In theories of mass popular culture, there remains a continuing assumption that the dominant messages encoded in media texts impact upon and influence their audiences. Thus, the question that is usually posed is one regarding the extent to which audiences are aware of and able to resist such domination by media messages. In this article, I use a comparison of narratives of romantic love in cinema texts and in the conversations of people ‘getting married’ to challenge such assumptions of unidirectional influence. I argue that both media texts and their audiences are part of a larger cultural logic, one that is not necessarily more dominating of audiences than of producers of texts, but which may nevertheless be used to reinforce prior unequal relations of social organization.
