Whose Life Is It Anyway?

At Dartmouth’s 2018 commencement ceremony, Mindy Kaling speaks poignantly of her post-grad checklist: “Get married by 27. Have kids at 30.” She immediately follows this with the revelation that her daughter was born without a man in the picture or a wedding ring on her finger. By all of our dearly-held patriarchal institutions, this is a failure. We discourage disrupting the established order of domesticity. However upholding the vitality of the nuclear family is an old-fashioned idea that is not only a symptom of generational complicitness, but a product of the greedy and invasive entity known as the entertainment industry.

Picture your favorite classic romantic comedy. Let’s say it’s “Sixteen Candles.” A happy ending sealed with a kiss between Sam and Jake Ryan over a birthday cake. Let’s make it more complex. A dystopian film: “The Hunger Games.” Katniss and Peeta get together and have two kids. Another happy ending. Two radically different stories, but they end the same: girl gets the boy. The latter pushes the envelope further, creating an idyllic family even in a post-traumatic setting. Harmless, until we map out an unrealistic model for our lives based on this fictional yet ingrained timeline.

Dominant and recognizable pieces of film and television are curated through a Euro-American lens. When it comes to home life, the screen emphasizes marrying young and producing two-point-five kids — maybe even a dog to boot. But these seemingly happy endings are toxic idealizations and exclusionary narratives.

Often, the characters centered in these narratives are white and heterosexual, to only name two facets of their identities. Hollywood’s representation problem has been addressed time and time again, but the conversation doesn’t expand on happy endings and how when couple does get together in a film or series, there usually isn’t a person of color or queer pairing involved. “Friends,” for instance, ended its ten-season run with most of the six leads finding happiness with romantic partners. Funnily enough, in its ten-season run, there were two women of color who were love interests, and neither, of course, were featured in the series finale. And the show certainly never gave hope to see a gay couple either, despite countless jokes about everyone perceiving Chandler as gay.

Heteronormative structures give media a blueprints for ideal lives, such as prioritizing marriage before childbirth. If you marry and you’re a woman, you must marry a man, and then have a child. This idealized structuring of time doesn’t take into consideration queer couples, nonbinary/genderqueer people, people who can’t have children, or those who don’t even want them. At the root of this demand is “restricted desire,” something that Elizabeth Freeman describes in “Time Binds.” Freeman explains how “restricted desire” was cultivated by imperial powers, dictating people, particularly women, to only crave domesticity and devote themselves to Christianity. Desires outside this limited bubble are labeled as sin, thus becoming the foundation for the institutions we now recognize as the hallmarks of a “happy ending.” Not to mention, “restricted time” doesn’t even extend to queer/nonbinary people. Collectively, this is all wrong, but media does a good job of weaving expectations with colonial roots into cutesy rom-coms under the pretenses of an exemplar modern life.

Delving further, these narratives participate in the erasure of “queer time.” “Queer time,” as Judith Halberstam defines it in “In a Queer Time and Place,” is a nonlinear way of conceptualizing time that incorporates the social and cultural disparities between various identities. Disparities such as how a heterosexual couple would have an easier time marrying and having children versus a queer couple’s path’s would be undoubtedly complicated by homophobia throughout the marriage and child-having/adopting process.

“Queer time” also advocates for unlearning fixed milestones. Markers of a well-lived life include going to college, getting married, buying a house, having kids by their early thirties, but only in that order. People who have children before marriage or start undergrad in their forties, for instance, are deemed unusual or unsuccessful according to heteronormative time. Media is, of course, a major proponent of this institution.

The establishment of the happily ever after is exclusionary of so many identities, including aromantic and asexual people because of the primacy it places on romance. And, sometimes, in an effort to center romance, film and TV tends to sideline or exploit these identities, such as fat-identifying people losing weight for happiness and people with disabilities “healing” in films. “This doesn’t happen in 2016’s “Me Before You,” because it sacrifices its paraplegic lead for the sake of a tear-jerking love story and Louisa, the able-bodied protagonist, to find her happy ending without him. The narrative only stresses the importance of sustaining the heteronormative timeline, which does not have room for the “burden” of a disabled love interest and can only foresee a palatable future for the able-bodied character.

All this isn’t to say I don’t enjoy films or shows where the two protagonists jump into each other’s arms at the end. I do. And it doesn’t mean I won’t root for them to get together. It means there is a harmful condition to be recognized: the endorsement of outdated concepts of romance, marriage, and family. Without understanding how these repeated images glorify a specific lifestyle, it is easy to feel pressured, inadequate, and helpless. Kaling put it best when she said,“Don’t be scared if you don’t do things in the right order or if you don’t do some things at all.” The positive twist of having no representation is not having to follow the beaten path, because there is none laid out for you. It’s easy to stop living life like it’s a race against a clock when you remember it’s unscripted.

WRITTEN BY FEVEN NEGUSSIE ART BY SHANNON BOLLAND