LCC Review: Silver Linings Playbook

Silver Linings Playbook was a film that when I first heard about I wasn't too sure I wanted to see. The name didn't really catch me, and I was feeling quite "down and out", not to mention cynical when I came upon the title. In a whim I chose to sit down and watch it based on the fact that Jennifer Lawrence won an Oscar for her performance and I just wanted to see what the heck all the fuss was about over the film. By the end of the film I was glad I did.

The film is about a man who suffers from bi-polar syndrome who is being released from a rehabilitation center after having an episode from coming home and seeing his ex-wife in the shower with another man. He's released on probation and goes about with the goal of trying to turn his life around to try and win back his ex-wife. He meets through friends Jennifer Lawrence's character who is a slightly depressed widow, and eventually after several seemingly "chance" meetings he decides to help her participate in a dance competition if she'll help him win back his ex-wife. I think you can tell the rest of the plot from there.

Philly, as in life, is a character all its own in the film.

Both Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper give stellar performances and deserve any and all accolades thrown their direction. The fact the film tries to tackle having a main character have a disease such as bi-polar syndrome is both a breath of fresh air and gives Cooper a chance to really flex his acting muscles. Robert DeNiro as Cooper's father is also amazing to see outside of his more recent typical roles as a more working class man. The personality of "Philly" is wonderfully captured in the film and overall it is just well made, and not to mention completely hilarious. On top of that the film is positively un-ironic in its message of pursuing "positivity" and "silver linings", which is quite an odd message considering our extremely cynical and snarky society at the moment. It's like Pollyanna woke up from a long nap and decided to turn our frowns upside down. Now that's not to say there aren't clouds to our silver linings, and our protagonists don't completely get a triumphant happy ending of being number one in the dance competition, they simply earn the score that'll win DeNiro the bet and win each other's hearts. It's a cautious optimism and one which is willing to settle for "not being the best" but simply "doing the best it can". Which I think speaks to how our society's mindset is evolving as we turn away from desiring being the sole super power into a nation more willing to accept being a great power amongst many other greats, as reflected in a microcosm here.

I'm crazy and you're crazy, but somehow we're less crazy together....

There are a few problems the film has--most of which center in its depiction of bi-polar syndrome. It's treated like it's a "minor hurdle" that is easily "cured" with the "power of love". There is only one example within the film of Cooper having an "episode" which occurs about half-way through the film, and then the second half drops any and all consequences living with such a syndrome might have. The reason why that complaint both holds water and doesn't at the same time is because the film is following a formula. Those familiar with my post on romantic comedies know that the formula for such a type of film is that "two sick people heal each other through love", and this film is absolutely no exception. So while I can definitely agree with the critique, I have to say that given the type of film that it is (a mix between a romantic comedy and a screwball comedy), that one should have expected such a "wiping the dust under the rug" treatment to occur at some point during the film, if only due to the nature of film expectations from audiences. It goes back to our love of "conventions" as mentioned in the satire post, that we're more willing to forgive something for lacking "realism" if it conforms to a convention than we are someone for breaking a convention in order to portray something more realistically.

You love her, right? If not you can say hello to my claws.

Silver Linings Playbook is at its heart a mixture between a screwball comedy and a romantic comedy. What are the differences between the two? While screwball comedy will get its own theory post later on, I'll say at this point not too much. In a romantic comedy typically the rest of the world is healthy (overall) except these two individuals--but in a screwball comedy the rest of the world is a little sick (not too much) as well as our two individuals and our individuals against all odds not only manage to heal themselves but their society in a small way as well. In a screwball comedy you're more likely to have a whole cast of eccentric and intriguing side-characters than you do in a romantic comedy proper where at most you'll have one or two eccentrics. The antics of the eccentrics are also likely to be much more zany, ridiculous, and over the top in a screwball comedy than they are in a romantic comedy. I'm reminded of the collapsing dinosaur skeleton or needing to sing "I can't give you anything but love" to a leopard in Bringing Up Baby which is the quintessential screwball comedy. In What's Up Doc? the curse of bad luck that follows our female protagonist wherever she goes is another example of the complete ridiculousness of the genre. In a screwball comedy the world is completely ridiculous--but that's okay because some of that ridiculousness is seen as a little "healthy" to balance out an otherwise dry and boring life. Silver Linings Playbook doesn't go to the extremes of ridiculousness of other screwball comedies--and even tempers it, but you feel it wouldn't be completely out of character if it did. Only part of the society our characters lives in is full of wild eccentrics--their immediate neighborhood--everyone outside of the immediate neighborhood (as depicted at the dance competition or at the school Cooper used to work) is depicted as "normal and well-adjusted" and having to deal with the zaniness of our characters, and so that's why I say it's a mixture between a romantic comedy and screwball comedy: only a small part of society is crazy and needs healing--not the whole of it. Our protagonists compared to the zaniness of the small sick society they come from, become more well-adjusted, but they remain crazier than the rest of our normal society, finding a way to balance and live in between the two. This seems to be the new norm for our modern take on this romantic comedy/screwball comedy mixture if the films Post Grad, 500 Days of Summer, and The Holiday are anything to judge by.

With one shot, New Hollywood was born.

Sliver Linings Playbook isn't like most films Hollywood releases--scratch that--it isn't like most films it's released since 1967 when "New Hollywood" took over with its attention to violence, sex, special effects, and explosions--and began dominating the silver screen with the shockingly bloody ending to the film Bonnie and Clyde. Silver Linings Playbook as a film could've easily been made any time prior to 1967--but probably in the 1930s during the golden age of screwball comedies--as that is essentially what the film is. You could easily put Ginger Rodgers in for Jennifer Lawrence, and a Dick Powell or some other slightly gruff guy for Bradley Cooper. The only difference between the 1930s and now is that in the 1930s they would've ended up becoming superstar dancers and winning the dance competition in the end. Beyond that everything else is transferable and has its equivalence. Jennifer Lawrence can still be a young depressed widow who's had a few too many indiscretions which has caused her to lose her job and turn to dancing while living with her parents. Bradley Cooper's parents in this iteration would become owners of a boarding house that he's now living in. You can still keep the betting subplot that his father has--but change the sport to baseball and the bet is between him and the only boarder who pays his rent on time while everyone else is behind, with the bank on the parent's about possibly repossessing the house turned boarding house. Instead of running into each other while running, the change there would be that Bradley Cooper's 1930s character likes to walk the streets visiting places where his ex-wife and he used to be. Bradley Cooper's character would change from outright having bi-polar disorder to simply being a little depressed but now on the mends and trying to win back his ex-wife. They can still have their "meet cute" of he needs a wife and she needs a husband, she can still be quite sassy and street smart, he can still be naively optimistic and a bit of a dreamer. The final scene where Lawrence character is crying and Cooper's character rushes after her to tell her that he really loves her and he has for a while is only missing the swelling violins and taffeta to have been between Becall and Bogart or Garbo and Taylor. I could go on and on, but I'll stop there. This is not to say that Old Hollywood will return as it was--this new wave that's still working its identity out is a bit more gritty, ironic, and quirky and much less glamorous than Old Hollywood ever was, even with all the similarities I see. It's a modern take on Old Hollywood, bringing some things back from the grave, while updating other things that don't transfer so well to all the changes that have happened in the past forty plus years.

