Tranbarger present this as an example of a negative portrayal. Commenting on the same issue but disagreeing, Barbara Cherry in her book Contemporary Nursing: Issues, Trends, & Management called the portrayal of Greg as a nurse "one of the most positive film portrayals of men who are nurses" and commented that Greg "humorously addresses and rises above the worst of all stereotypes that are endured by men in this profession." Sandy and Harry Summers in the book Saving Lives: Why the Media's Portrayal of Nurses Puts Us All at Risk postulate that Greg's character, although intelligent and firm in his defense of his profession, "might have done more to rebut the stereotypes" while also reporting that "some men in nursing" expressed their opinions that it would have been better to not present the stereotypes at all.