This week I watch Love for Sale and live-tweeted the experience with my fellow peers of BCM320. Love for Sale is an Indonesia Romantic Comedy that follows Richard’s life for a couple of months. Richard is a middle-aged, single, family business owner that is trying to get a date for the upcoming wedding he is attending. First I thought fair enough he is getting a bit old and wants to show some life progress off and present a big image of himself. While this may be true then he received this voice mail:
A message telling him the wedding was soon and he better show up to the date and my brain was just shocked straight away and fired of this tweet
Immediately this was my first real culture shock from the film as I have been to a few other Asian countries where Indonesia was looking to match my expectations from those experiences.
This was completely different from my frame of viewing the world and seemed outrageous to me. I am looking at this from the position of last year being a groomsman at my brother’s wedding where only 1 of the 4 groomsmen was even in a relationship. While I have a small slice of experience with Indonesian weddings with my cousin had married someone from Indonesia and not even a hint of this idea was brought up, this made me think maybe this was just an outlier case. but there was not an Indonesian wedding due to the health of his wife’s mother and it would be particularly odd to enforce these values on an Australian wedding. Most of the people there were not Indonesian and in a situation like that, you are unlikely to say to someone’s face you should be disgraced by not having a date especially to a 21-year-old vs a 41-year-old.
Thinking about the shame/honor culture to the family name and yourself it makes a lot more sense especially that a middle-age man could be a disgrace if he had not met the societal expectations for him at that age. And I don’t think in either culture the image below represents the ideal successful man.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8065796/mediaviewer/rm2302494976
Richard is portrayed as lonely, only having one friend and being a strict boss with no real redeeming cultures which is far from the archetypal successful man.
where was I coming from being shocked about having his dignity on the line to get a date?
In the cultural frame, I bring to watching this movie especially when I myself have no plan of dating any time soon. To continue furthering my options in the judo competition realm and traveling where’d that takes me. So for my perspective, if someone tried to tell that to me I would not be having any of it. But from a different cultural perspective of someone raised in Indonesia, it would make a lot more sense for that type of statement to be made.
so basically it is very clear here I was having an emotive response based on what would happen if someone said that to me. However, this seems much more regular and appropriate for this Indonesian culture.