Staff Writer Angela Alberti delves deep into the ‘boring nice guy’ trope, highlighting the harm it has in shaping identities.
‘You know what I just realised?’ / ‘What’s that?’ / ‘You are the nice guy.’ / ‘You take that back.’ (The Hating Game, Netflix)
I have recently watched Netflix’s The Hating Game and I have some beef with it.
It starts with the two main characters hating each other and ends with – spoiler alert – them falling in love. Shocker, I know. But this article is not about the overused, uninspired, and redundant trope that is the enemies to lovers. This is about the strange embarrassment the male lead feels when he is perceived to be a ‘nice guy’.
The movie follows Josh – played by Austin Stowell – and Lucy – played by Lucy Hale – after they are forced to work together due to the merger of their publishing houses. She is artsy, messy and passionate about publishing. He is corporate, seemingly unemotional, and obsessed with order. They are absolute opposites and quickly come to hate each other. After some time, of course, hatred turns into deep and overwhelming love.
Throughout the movie, Josh resists any affiliation to the ‘nice guy’. He insists he is anything but, often comparing himself to Danny – a co-worker equally enthralled with Lucy – whom he perceives to be the actual ‘nice guy’, and thus also the most boring. Lucy agrees with this conclusion and remains uninterested in Danny.
It ends with Lucy telling her newly found love that she’s just realised ‘he is the nice guy’, to which he replies: ‘you take that back’.
Whilst Lucy ends up believing Josh actually is a ‘nice guy’, she falls for him because he isn’t, or at least pretends not to be. Though he has a compassionate side, there exists within him a strange internal battle between being kind and making sure the world doesn’t see him as such.
This movie and all of its kind – Fifty shades of Grey, 365 days, and so on – seem to be teaching men that being the ‘nice guy’ is something to be ashamed of, and it definitely won’t get you the girl. Instead, if you want the girl, you should be mysterious, a tad torturous, and overall an absolute a**hole. That’s what every little girl dreams of, haven’t you heard?
No matter how ridiculous it sounds, impressionable young people can’t help but internalise this dynamic and thus end up reproducing it. There is an overwhelming amount of books (harlequin romances being the most successful example) and movies with this trope. Young women who read or watch these are led to internalise the idea that the man who truly loves them, is the one who’s a tad aggressive, cannot communicate to save his life, and for certain is not the ‘boring nice guy’.
I believe a lot of this is due to the confusion around passion and violence, and how they somehow must be intertwined for them to be fully expressed. The idea seems to be that you cannot feel passionate love for someone who is ‘nice’.
Passion burns hot but is also extinguished fast, which in my opinion, makes it quite overrated. Nevertheless, passion is what these movies are selling, and this then builds expectations for it in young people.
We start believing that if it’s isn’t passionate – as in movie passionate – it isn’t worth pursuing, or it isn’t meant to be. And what these movies argue is that passion is usually experienced with ‘the bad guy’, the guy who will assuredly break your heart.
At the same time, the bar seems to be so low for men that most women are just looking for a standardly decent person. Yet, these lazily written movies continue convincing people that in order to find true love they should be looking for, or they should be personifying, the exact opposite.
Who benefits from this? The only answer I can muster is: Men.
Through this ‘boring nice guy’ trope, men are able to act shi**y and yet still be the hero, still get the girl. There seems to be no upside to the depictions for women. The outcome is men feel more confident degrading women, and women learn to associate love with those behaviours.
Overall, I believe this strange denunciation of ‘niceness’ in men is hurtful for both genders. It teaches men to be ashamed of their kindness, or more emotional sides, all the while teaching women to accept degradation as a sign of passionate love.
Movies have the power to create magic, but their influence can also be destructive due to their vast reach. For many of us, they have played a crucial role in shaping our adult identities. Even seemingly trivial films, like certain rom-coms, can profoundly impact how we learn to love, making it all the more important to hold them to higher standards.
These books and movies will continue to be made, and their widespread audience reflects their significance to many people. Thus, we cannot dismiss them entirely but should take them with a grain of salt and ensure that young people are aware of these dynamics as they engage with media.
