A Taste of an Asian Rom-Com

Posted on by lucyronald

After studying the texts that we had in glass (in particular State of Play), I became very interested in gender equality in all Asian countries. I think this is because, as a young female in Australia, I am already presented with gender inequality on a daily basis, not only in everyday life, but through all media that we are surrounded with. I initially didn’t really know what type of text/practice/policy I wanted to look at. I then began thinking about my interests in everyday life as I thought that would increase my interest in the subject, especially if it was in a form that I was unfamiliar with – for example if it was produced in an Asian country.

I decided to focus on a film, as it was the industry that made me curious about gender equality, and I then decided to focus on the film genre of Romantic Comedies. Initially, I wanted to focus on just purely gender equality, but through research I became interested in the representation of relationships in film too, and wanted to see the “ideal” for relationships in Asia also. For years, Romantic Comedies have challenged the way we see relationships to how they should be and set men and women on unrealistic pedestals. Narratives that focus on a woman’s love life to the exclusion of everything else are pervasive. And with a notable lack of other types of female-led arcs, they make up the vast majority of representations of women’s lives we see on screen (Karlin 2015). “Strong female character” has become a buzz phrase in conversations about improving two-dimensional representations of women in film and television. But Schreiber (similarly to Sophia McDougall at New Statesman) stresses the need for complication rather than perfection (Karlin 2015). I can really agree with these statements written by Karlin, as I think that most rom-coms that we are presented with today set an “ideal” of both female and male characters, creating this never-ending cycle of unrealistic expectation in real life relationships.

After researching these opinions and debates about “rom-coms” I decided to look into general gender equality in all of Asia, not just in the movie industry.
This video posted by CNCB explores Gender equality in the workplace, which I found very interesting.

http://player.cnbc.com/p/gZWlPC/cnbc_global?playertype=synd&byGuid=3000499649&size=530_298

Despite women representing half of the world’s population, an average of just 30.9 per cent of all speaking characters in films are women (Law 2014). In a UN-backed study by Geena Davis Institute at the University of Southern California, academics conducted the first-ever international research on gender images in global films. Their findings detailed how Asian countries are the leading nations in terms of balance in regard to male and female lead characters. Asian countries also were among the leaders in the percentage of female characters in film and television productions (Law 2014). I found the results of this study to be pleasantly surprising and would really like to know where Australia sits in the list of gender balance. After all this research, I was really keen to begin watching the film to see if I could notice gender equality, and I also was really keen to take note of the relationships depicted in the film and see if any of the challenged the stereotypical Rom-Com relationship. I chose Twitter as a platform to document my thoughts throughout the movie, as an simple way to show my auto-ethnographical response. Here are my tweets throughout the movie in order..

 

 

At this point in the movie, I was focussing more on the visual aspect of the movie, not the subtitles (the movie had English subtitles). Everything in terms of visual was very similar to Western romantic comedies – very bright and happy colours to set the light tone to the movie.

 

This is something that I have noticed in all Asian media – the use of animation. This film used pop up screens to represent the text messages and emails that the characters were sending to each other.

Sadly, I found myself relating to the characters in this movie quite a bit – the clubbing culture seemed quite similar to what I’m familiar with, and I then found myself remembering those horrible, horrible Sunday mornings that I’ve spent beside my dear ol’ friend the toilet.

Even from the cover of the movie, it was pretty easy to tell that this movie was going to be predominately about four girls, and would only really delve into male characters when they were presented as romantic interests to the protagonist female characters.

 

I really liked that – as corny as this movie was – the whole social issue that is really prominent in our culture today. This is males forcing themselves on drunk and vulnerable girls, and this mostly happens in the clubbing seen. Even though the movie is pretty poorly made (just your classic shitty rom-com), the fact that the female actually defends herself and says “no leave me alone” to this boy, I think is a really powerful message to be sending to viewers all over the world.

 

 

At this point, I had slightly started not really paying attention to the movie – this always happens in movies with me if I am not completely drawn in by it. I also think that the fact I am a lazy person, having to read subtitles constantly to understand what was happening was not going to happen for a whole 2 hours. And when you stop reading subtitles, you stop understanding what is happening at all.

 

Another aspect of this movie that I was surprised with, was the copious amount of alcohol that was being consumed. In Australia, we are surrounded by the unusual drinking culture (by unusual I mean that we drink a bloody lot of it), but for some reason I assumed (a lot of assuming goes on with me when thinking about other cultures) that clubbing and drinking wasn’t a favourite past times. This is me probably creating stereotypes in my head and applying them to this movie, something that I cannot help doing but really should try and avoid.

 

 

 

 

This is where I really had no idea what was happening.

 

 

The Twitter post basically tell it all, but overall, I was pretty confused by the plot towards the end, and I think this is because my lack of attention meant I wasn’t reading the subtitles and also I didn’t find the storyline that captivating (again maybe because I wasn’t reading the subtitles).

 

References

Karlin, Lily. “How Romantic Comedies Are Failing Women (And How To Fix It)”. Huffington Post Australia. N.p., 2016. Web. 4 Sept. 2016., http://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/entry/romantic-comedies-failing-women_n_7026302 

Law,. “Gender Equality In Asian Film And Television – Onehallyu Blog!”. OneHallyu Blog!. N.p., 2014. Web. 14 Sept. 2016., http://blog.onehallyu.com/gender-equality-asian-film-television/

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