My Big Fat Greek Wedding and Interpersonal Communication

My Big Fat Greek Wedding

There are many different styles of communication and within the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding a lot of these are displayed. I will mostly be talking about family communication and cross-cultural communication (also known as intercultural communication) and some of the theories within these two areas of communication.

This movie is a great representation of the challenges that immigrants face coming to the United States and assimilating to the US culture and ways of communication all while trying to hold onto their culture. The movie really focuses on the relationships between family members and their struggles to integrate into the American society particularly through marriage. In the movie, Toula Portokolis is a 30 year old, unmarried, Greek-American woman. Her parents are very concerned about her getting married since Greek women were put on this earth to marry Greek men and have Greek children. Toula’s chances seem slim until she meets Ian Miller, a non-Greek. Because Ian is not Greek Toula will need to embark on a cross-cultural journey as Ian and her date, fall in love, marry and eventually have children. The families will need to be open-minded and flexible as they figure out how to intertwine both of their family’s beliefs and cultures.

Their communication and family differences are not completely evident until chapter seven when Toula and Ian are at dinner and Ian is discussing his “boring” life and family and then after when they are on the bridge and Toula exercises very little control on self-disclosure. She goes on a rant about holiday time with her family. Explains how her dad and uncles fight over who gets the lamb brain, aunt Voula chases Toula around with the eyeball because it makes you smart. She compares how she has 27 first cousins and he has 2, everyone is loud and never alone in their culture and how she only knows other Greeks because Greeks marry other Greeks to be Greek breeding machines. Because of all...