So why did I just spend a nice lengthy paragraph detailing how this film would've been made in the 1930s? Well, that's because not only could it have, I think it marks the beginning of the end of "New Hollywood". I know with all those superhero films coming out, it looks like New Hollywood is digging in, but at the same time there is a slow--but growing movement in younger film makers I've been noticing to tell simpler stories that are low budget (hence little to no special effects or explosions) and are now referencing sex and violence but we hardly see any of either on screen. Silver Linings Playbook is just near the forefront of this trend in film making. Arguably New Hollywood didn't take over in one year either. Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, Hello Dolly!, and What's Up Doc? which were all released after Bonnie and Clyde are very much of the Old Hollywood formula. Consider ourselves in the transition period. So this doesn't mean that expensive blockbusters with their pricey special effects are through--but it's getting towards the end.

Trailer:

~LCC

LCC Review: Django Unchained

Tarantino I've always held to be a director of quality and substance with his film making. He makes great films (brilliantly written especially), but they are very much stylized affairs that make sense in the world of his imagination--but not much sense out of that stylized world he's created. In other words, the way he presents the world not as how it is, but in a manner that is completely unique to himself that no one else can quite replicate without it seeming disingenuous.
   
And I'll say that Tarantino is not the only one of his kind, but represents just one species of director. The species consists of (and I'll even throw in a playwright) some of those that are hailed as "greats" amongst the field. They build similarly stylized worlds that are unique and distinctive to them. Hitchcock is just one example, the German Expressionists like Fritz Lang are others, Chaplin yet another, and Bertolt Brecht is yet another still. Sure, their works might be heavily based on realism, but the style of their storytelling supersedes and transcends simple realism (the Expressionists being the obvious example). The world they portray isn't necessarily the world as we know it--it's slightly better and slightly worse simultaneously, done on purpose to make a point that transcends actual reality.


There are other species of directors as well, the hacks being a notable subset, as are the actual realists, and many many more, but today with this film, I want to talk about the directors who create highly stylized films, and take apart the world of Django Unchained.
On the surface, Django Unchained looks like your typical comic formula--especially in the latter parts of the film when we arrive at the Candie Land plantation--with a hint of romance thrown in for good measure. For a brief summary of the plot, the story is about a slave named Django who is "freed" by a bounty hunter to find some overseers who he knows to collect a reward on. The man trains him to be a bounty hunter and after bagging the overseers decides to help Django in getting his wife Brunhilda back--who was sold to another plantation owner. Pretty simple stuff--on the surface. The senex iratus was played by Samuel L. Jackson, with Django playing the tricky slave. There's a tiny bit of romance thrown in for good measure via the Sigfried and Brunhilda structure the film looks at later on, but that's Tarantino dipping his toes in the water of romance at most, not going in for the full plunge. If anything Tarantino brings our German bounty hunter over from the world of romance, as he has the most romantic viewpoint of the entire film, in fact one could say he's a refugee from a romance story that found himself amongst an ironic comedy world and learned to adapt.



The overarching formula is comic as it is about an eiron character: the slave (Django) who earns his freedom and thus rises or ascends to the status of a freedman through bounty hunting. Bounty hunting requires our tricky slave character to transcend twice throughout the course of the film and evolve into a sly servant character for our "master bounty hunter" in the beginning and finally by the end of the film evolving into the prototype of our amateur detective as an independent bounty hunter all his own. Essentially, giving us the history of the evolution of this eiron character archetype all in one film. As such, the role requires this character throughout his many incarnations to always be donning disguises, which is a clear sign of an eiron character, no matter the genre. Eirons will always pretend to be "lesser than they are" so that when the big reveal happens it's a shock to those around them. Typically you can find eiron characters cloaked or donning some kind of disguise, act, or fake pretence around others. You can see this in Django when he pretends twice to be a manservant to his master bounty hunter, when in reality the bounty hunter gave him his freedom early on in the film. Ultimately through the film we are watching the evolution of Django from chained slave to independent bounty hunter.


After the evolution of Django, the overarching story of the film is still comic, but an extremely ironic version of comedy--probably the most ironic you can get without it crossing into the sphere of irony completely. Django seems to mix different stages of Comedy together: "stage one" and "stage two" most especially:

Northrop Frye (Anatomy of Criticism, p178-80):

Phase One: Ironic Comedy - Existent society remains: The absurd society triumphs or remains undefeated or sometimes, in more ironic cases, dissolves without anything to take its place.

"We notice in ironic comedy that the demonic world is never far away. The rages of the senex iratus in Roman comedy are directed mainly at the tricky slave, who is threatened with the mill, with being flogged to death, with crucifixion, with having his head dipped in tar and set on fire, and the like, all penalties that could be and were exacted from slaves in life. An epilogue in Plautus informs us that the slave-actor who has blown up in his lines will now be flogged; in one of the Menander fragments a slave is tied up and burned with a torch on the stage. One sometimes gets the impression that the audience of Plautus and Terence would have guffawed uproariously all through the Passion. We may ascribe this to the brutality of a slave society, but then we remember that boiling oil and burying alive ("such a stuffy death") turn up in The Mikado. Two lively comedies of the modern stage are The Cocktail Party and The Lady's Not for Burning, but the cross appears in the background of the one and the stake in the background of the other. Shylock's knife and Angelo's gallows appear in Shakespeare: in Measure for Measure every male character is at one time or another threatened with death. The action of comedy moves toward a deliverance from something which, if absurd, is by no means invariably harmless. We notice too how frequently a comic dramatist tries to bring his action as close to a catastrophic overthrow of the hero as he can get it, and then reverses the action as quickly as possible. The evading or breaking of a cruel law is often a very narrow squeeze. The intervention of the king at the end of Tartuffe is deliberately arbitrary: there is nothing in the action of the play itself to prevent Tartuffe's triumph. Tom Jones in the final books, accused of murder, incest, debt, and double-dealing, cast off by friends, guardian, and sweetheart, is a woeful figure indeed before all these turn into illusions. Any reader can think of many comedies in which the fear of death, sometimes a hideous death, hangs over the central character to the end, and is dispelled so quickly that one has almost the sense of awakening from nightmare."

This phase is most especially visible when Django reflects on his past life as a slave as well as when he gets caught towards the end of the film and nearly is castrated. The world of ironic comedy is a harsh one--and for all intents and purposes is a police state. Ironic comedy takes the hell-on-earth of irony and then at the last moment undoes it all. Candie Land itself as a plantation dissolves without anything to take its place, but overall the structure of slave society which allowed for the creation of Candie Land, remains undefeated.

