Love Actually

When I wrote about the guilt-free enjoyment of movies, I also thought of movies I do feel guilty for  having enjoyed initially but don't any more. The movie I was thinking about was 'Love Actually', particularly the thread with Keira Knightley and her husband's best man, who is secretly in love with her. His behaviour is downright creepy--filming her on the sly, turning up at her doorstep and telling her to keep his presence secret from her husband before talking to her through posters as Christmas carols play in the background. The lovelorn nice guy who accepts that he can never be with the woman he loves with dramatic grace. It also chimes with a popular Bollywood trope of the lovesick male who soaks his sorrows in alcohol while singing sad songs about lost love. Romanticizing thwarted love and the resulting melancholy, essentially.

What I didn't get at the time was the extent to which the thread was centered around the man and his feelings without a concern for the women's safety and autonomy. Yes, it is possible to love someone who doesn't love you back. But, it is unacceptable to stalk that person as a way of coping with your feelings. From personal experience, in such a situation, you do your best to move on, not build creepy monuments to her. Rejection is a bitter pill to swallow but everyone has to to deal with it some time or the other. As harsh as it sounds, your rejection is not special. So instead of saying how much he loved her even though he knows they can't be together, he should have apologized her for sneakily filming her at her own wedding. But, of course, that wouldn't have made for great TV. Instead, you  have a movie that tells young men that it is okay to stalk someone who rejects you as long as you are a "nice guy". That  romanticizes rejection instead of normalizing it.