"Dark Shadows" is "The Princess Bride"
Saturday, 26 September 2015 10:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
carose59"That's Probably Asking A Lot Of The Metaphor."*
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I've been re-watching Dark Shadows for a while—a month, maybe two. Time starts losing all meaning when you marathon a TV show, which is one of the things I love about watching that way. And I've been thinking about why Dark Shadows—a flawed, Gothic, supernatural, patchwork soap opera—is still picking up fans lo, these many years later.
Mostly I don't think about why we love what we love because mostly it's a waste of time. It's a matter of resonance. You don't see it as much as you used to, but you used to see scenes of wine glasses being broken by a loud, pure, sustained musical note. There's more to it than that, though. Objects have resonance. If you strike a wine glass, it makes a sound, a note; it makes music. Whatever note the glass makes is the note that can break it. If the glass is C and you use an E, you won't break it.
And so it is with the things we love. If they don't cause resonance, vibration inside us, they can't break through to the passion part of our selves.
But I do like to think about the whys of things, and at the end of each Dark Shadows disc is an interview with an actor, writer, director, technician, and at some point they're asked why the show has lasted. Maybe I can only hear that question so many times before I start trying to answer it myself. In a way, I'm more qualified to answer than most of the people being asked because I'm one of the lovers, while they're the creators of the beloved.
My mind wandered around, picking up words like purity and innocence and passion. The beauty of something flawed but uneditable, something so of the moment trying to fix it would only destroy it. None of that gelled, and if it doesn't gel, it isn't aspic.
Then, this morning I thought of something Alfred Hitchcock said about movies: "What is drama but life with the dull bits cut out?"
Then I thought about what Arthur Quiller-Couch** said about writing: "Murder your darlings." What that means is, no matter how much you love a line, a scene, a description, a character—if it doesn't fit, you have to remove it. (You say you'll save it, use it some other time, but that happens almost as often as lottery winners are struck by lightning. It's just something you have to tell yourself so you can commit the murder.) The story has to work, and if that means pulling out the wonderful description that throws the whole thing out of whack, you pull the wonderful description, kiss it tenderly, promise you'll use it somewhere, sometime, someday. And then the story flows properly. Think of it as having a giant diamond in the middle of your river, one that obstructs the boats that try to travel down the river. "It's a diamond!" you keep telling yourself as boats hit the big rock and capsize. "I can't just get rid of a diamond!" But if your goal is running a river (please ignore the way my analogy is breaking down), that diamond must go.
And then I realized that the Dark Shadows writers never killed their darlings, they never threw away diamonds, they didn't care about the story as a whole, or the river or any other half-assed metaphor I might come up with. They cared about the good parts.
Which, of course, led me to William Goldman and The Princess Bride.
Everybody's seen the movie, of course. But before the movie was the book, and while the movie is really great, the book is fucking brilliant.
In the movie, we start with a little boy recovering from an illness being read to by his grandfather, and then we move into the story the grandfather is reading. Occasionally we come back to the boy and grandfather, but mostly it's the story-within-the-story that we see. It's only a little more complicated than a regular movie. They could have made the movie without the boy and grandfather. It would have been less textured, but it probably would still have worked because The Princess Bride is a magical movie. It even has a magical origin story.***
But the book isn't magical, it's brilliant. It's complex, fanciful, sophisticated, mythic, and smart. It's a cousin to Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, telling you not only the story it's telling you, but a few other stories besides. It's stories all the way down.
In The Princess Bride, William Goldman (a fictional character) is trying to find a copy of a book his father read him when he was a young boy. The book was the classic novel The Princess Bride, a swashbuckling tale of romance and adventure. It started Goldman's love of literature, and he wants to buy a copy for his son's birthday.
He buys a copy long-distance—he's in California, his son and the book store are in New York. He's hoping his son will be just as dazzled as he was by this incredible book.
Only, his son isn't. He's bored to tears. And when Goldman gets his hands on the book, he can see why. Yes, there's adventure in the book, but what the book is really about is the country of Florin, and much of it is parochial and dull. Goldman is baffled. What happened to the book he loved so much?
Well, what happened is, his father only read him the Good Parts, the parts he knew a twelve year old boy would like. And Goldman has a brainstorm: he will edit The Princess Bride down to the Good Parts and get that published.
What follows is the story you've seen in the movie, but there's so much more. There are footnotes, glorious, sometimes-page-long footnotes,**** hilarious, smart footnotes that are just Goldman talking to us, the readers.