Also Northrop Frye:

Phase Two: Quixotic Comedy - Criticism of society without change: The hero escapes a humorous society without transforming it

"The second phase of comedy, in its simplest form, is a comedy in which the hero does not transform a humorous society but simply escapes or runs away from it, leaving its structure as it was before. A more complex irony in this phase is achieved when a society is constructed by or around a hero, but proves not sufficiently real or strong to impose itself. In this situation the hero is usually himself at least partly a comic humor or mental runaway, and we have either a hero's illusion thwarted by a superior reality or a clash of two illusions. This is the quixotic phase of comedy, a difficult phase for drama, though The Wild Duck is a fairly pure example of it, and in drama it usually appears as a subordinate theme of another phase. Thus in the Alchemist Sir Epicure Mammon's dream of what he will do with the philosopher's stone is, like Quixote's a gigantic dream, and makes him an ironic parody of Faustus (who is mentioned in the play), in the same way that Quixote is an ironic parody of Amadis and Lancelot. When the tone is more light-hearted, the comic resolution may be strong enough to sweep over all quixotic illusions. In Huckleberry Finn the main theme is one of the oldest in comedy, the freeing of a slave, and the cognitio tells us that Jim had already been set free before his escape was bungled by Tom Sawyer's pedantries. Because of its unrivalled opportunities for double-edged irony, this phase is a favourite of Henry James: perhaps his most searching study of it is The Sacred Fount, where the hero is an ironic parody of a Prospero figure creating another society out of the one in front of him."

Some elements of this phase are thrown in for good measure but for the large part this phase is subordinate to the phase one setting. The most distinct part of this phase's inclusion is where Django rides off into the west with Brunhilda at the end after giving us a characteristic movie poster pose with sunglasses and cigarette in front of the smouldering ruins of the Candie Plantation. Our hero has escaped the society and is about to go and create a rival one out west as a bounty hunter with Brunhilda and whatever children they have together.


Okay, so Django has an overall comic formula, but what about Tarantino's style? Tarnatino goes the extra mile in this film to create not the slave-holding south as it was, but a kind of mixture between the slave holding south and the post-Civil War old west. He also adds in some elements of black exploitation cinema with the theme of having an underground wring of slave masters who have their slaves fight to the death for their entertainment. It's especially in this element that Tarantino transcends reality and--well, at least to our knowledge--invents something that could have plausibly happened, but we never actually saw happen in real life. Finally in pure Tarantino style over emphasizes the violence of this world--which is completely appropriate to do in an Ironic Comedy. As Frye mentions an Ironic Comedy world is a violent and repressive society that has teeth to back up its claims, and Tarantino presents it with all of its teeth intact.

In terms of performances, all the actors give a high caliber performance and I have to say I greatly enjoyed them all, with Jackson, Foxx, and DiCaprio probably giving the best performances of the film, and Waltz coming in a close second after that three-way tie for first.

Django Unchained does have a few problems most notably by bringing in the theme of vengeance--a theme mroe appropriate to tragedy than comedy. The reason I say this is because bringing vengeance into comedy allows us to entertain the notion that vengeance has no consequences--and most audiences don't react well to that idea. However Tarantino does his best to try and give vengeance its proper consequences in this film by amplifying the violence of the slave society, but with Django's triumph in the end there's some small hint of a consequence-free vengeance plot at the last minute. It also makes Django a much more serious character who is only occasionally funny or is perceived as funny to others, which makes him a much less of a fun character. Jamie Foxx arguably does however bring just enough of a minutia of levity to the part so that we feel he's having fun, which thus counterbalances the seriousness of this vengeance plot.

The middle part where Tarantino tries to dip his toes into the genre of Romance with Django and the German Bounty hunter talking about Sigfried and Brunhilda is a point when the film begins to drag and it becomes obvious that our Bounty Hunter is a refugee from another type of film and has tried his best to adapt to the strange new world he's entered. The part of the film between the killing of the overseers which was the initial reason for Django's release and the point when we arrive at Candie Land plantation has to be the slowest part of the film pacing wise and could've been snipped at and shortened to some degree--the worst offence being the long carriage ride to the Candie Land plantation that never seemed to end--which the characters even commented on it was so long...

Another problem is when there are cut scenes to showing Brunhilda as a character when she isn't in the first half of the movie outside of what Django says about her. There's this one of these cut scenes in particular where she looks to the camera and directly says: "call me Hilde". And then the camera pans out and shows no one else around her, thus overemphasising that was "just for us", which takes us out of the film for a moment, and is a trick that would go over better in a satire than here in an ironic comedy.

The hokeiest part has to be with the Australian slave traders, I was distracted the entire time how Australian slave traders were in the deep south. And of course the scene allowed us to hear Tarantino's barely passable attempt at an Australian accent. Not one of the better moments of the film--well at least until Django takes over the scene like he's supposed to.

Also Django Unchained often bends reality for stylistic and comic necessity, especially in the violent scenes. He bends reality to the point where it almost becomes blatantly obvious we're watching a movie to us.  The violence while it is enhanced, doesn't follow the normal laws of physics and thus enters the realm it shares with cartoon violence. One particular example comes to mind when Django shoots a lady from one angle and she goes flying back in a direction not possible from the angle at which he shot her--the point being to get her body out of the frame of the camera and is never seen again for the rest of the film--because dead overseers and red necks are funny to look at, but a dead and bloody Southern Belle ain't pretty or comic. And its at times like that that we're reminded that we're watching a film and brought outside of the world Django exists in.

So while I admire it for its daring, I also freely admit that in taking those risks it also creates some inherent problems within its own world. However, having said that, I must say that overall the film is a wonderful piece of entertainment and well worth seeing, whether you just want to be entertained, or you want to think a little more deeply about a film. That's probably the beauty of this film in general it allows for that wide variety of audience to see and enjoy it.

Trailer:



~LCC

What Makes Us Laugh - Part Three: Satire, Attack with Laughs

Talking to the audience, done right.

Satire often in modern times is blended with its more low-brow brother farce and nowadays called parody. Sometimes we even go so far as to call satire "meta-humour". However satire is quite distinct itself as a genre and should be noted as such. While I am including it in the "What Makes Us Laugh" theoretical series, I'm doing so because it literally makes us laugh, not because it is a descendent of comedy--actually it's quite the reverse, comedy is a descendent of satire. In fact one could technically say that satire was the "original comedy" under Aristophanes and traditional Greek Old Comedy. In fact Aristophanes is dubbed, the "Father of Comedy", though I argue he really laid the foundation down for satire (and farce) first and foremost, and modern comedy comes from Menander.

I know what you're thinking...

