Love Actually and the musical sphere as an accomplice to the perpetuation of traditional gender roles
Abstract The romantic comedy remains today as one of the most demanded film genres by the consumer society. In spite of the numerous and recent examples in which we can find a new gender approach, where the empowerment of women prevails or their absence is visible, most of the romantic comedies that have reached the big screen and have been considered classics of commercial cinema, are based on the perpetuation of traditional roles. This is precisely the case of the parallel plots that occur in the movie Love Actually (United Kingdom, 2003), directed by Richard Curtis, considered one of the most popular English romantic comedies developed in Christmas and whose soundtrack would be, also, projected as a powerful sales product. Last December, fourteen years after its Premiere, social networks opened a chain of discussion where they proposed the visualization of the film from a feminist perspective. Throughout our article we won’t only study the roles played by the female and male characters, whose characterization perpetuates the image of the woman, among others, as caregiver, sexual object, mother, femme fatale, meanwhile men are projected as powerful, cultured and unfaithful, but we will focus on those elements which constitute the attractive package that manages to convert a plot based on clearly unequal principles in a candid cinematographic piece that pursue being a poem of love in all its forms. In this process, as we will see throughout the text, along with the ambitious distribution of the group of actors and the use of the sense of humor, music will act as an accomplice and main object in the development of the different plots, supporting with the characterization of roles and as a key ingredient of main scenes of the movie.
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Viñuela, L. (2003). La perspectiva de género y la música popular: dos nuevos retos para la musicología. Oviedo: KRK Ediciones.
Ashby, J. (2005). Postfeminism in the British Frame. Cinema Journal, 44, 2, 127-132. - https://doi.org/10.1353/cj.2005.0002
Basinger, J. (1993). A Woman's View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women, 1930-1960. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.
Belinchón, G. (2017). Por la igualdad de género en el cine. El País, 14-6-2017. Recuperado de: https://elpais.com/cultura/2017/06/13/actualidad/1497354488_189998.html.
Brett, P. et al. (1994). Queering the Pitch. The new gay and lesbian musicology, New York: Routledge.
Brown, M. (2017). British cinema's gender imbalance worse in 2017 than 1913, says BFI study. The Guardian, 20-09-2017. Recuperado de: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/sep/20/british-cinema-gender-imbalance-worse-2017-bfi-filmography.
Butler, J. (1991). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.
Citron, M. J. (1993). Gender and the musical canon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Clément, C. (1988). Opera or the Undoing of Women. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press.
Cohan, S. y Hark, I. R. (eds.). (1992). Screening the male: exploring masculinities in the Hollywood cinema. London: Routledge.
Filardi, E. (2015). Todo lo que necesitas saber sobre la vida está en Love Actually. Recuperado de: http://www.jotdown.es/2015/05/todo-lo-que-necesitas-saber-sobre-la-vida-esta-en-love-actually/
Frith, S. y McRobbie, A. (1991). Rock and sexuality. En Frith, S. y Goodwin, A. (eds.). On Record: Rock, Pop and the Written Word (pp. 371-389). London & New York: Routledge.
Kaplan, A. (1983). Women and Film: Both sides of the Camera. New York & London: Methuen. - https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203328149
Laguarda, P. (2006). Cine y estudios de género: Imagen, representación e ideología. Notas para un abordaje crítico. Revista Aljaba, 10, 141-156.
McClary, S. (1991). Feminine Endings. Music, gender and sexuality. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
McRobbie, A. (2007). "Postfeminism and Popular Culture: Bridget Jones and the New Gender Regime". En Tasker, Y. y Negra, D. (eds.). Interrogating Postfeminism (pp. 255-264). Durham: Duke University Press. - https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822390411
Murphy, J. N. (2015). The role of women in film: Supporting the men. An analysis of how culture influences the changing discourse on gender representations in film. Journalism Undergraduate Honors Theses, 2.
M. V. (2017). ¿Y si Love Actually no fuese la encantadora película que siempre creímos? La voz de Galicia, 19-12-2017. Recuperado de: https://www.lavozdegalicia.es/noticia/cultura/2017/12/19/love-actually-fuese-encantadora-pelicula-siemprecreimos-era/00031513698552435743320.htm
Powrie, P. (2004). The trouble with men: masculinities in European and Hollywood cinema. New York: Columbia UP.
Quick, M. (2018). The data that reveals the film industry's 'woman problem'. BBC, 9-5-2018. Recuperado de: http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20180508-the-data-that-reveals-the-film-industrys-woman-problem.
Ramos, P. (2003). Feminismo y música. Introducción crítica. Madrid: Narcea Ediciones.
Salam, M. (2018). Hollywood Is as White, Straight and Male as Ever. The New York Times, 2-8-2018. Recuperado de: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/02/arts/hollywood-movies-diversity.html.
Scharaga, J. A. (2017). Female Moments / Male Structures: The Representation of Women in Romantic Comedies. Media and Communication Studies Honors Papers, 6.
Solie, R. A. (ed.) (1993). Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship, Berkley: University of California Press.
Viñuela, L. (2003). La perspectiva de género y la música popular: dos nuevos retos para la musicología. Oviedo: KRK Ediciones.
Hernández Polo, B. (2019). Love Actually and the musical sphere as an accomplice to the perpetuation of traditional gender roles. Popular Music Research Today: Revista Online De Divulgación Musicológica, 1(2), 41–55. https://doi.org/10.14201/pmrt.20667
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