Male and Female Interactions in Iranian Romantic Comedy Genre (1990-2011)

Most of Iranian comedy films, both before and after the revolution, can be categorized as romantic comedies. These films show the romantic relationships between men and women as something funny and create the Iranian romantic comedy genre. According genre theory, this study aims at understanding which values and beliefs are reinforced by the interaction between heroes and heroines in this genre. To do so, 62 Iranian romantic comedy films which had been screened at movie theaters in 1990 to 2011 got the structural analysis of the text. The structuralist approach aims to distil genres down to a generic narrative and relationship structure, where character types interact in structurally predictable ways. This approach is a combination of paradigmatic and syntagmatic analyses. The paradigmatic analysis depends on Levi-Strauss’ binary oppositions and eveals what the meaning is. According to Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale (1928), the syntagmatic analysis deals with roles of characters and their functions and shows how the meaning is expressed in the text. The syntagmatic and paradigmatic analyses of the Iranian romantic comedy films reveals that there are four basic generic sequences in this genre: the ownership sequence, the redemption sequence, the permission sequence and the rival sequence. The ownership sequence makes males and females into active subjects and passive objects. The redemption sequence has two types: the coldhearted and the brokenhearted, and each one has three versions: the redemption of the hero, the redemption of the heroine and the redemption of both the hero and the heroine. Although these versions differ slightly, all of them serve to reinforce the gender role of the defiant female. The permission sequence depicts a romantically involved hero and heroine who wants to marry but an authority figure disapproves of their marriage. Adding an authority figure to the romantic story, in fact, provides an opportunity for the hero to prove his perseverance. There are three versions of the rival sequence: the wrong man, the wrong woman and women against women. The first two empower the hero directly and the third one belittles women and actually empowers the hero again. While the narrative structure of the 52 Iranian romantic comedies follows a similar pattern, this pattern changes in 10 unconventional romantic comedies. By intentionally changing functions of four basic sequences, these films ignore the most important condition of conventional romantic comedies. It means that they do not often have a happy ending which depicts a wedding or a promise of a wedding. The narratives of 57 films also serve to reproduce the existing social order between males and females and reinforce the gender role of the defiant female. There are only five unconventional films (The Spouse, Sweet Passions, The White Sleep, Donya and The Poet of Waste) which ultimately question or challenge dominant gender conventions. As a matter of fact, the Iranian romantic comedy genre is a popular form of entertainment that naturalizes gender inequality.