The history of Satire however begins earlier than that though. Where we get the word satire come from the old Greek satyr plays that would play immediately after a Greek tragedy trilogy. Although only one complete Satyr play survives entact to this day, we can derive from it, fragments of others, and descriptions of Satyr plays in general that they typically involved Silenus, the leader of the satyrs, and his flock of fellow satyrs getting into some kind of predicament and a hero character coming along and managing to rescue Silenus and his merry flock. More will be mentioned on this in the next theoretical post next Monday. In this early time I'd argue that satire and farce had not yet separated into separate genres and even in the poop joke loving Aristophanes the two forces still managed to be held in balance. What were these two forces you might ask? I'll give you one answer today and another next week when we look at farce in depth, when I hope to get a rise, out of you all. So, let's take a look at Aristophanes, shall we?

Stone cutters took pity and gave him a great head of hair.

Little is known of Aristophanes' own life. He was most likely only just eighteen when his first play The Banqueters was produced, and despite the picture of the marble bust depicting a full head of hair, it's thought that he probably was prematurely bald due to the number of self-deprecating jokes he made against himself in his plays. He wrote forty plays that we know of, eleven of which have survived to this day. We know from Plato as well as his own parabasis that he embarked upon becoming a comic dramatist because he didn't like the ridicule that comic dramatists received and wanted to create a better image for them--comedy at the time was the new kid on the block and had much the bad reputation. As such, while generally remembered by Plato to be genial and good-humoured, he's depicted as not liking to be belittled or dismissed. Aristophanes' comedies are what we today would clearly recognize as highly political satire. If Aristophanes were alive today he'd write and perform for the Capital Steps or Saturday Night Live quite easily--in that way you could say he was the Tina Fey of his day--although with his propensity for poop jokes, he might have fit in better with the bawdier Mad TV. As such, a lot of his humour was very politicized and topical to the times he lived in, and Aristophanes sure did live through some interesting times. Not only did he live through the dying days of the Peloponnesian War (which is quite clear in his play The Frogs--in which Dionysus goes to the underworld to hold a contest to bring back the best playwright to re-inspire a demoralized Athens with a great work of tragedy), but also two oligarchic revolutions, and two democratic restorations. He lived through troubled and interesting times indeed and through it all used comedy in the first satiric manner to parody and make fun of many well known figures of his day. We know from Aristophanes for example that for a fact Socrates existed and wasn't just some figment of Plato's imagination because Aristophanes parodies Socrates quite extensively in his play The Clouds.

Remember, this is funny to an audience 

who has no doubt in their faith in Zeus.

He also took on figures such as Cleon (a prominent Athenian statesman and strategic mind during the Peloponnesian war--Aristophanes and Cleon got into a heated debate over how Aristophanes depicts him), Lamachus (a risk-taking general of the Peloponnesian war), to the gods themselves--Dionysus getting a rather hilarious portrait in The Frogs. And it's here where we first see the beginnings of satire. Satire isn't afraid to hit hard and hit high. Primarily it is on the attack. It's humour is based around attacking something--typically real-life people--and making a mockery out of them. Again, I say if Aristophanes were alive now, he'd write for the Capital Steps and he would've have had deja vu during the Iraqi War and it's similarities to the Peloponnesian war. Yes, I should note that Aristophanes was virulently anti-war, well anti-the Peloponnesian war, not so much against the concept of war per se. However while attack is an important part of satire it is not the end-all and be-all part of it. Otherwise pure invective or simple plain cursing and swearing at a person would be considered satire. No, there has to be something more to it, the attack has to be balanced with a sense of humour that way satire doesn't completely wallow in the sea of the mean-spirited.

Another tradition that comes from Aristophanes in to modern satire is the idea of authorial intent. In no other literary genre is authorial intent more out in the open and plainly obvious for everyone to see. Often times the author will speak to us through to work to the readers or audience directly, giving a little smirk, wink, or eyebrow raise for our own benefit. This was actually a formalized part of Old Comedy called the parabasis, and it is here that the author's intent was made clear to the audience, as the Greek chorus would "break the fourth wall" and speak the author's mind directly to the audience. Often times, well at least from Aristophanes' play, we'd get insights into the life of the author, but at the same time, the focus usually was more on the message that the author wanted us to take from the piece. It is from parabasis that the tradition of witty narrators, self-deprecating humour, and breaks in the fourth wall between the world of the story and our own as readers come from. Often satires will play with the notion of characters being self-aware that they're in a story, or will play around with self-awareness in general. As such the satirist will play around with exploring the artificial nature of storytelling.

Cracked.com plays around with the notion of self-awareness

Although comedy derived from satire, I'd argue they've evolved to the point where neither truly exists in the same world, and the only thing similar about them anymore is that they both make us laugh. True comedy as we know it today is about community building, and satire if anything is about community destroying. Satire sees the world as corrupted and in need of a good purge--and it sees itself as the man up to the task to point the rest of us in the right direction. In a lot of ways satire is about wading through the muddy, dirty and disgusting parts of society that would trouble or upset us in a comedy. Comedy would try and laugh it all off as us just "being human", but satire likes to sit with the uncomfortable and demands that you pay attention. Satire typically wants to change the world, probably just as much as some of the best melodrama does. Except satire will try and get to you through your mind and intellect, while melodrama will hit you in an emotional gut wrenching manner.

I hope it's not the swimsuit edition.

As satire likes to focus in on the corrupted part of society, it could thus be said to be about giant slaying as Northrop Frye argues in his essay on the genre. I know, that association probably threw you for a loop, but please hang on for a second. Usually it isn't the giants of romance (although in some special cases it literally is), no it is the self-important fools who think themselves great and grand--like politicians, the clergy, professionals, and other people of "high respect and esteem". The "giants" of their fields, so to speak. This goes back to Aristophanes and his love of taking real life people he knew down a peg or ten. Usually in doing so satire could be said in Frye's terms to be taking an alazon and attempting to reveal that the delusion they have does not reflect any apparent sense of reality. However, as is often the case in satire, the entire world is full of alazons. Satire thus could be said to also concern itself with distinguishing reality from illusion, as well as the theme of deception. A lot of time is spent in satire in distilling "reality" and knocking people into seeing the "world as it is". Realism's existence is thanks in part to satire as well as science.

After Aristophanes' Greek Old Comedy gave way to Menander's Greek New Comedy, the notions of satire weren't again picked up until the early days of the Roman Empire under the quills of Juvenal and Horace. Here is a quote from Horace's The Art of Poetry, which discusses a new idea to crop up in our development of satire, humour of convention:

"Gods should not talk like heroes, nor again

Drink Roman, the only wine that matters.

