Gender Representations in Romantic Comedies: Females

Romantic comedies are a much loved genre by both male and female audiences. In this post I will discuss how women are represented in this genre and how I am going to represent women in my opening scene. In many romantic comedies women hold a key role and are commonly the protagonist, the usual target audience of the romantic comedy is a female one. Common elements and plot-points of the romantic comedy genre include break-ups, love at first sight and two friends going that one step further and turning their friendship into a relationship. In rom-coms women are often stereotyped as being unlucky in love and unable to find "Mr. Right". A good example of this recurring character trope would be Bridget Jones in the film 'Bridget Jones diary'. 

     In this film we see that protagonist Bridget Jones is an average woman struggling against her age, her weight, her job, her non-existent love-life and her many other imperfections.  Bridget yearns for commitment and love and like in other rom-com female protagonists, is often getting her heart broken and can't find the right man. This is one of the most common elements found in  romantic comedies with most of them following a similar story structure.

    A different representation is the dominant female protagonist. These characters will typically be breaking male characters hearts or have men falling head over heels for them. An example of this would be Sarah Marshall 'Forgetting Sarah Marshall' . In this movie the character Sarah Marshall dumps her loving boyfriend after five years and leaves him alone to wallow in his sadness and finds a new man straight away. This shows that in some films females can be represented as the villain and is not always the one looking for love.

In my opening scene of 'House of Heartbreaks' the women are going to come across as the dominant female. All of Kevin's girlfriends are leaving him to wallow in sadness like in 'Forgetting Sarah Marshall', for being bad boyfriend. Although they are leaving him for a fair enough reason, we will be trying to make the audience feel slightly sorry for him by portraying the women as if they have no hearts and who do not care about hurting people's feelings, making it look as though they are in the wrong creating sympathy for Kevin.