Wartenberg argues that the filmmaker and audience often see past the initial estimation of unlikeliness because they understand that the two love each other or share a bond, despite apparent obstacles and violations of what is socially acceptable. In this way, the pairing of an unlikely couple, for Wartenberg, can function as a vehicle for social critique. In their plotlines, the films find a way to negotiate whatever social barrier might be separating them, and during these 90 or so minutes, the audience develops a sympathy for both the individual couple and their situation. Even a small detail can elicit this effect. At the end of Some Like It Hot, for instance, when Lemmon's character reveals he is actually a man, Brown's character shrugs it off and says, "Nobody's perfect." Though this is a meant to get laughs from the audience, Wartenberg also argues that it will cause them to think about why they're laughing, thus subverting societal norms.

Wartenberg acknowledges that these films don't present themselves as "vehicles for serious social analysis," but he rejects the common conviction that films are superficial and reinforce dominant social beliefs. He concedes that sometimes in fighting certain stereotypes, films falter by including other stereotypes.

Sabrina is not mentioned in Wartenberg's analysis, but fits in neatly as a romance spanning the upper and lower class. The lower class Sabrina surprises high society when she gets involved with the upper class Larrabee brothers, and this plotline works the subvert and undo the stronghold of class barriers in 1950s society.  Though seemingly rigid structures might keep a couple apart, Hollywood implicitly approved of and endorsed this unlikely pairing.

Because this article takes a methodological approach, it is not very accessible for the average film scholar. It also talks about trends as a whole, leaving out the detailed scene analyses that those interested in films often enjoy. But the article does a good job of trying to examine what the medium of film might have to say about our culture, and its strength lies in its ability to offer empirical evidence of trends, such as an explosion of romantic comedies in the 1990s, as opposed to individual examples. In this way, we can look at the trends of particular decades. When Sabrina was released, in the 1950s, for example, romantic drama was more popular than romantic comedy, a reversal of what is currently true. Other subsets that are popular now, such as teen romances or romances that feature supernatural elements (like 1990's Ghost), were nearly nonexistent in the 1950s.

The study also found that cultural conditions have effectively killed many formerly popular plotlines of romance movies. Couples in different classes, for example, no longer offer a "convincing dramatic impediment." Movies that feature these aging romantic conventions," then, can only remain popular today as "relics of an earlier era." This statement serves to justify Sabrina's ongoing popularity despite its perhaps hard-to-swallow plotline. All in all, romantic films, even the current ones, do continue to reinforce some of the more conservative romantic tendencies in our culture, namely the importance of marriage and fidelity, and this has not changed since the days when Sabrina was released.