Impetuous youth like grave and reverend men;
Lady and nurse a different language crave,
Sons of the soil and rovers o'er the wave;
Assyrian, Colchian, Theban, Argive, each
Has his own style, his proper cast of speech.
In painting characters, follow tradition,
Or in inventing be consistent,
If great Achilles figure in the scene,
Make him impatient, fiery, ruthless, keen;
All laws, all covenants let him still disown,
And test his quarrel by the sword alone.
Make Medea all revenge and scorn,
Ino still sad, Ixion still forsworn,
Io, a wanderer still, Orestes still forlorn.
If you would be original, and seek
To frame some character ne'er seen in Greek,
See it be wrought on one consistent plan,
And end the same creation it began." -- Horace

In this short excerpt from Horace, he argues for convention and tradition in character creation, he goes on to argue that it's hard to put an original twist on a story men know so well, but he asks us to maintain conventions for the sake of not confusing one's audience. And the reason I quote this is because Satire is a form of humour extremely dependent on convention. An example given by Northrop Frye that will be mentioned later as well, is the convention of the battered husband and shrewish wife. We conventionally find it funny in a comic strip for a wife to beat her husband with a rolling pin or a frying pan of some sort, but to introduce a comic strip where a husband beats his wife would stop and confuse its readers. One thing we know from convention is funny, the other we're told is a more tragic situation, and so an uneasy feeling would settle on the readers which would kill the satiric mood. Satire does aim to make its audience uncomfortable, but this specific level of discomfort is how one loses readers and audiences. It's a line not to be crossed too often, and when you do, as Horace suggests, be consistent.

=  

One is cute in a weird way, the other has cute bu--

I think I know why we updated this convention...

Similarly if you wish to create a new convention, likewise be consistent. Arguably the minions from Despicable Me have created a new convention that has been emulated in many other children's films and will continue to be so in time to come. However I'd argue they're not so much a new convention as a re-imagining of an older convention of kewpie dolls and cute little cupids (see Disney's Fantasia). Conventions have lives and after living a full one, will die or fade from popularity, and as such every so often will be unexpectedly revitalized by a re-imagining of the convention in a manner that more modern audiences can relate to.

A knight and his washer lady.

So we've talked about attack and humour of convention, the two most vital parts of satire but in order to understand the final part of satire we need to jump ahead in time past the golden age of Romance in the Medieval period to the Renaissance where we arguably see the birth of modern satire with Don Quixote. To look at Don Quixote, one sees an obvious juxtaposition between itself and the Romances it parodies. Most heroes on a quest are young men, Don Quixote is at the senile end of his life. His lady love is a washer woman, the giants he faces are windmills. Don Quixote is an obvious satire of the Medieval Romances. Satire likes to concern itself with parodying Romance quests and epic journeys of sorts. And as such in a satire, episodic adventures, strange encounters, and odd intervals can be inserted for as long as the satirist desires. All of this comes from Don Quixote's influence as a cornerstone of modern literature. Due to this, satire often is seen as the complete opposite of romance. As such as romance was the elite's propaganda, satire can be viewed as the common man's response. In fact the most noted of satirists always seem to to be self-made men from the lower classes or are considered "outsiders" from a lesser ethnicity or nationality, from the lower class Horace to the Irish Jonathan Swift.

Gulliver in Brobdignab where the tables are turned.

Speaking of Jonathan Swift, he adds another element to Satire through Gulliver's Travels, which is a humour based on the fantastic or exaggerated. It's a grotesque based humour, made obvious blatantly obvious by the exaggerated extremes our character is taken to. These exaggerated extremes though never get balanced out for the reader like they would in a comedy, so they remain in their "sick" extremes. The little people of Lilliput will constantly be a war with the Bigenders over petty small individual quarrels like which end of an egg to break first. The giants of Brobdignab might have a better concern for its community at large, but it will overlook and suppress the individuals within its community. Brobdignab may also be free of war, corrupt officials, and greed--but at the same time it doesn't have music, art or modern science. Laputa may finally think of the meaning of the universe, but they'll never appreciate the beauty of a flower. The Academy might go about creating a new perfect world, but they'll have utterly destroyed the old one, and so on and so forth. In fact that's probably the best way to look at satire. Our protagonist has become stuck in a world full of the sick and insane, and in the darkest of satires, the person stuck there doesn't even realize that they too are sick and insane as well.

In Wonderland, everyone's mad. I'm mad, he's mad, you're mad...

The best case example of a satirical "protagonist" getting stuck in a "world of crazy" would probably have to be the two Alice stories: Alice in Wonderland, and its sequel Through the Looking Glass. Through those two novels, and Charles Kingsley's The Water Babies (which satirically makes fun of fairy tales), satire arguably entered the realm of Children's Literature, and as such those novels can be reread as an adult and appreciated on an entirely different level. There are many conventions of satire to be found in Wonderland alone. The most obvious being that of the battered King of Hearts and the overbearing Queen of Hearts--a satirical glance at the balance of power between Queen Victoria and her husband Prince Albert. The other is that the entire world of Wonderland is a world full of loveable eccentrics taken to the extreme of their characters. And all through it, our protagonist Alice makes it through as our lone character of "sanity" in an insane world.

Humour in satire, thanks to Aristophanes, can be more than just conventional,fantastical, grotesque, or poking fun at romance, it usually is quite topical as well. This is why of all the genres, I'd say satire has the hardest time lasting very long, and has to be constantly re-invented. Aristophanes attacked real people he and the rest of Athens knew, Cervantes parodied romance novels and stories that all of Spain had grown up reading, and Swift attacked the hypocrisies of his own society mercilessly. In each case though they were dealing with a subject that their readers already came to the table knowing quite well--and if we wish to understand just as much as they did, we have to do our own "studying" of the materials. However I would argue that the best satires, while using topical humour manage to find a way to transcend the topicality either by having the insanity it explores be SO grotesque and extreme that it transcends its specific time (Gulliver's Travels and the Alice stories fit here) or by simultaneously telling its audience what to expect to happen by meta-theatrically having the protagonist "explain the rules". Don Quixote for example, when asked to pay for his inn bill, proclaims that no knight ever has a concern for money and they're provided hospitality without any expectation of repayment. In the modern horror film satire Scream, a character literally explains "the rules" of old horror films.

Satire served up with a healthy dose of beer and teen torture, please.

While satire is quite topical in its humour, and thus prone to making fun of particular individuals, one can find a few common characters that belong to it that have now become prolific favourites.

Some common characters of satire:



The Last Man of Common Sense

Wait till he pulls out his gun in five, four, three, tw--BANG!

