When people decided to title a movie The Prince and Me, were they purposely trying to evoke The King & I, but to signal that it was nothing like the classic, the filmmakers decided to use bad grammar? The Prince and Me is a rom com starring Julia Stiles as Paige, an ambitious Wisconsin premed student, i.e. “Me.” She is the last of her friends not to get paired off and have a ring on her finger, but she doesn’t seem too worried about it. The titular Prince hails from Denmark and decides to go to college in Wisconsin because he saw a commercial for a Girls Gone Wild video, which is dumb because in our brief introduction, it appears that he can get girls to do that already based on his title. He hides his identity and is a complete fish out of water when it comes to practical daily life and lab work so he decides to latch on to her after a (not) meet cute. (un)Surprisingly after a truly offensive start, Paige eventually warms up to (Prince) Eddie after she finds an area that he IS competent in (Hamlet), and they become an item. There is a brief rocky patch when she discovers his real identity, but after she verbally takes an English exam on Othello (O if you’re nasty), they switch places with her becoming the fish out of water and him being the star politician. She begins to wonder if she will have to sacrifice her career goals to marry him (that escalated quickly). Dun dun dun! Sequels!
The Prince and Me is the kind of formulaic, satisfying pablum that makes for perfect background TV or to play on a plane. The Prince in the US is satisfying because you get to feel briefly superior to someone better off and more attractive as he reveals his utter incompetence and cluelessness. There is even A Simple Life sequence where he works on a farm-Paris Hilton and Nicole Ritchie would be pleased. Such scenarios give audiences a vicarious thrill of harmless torture and infantilization of someone who in a real setting is an adult, and you would have zero power over them, but they would probably be telling you what to do regardless of how useless they are. Paige in Denmark is satisfying because she gets to fulfill her Cinderella fantasy, become a princess, get the prince, but she simultaneously claims the moral high ground because she cares about her career and working hard.
The most jarring aspect of The Prince and Me is how a womanizing Prince and Paige barely even make out in the movie or when they do, they are interrupted. I usually bemoan the gratuitous, narrative stopping licentiousness in films, but their relationship was oddly chaste once we realize that Paige was willing to go to the stacks with him. Paige is not a personally conservative woman, and the Prince has gone from 10 to zero yet they are debating about marriage. Has The Prince and Me learned nothing from Princess Diana’s life? Those are red flags in their world. Why the rush between two alleged unconventional people to fit a narrative that is completely alien to them-no sex or dating apparently before marriage. How can they get married if they barely know each other? There is no intimacy-physical or mental.
I’m less concerned about princess culture, which can be disturbing (see Mommy Dead and Dearest), than the message sent by rom coms such as The Prince and Me that you should jump into marriage after a few cute moments. It is rare, but not impossible, for people to successfully maintain such a huge commitment after a few cute moments. What is not rare is the high likelihood of divorce and creating unhealthy relationship patterns for the people in the relationship and (God forbid) their children. Dating may be a pain, but it is better to get to know someone than live in an unrealistic fairytale world where you meet the right one and get married seconds later. If the choice is marriage or splitting up, which The Prince and Me initially offers as the selection, then run.