Why do novels and movies portray sex and love like this?

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I find that every movie or novel I have read that deals with the subject of love and sex portrays them very unrealistically. Films show sex scenes and romantic moments where the two lovers display these huge feelings for each other and the whole thing is sooooo beautiful. Ditto with discriptions in novels.

To be honest, I would love to see a film that actually deals with the realities of love and sex......no, not about the wife who leaves her boring/impotent husband for a young stud and has amazing sex with him. I mean, a film that focuses on the actual aspects of romance and sex.

In my opinion, and this is only me speaking, love is overrated.

I know what you mean and think your analysis is correct. I dont watch many films, but I suspect that the sort of film you're looking for does exist somewhere.

I suppose these films are popular because they provide escapism from people's true life experience and people are willingly suspend their disbelief.

I am just thankful that I found a girl who loves me for who I am and would not want me to change in anyway at all - neither of us need to see films because what we have is so special

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlyqGmPXgBI[/youtube]

Good movie on relationships, not all lovey dovey.

Closer Torrent

and I see you can buy it for about €3.50 from Amazon!

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is my favourite depiction of love in a movie. The even attention it gives to the ugly side of the characters and their relationship makes the positive parts that much more moving. I can never get sucked into a film when things are too clean and idealistic.

Yup, especially Disney-type crap. And I agree that love is overrated, too.

... I agree, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a favourite of mine too. Albeit a little disturbing at times. Stangely the thing I most remember from it was Kate Winslet's orange sweatshirt: I finally got a similar one yesterday.

If you are looking to romantic comedies, romances and thrillers, their purpose is escapism. You'll have better luck with dramas. But a drama in which a grim reality is shown can be nearly unwatcheable. I never made it through Ingmar Bergman's "Scenes From a Marriage" or Gary Oldman's "Nil By Mouth", however accurate to many peoples' lives they may be. Sometimes accurate is just too painful to watch.

Other times, accurate is just too boring to watch. A movie where the couple didn't wind up dramatically mated or dramatically divorced would defy the story arc that most people are expecting. There are movies that deliberately defy expectations and somewhere out there must be one about a couple who are rather bland and not passionatley in love or passionately in hate. But it probably sank at the box office because an ordinary couple is just...ordinary, and not very interesting to watch.

Our society is always searching for that perfect golden elixir that makes everything that is bad magically disappear. But I don't think stupid movies are the problem. They're just a symptom.

Oh, if you want to watch a film that shows the ugly side of human relationships, you want to see "Bitter Moon." Hugh Grant's character meets Emaneulle Seigneur's character on a cruise ship and her husband, played by Peter Coyote, says Grant's character can have her (sexually) if he listens to Coyote's story first. Coyote tells a story of a relationship gone bad and two people addicted to each other and the harm they inflict on one another as a result of growing to hate one another yet feeling powerless to break up.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jb1YcQjOiw[/youtube]

(The whole film is available in parts on YouTube. Just search on "Bitter Moon" to find it.)

Yeah, I think you've kind of hit the nail on the head. Hollywood goes for "drama," at the expense of pretty much everything else.

Our species loves to dream, no?

Edit: For the record, I find Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind to be rather good in that aspect as well.

Last edited by TechnicalPacifist on 27 Jun 2010, 2:12 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Not to mention big, hulking men and anorexic looking women in those sex scenes, on the screens.

But . . . love is beautiful, and the feelings are immense, and I think that really loving someone changes a person irrevocably. At the same time, though, love can be the most painful thing. It's not melodrama - it does actually hurt and can be absolutely debilitating to care about someone more than you care about yourself. I think that this complexity, this duality, is a very hard thing to truly depict in art . . . and in any case, people like happy endings and joyously theatrical representations. After all, you don't usually have to travel very far to find drudgery and sadness in real life.

Personally, love and all it's good/bad facets are quite hard to put into anything we call, "Entertainment." It's one of man's most influential emotions, but it's hard to display in something we're watching/reading. Sex, however . . . well, that's older than the Roman Empire, and they even had rather risque shows (and the random people who had to get it out of their system during the gladiator games). Sex is the easy part, romance is not . . . oddly, a movie, say "The Princess Bride," is a fairy tale about Love and did it without the sex, but then you have stuff like "Basic Instinct," which does nothing more than link sex to violence. In the end, I doubt there will be a movie that finds the true balance of what's needed to be conveyed . . . if there is, I probably won't live long enough to see it happen since it will likely require our species to be a bit wiser before it happens.

I don't watch romantic movies or read romantic novels very often. But 'realistic' ones are either too boring or too depressing for me. Movies and books=escapism for me. Reality is no fun--for the most part.