My Big Fat Greek Wedding

After watching Bend It Like Beckham in class, I started thinking of other movies that possessed similar themes.  One of the movies that I liked growing up was My Big Fat Greek Wedding that came out in 2002.

If you haven't seen this movie I recommend it, its pretty funny.  It is about a Greek woman living in Chicago, named Toula.  Toula's father wants her to marry a nice Greek boy.  In the movie, Toula ends up falling in love with a non-Greek man (Ian) and sneaking behind her family's back to date him. Her family ends up discovering her secret and her father is especially angry about her secret love life. Toula's father ends up accepting Ian and Ian has to learn to accept Toula's family. The clip below is how Toula's father reacted to her announcement of her engagement to Ian.

One theme in the movie that become very apparent early on is conformity.  According to the textbook conformity is "a change in beliefs or actions as a reaction to real or imagined group pressure" (Solomon, 2013, 414). One example of conformity in My Big Fat Greek Wedding is when Ian is baptized in a Greek church in order to marry Toula and gain respect from her family.


Another theme that is apparent in this movie is social power.  Social power is "the capacity to alter the actions of other" (Solomon, 2013, 407).  In the movie the Greek culture is portrayed to have a big portion of their diets consist of meat.  When Toula tells her aunt that Ian is a vegetarian and does not eat meat her aunt is really confused by the idea, but quickly responds that instead of meat she will make lamb.  This is an example of how Toula's aunt tries to alter Ian's actions in order to conform to the rituals of their Greek family.

If you have not seen My Big Fat Greek Wedding I recommend it because it has many themes similar to Bend it Like Beckham.  The idea of groups of people and cultures is embedded into the movie and pop up frequently.