Analysis of My Big Fat Greek Wedding

During the movie, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, there was a lot of positive and negative communication that influenced the main character’s life decisions. The story is about a young woman, named Toula, that is of Greek decent who is fearful of being stuck in the life she is now living. She is a frumpy girl that works in her family’s restaurant because she has not been able to find a Greek man to marry, and because of this, her family claims that she is old and has failed in life. She is allowed to attend college, which in turn, gives her new confidence and she is able to fall in love with a non-Greek man that is named, Ian. During the movie she struggles to get her family to accept him as the man she loves, and she also finally comes to terms with her heritage and cultural identity. At the end of the movie, Ian is accepted into the family, he becomes a baptized Greek, agrees to marry in the Greek Orthodox Church and participate in the Greek culture. Despite the happy ending of the movie, Toula struggled to follow the rules and values of her culture, practiced nonverbal communication with Ian, and received empathy from her mother while Ian had to deal with a language barrier of English and Greek. Toula has a hard time accepting the culture of her family. From the movie, it seems as though the Greek culture is a high context culture. High context cultures have a strong sense of tradition and history, and they do not change much over time. In the beginning of the movie, Toula states that her family expects her to “marry a Greek boy, make Greek babies, and feed everyone in the family till the day she dies.” Since she has not been married she is stuck working in the family restaurant until she does. She breaks tradition when she starts dating and then marries, Ian, because he is not a “Greek boy, and not from a Greek family.” She also does the unthinkable since she marryed Ian and changes the history and tradition of the culture, as high context cultures

Cited: Page(s): 187, Looking Out, Looking In, 13th Edition by Ronald B. Adler, Cengage Learning