This character is one--typically with rural associations--who "cuts through bull shit" like a knife, reducing things to simple common sense to be weighed and evaluated. The character, though having a long history of existence, has come to be adopted by Americans of the Appalachian persuasion as their go-to source for entertainment and emulation. As such we have the reason for why Larry the Cable Guy exists. Jethro Gibbs from NCIS is another example. For a more refined American variation, see the suburban Mid-West's version with the Nostalgia Critic (as pictured), and for an even more refined variation, the Northeastern urbane Nostalgia Chick. The more urbane a culture this character comes from the more refined this type of character will become. I must say though that this is clearly the typical satiric character of choice for most Americans--whether they be rural or urbane, which as a nation suggests a more rural-based culture than most developed nations. Their sense of humour comes from wading through the excess wasteland that they see themselves in, and tearing it to shreds thus reducing it to its simplest elements to properly beat or kick to death. There is often something very violent about this character, for they usually see violence as the only way to "knock any kind of sense" into the world. Typically they see themselves as one of the last survivors of good common sense in a world run mad with idiocy. They only have common sense though in the lightest of satires. The darker a satire gets, the more common sense will be doubted as having any meaning and the crazier this individual will become until there's no distinguishing him or her from the rest of the insane society. In the darkest of satires, this individual is also an alazon figure who's worst offence is thinking he can save a society destined to go to hell in a hand basket by beating it into submission.

The Loveable Eccentric

Everyone loves Abby, that could be a sitcom, right?

Typically this character is female, but not always. There is usually something "off beat" or "quirky" about this type of character. And we tend to love them as there's some sense of "childishness" that lingers about them, but doesn't completely hamper them from interacting with the rest of the world in an adult manner. The satire of these types tends to stem from the fact that such a character of such professional knowledge or power can be so childishly eccentric. They add a diversity to the world they inhabit, breaking minor rules or conventions of that society that don't really matter, and by doing so allow us to discern the bull shit rules that need to be broken, and the common sense rules that need to be enforced. They're a living oxymoron that we love to see. These character types can only exist in the realm of satire where common sense can still be used as a measure of sanity. Once common sense is doubted these loveable eccentrics begin to disappear, and in the darkest of satires there's nothing at all loveable about them. While there are many examples of this type of character, arguably the best well-known one currently is Abby from NCIS, as pictured above who is a goth girl forensic scientist with a personality so sweet and loving she's the fan favourite of the show. See also Luna Lovegood from the Harry Potter series. For a more classic example see Betsy Trotwood from David Copperfield.


The Delusional Giant

Well isn't this rather obvious...

As mentioned earlier this kind of character is an Alazon figure who unlike the Alazons of comedy isn't self-deceived so much as they have an agenda to deceive the rest of society into thinking that they're greater than they really are. This is the classic "Emperor's New Clothes" situation, but usually with a darker twist that the Emperor knows he doesn't have any clothes on, but wants to make everyone else think he does. There are usually many delusional giants in a satire and they are often to be found in the highest positions of power and prominence.


The Battered Husband & Shrewish Wife

Feminists, if you want to change society, get rid of this...  OW! Yes, mistress...

This type of character is a duo where you don't see one without the other. It's essentially a Punch and Judy show, except Punch has no recourse to a more dominating Judy. This is a traditional satiric take on "traditional marriages" where the inherent laughter comes from a man being so frying pan and rolling pin beaten he is unable to assert his societally expected male dominance over the women in his life. In modern times one can see something of its existence still in comic strips like Hagar the Horrible or in the related descendent of the Overbearing Mother and Momma's Boy pairing.

Now all that is fine and dandy, but how does it all interact with our society? Well, currently since about WWI or so we've been living in a "golden age" of Satire, where everything is smeared with a satiric touch from pornography to children's literature. Sure, in the 1950s and on into the 1960s there was a bit of a backlash to that mindset (thanks to Disney and the dewy-eyed Silent Generation), but come the 1970s our satirical outlook was more firmly fixed than ever--one eyebrow raise at a time. Satire was and always will be a genre about mercilessly attacking a sick society and tearing it down. By doing so the satirists attempt to show what is wrong with "us" so that we as an audience might know what to change. In a way it's like House (people still watch that show, right?), where the satirist is an expert at diagnosing the sick. Now as has been mentioned previously, although satire is brilliant at diagnosing the sick, that's just about all it does. It doesn't try to heal the sick like a comedy would, instead it's the little kid in the parade pointing out the Emperor has no clothes on, and it's never seen or heard from again. Satire gives us the diagnosis, but it leaves the cure up to us--typically Satire is too cynical and too suspicious of cure-alls and those who proclaim to have the answer to everything, which is probably why it doesn't bother trying to heal society. The satirist figures letting you know what the problem is is enough, and oh, by the way, you're welcome. You'll have to figure out the rest from here on out, the satirist's job is done. And that's just in the lightest of satires, in the darkest of the dark satires--there's just pure nihilism with absolutely no hope of reforming anything and so we all might as well enjoy the ride to hell while it lasts.

Satire as a genre is how we attack parts of our society which are seen as sick and are most likely incurable. Sometimes through common sense we hope to violently purge the idiots who now control our society, and in other cases merely thinking you can cure it at all is a ridiculous notion to hold on to. Which makes me wonder if the darker satires really don't have a point? Perhaps we as a society are sick and going to hell in hand basket and there's nothing we can do about it. And if that's the destination, at least we can laugh about it on the way there.

~LCC

LCC Review: The First Thing We Do...

The First Thing We Do..., is the beginning of a quote from Henry VI Part Two by Shakespeare which ends with: let's kill all the lawyers. As such this mystery and thriller is about a murder killing all the scumbag lawyers who get guilty people off on their charges. It follows two police detectives as they go about trying to solve the mystery, and as such this novel has a feeling of Law & Order, Agatha Christie, and CSI mixed all into one.

I was given a copy of this book not too long ago by a friend who wanted my opinion on it. Honestly I can say it was a well-written thriller. Bertram Gibbs truly understands the origins of the thriller genre in comedy and brings that aspect to life especially in the varied and intriguing characters we meet.

I especially loved all the characters that were unusually unique or inversions of typical stereotypes. The drug-dealer who dresses nicely and listens to classical music being one example of many laugh-out-loud characters who are not just ridiculous but at the same time very believably human. It's that combination of humanity and the ridiculous that Bertram Gibbs truly knows how to blend perfectly well.In terms of genre, it knows how to employ its genre quite well and it follows all the rules of it while at the same time giving it its own twists and spins on it as well as incorporating the ever popular world of television cops. In the foreword Mr. Gibbs mentions he was inspired to write this story after seeing too many Law & Order type shows where the scumbag lawyer gets the clearly guilty guy off on a technicality of some sort and I can quite easily believe him. As a thriller/detective/mystery story, it belongs to the world view of Comedy--only it's Comedy that's so ironic that the only way to bring a community that is so self-interested, so disparate, and so degenerate together that it has to find a way to cast out the worst person of the bunch--and who's the worst person? The killer, whoever we determine him to be. It's in this stage of Comedy that it begins to reflect the world of Tragedy, except if this were an actual Tragedy we'd be looking at things from the killer's perspective. Instead we look at it from the defender of the community's perspective, the last person who can cajole some rag-tag sense of order and shared purpose together in a Comedic world that has become increasingly individualized. More will be talked on length about this in the What Makes Us Laugh series when it comes time to talk about Thrillers/Detective Stories/Mysteries.

