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When Greece meets America


            
             The movie My Big fat Greek Wedding is a fun-filled romantic comedy about a Greek US immigrant family. Toula Portokalos is 30, Greek, and works in her family's restaurant, Dancing Zorba's, in Chicago. All her father Gus wants is for her to get married to a nice Greek boy and have children. However, Toula is looking for more in life. Her mother, Maria, convinces Gus to let her take some computer classes at college. With those classes under her belt, she then takes over her aunt's travel agency. She meets Ian Miller, a high school English teacher and they date secretly for a while before her family finds out. Her father is livid over her dating a non-Greek. He has to learn to accept Ian; Ian has to learn to accept Toula's huge family, and Toula has to learn to accept herself. In this movie, we see an intercultural marriage between the wealthy, upper-class, White Anglo-Saxon Protestant Ian and the Greek middle-class Toula. .
             This movie will help us analyze certain aspects of the ethnic identity of Greek culture as seen in the movie such as the role of women in marriage, food and lifestyle and compare it to the WASP American culture as portrayed in the movie. The Greek family is portrayed as a very light-hearted, family oriented and male dominant family. On the other hand, the American WASP family is very uptight, distant in attitude and appear to be reserved. We will analyze the representation of the Greek and WASP American families in this movie. This analysis will be supported by analyzing and comparing the Portakalos and Miller families in the movie. .
             The role of Greek women in society seems to be rigid and fixed. However, we will see that it isn't always the case. In my opinion, the women feel they can get anything they want out of the men. As Toula tells us early on in the film, "settling down means marrying a Greek boy, having Greek babies, and feeding your large Greek family for the rest of your life".


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