Third Culture People in Film: My Big Fat Greek Wedding and Bend it Like Beckham





Third Culture People in Film: My Big Fat Greek Wedding and Bend it Like Beckham


Two films I loved growing up are My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002) and Bend it Like Beckham (2002). The two films have a lot of similarities: released in 2002, they were both Indie films with small budgets that were unexpected huge box office hits. Most notably, the two films were about the triumphs and struggles of immigrant children trying to navigate culture clash while staying true to themselves. While the films star the Greek-American daughter of a Greek family in Chicago, Illinois, and the British Indian daughter of Indian immigrants in England, respectively, any third culture person will find their stories familiar. 

My Big Fat Greek Wedding opens with Toula, a full-figured, 30-year-old, Greek-American woman who works at her immigrant family's restaurant in Chicago, Illinois as a seating hostess. Her extended family is concerned for her because as a Greek woman she is "way past her expiration date" for marriage. Toula, like so many full-figured women on film before her, is depicted as a "frumpy" woman who does not like her life and wears baggy clothes, glasses and dull, listless brown hair. After her father, Aunt and Uncle discuss sending her to Greece to find a husband she suddenly has a change of heart. She wants to make a change in her life and starts by asking her father's permission to start a computer course, which he vehemently refuses because it is not a woman's place to pursue higher education, only to get married. Her mother argues with her father and convinces him to let Toula take a computers course at their local community college.

The patriarchal role and attitude of Toula's Greek father is a source of tension throughout the film. This patriarchal role is evident from her father complaining that Toula is "looking old" and needs to get married to his upholding of strict gender roles in which his 30-year-old waitress daughter cannot get an education and must depend on men all of her life (if not him, then a Greek husband). This last requirement is the main point of contention in the film. When Toula starts school she also starts doing her makeup, curling her hair and dressing in cute clothes. Soon after this she meets her boyfriend turned fiancé Ian, a tall, white-American man with long brown hair. As Toula becomes happier and happier with her life, her father becomes more and more distraught, eventually wearing on Toula's happiness. Toula's father is so unhappy because he wants Toula to marry a Greek man and having his 30+ old daughter live at home unhappy, while her relatives worry is a preferable alternative to allowing her happiness with a foreign man. However, Toula's father comes around, as strict parents are wont to do and the film culminates in a Big Fat Greek wedding. But before this, it is nice to see Toula's extended Greek family accept Ian as their own because he loves Toula.

Bend it Like Beckham has similar plot devices. British Indian teenager Jess is a huge football (soccer) fan. She watches matches avidly and is a big fan of David Beckham, Britain's premier footballer of the time. She is also a tomboy, hangs out with the guys and plays football with them in the park. All of this is distressing to her traditional Indian parents who are concerned with gender roles and prefer for Jess to "act like a lady." While they encourage Jess to get all A's in her A-levels and go to university, her parents request that she stop playing football because it is for boys and that she engage in more feminine activities like learning how to cook Aloo Gobi. However, Jess gets tapped to play for her local girls' football team and she excels at it while trying to hide her new activity from her family. Despite getting into deeper and deeper trouble after getting busted by her parents, Jess perseveres for her love of the game. One of the best moments in the movie is Jess's Dad's speech after he witnesses her natural talent and has a change of heart, giving her his blessing. "I want her to fight, and I want her to win." 

Jess, like Toula, has a "perfect" older sister who better fulfills their gender role and marries a man of their ethnicity, to their wider community's joy. Jess, like Toula, butts heads with patriarchal notions but is eventually accepted by her father. Jess, like Toula, feels like the Black sheep in her family and finds happiness with a white man to her family's initial consternation. This is my first critique for these two films and so many others like them: the white savior trope. These films and other forms of media fortify the idea that if you are the Black sheep in your family, a woman of color, a daughter of immigrants or otherwise a damsel in distress, you will be "saved" by a white man. This is not to say that Jess and Toula were not strong female protagonists who fought rigid gender roles and cultural norms in their families and won; they are and they did. However, the continued appearance of the white savior trope suggests that strong female protagonists that are women of color and/or part of immigrant communities cannot find love with men of their ethnicity because they are just too much. Furthermore, while Bend it Like Beckham upended gender norms and biases against women in sports in both Desi and British culture, it simultaneously upheld homophobia in both cultures in the form of a running joke. Jess's best mate and football teammate Juliet is also a tomboy and Juliet's mother panics because she thinks that they are lesbians; Jess's family confuses Juliet for a boy because of her short hair, another off-kilter joke the film tries to play off. Empowering one community just to disempower another is never funny or appropriate.

Despite these shortcomings, I have fond memories of these films because of the ways in which they portray the difficulties and fruits of navigating two cultures: the culture of immigrants from a homeland and the culture their children are exposed to in the new land. At points, each film beautifully blends the two cultures (Greek and American; Indian and British) to perfectly illustrate the realities of the films' third culture stars. Both films end with beautiful cultural weddings and are peppered throughout with pop culture references from the new land. In My Big Fat Greek Wedding, NSYNC member Joey Fatone plays Toula's cousin while in Bend it Like Beckham, David Beckham and the Spice Girls are referenced throughout the film and David and Victoria Beckham make a "cameo" at the end. The films leave me feeling positive and hopeful that despite all of their differences, third culture people can overcome their hardships, achieve their dreams and immigrant and non-immigrant communities can live in harmony at the end of the day. 

Hyphenated Ethiopian third culture kid. Twitter: @moonchereka

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