An Intercultural Analysis of My Big Fat Greek Wedding
GDUFS SEIB1104 Nicole Guan

As a typical intercultural movie, My Big Fat Greek Wedding is about Toula, a lower middle class Greek American woman who fell in love with a non-Greek upper middle class “white Anglo-Saxon Protestant” Ian Miller. They overcame a series of difficulties and eventually held a big fat Greek wedding. This movie shows us how Greek Americans live, reflecting the conflicts between Greek culture and American culture in a humorous way. Guided by Hofstede’s cultural dimensions theory, this paper mainly explores how Greeks and American handle the cultural conflicts, and how they integrate into each other’s culture. Therefore, we will arrange the paper in three …show more content…

Individuals assess authority in view of its perceived rightness or their own personal interests. From the movie, we can see that in the US, each member in a family enjoys equal rights and everyone is responsible for his own things. Compared with Toula’s family, Ian’s has lower power distance. Ian could individually deal with his affairs without asking his parents’ opinions or permissions in terms of dating and marriage, even his religion. In the American family, children were raised with the values of individualism and equality, and their parents have no privilege to ask children to obey orders. There is no obvious hierarchy in American family.

3. Uncertainty Avoidance
Uncertainty avoidance is the most obvious dimension that differentiates Greece from the US. Greece has the highest level of uncertainty avoidance among the countries Hoftstede have surveyed, which is 112, while the US is 46, much lower than Greece. We can also easily find evidence from this movie.
When people are under new cultural environment, there are four main reactions: assimilation, isolation, marginalization and integration. In this movie, isolation is the strategy taken by Toula’s father because he is a chauvinist with a high level of uncertainty avoidance. He tried to keep himself and his families away from American culture and seized every chance to show Greek culture. The methods he used