It’s a good novel, though at times it can perhaps dwell a little too much in its own melodrama and angst. The novel starts strong and fresh in the beginning, but around the point where the author has to start providing us with a suspect to the crimes the novel quickly starts becoming predictable in terms of plot and action—but never motive. The author keeps any hints at motive as a jealous secret until the big reveal scene.

Some parts felt a tad phoned in in places (especially with the whole “I loved D____ in secret all along” part). The story itself is great, but the ending isn't as finely polished as the beginning is. It's like Mr. Gibbs took more relish in creatively killing off the scumbag lawyers and less so in bringing his killer to justice. Personally I don't blame him if he did feel that way, but it does dampen the novel and lowers my score. The beginning deserves a five, but the ending more a three, so I have averaged my score out to a four.

Overall it's a good read with many memorable characters to say the least. Pick it up if you have a chance.

It's a historical fact that nobody likes lawyers apparently.

~LCC

What Makes Us Laugh -- Part Two: Romantic Comedies, when Opposites Attract

I wonder what the dog is thinking...

My apologies on getting this up a day later than promised, but the best laid plans go to waste and all that jazz.  But anyway here's this week's theoretical post.

I mentioned in our last segment (Part One) in the What Makes Us Laugh series that Comedies are primarily about the sick becoming healthy again. No more is this so true than the genre of the Romantic Comedy where you have not just one sick person but two sick people--who by interacting with one another heal themselves into a healthy, balanced whole. Generally Romantic Comedies are that simple, two "sick" personalities make each other "better" and more "balanced". This is especially true of the good Romantic Comedies of today, but it wasn't always the case.

Romantic Comedies are often critiqued as "chick flicks" but I'd argue that in a lot of Romantic Comedies you could never find a stronger difference between the sexes. Men are typically manly men's men in Romantic Comedies and women are typically whatever the current definition of womanly virtues. And this dichotomy is persistent throughout most of Romantic Comedies, with the exception of a few modern films where the man is made less of a man's man and the love interest might be a guy more obsessed with technology than his physical prowess--still a manly obsession, but it is still considered less manly on the scale of manliness all men hold themselves up to. Yes girls, such a scale exists, just like the scale of femininity exists for you. ;-)

She's leaving him.

One of my personal favourite things about Romantic Comedies is that it blends two things together quite nicely. It blends in the Comedic formula of usually being about two people who fall in love and their struggle to be together. However it takes something from the genre of Romance--which will be discussed further in another essay--which I'll call here the "lost love principle". Romance typically is about love AFTER marriage (along with many other things) when it decides to focus on love as a subject manner. And as such Romance typically deals with the subject of rekindling love that has either faded or been lost. Romantic Comedies take this principle and try and fit that pattern in the pre-marital stages that Romantic Comedies typically live in. And as such the formula which is industry standard came into existence: Boy gets Girl, Boy loses Girl, Boy gets Girl. How he loses her is usually due to some truth about him being revealed (very often the situation of "The Liar Revealed" occurs here) or the misunderstanding blows up the relationship at this moment, etc. Somehow the relationship will be put into doubt and the two characters will learn that they miss and truly love and appreciate the other.

My second favourite thing about Romantic Comedies, is that it typically keeps the wacky and quirky character list from comedy proper, thus prompting some notable and memorable side-characters who tend to appear in Romantic Comedies, that truly entertain in their own way and sometimes, but not always, they get their own "partner" so to speak. Generally these characters are there to round out the world and provide for us the sense that the Romantic Comedy is inhabited by intriguing and notable characters. Often times they'll attempt to help the protagonists in their lover match, but this isn't always the case.

Commedia costuming.

What about the history of the Romantic Comedy, where did it begin? Well back in Renaissance Italy when travelling theatre troupes performed small improvised mask shows of Commedia dell'arte from town to town, there was such a thing as tropes. These tropes were common characters that were found in most of these improvised scenarios. One of the most central of these characters being the Innamorati, aka the lovers. It should be noted that the "masks" for the Innamorati, was typically lacking. They were the only characters who typically went without a mask of some sort. The lovers main purpose in the improvised scenario is to be in love, and to throw childish tantrums whenever separated, and having to use a clever slave or tricky servant to serve as go-between messengers. The entire point of the Commedia scenario usually was to find a way to keep the lovers separated until the end. This tradition extends back to Roman Comedy and Greek New Comedy, but the Renaissance takes an interesting turn on the entire affair in their plays. The most influential being that of William Shakespeare.

Ol' Billy Shakes.

Now I know what the men in the readership are thinking, Shakespeare created the Romantic Comedy? He created chick flicks?! Well, not exactly him alone, but later playwrights and authors chose him as the inspiration for their works, which then became our modern day Romantic Comedies, but even so, Shakespeare and his contemporaries did lay the groundwork, it's just later people from the 19th Century chose to put Shakespeare on a pedestal in terms of influence.

The two earliest Shakespeare plays that one could argue are Romantic Comedies are:

Taming of the Shrew
Much Ado about Nothing

Now I know I'm offending all the women in the readership with the first choice but hear me out. Shakespeare draws from the Commedia dell'arte tropes, but then he twists them. Usually there's only one pair of lovers, who to be perfectly honest are very bland characters. Shakespeare instead in both plays provides TWO sets of lovers. One set is generally the traditional childish lovers who love to be in love that can be found, and then you have what I lovingly call the "sick pair". And if you view Shakespeare as experimenting and toying with the conventions of his time, you can see a clear evolution from one to the next in the above two plays. As such Taming of the Shrew is an early experiment that like most early experiments is ground breaking but not exactly the perfected formula so to speak. But I'm getting a little ahead of myself. Shakespeare and his contemporaries played around with the traditional formula by adding additional love interest couples. This wasn't unheard of in Commedia dell'arte as the examples of Arlecchino and Columbina & Pierrot and Pierrette give. however in those cases the couples are various "servants", with the love match between Arlecchino and Columbina being more often about lust & the one between Pierrot and Pierrette the adoration of finding one's sensitive soul mate. What Shakespeare and his contemporaries do is provide what I'd essentially call a rival couple of equal status to the Innamorati. This "rival couple" are typically at odds with one another, and have a lot more problems and issues. Typically they're a bit more cynical of life and love and more practical in how they dispense their heart. As such we typically congregate around them as a couple more than we do the Innamorati equivalents--seeing them as "too young, too naive, and too self-absorbed" to consider our central characters when we read his plays, and that's because Shakespeare and his contemporaries are indeed moving away from the Innamorati and creating their own problematic characters.

