Happy Endings in the Land of Nothing

I recently watched My Big Fat Greek Wedding again. Not one of my favorite movies, not particularly profound, but always enjoyable nevertheless. I think one of the reasons it strikes people so is because it is essentially a fairy-tale in all the mechanics, and because its selling grace lies in its representation of cross-cultural contact resolving in classic eucatastrophe, the happy ending inserted in that space which in reality is so often the scene of the tragedy this movie flirts with. Ostensibly this is a brave, admirable message with contemporary relevance. But I couldn't help thinking how much this movie's happy ending depends on not only constructing a space in which it can operate, but on displacing that space where vital tragic elements should have been resolved.

Examined closely no inter-cultural understanding takes place in the movie, because there is no contact. What happens from the beginning of the movie is that a place is introduced for one culture, the colourful warm American Greek family. That culture is set up in Tula’s opening lament against a vague unresisting homogenized ‘norm’, invested with the authority of its status as ‘normal’, but essentially no real character of its own. This ‘norm’ is represented first by the ‘blond, delicate’ girls who mock Tula’s Greek culture as a little girl, and later by Ian and his parents, the Miller family. The function of the first is to provide a context for Tula’s angst and to locate the American Greek culture as defined by ‘difference’, a difference which is celebrated and whose short-comings are redeemed through sentimental comedy. The function of the second (the Miller family) is simply to maintain the basis for that celebration through simultaneously emphasizing its peculiarity and locating the culture’s value in its difference from the Miller family, whose homogenized lack-lustre status is epitomized in Tula’s father’s phrase ‘the toast family’. How is that celebration maintained?

Who is the Miller family, and just what are they supposed to represent? If the comparison between the two families is examined it is plain that their primary signification is that of emptiness, comprised of negatives, ‘not-being’, ‘lack’. Ian’s family lacks loudness so there is space for Tula’s family’s loudness and even for Ian to learn their language. They are not religious so there is space for Ian to assume Tula’s religion. Ian is a vegetarian, his diet defined by lack, while Tula’s family are big eaters. All contact with the Greek culture then is defined by ‘filling’, a ‘filling’ which is enabled by their structured emptiness. A large part of that structure consists of Ian giving in to all Tula’s family’s demands while there is no instance where the opposite ever needs to occur.

Their silence is contrasted with the Greek family’s loudness; their dispassionate secularity with the colourful faith in the Greek Orthodox Church; even their colouring tends to hues and lines (beige, white and understated shades) suggesting ‘space’, while Tula’s family wear bright or dark colours. Gus calls them ‘dry’, the ‘toast family’ and they lack life, emotion and even religion. Ian tells Tula ‘I came alive when I met you’, and the sign of the Miller parents getting up and dancing at the end of the movie signifies the same. ‘Life’ enters the empty culture through being substituted by fullness, signified by the American Greek culture.

I want to be plain here that my complaint is not simply that inter-cultural understanding occurs at the expense of any one culture. I am not implying that Western culture, secular culture or whatever is being represented by the Miller family is vilified by the movie, because it simply isn’t present in the movie. The Miller family are rather conveniently empty; and as such they don’t so much signify a culture as a vague West emptied of culture. Ian effectually ‘becomes culture-ed’ by accepting Tula’s culture where before there was none. And what this implies is that there is only a space for other cultures if we make absent the vitality of the dominant culture, implicitly, because other cultures simply cannot hold their own in a direct tackle with it were it allowed to be present in its true complexity and vitality, and that is deeply discouraging and offensive.