Love, Hollywood Style
Every year, audiences fill the movie studio’s coffers and theaters watching a genre of film that has existed for as long as there have been movies. The genre pre-exists the advent of motion pictures by perhaps several thousand years, but the cinematic presentation is the one that modern audiences are most familiar with. The plot generally goes like this:
A big case comes to a big city law firm. Maybe it’s a lawsuit filed by “the little guy” against a giant greedy corporation who did him wrong. The senior partners like the attention it will garner for the firm, but think it’s a loser. They assign two junior associates. One of them is a handsome, young Ivy League law school graduate. He has a privileged background, and maybe his name has a Roman numeral in it. He drives a BMW. The other is a pretty, young graduate of a well-respected state university law school. Maybe she went to night school while waiting tables at a diner and taking care of the beloved aunt who raised her after her parents died. She drives a Honda Civic. Naturally, these two young, fabulously attractive associates take an immediate dislike for one another. She thinks he’s crude, not very bright, and only got his position at the firm because he’s a man and because of his privileged background. He thinks she’s uptight, cold, and snooty and that she only got her position because of her looks. We see that he is cocky, arrogant, and a player, flirting with the receptionist and the firm’s paralegals. Despite her brilliant mind, we can see that she suffers from imposter syndrome and feels that she doesn’t belong at this prestigious law firm. The senior partners leering at her legs do nothing to boost her confidence or quell her anger. Sparks fly. They argue, they fight, and they even mix it up in front of a judge during a preliminary hearing. They just rub each other the wrong way. Awkward moments abound. We see each of them battling their own insecurities by building walls and projecting their own perceived flaws on one another.
They each have a confidante that allows us to see the real person behind the façade. For her, it’s the well-meaning, slightly less attractive neighbor who lives across the hall and offers tender advice, which she ignores for most of the film. For him, it’s the hedonist, stockbroker fraternity brother who offers very, very bad advice, which he ignores (“No, Boomer, this one’s different”). The audience sees through this and wonders when the couple will see the light. Time’s running out. It’s been over an hour, and the movie has a ninety-five-minute running length—carefully calculated by producers so that exhibitors can pack their theaters for as many screenings a day as possible.
Begrudgingly, our hero and heroine begin to respect one another. They learn to see past their first impressions, the facades they’ve constructed to guard the vulnerabilities they have desperately struggle to hide. They reflect and can see their own inner lives, recognize their own worth, and thereby recognize each other’s unique and precious value. Most of all, they learn to trust another human being enough to reveal their true selves. In the final moments, they not only win the big case but find true love!
We’ve all seen this movie. Many times. If it’s not lawyers, it’s doctors. Or sometimes cops. (Variation: she’s a rookie trying to prove herself, and he’s older, slightly grizzled, and drinks too much because his wife left him, and he believes he is unlovable). It’s all fluffy, silly, and formulaic, yet people line up again and again to see this story. There are some notable bombs, but blockbusters far outnumber them. People love this story. Why?
It’s not about the lawyer story, or the doctor story, or the ice-skating story (see The Cutting Edge). Abstracted, the story is far more universal—transcending time, place, and social conventions—and, at the same time, more personal. When done well—good writing, good
acting, good directing—they reach into our most intimate spaces and reveal truths we rarely admit to ourselves, not to mention other people. The insecurities, the defense mechanisms, the fears we see on screen are common to all of us. We are both amused and touched seeing the fumbling couple on the screen. What could be more frightening than learning to trust another person with our heart? And what could be a more universal desire than to find a life partner, a true love, a soulmate?
The World of Jane Austen
In the world that Jane Austen was born into, women were not allowed to sign legal contracts. Women were not allowed to own property. In fact, women were property. More to the point, they were the property of men. First, they were the property of their fathers. Then, they were the property of their husbands. The tradition and legal right of primogeniture ensured that firstborn sons inherited estates from their fathers. Their sisters were then at their brother’s mercy. It was his right to evict them from the family estate destitute and with no means to provide for themselves if he wished to do so. If they did not have a husband to support them, they would be forced to work in the only professions available to them: as a domestic servant, such as a maid or a housekeeper, or something far worse.
Further exacerbating this problem were laws in effect at the time placing severe restrictions on how estates could be bought, sold, and inherited. Intended to keep large estate properties intact and preserving the livelihoods of the many tenant farmers who
lived on them, estate owners, while entitled to any financial profits the estates produced, were forbidden from ever selling part or all of the property. Estates could be willed to sons and not daughters. If an estate owner had no sons, the family tree would be traced to find a suitable male heir, no matter how distant the relation might be. These laws, with few exceptions, superseded any written will. Daughters could be left money but not land. A father’s primary duty to his daughter was to find a suitable husband. This was the basic premise of the popular BBC television series Downton Abbey. Robert Crawley has three daughters, all unmarried and no sons. His assumed heir, a second cousin to his daughters, dies on the Titanic, and a new heir, a poor relation they have never met, becomes the presumptive heir. To secure his daughters’ futures, this new heir is contacted and invited to visit the estate for the sole purpose of introducing him to the three daughters, hoping he will choose one to be his wife.
(Note; these options were available to women of Austen’s social class—landed gentry. Backbreaking manual labor in the fields or in the factories of the burgeoning Industrial Revolution was always available to both men and women if they were poor and desperate.)
The Bennet family in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice finds itself in a similar situation. Modern readers, rightfully, tend to be outraged by this entire premise. It is unjust, misogynist, and cruel, no matter how polite the presentation may be.
Two centuries later, we are still contending with the vestiges of that conception of society, socially, if not legally. Readers tend to expect Austen’s book to be a wholesale indictment of that system and for a heroine to rise up in revolt against it. But that is not the book that Austen wrote. Those books would come later in the 19th century. Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles would tell the story of a destitute peasant girl repeatedly victimized by a society that cruelly subverted and oppressed women, impoverished women. While Pride and Prejudice’s storyline is critical of the society it depicts, revolution is not what it is about. Modern readers may be disappointed that Austen doesn’t take up the fight with more vehemence. That was not Austen’s purpose.
Instead, Austen was seeking more profound truths, truths that define the human experience. Elizabeth Bennet is not a revolutionary attacking the ramparts of the patriarchy. However unfair we may judge it to be, the circumstances of her life have placed her in her predicament. Beneath the fluffy surface of this story is a hard life and death truth. The future of her family is at stake, and she knows she has a duty. Her objection is not that she must marry. Her question is: “Does it have to be him?” The dance that plays out between her and Darcy is about each of them getting over themselves long enough to recognize their own individual value and to appreciate the other’s value
Austen’s initial title for Pride and Prejudice was First Impressions. Indeed, both Elizabeth and Darcy must get past their first impressions, give up their prejudices, and abandon their pride.
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