“I was 3 when ‘My Big Fat Greek Wedding’ came out, so my experience as a Greek American is indelible in the film,” the author writes.
When I was little, my siblings and I all owned T-shirts that said GAP: Greek American Princess (or Prince, if you were my brother). When I was in middle school, a boy in my English class asked me if being Greek Orthodox meant we believed in Greek gods, like Zeus and Hera. Every trip I’ve taken in my life, I’ve found an icon hidden in my luggage that my father had packed away without me noticing. Currently, I have a container of olive oil in my apartment that was made with olives from my family’s grove in my grandfather’s village in Greece.
These are just a few of the Greek-American stereotypes I have experienced in my life. As the grandchild of Greek immigrants on my mother’s side and the great-grandchild of Greek immigrants on my father’s side, I have never known a life where I was not immersed in my heritage. I was baptized in the Greek Orthodox Church, spent my afternoons as a child in Greek school, was a member of Greek dance troupes and attended a dance camp. Greek summer every year. And while the Greek-American community is large – so it’s not a particularly unique experience – it can still feel a bit isolated in terms of modern media representation. Until “My Big Greek Wedding”.
I was 3 years old when “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” came out, so my experience as a Greek-American is indelible in the film. Greek-Americans have adapted the vernacular of this film so fluidly that it feels like we’ve always recited this quote as if it were holy scripture: “There are two kinds of people : Greeks and all those who wish to be Greek. »
I think there was a time when I honestly thought it was my mother who came up with the saying, “The man is the head (of the house), but the woman is the neck.” And she can turn her head any way she wants,” because she loved and referenced that feeling so much.
I was probably 10 the first time I watched the movie; I was young enough that my eyes were covered during the scenes where Ian (John Corbett) and Toula (Nia Vardalos) are in his apartment, but old enough to reckon with the mirror image of my life unfolding before my eyes.
John Corbett and Nia Vardalos star in “My Big Fat Greek Wedding.”
I immediately saw a kindred spirit in Toula. She could express things I was experiencing long before I had the words to describe them, like: “When I was growing up, I knew I was different. The other girls were blonde and delicate, and I was a swarthy 6-year-old with sideburns.
Like Toula, I was a visibly ethnic kid in a mostly WASPy Midwestern neighborhood who understood on some level that I was different from my school friends. I used to joke that my life as a teenager mirrored that of Hannah Montana, although instead of switching between the personas of celebrity and normal girl, I led a double life as an American girl. school and Greek in the evenings and weekends. It’s a disorienting experience.
But “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” was essential in my understanding of how much I love my culture and how special it can be to share my heritage with others. I have always been in love with the love story at the center of it. I didn’t really grow up with the ideology that I must marry a Greek; I just realized that it would probably be easier that way. After years of watching romantic comedies and reading love stories, I still don’t think there is a more beautiful and intimate expression of love in media than the scene in which Ian is baptized in the Greek Orthodox Church of Tula. It makes my heart swell with every viewing and it reinforces my belief that it would actually be very nice to envelop a partner in my culture.
“My Big Fat Greek Wedding” and its sequels continued to play a sentimental role in my life over the years. I like to show the film to people who have never seen it, who are usually not Greek. When I was 20, I lived in Athens for a few months doing an internship and taking a course, and my most precious memory of the film is watching it in a hotel room in the small village of Koroni during that my class was on a trip. . My new friends and I piled onto two beds and projected it on my laptop while I translated some of the deeper jokes for them. It was a perfect example of being able to teach a bit of my culture to people who wanted to learn, a platonic reflection of Ian and Toula on the small screen in front of us.
Elena Kampouris as Toula and Ian’s daughter Paris in “My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2”.
“My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2” came out in 2016 and I saw it in a movie theater in metro Detroit that was filled with at least 20 members of my family. I was a senior in high school that year, deciding between going to an in-state or out-of-state college, and lo and behold, it was a major plot point in the movie. Even though I had decided to stay in Michigan when the film came out, my mother would still cry in the theater seeing how particularly poignant the story was for us.
In the second film, Ian and Toula’s daughter Paris (Elena Kampouris) decides between staying in the Midwest for school or going to New York. In the end, her very traditional grandmother, straight from Greece, tells Paris that it’s OK to leave.
Although I only went to college an hour away, I had a similar experience almost two years ago with my own grandmother. I decided to move to New York (cue the mental image of Toula’s father, Gus, played by Michael Constantine, saying, “Why do you want to leave me?” in the first film) and I was very nervous to the idea of telling my grandparents. But when I told them, they couldn’t have been more excited for me. After all, New York is where my grandmother settled when she immigrated to the United States. I’m also his namesake, so in a way it felt like coming home.
So last week, it was in New York that I saw “My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3”. Honestly, the sequels pale in comparison to the first film. In this film, the gang returns to Greece to visit Gus’ village to take care of unfinished business after his death. Even though the movie was incredibly cheesy, I still found myself surprisingly moved by it.
Maybe it was aspects of the plot that resonated, maybe homesickness, or maybe the feeling of being detached from the community I grew up in now that I live in a place new and far from what is familiar to me. I still wonder how to feel connected to the culture that was fostered by my family now that I no longer live near them. It’s tough, and the overall message of coming home from the third movie hit me hard.
So even though I grew up rooted in my cultural roots, I feel a little disconnected from them these days. I think it’s a form of whiplash that many second and third generation Americans experience. When I was a child, I was sometimes unhappy about being different from my peers and felt stifled and exhausted by being Greek (a feeling that Toula and her daughter express in all the films). But as an adult, I feel almost too Americanized. Without the planned activities and traditions of my youth, I am left with imposter syndrome that makes me wonder if I am as Greek as I think I am.
But as I discover what it’s like for me to be Greek-American in this new life I’m creating for myself, it’s a source of comfort to have a film that feels like I’m taking my family with me everywhere I go. And as Maria says to Toula in the first film: “I gave you life so that you could live it. »
And that’s exactly what I do.
