The Totally Geeky Guide to The Princess Bride
by MaryAnn Johanson
Smashwords edition
Copyright 2006 by MaryAnn Johanson
First ebook edition copyright 2010 by MaryAnn Johanson
The book is available in print at Amazon (ISBN 978-1-84728-739-7)
Discover other works by MaryAnn Johanson at maryannjohanson.com and Smashwords.com.
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~ ~ ~ ~ ~
for everyone who has ever wondered
why murder by pirates is good
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
introduction
I: “I’m only waiting around to kill you...”
II: “You keep using that word...”
III: “I was eleven years old...”
IV: “She doesn’t get eaten by the eels at this time...”
V: “Have fun storming the castle!”
VI: “It was a fine time for me...”
VII: “Murdered by pirates is good...”
VII (con’t): Murdered by pirates: still good
VIII: “This is true love—you think this happens every day?”
IX: “When I was your age, television was called books.”
easter eggs
“He is a sailor on the pirate ship Revenge...”
Casablanca, or The Princess Refugee
Two men in black walk into a bar...
about the author
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
The Princess Bride has always been with me. I don’t remember the first time I saw the film, though I’m pretty sure I did not see it during its theatrical release and only stumbled across it on video. But I can’t remember a time before The Princess Bride, a time in which I did not have its wit and snark to guide me through life in all its pain. And I can say that life is pain with a smile, nay, a happy-go-lucky grin, because the Man in Black said so right here in this silly, wonderful, perfectly perfect movie. I mean, it’s got everything: fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes, true love, miracles—
But you knew that, didn’t you, and you know, if you’re like me, that I could happily babble on for hours uttering nothing but lines of dialogue from The Princess Bride. If you’re not sure if you’re like me, if you’re not sure if this book is for you, then simply take this easy quiz:
Are you a Princess Bride fanatic?
Who is the sworn enemy of the country of Florin?
A. Rosencranz
B. Guildenstern
C. Guilder
Name the fencing strategy to counter Bonetti’s Defense.
A. Casablanca
B. Copernicus
C. Capoferro
Finish this sentence: Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates are...
A. Morons
B. Dead
C. Philosophers
Where was Fezzik the Giant unemployed when Vizzini hired him?
A. Greenland
B. The WWF
C. Hollywood
To avoid the first Classic Blunder, you should:
A. Never go up against a Sicilian when death is on the line.
B. Never get involved in a land war in Asia.
C. Never utter a line from The Princess Bride unless you want to be spouting quotes all day.
The Princess Bride was written by:
A. William Goldman
B. S. Morgenstern
C. This is a trick question, isn’t it?
Is this a kissing book?
A. Yes
B. No
C. You know, someday you might not mind so much.
ANSWERS
Well, if you don’t know, I’m not going to spoil the movie for you by giving away all the fun. But if you’re thinking, “Hey, why not ask what the three terrors of the Fire Swamp are, or why no one would surrender to the Dread Pirate Westley, or what ‘as you wish’ means, or what interpersonal institution is considered ‘a dweam within a dweam?’” then you already know what kind of fanatic you are. Read on.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
I
“I’m only waiting around to kill you...”
It’s not as if it’s something you do deliberately. No one thinks to herself, “Ah, now’s my chance to test my new pal on his knowledge of The Princess Bride.” It just happens naturally. You’re wishing each other farewell and you say, “Have fun storming the castle!” Or you’re discussing the idiocy of a third party and you say, “That’s one of the classic blunders,” or perhaps, as if to scold that idiot blunderer: “You keep using that word. I don’t think it means what you think it means.”
And then it happens. Your new pal screws up his face in a mystified grimace—he has no idea what you’re talking about. And you, hoping to salvage the situation, prompt him: “You know, The Princess Bride? Inconceivable? Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya? No?”
