The Marriage Files

Readers: For the following snippet of conversation, can you guess who's talking and where it's taking place?

—"I’ll trade you one slice-and-dice and a Jackie Chan for three tear-jerkers."
—"Two for three?! Isn’t that against the rules? And Jackie Chan doesn’t count. You like Jackie Chan!"
—"Well then, a Jet Li. But I’m standing firm on the two-for-three."
—"Okay, I’ll do it just this once. But no Jennifer Lopezes. If you want a Jennifer Lopez, it’s gonna cost you."

Could this exchange be some bizarre back-alley haggling for code-named contraband? Perhaps a couple of hungry lunch-timers bargaining for the last few overstuffed sandwiches at a Hollywood-themed deli? No. In reality it was just a conversation overheard between two marrieds in line for tickets at a movie theater. When a man and his wife dicker about their movie choices for the coming weeks, it sounds like a round of betting on a really strange card game: I’ll see (literally) your Hannibal and I’ll raise you The Wedding Planner and Lost In Translation. The stakes keep rising until someone folds.

Evidently I’m not the only woman who has to engage in the domestic equivalent of U.N. negotiations every time I want to see a movie with my husband. It’s indisputable: men and women have very different ideas about what’s entertaining, and there’s not a lot of middle ground.

Several years ago, I read an article about the movie preferences of men and women. It said that fully half of all men, if asked to name one favorite film, will say Apocalypse Now or The Godfather. I found this intriguing and frankly, pretty disturbing. I can see how someone could defend both of these gruesome bloodfests as movies that needed to be made, but a favorite film is something I’d want to watch again and again, whereas Apocalypse Now and The Godfather are two flicks that depict things any sane person would wish never to see at all.

To be honest, I don’t remember what the article said about the film preferences of women except that Apocalypse Now and The Godfather certainly didn’t make the Top Ten cut. Maybe not even the Top 100. But that feeling of disbelief I had about the article stuck with me over the years, and finally, I decided to do a quick reality check by conducting a survey of my own.

Informally and unscientifically, I polled my friends, male and female, asking them to name their favorite movie. Lo and behold, about half of the men did, indeed, name either The Godfather or Apocalypse Now. Who’d a thunk it? Running a close third was The Matrix, which had not yet been released back when I read the original favorite-flick article, so the professional pollsters can be forgiven for not nailing this utterly predictable result. Any movie that boils down to Mr. Normal Everyday Guy finds out he’s the savior of the world, has supernatural powers and also gets the chick is bound to be a shoo-in with the masculine crowd.

After the three front-runners came a whole spate of titles so interchangeable I awarded them all collectively fourth place. Their common theme will be clear to the astute reader: Animal House, Month Python and the Holy Grail, Airplane!, Weekend at Bernie’s, This Is Spinal Tap, Caddyshack, et al.

The list of movies the women came up with couldn’t be more different. First off, nearly all of my female poll participants named movies about fairly normal stuff, but even more significantly, no two answers were the same. The women said Little Big Man, The Wind and the Lion, Fisher King, Singin’ in the Rain, Gone With the Wind, The Age of Innocence, and The Wizard of Oz, to name a few. Okay, so singing scarecrows and flying monkeys don’t exactly constitute “normal stuff,” but the death toll in The Wizard of Oz is relatively low.

When I shared my poll results with one of the guys whose film preferences I’d canvassed, I couldn’t help but mention that it appeared as if men had a perturbing taste for extreme violence and boorish inanity. He wrote back, "Did I mention that Dr. Strangelove is near the top of my list? And that's kind of cool, because it encompasses both idiocy AND Armageddon. Where's the popcorn?"

He also said, "Here's what I notice about the results: Men prefer funny. Women do not prefer funny. In fact, for women, the absence of funny is striking." Hmm, I thought as I read this, he’s got a point. I had to admit: I’d forgotten all about that scene in The Godfather where Michael Corleone in disguise as a Jewish comedian does thirty minutes of hilarious stand-up and succeeds in offing his Mob nemesis sitting in the audience by making him literally laugh himself to death. Oh wait, no, I’m confusing The Godfather with parts of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? I always did get those two mixed up.

I think it would be more accurate to say that humor is relative, and men and women have different perspectives. As an example, take the civil ceremony scene from The Wedding Banquet. It’s a classic. In it, the female lead, a Chinese native living in the U.S. whose English is marginal, is getting married by a public official who’s so bored with his job he’s reciting the words of the ceremony as if they were the aural fine print at the end of a pharmaceutical TV ad. In other words, at the speed of light. She struggles to recite back the words "For better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, ‘til death do us part," but she can only manage to stammer out, "...worse...poorer...sickness...death..." It leaves me in stitches every time I see it.

My husband K— just can’t understand why I find this so funny. His problem is that he takes it personally. If I find it funny, he thinks it must be because I see our marriage as a string of calamities. He can’t just sit back and watch that scene dispassionately. And that’s the crux of the difference between what men and women find entertaining. Men may prefer funny, but they sure can’t take a joke.

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