First and foremost, SPOILERS! That's right, I hate spoilers, but alas it seems as though sometimes it is unavoidable if you're obnoxious enough not to care and want to say what you want to say badly enough to include some spoilers, as this post does (in my defense, I'm spoiling a relatively obscure movie that's not very popular...). However, you have been duly warned.
Have you ever seen the movie Post Grad? It came out way back in 2009, which I guess isn't all that long ago, and it's about this girl (played by Alexis Bledel, shout out to Rory Gilmore, what what!) who loves to read and loves books and graduates from college with her whole life planned out (get a job at this big shot publishing company and work her way up until she discovers the "next great American novel") and then stuff happens and nothing turns out the way she planned (including her having to live at home again) and so she's figuring out life and there's a boy (plot twist!) who's been her (platonic) friend for forever, but he's madly in love with her until she blows him off for another guy (but it's a bit more dramatic than that) and so he goes to law school in New York and she finally gets the job of her dreams only to realize that she really misses that guy (plus some stuff that happens with her family). And so at the end she quits her job and moves to New York to be with him and continue her search for the "next great American novel," presumably at a new big shot publishing company. The End.
Anyway, I watched this movie and I couldn't decide if I liked the ending or not. The feminist in me was upset that she quit her dream job for a boy, but the hopeless romantic in me liked that she quit her dream job for a boy, you know? And so I was thinking about it and I came up with this grand conclusion:
Love, and particularly finding the one you love, is not the enemy to feminism/women everywhere, even in a movie.
Here's the thing. I think that looking at this movie it's really easy to think that the point is boys come before dreams, or that maybe finding a boy should be one's ultimate dream, which is in fact the first thing that I thought of upon the movie's big climax moment (her packing up and flying to New York and showing up on his doorstep). That's utter crap, and I was of course very upset.
However, I think the moral of the story was more like 1) you can plan everything out and have everything fall apart and yet still be happy and even get your dream in the end (her end goal wasn't working at this publishing place, it was finding the "next American novel" which she could potentially do ANYWHERE as long as they have books for her to read and she wanted to do this in the first place because she had a passion for reading, because she loves books) and 2) you can have more than one dream of equal importance to you (having a career in something you're passionate about doesn't have to be more or less important than finding love, or even sacrificing for that love).
And I think that a lot of people miss the point of movies like this. I have no problem with the plot or the ending of the film. The only concern I have is that the likelihood of Hollywood making a movie with the same exact story except switch the girl and the guy, having the guy leave what he thought was his dream job to follow a girl as she goes to law school in New York is slim to none. That's the message I would like to change. Not that one's dream can be finding love, but that in our society that is a dream for girls. Far from being an enemy to women everywhere, I think this message is a danger to the men in our society.
Rant over.
Absolutely brilliant.
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