There are only three possible outcomes at this point. One, your friend says, “Oh, I’ve never seen that.” Which is sad, but it means there’s still some hope for him, and you will have the opportunity to initiate a neophyte into the cinematic equivalent of a not-so-secret secret society. Two, your friend says, “Oh, that. I think I saw that once.” Which is bad, because there’s no such thing as seeing The Princess Bride “once”—if you haven’t seen it so many times that you unconsciously mouth the dialogue along with the action, you haven’t really seen it at all. Three, your friend says, “Oh, that. I never really got that movie.” Which is the point at which you stop calling him friend.
Extreme? Perhaps. But all true worshippers at the altar of the Dread Pirate Westley have done it, have looked askance at someone we thought we knew who suddenly shows himself to be an alien creature beyond our ken. Not having seen The Princess Bride is almost understandable, but not getting it? That indicates a discordance between you and this so-called friend on a level so fundamental that it cannot be overcome. What do you say to someone who isn’t tickled by the concept that being murdered by pirates can be good? How can you ever look such a person in the eye again? Someone I used to know, someone whom I liked and respected, suddenly told me one day that she thought The Princess Bride was “dumb.” I was devastated, not that she had insulted my movie but that I could never see her as quite the same sharp cookie I had before. She had, in my eyes, insulted only herself.
I’m only half kidding. There is a kinship among people who “get” The Princess Bride that isn’t about the movie per se but about sharing a particular outlook on the world, one that does not tolerate bullshit, mundanity, or obviousness. People who “get” The Princess Bride “get” irony and sarcasm. People who “get” The Princess Bride do not suffer fools gladly. People who “get” The Princess Bride long for swashbuckling romantic adventure while simultaneously acknowledging the impossibility of such a dream. To be a Princess Bride fan is more than to be in the grip of mere “fannishness.” It is to be possessed of a deep and abiding feeling that all knowledge and wisdom is to be found in The Princess Bride. It is to be convinced that there is no single moment of human experience for which there is not an appropriate quote from the film... and it is have those quotes spring to mind of their own accord in the course of everyday life. And it is to realize that, as extraordinary and hilarious and perfect as the film is, it is still, in the end, only a movie.
People who “get” The Princess Bride are of that special breed of cynics who are thwarted idealists. Of course there are people who don’t “get” The Princess Bride who aren’t reluctant cynics, who don’t yearn for adventure, who don’t, in fact, sense that the wisdom of humanity is contained within its frames. But it’s impossible to imagine someone who does feel all these things not “getting” The Princess Bride... and the corollary, then, is that anyone who “gets” The Princess Bride is almost certain to share all those qualities and characteristics. Love and appreciation for the movie becomes shorthand for an almost guaranteed simpatico.
There’s never anything malicious or conniving in The Princess Bride Test, because drawing upon the movie for commentary on life, the universe, and everything is reflexive, almost unconscious on the part of any fan of the film. The movie’s philosophy is so attuned to our own that quoting from it is totally natural; in fact, we only ever realize we’re testing a new acquaintance when he or she fails the Test, when his or her response reminds us that it is not normal and natural to lament the reality that there’s not a lot of money in revenge; that most people, if they even bothered to think about such things, would consider the lack of remuneration involved in the revenge business quite obvious.
Obvious, yes, but not the kind of clichéd Hollywood obvious that Princess Bride fans want nothing to do with. It’s a questioning-reality kind of obvious, an über obvious that refuses to take anything for granted, an all-seeing obvious that points out the strings tugging at the puppet theater of the world. Bride holds up for gentle ridicule the pretense of movies as well as our own eagerness to be fooled by them; it pokes at the relationship between storyteller and audience in order to unravel the mystery of why we give ourselves over to fantasy; it celebrates the joy of story while it simultaneously pulls out the supports that hold up fiction.
There’s a word for people who not only appreciate but seek out mere entertainments that undermine social and cultural preconceptions. There’s a word for people who think about things that most people take so much for granted that they don’t even realize they’re not thinking about them. And that word is “geek.”
= = = =
The simple truth is that The Princess Bride is one of those films that caught me at a pivotal moment in my moviegoing life, when watching something infused with the sheer bliss of fantasy made it easy to love what movies could offer. It became second only to Monty Python and that other early Rob Reiner film, This Is Spinal Tap, among my cohort group as quote fodder.
