Is movie magic another digitally enhanced model?

The other night, my husband and I had one of those conversations that are diverse in topic and as deep as it is shallow. It was one of those “we should be sleeping, but ended up talking instead” conversations. Do you know the ones I mean? It was nice. We don’t get much time for major conversation, and even less for meaningful conversation.

At one point he started talking about models in magazines; how they take someone with near impossible looks that have the additional benefit of hair, make-up, and fashion professionals and still manage to find things to digitally enhance, remove, etc. The end product, the magazine photo, projects an image that many women (and girls) spend their lives trying to live up to. He said that chic flick/romantic comedies/any movie romance has that same destructive pattern; just apply them to romance instead of body image. Many of these movies don’t have realistic relationships, or ones that you could really see lasting if you thought about real hard. They set up impossible expectations for romance. He asked me if any of them even seemed real.

While I admit that many of them don’t (no matter how much I like to pretend that they do), there are a few that do feel more real. I used the example of Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy as a movie relationship that seemed as though it could be “real.” He conceded that they do feel more real, but that they still represented an impossible romantic standard, but not with movies … the book came first. I countered with something much more contemporary, but still “real” seeming, and he agreed that however unlikely it may be, the possibility of a real-seeming movie romance does exist.

My husbands analogy of movie romance to magazine models does make a point. I wonder if some of us don't see the romance all around us because we are waiting for that moment. That wonderful, movie-magic moment. Time slows, music swells and women everywhere sigh. Maybe that moment is the equivalent of digitally enhancing the gorgeous model's body. Romance is already gorgeous and it doesn't need the enhancements. Still ... I have to admit, while I've never seen cover models and celebrities as something to aspire to be, I'm not sure I'll be able to stop watching those movies, and sighing at their magic moments.