Not to belabor this movie, but I don’t think that’s quite the idea the movie is promoting. Tracy remarried Dex because she realizes that 1. He’s still in love with her and 2. She’s a better woman with him that she would be with George or Mike.
The movie does make a point about working class, but I am not sure it means they should always stay in the same class. Tracy offers to let Mike live in her summer cottage so he would have more time to write and he turns her down flatly, saying the time artists relied on patrons was long past. He didn’t want to be dependent on her.
I’m reminded of the opposite of knowing your place from all ironies, an Edith Wharton novel: The Buccaneers…where readers were surprised of the UnWharton-like ending.
The protagonist decides she’s better off leaving England instead of dutifully sticking w/her first husband and runs off with the first guy she actually preferred to South Africa. What is most convenient (well in the film that I saw not sure if the book did it) was first husband killing himself?
I also thought of the book, She’s Come Undone. Where the main character accepts her fate and even accepts she’s too poor to make changes about her fate.
There’s NEEDFUL THINGS, where Max von Sydow tempts a string of small-town New Englanders with stuff they’d do anything to get; Ed Harris proves to be the one man who can stop that ruinous spiral of make-a-deal-with-the-devil folly, as helpfully foreshadowed when first he meets the villain of the piece:
"So, what can I sell you, Sheriff?
“Me? Nothing. I got everything I need, thanks.”
The real message of* Rudy* is that if you really, really, really, really, really, really, make a pest of yourself, people will give you a chance just so as to get you to stop pestering you. This technique works both for big-time college football programs, and for Hollywood studies who you can really, really, really, really, really, really pester to make a big budget movie about your 30 seconds of playing time at said big time college football program.
Really? You figure he doesn’t need to care anymore now that the business is in his name? All he’s done by buying the store is cut off his chances of ever escaping the job he’s always hated.
Why do you think that Dante would have been happier marrying Emma, moving to Florida, and taking the job managing the carwash that his father-in-law owned? I thought it was made clear that this wasn’t his dream but Emma’s. She had decided that he wasn’t the sort of man she had planned to marry, so she would make him that sort of man. She had planned to marry one of the popular, successful guys that she had dated since high school who would graduate from college, maybe go to business school for an M.B.A., and work his way up to a high-level job at a big corporation. After dating and getting dumped by a string of such guys, she found herself in her thirties dating a guy who had dropped out of college and whose jobs consisted of things like convenience store clerk and fast food restaurant cashier. She decided that she would marry him and move back to Florida so he could take over management of her father’s carwash. She would stay home and have kids while he spent sixteen hours a day slowly building up the business into a nationwide chain of carwashes. He would have to continue to do that until the point that he died of a heart attack from the stress just before retiring. She would then be a rich widow.
He might have hated living in Florida and managing a car wash. Who knows? Maybe he never had a chance of escaping. But at least he had the hope that escape was possible. The movie was watching that hope being crushed.
We know he hates being a clerk. That was the main theme of his life. He spent years trying to escape. And it’s not like he had some epiphany at the end of the movie where he suddenly decided being a clerk was okay. No, he just gave up and accepted it was his fate.
Do you remember the last scene of the movie? Dante’s back in the Quick Stop. The movie turns to black and white and he’s serving the same customers he was serving twelve years earlier (literally, it’s the same actors). Dante says to Randall: “Today is the first day of the rest of our lives.” Soul Asylum begins playing on the soundtrack: They say misery loves company/We could start a company and make misery/Frustrated Incorporated.
Seriously, you think this is a happy ending? Do you need to have a literal sign saying “Abandon All Hope”? This is Dante in Hell finally realizing his damnation is eternal.
I’m not sure Fiona really settles in that sense (and in no way does Shrek settle). She only settles in that she has to learn to accept her “ugly” form.
And, anyways, the real broken Aesop is that people should stick with their own kind. Remember, Donkey’s romance with the Dragon is just played for laughs.
And he chose to settle. In the end, staying in the shop was his best choice. He can’t escape, because that’s literally the best life has to offer.
The only reason it doesn’t fit this thread is that this isn’t presented as a good thing.
Yeah, I’ve always been frustrated with Rudy; the movie basically says that "Yes, you can be a loser with a pipe dream, but if you hang around long enough and be pathetic enough, someone will eventually throw you a worthless bone and let you play for one play at the end of a total blowout.
Then, people will somehow confuse this wretched loserdom with some kind of story about hope and determination, and make a movie about it.
There’s nothing inspirational about that movie; it’s like when they let the special needs kid play or elect them homecoming king or queen, except that this Rudy asshole should have known better, being ostensibly not mentally disabled, but apparently pathetic and without shame.
That movie is an example of a movie that SHOULD have been about settling or “knowing your place”.
I think we can count X-MEN: THE LAST STAND, where the mutant superheroes are offered the chance to give up their powers and lead normal lives; most of them say ‘no’ and keep fighting the good fight; one of them says ‘yeah, okay, sounds cool, sign me up,’ and honestly doesn’t seem to regret a thing at the end of the movie, where she’s just enjoying a little quiet time with her boyfriend.
(The upcoming movie will probably have her go off in a different direction, but as of right now it seems to fit.)
I think this is making a lot of assumptions about what happens after the credits roll. These are two young people, newly married, with a giant army of loyal friends and retainers and essentially limitless wealth. The Prince, we know, has been stuck in his castle for ages, and Belle has always longed to see and do great things.
I see no in-text reason to believe that they followed up their grand and happy wedding by locking themselves into the castle and doing nothing new for the rest of their lives. Why wouldn’t they head out and see the world, together? Why should we view Belle’s marriage to the Prince as her endgame, just because it’s the last part of her story that we actually see? I think there’s no reason not to believe that their adventures started, rather than ended, at the wedding.
I suspect whynot and the unnamed commenter are being a tad blase about a well-known story. I’m fairly certain if any of us were unceremoniously dumped in a derelict castle with sentient housewares and a raving manbeast, we’d damn well consider those months an adventure. Especially if we add in the shitty sequel with the jealous lover organ and almost drowning.
Adventure doesn’t just mean running around dropping rings in things or bullying dragons.
I think there is a subtle difference between the moral You should settle for what you can get and the moral You should go after what is important to you, not what other people tell you should be important to you.