—Scott Renshaw, film critic and entertainment editor, Salt Lake City Weekly
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
II
Film geek. Fantasy geek. Fencing geek. One of those terms likely applies to you. Whatever draws you to The Princess Bride, chances are it’s operating on a high level of pleasant, recreational obsessiveness—you’re consumed by the escapism of movies; you’re in love with fanciful stories about pseudomedieval realms; you know every fencing move, own your own épée, and can’t believe that all movies don’t get swordplay this perfectly perfect; maybe all of the above. That’s fine, and quite normal—there is no need to see a doctor; mind-pacifying pharmaceuticals are not called for. But I know that you were moved to pick up this book in a kind of fit of self-deprecating, ironically detached desperation, frantic to figure out just why this wonderful, glorious, silly film has such a hold over you. And I know this because 1) If you don’t already have a self-deprecating, ironically detached sense of humor, you wouldn’t be in the thrall of The Princess Bride, and 2) People who aren’t obsessed with movies, for whatever reason, do not read self-deprecating, ironically detached but hopefully humorous book-length essays about them.
Look, you’re a geek. It’s okay. Take a deep breath.
Geek. Say it out loud: Geek.
Some people, even those who would call themselves geeks, consider it a dirty word. Others consider it derogatory. It should be neither. “Geek” is the new “intellectual,” only a whole lot less stuffy, and a whole lot more fun: geeks apply the thinkiness of intellectualism to pop culture, and we’re making smarts cool while we’re also redeeming our own love of the objects of our obsessions. Geeks are no mere passive watchers of television or thoughtless consumers of film. Geeks are active participants in pop culture, absorbing it, analyzing it, regurgitating it as commentary on the larger culture.
And there couldn’t be a better example of the conectedness with and engaged relationship to pop culture than the cult of The Princess Bride. The cult of The Princess Bride may well have been, in retrospect, inevitable... particularly since it came along at precisely the right time to take advantage of a new technology that was about to change the movie industry—and movie fandom—forever.
See, test screenings prior to the film’s release had shown that college kids were likely to be its biggest audience, but poor marketing ensured that they never got the word that this was a movie not to miss. And so, when the film opened in the United States on nine screens in September 1987 after a few film festival screenings worldwide, it enjoyed only modest box office and critical success. The first real following for Bride was built—slowly but certainly—on the word of mouth that spread as the film’s key audience finally caught up with it after its VHS release.
And the VCR had only just arrived as a must-have home-entertainment gadget—by 1988, 60 percent of U.S. households had at least one. Geek culture would never have developed as it has without the VCR. When you can view movies and television shows multiple times on any schedule, it qualitatively changes how you react to them: You feel their rhythms more acutely when numerous viewings invariably lead to memorization of its dialogue; you almost can’t help but begin to think about the characters and motifs and themes in a more profound way. The Princess Bride wouldn’t be the touchstone that it is without this new way of not just viewing but absorbing movies.
Video, and now DVD, allows Bride—and all movies that have engendered devoted followings—to be approached less like a transitory experience that washes over you and then is finished, and more like a work of literature that can be examined and considered from all angles. You can put down a book and ponder what you’ve read so far before you continue. You can jump back to earlier chapters in a book and clarify some point of plot or character. You can reread your favorite bits in a book out of order, or even jump to the finale (if you must) and find out how it all ends. And with home video, we lovers of film could do all this with a movie.
But if there was suddenly new technology available that allowed viewers to dissect and deconstruct pop culture, that did not automatically mean that every film was worth dissecting and deconstructing. Why The Princess Bride? Why not, say, the Kevin Costner thriller No Way Out, which was released a month before Bride and pulled in about the same amount of cash at the box office, indicating a similar degree of approval from the moviegoing audience? What aspects of the film make it so cult-lovable in the first place?
It starts, I think, with a golden age...
