For this week’s posting, I will reexamine the Nicholas Sparks film posters and perform a metaphoric criticism.

The rhetor of these six films is a range of white actors and actresses or (more broadly) Nicholas Sparks, who wrote the film scripts and the novels that the films are based on. In my experience, the targeted audience is often straight white women who can identify with the relationships portrayed in the films. Each film emerges from a slightly different context, but the overarching context is one of contemporary heterosexual relationships in the southern United States. The posters each argue for the beauty of these relationships and, through the exclusion of other groups, seem to reject other types of love (between individuals of other races, the same sex, non-binary, etc.). The posters’ collective purpose is to promote the film franchise through the presentation of a similar and recognizable image.

The main metaphor expressed by these posters is that “two white heterosexuals gazing happily into each other’s eyes is love.” One could also infer a more implicit metaphor which states that “anything outside of these depictions of relationships is NOT love” given that each poster looks largely the same. In both cases, the portrayals of relationships would be the tenor and love would be the vehicle. The replicating nature of each poster creates a level of frequency which implies that repeatedly excluding other groups from these films is acceptable (and, perhaps, encouraged).

I have chosen to perform an ideological criticism on six Nicholas Sparks film posters. These advertisements are for The Notebook, Nights in Rodanthe, The Last Song, The Lucky One, Safe Haven, and The Best of Me.

Presented elements in these posters include heterosexual, Caucasian couples kissing outdoors, the short introductory sentences that indicate the basic ideas behind the films, and the complementary nature of their clothing colors to the backgrounds behind them. Suggested elements include conforming to stereotypes about gender and sexuality,  focus on style and aesthetic even in intimate moments, exclusion of people of color/other sexualities from plots (and thus, a lack of importance regarding their relationships), and over-the-top depictions of love.

These artifacts each suggest that love between opposite-sex couples of the same race is a good thing. By excluding people of color and other sexualities, the film posters imply that these relationships do not deserve equal representation in popular media. Additionally, the centered focus on the couples in near-kissing poses ask audiences not to question the films’ lack of representation. These qualities present a problematic ideology that focuses on the hegemony of one type of couple over all others.