Hilal Nakiboglu: American ethnicity on film?

Breathing in the strangely comforting scent of rancid buttered popcorn at Cinemagic the other night, I found myself faced with a tough decision. Should I shell out $7 -- risking potential public embarrassment -- to see Swimfan? Or should I take a cinematic plunge by committing to 95 minutes of a Big Fat Greek Wedding?

I'll admit that, initially at least, the two choices seemed equally appealing to me.

At risk of offending Erika Christensen fans, this call should not have been a difficult one for me to make. I've seen, and will even confess to enjoying, many forms of big-screen nuptial sap. From My Best Friend's Wedding to When Harry Met Sally, I am a fairly undiscriminating consumer of the "romantic comedy."

My hesitation about seeing the smaller Nia Vardalos film, then, didn't stem from its genre. It came from the fact that it is, supposedly, about a Greek wedding.

Not since Moonstruck have I cared to watch an "ethnic" film about unlikely love that blossoms between two older, relatively unattractive people. The problem with Moonstruck and now, I suspected, this new flick, is that they present immigrants as these slow, laughably garish people with little to no knowledge of English grammar above the second grade level. This is misleading and, frankly, more than just a little offensive.

But after having sat through it, I can tell you that My Big Fat Greek Wedding is actually not about a Greek wedding. It's about a first generation American woman, who decides to marry a man named Ian Miller. There are no subtitles. The movie takes place entirely in Chicago.

So why the emphasis on Greek here? Why aren't other romantic comedies very clear as to the ethnic ancestry of the main characters?

Why wasn't When Harry Met Sally pitched as say, a heartwarming film about love between a man of Jewish decent and a second-generation Scottish Catholic woman? Why should ethnicity matter so much, be used as the key -- or the only -- selling point in movies about certain peoples, and not be brought up at all in others?

We, the young movie-going patrons of Hollywood, deserve better than this.

I squirm when faced with full-screen images of my ethnic "neighbors," Greek and, especially of late, Arab-Americans, that are so far from flattering, so damaging and inaccurate.

Arabs, like Greeks, have been emigrating to this country for well over a century. Isn't it time they be seen outside of the limiting light of an illusory clich‚? When will they both be recognized as simply, beautifully, American?

How wonderful it would be to one day watch a movie about a Greek-American woman falling in love, without being hit over the head with her ethnic heritage every minute. How wonderful it would be to hear about the service and brilliance of Arab-Americans -- the contributions of Donna Shalala, Ralph Nader or even Casey Kasem and Paula Abdul spring to mind -- instead of being bombarded with the repeated message that the Arab origin-ed are mustached fanatical outsiders. How wonderful it would be to see an Asian-American in a feature film who does something other than run a convenience store or martial arts studio of some sort.

Cultural theorists have long been trying to convince the rest of us that such one-dimensional identities are a thing of the past. Instead of boxing people into rigid ethnic categories that are static and usually come with a host of public assumptions and perceptions, they argue that immigrants especially ought to be recognized as mutable "hybrids" with rich identities that go beyond these largely politically constructed groupings.

What kills me about My Big Fat Greek Wedding and other films like it, is the fact that screenplay writer -- the lead actress Nia Vardalos -- is herself of Greek origin. In making this film, she had a terrific opportunity to present a different view of being a so-called mutable hybrid American, to a nation of viewers. She had a chance to dismiss the idea that all Greek-Americans are over-the-top, overweight diner owners that cannot seem to master more than 800 words of the English language.

Instead she chose to reaffirm a slew of derogatory half-truths about her cultural heritage in the minds of hundreds of thousands of people.

At the end of the film, the protagonist's father, played by Michael Constantine, toasts his new son-in-law by comparing his own family to oranges and his in-laws to apples. Raising his glass, he declares, in very broken English, that at the end of the day "we're all fruits."

Absolutely, but someone should tell him that in today's world of transgenetics, produce labels can mislead. An orange that might seem to be is not necessarily so.

Hilal Nakiboglu is a second-year doctoral student in Higher Education Management from Ankara, Turkey.

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