Let's look at Taming of the Shrew for a moment. What most people forget is that the play proper is a play performed by a group of travelling actors for a drunken slob named Christopher Sly who's being made fool of by a Lord into thinking he's a Lord. Which means that the characters of the play proper are literally Shakespeare's interpretation of a Commedia dell'arte type play. Using Commedia dell'arte to analyse the play proper briefly, Bianca and Lucentio are easily our Innamorati. Baptista is our father figure who stands in the way of Bianca and Lucentio marrying easily, thus requiring Lucentio to trade places with his Arlecchino-like servant Tranio in order to sneak into Baptista's house under the guise of a servant scholar to woo Bianca. Other suitors for Bianca's hand in marriage fill out the Pantaloon and Braggart roles. However Sheakespeare throws a curve ball at us by including Katherina and Petrucchio who are unlike any characters typically involved in a Commedia dell'arte show. The closest you could argue that they come would be a Punch and Judy puppet show. But even that's limited as they don't stay like that for the entirety of the play. Katherina is arguably the "sick man" of the play. She's the Shrew--which was an archetype all its own in Late Medieval culture, first associated with men and then later with women come the beginning of the Renaissance. And the fact that the archetype was originally associated with men is a factor that should be kept in mind when viewing the play and trying to understand the character of Petrucchio. Petrucchio is thus the "healing" character who "heals" the sick Katherina of her Shrewishness and wins a wife you'd think, right? Well, this is where Shakespeare again likes to tinker. Petrucchio doesn't so much as "heal" her of her Shrewishness, but simply teaches her how to play more than just one role. Petrucchio himself seems to like to play many roles and mind games and recognizes the same ability in Katherina (as they have a battle of wits when they first meet that proves that both have sharp minds and like the back and forth they have going for themselves) and I'd argue he teaches her to like the games he plays just as much as he does by teaching her to play more than one part. These two characters are hard-bitten, much more realistic with their thoughts of how the world works and the expectations placed upon them. Even so, these cynics are both rough around the edges and their love match is more about two people running head long into each other to find love than the simple gentle versions we find in later Romantic Comedies. Petrucchio and Katherina dominate the play after their initial meeting and the whole Commedia-esque plot that Lucentio and Bianca have going pales in comparison. And it should be noted that the true Shrew of the play does get tamed and I'll say that the true Shrew is not Katherina. ;-)

Petrucchio and Katherina meet for the first time in this Commedia dell'arte influenced production of  The Taming of the Shrew.

Continuing our Shakespeare period, after the early experimentation that was Shrew, becomes more refined in Much Ado About Nothing. Here Shakespeare gives us a more tempered example of two characters falling in love in Beatrice and Benedick. Here Shakespeare takes the witty give and take that Kate and Petrucchio had in the above video scene and makes it the defining feature of his "rival couple".

Bragnaugh & Thomson as Beatrice and Benedick match wits in this production of Much Ado about Nothing.

The physical comedy of Commedia dell'arte is taken away from our developing genre and we're given witty repartee. It is from Much Ado About Nothing that we have the Renaissance origin of our "arguing couple"--however where modern tastes have returned to making it simply about two people who are opposites and grind on each other's nerves and balance each other out, Shakespeare here makes it a point to say that such behaviour is an act (Shakespeare's constantly pointing out moments in life when people are "acting" and "playing roles" and comedy and courtship are usually where he finds it the most), and that really, underneath all their cynicism and hard-bitten outer edges are two people in love with one another and very much alike, but afraid of getting hurt. They truly here completely outshine our main paring of Hero and Claudio who still play the Innamorati roles.

Austen in her matronly glory.

Romantic Comedy's next influential evolution comes arguably two hundred years later, from author Jane Austen, the unofficial queen of the genre. While she didn't set out to influence the genre, simply tell stories that would entertain her own family and be worthy of publication, she has been chosen by modern audiences to be the most influential person on the genre since Shakespeare. And obviously the most influential of her works on the genre is Pride and Prejudice, in which we finally get the final crucial ingredient to the Romantic Comedy genre: the misunderstanding. While arguably one could say that the "misunderstanding" was present in Much Ado About Nothing, it isn't as vital to the plot as it is here in Pride & Prejudice, where our hero and heroine, Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy, have a bad first impression of each other (the alternative title was First Impressions), which goes on to dominate how they interact with one another for most of the book. Eventually events occur which show each other's true merits and character which cause them to realize that they in fact are perfect for one another, and to scrape the horrible first impression . While the modern 2005 version tried to play up how they are an argumentative couple, thus supporting the modern Rom Com bias towards arguing = love, the fact of the matter is that again like with Beatrice and Benedick before them, it's not who they truly are--it's just a part of their misunderstanding of one another that fades as the novel progresses and both come to love one another and see that they have more alike than they first thought

Elizabeth and Fitzwilliam talk and tease as they dance.

It is also here that we find the idea of "opposites attract" that crops up probably for the first time arguably. Both Kate and Petruchio & Beatrice and Benedick were more alike than unalike--but it's here with Elizabeth & Fitzwilliam (yes that's his first name) that we get the lively and gregarious woman partnering with a quiet and reticent man. But even here this division proves to be a false one as Fitzwilliam can be quite gregarious and lively when amongst friends and in an environment he's comfortable in, while Elizabeth can likewise be quiet and reticent when not on her home turf and amongst her family--so to speak. This doesn't preclude that both do have preferences that are differing as Elizabeth speaks her mind when comfortable and Darcy holds his tongue until in private consul, but still they both have more than enough in common for one another, and enough differences to balance each other out without driving each other absolutely crazy like Elizabeth's parents do who are the ultimate example of opposites who've married to find that not enough was there to make the match work well and so have retreated into their own spheres of influence.

Opposites attract like magnets... hmm... perhaps we need a new analogy.

This of course brings me up to modern day where the concept of "opposites attract" has run wild to the point that I have a hard time watching certain modern Romantic Comedies without wondering if the two "lovers" really love one another or that they love arguing with one another. That's not to say that there aren't some really good Romantic Comedies out there today, but too often than not, the relationship gets wheedled down to just the variety of relationship that evolves from the school yard boy pulling the pigtails of the school yard girl. And I have to look around and ask if there is more to love than just that level immaturity in a relationship, or have we redefined our marriage rituals to prescribe that if there isn't this "spark" then that person isn't the "one" that if we don't argue then we're not "truly in love". When did romance become a battlefield? Why do people have to constantly fight? I'm not saying that ALL relationships should be devoid of argument--but expecting there to be this competitive edge in a relationship doesn't always work out for the best. So I truly have to ask, is it healthy to consider "opposites attract" a stand-by policy in romance? Probably not, but we sure do find it full of entertainment gold in Romantic Comedies.

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Next Monday there'll be a surprise theory post, and I'll give you a hint, it's somewhat related to tonight's topic.

Have a good night,

~LCC