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
III
Science fiction editor and critic David Hartwell has said that he believes that the golden age of science fiction is not the 1930s or the 1950s but... 12. The best or most successful or most worthy works of the fantastic, he suggests, are not the products of a particular decade or of a certain literary movement but those we read at the moment when our sense of wonder is at a peak; the imagination is captured more by our state of mind than as a result of the supposed classicness of what we’re reading.
Now, most people you’ll meet who profess to Princess Bride worship will likely have been somewhat older than 12 when they first saw the film—I certainly was in my 20s before I caught up with it. It’s true, though, that many of those who are drawn to Bride, regardless of when they first experienced it, will have had their little minds warped at that vulnerable pubescent moment, the impact of which is lifelong. You never really stop being drawn to this kind of stuff once you’re in its thrall. But for those who failed to have that transcendent childhood experience, there’s an element of the film that allows anyone, no matter how old, to become a kid again at the precise critical age that will allow the movie to rocket its way directly to the imagination center of the brain. And that is the framing story around the faux medieval adventure, of the modern grandfather (played by Peter Falk) reading the “good parts” version of “S. Morgenstern”’s “classic” “novel” The Princess Bride to his grandson (played by Fred Savage).
The Grandson’s situation alone is enough to slam anyone who grew up in America in the second half of the twentieth century right back to powerless childhood—Savage, in the retrospective documentary “As You Wish” on the Special Edition DVD of the film, describes his characters as an “everykid,” and he is. His plight is one that we all appreciate with a groan of recognition: he’s stuck in bed, too sick to go to school or outside to play but not so sick that he doesn’t need diversion. He’s well enough to be bored, and the video baseball game he’s playing isn’t doing it: the inelegant game may have been the state of the art when the film was made, and hence the height of possible distraction for the Grandson, but today, two decades later, its clunkiness only serves as an even more potent reminder that high-tech toys are no substitute for deceptively simple storytelling.
Not that the Grandson realizes this at first; his resistance to being read to—from a book—and his gradual giving of himself over to the power of the written word is more than mere humor recalling our own childhood reluctance to sample new experiences... though that is indeed even funnier from the perspective of comparatively more sophisticated adulthood, which knows that many of the things we once found icky and boring and stupid are now some of the best things life has to offer.
But that’s also a perfect metaphor for the resistance some moviegoers might feel toward quote-unquote fantasy if they weren’t fortunate enough to be exposed to such things at the proper age. Rodents of Unusual Size and Miracle Pills and the like—there are, I’ve heard tell, otherwise perfectly pleasant people who are unable to buy the reality of such things, and so avoid movies about them. And the conceit that we are being read to—for we are, too, along with the Grandson—is a way to overcome such reluctance to trust to imagination.
Where other films typically posit even the most absurd things as “real” (within the world of the film)—and ask us to accept without question invading aliens, tiny hobbits, whatever—here the whole medieval fantasy story and all its attendant absurdities are self-consciously fake, are “only” a story. The structure of the film adds a level of remove that invites—even demands—that we not “believe” a word of it... or believe as much or as little as we care to.
The Grandson? He has no tolerance for the “kissing” stuff, as the Grandfather begins to read, and his disdain shapes our anticipation of what we’re about to see: we join the Grandson in poo-pooing the romance (at least at first) and demand action, excitement, swordfighting, murder by pirates! It apes the approach many moviegoers—particularly the young and impatient audience that action/adventure films are typically aimed at—take to watching movies: We don’t want to watch the slow setting-up stuff that lots of movies feel the need to throw at us before things starts blowing up (metaphorically, in the case of Bride), we want to get right to the good stuff! What happens as a result is that Bride is as much about how we watch movies as it is a movie itself.
= = = =
We identify first not with Westley or Buttercup, but with the boy in bed—stepping back into childhood, that time when disbelief was easier to suspend—and so are seduced by the story, drawn into the intrigue and adventure, with an imagination automatically prepared to accept the “Cliffs of Insanity” as a real place—even as our “knowing” adult self smiles at the irony.
