Radical Romance to the Extreme

After watching the movie “10” I had a profound enjoyment of it. I have never watched a movie and disliked it so much and then at some point had a paradigm shift and created a whole knew feeling for it. Well that is exactly what happened when I watched this movie. Throughout the whole first half of the movie George Webber disgusted me. I already don’t like nudity in movies, but having a main character like George who came off as a dirty old man didn’t make it any better. However after trudging through the movie and then reflecting on it with the theories developed in my pop culture class helped me develop a respect for the movie and its portrayal of “romance”. My focus on this blog post is by defining the three main characters and then relating it back to radical romance.

The main character, George Webber, represents the typical man going through a mid life crisis in that he is not satisfied with the women of his same age. He is, instead, focused on a younger woman that represents a number 10 on the 1 to 10 scale. He decides to separate from his long time girlfriend, Sam, to pursue Jenny who has just gotten married and is now on her honeymoon. George’s therapist said that his desire is for a younger girl… a virgin. George desires women in the radical sense of romance that he is an older man desiring a younger woman. However, as the movie progressed he realized what he wanted wasn’t what he truly wanted.

Sam Taylor represents the woman that George is with and is not satisfied with. She is comfortable with her self and what she wants in a relationship. Sam follows romance in the typical sense that she has gong through her trials to get her where she is and she is content and happy to settle down.

Jenny, on the other hand, as we find out later in the film represents romance and culture in a new way. She is the essence of radical. She married her husband with no thought of true “love”. She views relationships as being open, that she can be married and still sleep with whomever she wants and her husband can do the same. Not only does age not bother her with the individual she sleeps with, but she is somewhat radical in how she likes to have sex. For example, she likes to scratch his back, insists on doing it to certain music, or having a particular position she enjoys. By no means is she traditional in the area of romance.

So in summary, George wants Jenny, Sam wants George and when George realizes Jenny doesn’t want anything serious, he wants Sam back. It was a accumulation of a couple things. First, it is as if his pursuit of the younger girl who is married was not as exciting when he found out that she was okay with having an open relationship with other men while still being married. Second, when she reveals that she doesn’t anything serious and is particular to how she has sex, it is almost as if George changed from the typical masculine role to the feminine role because Jenny was being the masculine character. It was that point that I thought of the movie as not being as bad as I had thought. Each of the characters portrayed beautifully the characteristics of radical romance.