Response to The Princess Bride

I came to The Princess Bride first as a reader, seven years after it was published (1973). As a first-year student in college, I loved the book. It was the outstanding contribution to my life of my second roommate (that or first exposing me to the Clash's London Calling). Later, in graduate school, I came to understand more of why I had so loved William Goldman's novel. It was this concept called "postmodernism" or, more precisely, metafiction, a form of fiction that calls attention to its own status as fiction. In metafictional novels, there are always two stories going on: the story within the narrative and the story of the narratives telling, into which the author often plants disruptions, including visits from a fictional stand-in for the author (to name three, John Fowles in The French Lieutenant's Woman, Ronald Sukenick in Up, and Kurt Vonnegut in The Breakfast of Champions).

From just the two-page excerpt I distributed in class, you can see some of the novel's metafictional elements. Although it's Goldman's novel, it pretends to be an edited version of "S. Morgenstern's Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure : The 'Good Parts' Version, Abridged." The editorial asides in the original hardcover edition were printed in red ink, changed to italics when the book hit paperback and again when it was reissued in the wake of the movie's success in 1987. More broadly, the novel invokes the genre of the fairy tale and tweaks the genre, mocks it but also reinforces it. Goldman as editor skips portions of the Morgenstern original because they are too boring, he says, because they get in the way of the story and favor history and satire over narrative. In the novel, Goldman's father omitted those portions of the Morgenstern text that denied the fairy tale, as Goldman himself declares himself to be doing in presenting this abridgement to us.

In the film version of the novel, it is the sick grandson who steps in to act as interrupter whenever the story goes off the proper fairy tale course (e.g., his "Hold it, hold it" when Westley dies). What we don't get in the film version is the summary of what's being omitted. For example, in the Goldman novel, the narrator/author explains that Morgenstern devoted dozens of pages to Buttercup getting dressed for the wedding, thereby to mock the vanity of the aristocracy of Guilder (or Florin, I can't recall which). It's also a given that lots of details from the novel get truncated in the film version. Inigogives a summary of his life quest before his clifftop sword fight with Westley, a story that gets several pages of treatment in the novel.

I suppose I prefer the novel for its details and texture, for its play with language that doesn't come through as often in the film (read the beginning of the tale itself sometime and its ranking of most beautiful women in the world as Buttercup matures--marvelous). Still, there are some things the movie version does that the novel couldn't. The first and most immediate is the action: the chase, the fireswamp, the multiple fights. There's a swordfight in the novel, for example, and it has the same left-handed double switch that the movie does. But the novel can't replicate the movement, the thrusts, the athleticism that the film presents. It's simply beyond the medium of words.

The book uses words that have been used before (that's a given), but the actors that we have seen before heighten our reaction (well, mine) to the film. I can't see Fred Savage as the grandson and not think of The Wonder Years * or see Andre the Giant and not think of professional wrestling or see Peter Falk and fail to think of Columbo, casting decisions the film seems completely aware of. This is one of the qualities of movies: that in casting familiar actors in certain roles, directors bring to mind the other roles the actors have played. The evil Prince Humperdinck, for example, once played a rapist in a Margaux Hemingway movie (Lipstick) many years ago.

The book and the novel both depend upon audiences that know the conventions of the fairy tale (and the action film): the ultimate conquest of good over evil, the marriage of the two intended lovers whose love path is only ever temporarily thwarted. That's why both book and film feature an interrupting agent--the "author" in the novel, the grandson in the film. Rob Reiner's decision to cast as hero and heroine, Westley and Buttercup, two actors who didn't have a screen past seems as deliberate as his choice to put Christopher Guest into the Count Rugen role (adding a comic element for those who've seen This is Spinal Tap). Whereas Falk brings to his role my knowledge of his Columbo days, since The Princess Bride was her first film, Robin Wright brings nothing but her beauty and ability to the role of Buttercup. Cary Elwes (Westley) had been in just one previous film, the forgotten The Bride (1985), a remake of The Bride of Frankenstein. The film can exploit our associations with actors, then, as the book cannot, made of words as it is.

 
* After rereading my response, I remember that The Wonder Years came after the movie. But that proves my point that it's the audience's knowledge that matters most, that at least "activates" the casting choices the director makes.