—Stephen Gerringer, Campbellian folklorist and “Practical Campbell” columnist for the Joseph Campbell Foundation, in an interview with the author
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
IV
“She doesn’t get eaten by the eels at this time...”
You almost cannot talk about The Princess Bride without winking. The whole thing is a giant put-on... which all movies are, of course. The difference is that this film is constantly reminding us that it’s all a sham, a fake. Usually, that’s something you want to forget—the viewer wants to get lost in a film, not be told that it’s a joke at our expense. But in making us very consciously aware of the mechanisms by which movies entertain us, Bride ends up entertaining us even more, surprising us in a way that few movies even dare attempt.
It’s like this. The ironic quotation marks I used before—“classic,” “novel,” etc.—were demanded because, as all true fans of the film know, “S. Morgenstern’s The Princess Bride” is an invention of screenwriter William Goldman. This conceit, though, of the film being a “good parts” abridgement of a novel you’ve never heard is so powerfully effective that a casual fan of the film—if such a creature exists—would be forgiven for thinking the book really does exist... that is, that S. Morgenstern was a genuine novelist from a real country called Florin who wrote an actual book called The Princess Bride that William Goldman did, in fact, abridge and which was then adapted for film. Which is not the case at all: Goldman wrote the novel that purports to be an abridgement of Morgenstern, it was published in 1973, and no book version of The Princess Bride exists except Goldman’s. Hell, I know that, but I would swear to the Impressive Clergyman that I once walked into a used-book store in a little fishing village on Long Island and saw there on a dusty shelf a vintage copy of the Morgenstern novel. Why I didn’t buy it, I can’t say, except that this entire experience must have been a figment of my iocane-addled brain. There is no other explanation.
Or is there? Maybe the Morgenstern does exist, and Goldman has pulled a triple-cross on us, convincing us to buy the book as real in that suspension-of-disbelief way we approach movies, but then saying, “Oh no, it’s just a joke,” all the while secretly holding this actual, old, out-of-print and impossible-to-find novel in reserve to be revealed upon his death, or something equally dramatic. I don’t really believe this, of course—it’s all Goldman’s lark. Or is it? It would certainly match the delicious tricksiness of the film that was adapted from Goldman’s novel, a film that plays with the conventions not just of filmmaking but of storytelling itself, undercutting the kind of suspense we expect from movies, undercutting the very necessity of the suspension of disbelief required to appreciate and enjoy almost any story. It seems contradictory to say that perhaps one of the most beloved films of the last twenty years—if not in the whole century-plus of film—succeeds partly because it does precisely what a movie should not do: constantly nudges us, inviting us to laugh along with it, in love with its own jape. The movie can’t help snickering at its own cleverness, and inviting us to snicker too.
Goldman is constantly reminding us though his script that what we are watching is a Movie... and he never lets us forget that we are consumers of a product designed to elicit certain reactions in us. When, for instance, Princess Buttercup is in great danger, seemingly, of being eaten by the Shrieking Eels, the logical part of our moviegoing brains knows that she will be fine, she’ll be safe—she has to be safe, because she is a major character in this story, and her story has not yet resolved itself in any way that satisfies what we unconsciously understand are the demands of storytelling: she must be reunited with Westley, her true love, or she must fail to be reunited with him through some action or fault of her own: dumb circumstance may rule real life, but it violates the conventions of effective storytelling. If we cannot take some lesson from Buttercup’s travails to apply to our own lives, there is no point to her tale, and we simply don’t know enough about her yet to draw any conclusions from her story. There would be no reason for her story to exist if it ended here.
So we know she is fine; her safety is absolutely assured. But we’re supposed to pretend we don’t know—it’s part of the unspoken contract between storyteller and audience: if the storyteller ensures that his story is gripping enough, the audience will play along. The real trick is this: When the storyteller is very good, the audience doesn’t even know it’s playing along: the audience fools itself into thinking it feels genuine suspense. And that’s what happens with the Shrieking Eels: anticipation of an attack and anxiety over Buttercup’s fate builds in such a way that we forget to remember that we have no reason to worry about her safety...
