Thoughts on the "Grease" phenomenon

[asakiyume]

I've had a number of things simmering on the back burners of my mind, and one of them is the "Grease" phenomenon: stories in which a socially conforming character transforms into something (supposedly) excitingly transgressive to make a romance work out--as in the musical Grease. The girl changes completely; the boy, not at all. (The genders can be reversed, though, as in stories in which a manic pixie dream girl stories transforms someone who's supposedly, or actually, stodgy or straitlaced or conventional into something marked as better or more exciting.)

It seems to me that this is obviously because in the minds of the storytellers, one character's stance is desirable and the other's isn't, and so it's right for the one with the undesirable stance to change. At one time, this led to stories where the love of a good woman converted a bad boy--she wasn't expected to become a rowdy lawbreaker; the transformation was all in him. That was equally tiresome. But by now it's switched so it's the other way around.

In any case, however the change goes, and whatever traits are favored, it bothers me when love is depicted as requiring suppression or erasure of characteristics that make a person who they are and adoption of new characteristics.

Love does change people, but stories that give me the impression that the happiness of the couple is based on one person repairing themself, while the other person changes not at all, are VERY UNSATISFYING. If two people are genuinely in love, aren't they most likely to both change in ways that make the love stronger? One partner helps the other get over timidity and learn to be more adventurous, and meanwhile the adventurous partner is learning the pleasures of close observation, which they hadn't done much of before when they'd been rushing from one adventure to the next.

That's the pattern I prefer.

Comments

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

One of the problems with our culture only liking to show the beginning of relationships is that the range of potential changes is not for whatever reason considered a fit topic for most stories the way that the initial rush is.

I think our literature *does* talk about this, but only when it becomes a problem--and generally only in lit fic. Hence the endless parade of stories of midlife marriage problems.

I think what our culture does have a problem with the dynamism of relationships. As you say, there's a tendency to reduce everything to one, or maybe two, axes, or to talk about differences as if they were all concrete and easily articulable, rather than vague and hard to pin down. And it's not just that people change over time, but that approaches to problems change over time. It's not a matter of just internalizing "we need to remember to talk to each other" or "my partner needs space when things are difficult" [or: "my partner needs me close by when things are difficult"]--you can't relax into just one way of dealing with things. And yet self-help relationship books will tout one technique as a cure-all for ever, and dreary lit fic novels about midlife relationship doldrums will present characters finding one solution. You always should be prepared to look for new solutions, because you, both singularly and as a couple, are always changing.


... In spite of what I said earlier in the comment, I do think a lot of stories do do what you say, and focus on the initial rush, and I do empathize with this. There are some series--ones that aren't particularly oriented around romantic relationships--that I've loved the first book (or movie) of, but then lost interest in as the worldbuilding closed in around me. I liked all that open potentiality; I liked where my imagination was free to roam, but subsequent stories limited that. And I think maybe there's something of that in ending a story right at the beginning of a long-term relationship. That initial rush can be understood regardless of how the relationship is going to grow, but as it grows, it's going to be a unique thing, and will probably speak eloquently to fewer people.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I think the idea that people are spoken to less eloquently by unique, individual relationships is alarming, and the idea that giving you more information about what these people are actually like instead of a standard model makes it harder to imagine things about their future potential is completely baffling.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I think that more-information thing may have been a tangent of my own that's not helpful when we're thinking about people and relationships. I think many readers very much want fully formed characters and unique relationships in the stories they read (though there are also readers who do just want patterns and stereotypes that they're familiar with). The question of why our society prefers the story to end at the beginning of a relationship I think must have a different answer, and may just have to do with not wanting to think about maturity (which is definitely a flaw I can see in this culture).