
All images courtesy of 20th Century Fox.
There’s an old saying that goes something like “All women marry men exactly like their fathers.”
Personally, I believe something that sounds similar but is in fact pretty different: that women, whether consciously or not, choose their partners based on their own experience with their fathers. And what I mean by that is that women’s relationships with men will always be coloured by their relationships with their fathers.
Even if they haven’t seen Say Anything, everyone knows about that one scene in the movie where John Cusack stands outside a girl’s window and holds a boom box over his head. It’s an iconic scene that’s set the standard for romantic gestures in modern relationships, even though nobody actually has a boom box anymore, and the more I say it, the stupider the word “boom box” sounds.
From that one scene, it’s easy to extrapolate what the rest of the movie is about: it’s a love story. But what a lot of people — including me, until recently — don’t know about this movie is more than just “boy meets girl.” It’s a love triangle between a girl, her dad, and her boyfriend, and it’s far less creepy than it sounds.