And then it’s all simply sliced away by the Grandfather/narrator’s line “She doesn’t get eaten by the eels at this time.” It’s an involuntary laugh that most viewers bark out at this point, even after the fiftieth viewing: Movies just aren’t supposed to do this. Movies aren’t supposed to subvert their own potency this way. We were—like the Grandson, scrunching up his bedsheets in his fists in a paroxysm of tension—actually tense, afraid for Buttercup, because the emotional power of the moment trumps any sense of the logical that tells us not to worry, and our laugh is like the Grandson’s astonished “What?!”
In a movie full of uniquely memorable elements (exciting duels, a rhyming giant, the Pit of Despair, Cliffs of Insanity, and more), this single line—“She doesn’t get eaten by the eels at this time”—may be the one that defines the curious appeal of The Princess Bride. In “As You Wish,” director Rob Reiner calls his film “a celebration of storytelling”... but the truly odd thing is that the film celebrates storytelling by deliberately and with comic aforethought pointing out how artificial storytelling is—and yet, at the same time, it is so effective an example of storytelling that even constant reminders that what we are being presented is fake cannot undermine it. If Bride celebrates anything, it is our supreme willingness to be fooled in the name of entertainment, our deep desire to give ourselves over to the fantasy of fiction.
Bride is full of bits like this one, bits that defy the very essence of effective storytelling, bits that tweak the metaphoric nose of audience expectations. But because this scene embodies the very spirit of Bride’s weirdness and humor, it’s no wonder that it is the line “She doesn’t get eaten by the eels at this time” and the Grandson’s shocked response that prompts Reiner, in his commentary on the Special Edition DVD, to say:
People said, “You can’t break away from the film like this. People will lose the thread of the story. They won’t be able to get reinvolved.” I said, “No, I think it’s just gonna make people get more involved.”...
It’s easy to see how such a sharp divergence from what audiences anticipate from a film could prompt nervous jitters among studio executives (who are undoubtedly the “people” Reiner is referring to)—not only because execs fear that audiences really will be turned off by something too bizarre but because studios simply don’t know how to market films that defy expectations. The marketing of a film is all about setting up expectations and then fulfilling those expectations, about offering hints about which particular storytelling tropes will be trotted out in the film’s story. Bride trots out tropes, sure... but then it smashes them. (Watch the original theatrical trailer for Bride—it’s on the DVD. It’s confused and confusing, and whoever cut it clearly hasn’t the foggiest idea what the formula is for selling a movie about undercutting movie formulas. It may be the single worst trailer in the history of cinema.)
Screenwriter William Goldman, in his commentary on the Special Edition DVD, notes ironically that because the film managed to overcome its poor marketing to become such a cult favorite today, now all he hears from Hollywood powers that be is “I want something like Princess Bride.” That we very rarely ever see something that even approaches the triumph of Bride is a testament to how very difficult it is to create a story that can overcome our skepticism, even as eager as we are to be fooled by a pretense and fakery. It must be said again: that Bride manages this even while never ceasing to hit us about the head with its own falseness is astonishing. It’s part of why the movie never fails to tickle, even upon the umpteenth viewing: because our sense of what’s right and appropriate and proper in the structure of a story never changes—it’s almost as if we forget to remember that the Grandfather is going to undercut the suspense we were enjoying over Buttercup’s fate.
And there’s more irony yet, for us Bride fans. While we forget to remember everything we know about cinematic storytelling while watching Bride, our love of Bride’s clever self-awareness has ruined us for lots of other, less obviously self-aware films.
= = = =
I thought the movie was going to be fabulous and wonderful and very popular. I thought it was going to be a big hit. And oddly enough, it wasn’t when it first came out, because I think the studio didn’t really know how to market it. They didn’t know to market it as a romance, a romantic comedy, a comedy, or an adventure, and the fact is that it’s all of those things.
—actor Chris Sarandon, aka “Prince Humperdinck,” in an interview with the author
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
V
“Have fun storming the castle!”