Hitch

           Every movie has a message; some are more impactful than others but a message is always there. Sometimes the messages are easier to understand and sometimes the messages are hidden and take some digging to really understand them. In the movie Hitch, the message is very typical of a romantic comedy. It involved a story about a man and a woman who fall in love, face some sort of obstacle that ends the relationship, and then end up together after one of them gives a profound speech.  The main message in this movie though is to just be you because that’s how you get the girl and find love. This movie shows many scenarios where couples are brought together by the date doctor (Will Smith).  It focuses on one couple in particular between a nobody guy and a very wealthy woman. They fall in love, but the woman finds out the man used the date doctor and became angry because she felt like she was played somehow. In the end, she finds out all the things she loved about the man were real and not things the date doctor told him to do. This sends the message of how important it is to be true to oneself because that’s the thing people fall in love with. This sort of message is directed towards women everywhere because most of us love the idea of love and anything having to do with love.  This message appeals to our emotions. In Everything’s an Argument by Lunsford and Ruszkiewicz, they comment that “emotional appeals are powerful tools for influencing what people thing and believe” (38). When women see a happy ending like the one in this movie, it gives them hope for their own lives; that they’ll be able to find love if they just act like themselves.

                But is there a negative side to this message? Is this sending a different message to men? The main job of the date doctor is to get the girl to “get out of their own way” (Hitch,film). He argues that most women don’t notice the great guys all around them because they’re not paying attention.  Smith gives guys all these tips on how to get the girl to notice him; things they wouldn’t normally do. This could be sending the message to men that while it’s important to be yourself, you have to change yourself at first so the girl will even give you the time of day. In the beginning of a movie, a guy takes a girls dog and lays in the road, acting as though he just saved the dog from being hit by the car. The way these two people meet is completely fake and staged.  The main couple of the movie meets because he is her banker and he makes a huge scene in front of her and ends up quitting his job. Normally, this man is very quiet and reserved and would never draw attention to himself. This tactic worked though because shortly after the woman came to his office asking to meet privately to discuss her finances.  She would have never given him the time of day if he hadn’t changed his normal behavior for her. At the end of the movie when the date doctor is trying to help the couple over their obstacle he asks her, “would you have even noticed him?” (He’s referring to the outburst at the finance meeting). The woman admits she probably would have never noticed him if that outburst hadn’t occurred. So as a man watching this, what kind of message does it send? It’s important to be yourself eventually, but not at first. This argument appeals to the logos of men, “arguments based on facts against our feelings and against the ethos of those making the appeal” (Lunsford and Ruszkiewicz 69). This movie says that logically no woman will go for a man unless he does something outrageous.

                The messages in this movie affect people differently. The main message, which is seen as mostly positive to both men and women, is that true love will find you if you just be yourself. But to men this could be interpreted differently because all the relationships in this movie are started by the help of an outside party. While this negative message could be seen, the positive message far outweighs the effects of the negative one.

rating: 4