I was about fifteen when I read The Princess Bride. I had no idea it was all a wonderful farce, that the real William Goldman had no son (he has two daughters) and that this was his Wuthering Heights,***** complicated and brilliant and wonderful.
Dark Shadows. I was talking about Dark Shadows.
Dark Shadows isn't the real novel The Princess Bride, because the real novel is a beautiful, well-crafted, highly-polished story. Dark Shadows is the story the fictional William Goldman's father read him. It's not just life with the dull bits cut out, but story with the dull bits cut out, it's distilled story. It's everybody's darlings, Dan Curtis's and Sam Hall's and Violet Welles's and yours and mine. It's soap opera on speed. It's the opposite of murdering your darlings, it's dress up your darlings and push them on stage, and who cares if the continuity is wonky, and time travel that makes Back to the Future look like a documentary, and sometimes it's astonishing and suspicious, this resemblance to an ancestor and sometimes nobody even notices, and sometimes the cemetery is five miles away and other times a little girl can walk there in a few minutes, and misspelled gravestones that wobble or disappear altogether, and I could go on all night in these dark shadows.
But I won't. Because what it is is us all being children together, and I'm going to be a ballerina and a queen and a fairy princess and an angel, all at once.
*Colby Granger
**I don't care what you've read about William Faulkner, Arthur Quiller-Couch said it first.
**The magical origin story of the movie The Princess Bride is thus:
Carl Reiner wrote a play called Something Different, which was on Broadway in 1967. That season, William Goldman was researching a nonfiction book about Broadway, and he went to as many plays as he could, some of them more than once. He also interviewed playwrights and other people involved in the theatre, which was how he met Carl Reiner. He loved Something Different (which did not do well) so much, he kept going back to it. He wrote glowingly of it in the book he ended up writing (The Season), and he sent Carl Reiner a copy. And, when he wrote The Princess Bride, he sent Carl Reiner a copy of that, too.
Which is how Rob Reiner happened to read it.
Which is how Rob Reiner happened to fall in love with it and want to make it into a movie.
Which is what happened.
****Maybe that's where I get my love of footnotes.
*****Wuthering Heights is complicated and brilliant and wonderful, but it's also goofy. Most people wouldn't use the word goofy to describe it, but most people don't remember (if they ever knew) how insane the structure of the story is. It isn't straightforward Cathy-&-Heathcliff. It isn't even narrator-telling-us-about-Cathy-&-Heathcliff. No, it's narrator-telling-us-a-story-he's-being-told-about-Cathy-&-Heathcliff. Who does that? Emily Bronte, and she was not to be trifled with.
-:- -:- -:- -:-
I've been re-watching Dark Shadows for a while—a month, maybe two. Time starts losing all meaning when you marathon a TV show, which is one of the things I love about watching that way. And I've been thinking about why Dark Shadows—a flawed, Gothic, supernatural, patchwork soap opera—is still picking up fans lo, these many years later.
Mostly I don't think about why we love what we love because mostly it's a waste of time. It's a matter of resonance. You don't see it as much as you used to, but you used to see scenes of wine glasses being broken by a loud, pure, sustained musical note. There's more to it than that, though. Objects have resonance. If you strike a wine glass, it makes a sound, a note; it makes music. Whatever note the glass makes is the note that can break it. If the glass is C and you use an E, you won't break it.
And so it is with the things we love. If they don't cause resonance, vibration inside us, they can't break through to the passion part of our selves.
But I do like to think about the whys of things, and at the end of each Dark Shadows disc is an interview with an actor, writer, director, technician, and at some point they're asked why the show has lasted. Maybe I can only hear that question so many times before I start trying to answer it myself. In a way, I'm more qualified to answer than most of the people being asked because I'm one of the lovers, while they're the creators of the beloved.
My mind wandered around, picking up words like purity and innocence and passion. The beauty of something flawed but uneditable, something so of the moment trying to fix it would only destroy it. None of that gelled, and if it doesn't gel, it isn't aspic.
Then, this morning I thought of something Alfred Hitchcock said about movies: "What is drama but life with the dull bits cut out?"
Then I thought about what Arthur Quiller-Couch** said about writing: "Murder your darlings." What that means is, no matter how much you love a line, a scene, a description, a character—if it doesn't fit, you have to remove it. (You say you'll save it, use it some other time, but that happens almost as often as lottery winners are struck by lightning. It's just something you have to tell yourself so you can commit the murder.) The story has to work, and if that means pulling out the wonderful description that throws the whole thing out of whack, you pull the wonderful description, kiss it tenderly, promise you'll use it somewhere, sometime, someday. And then the story flows properly. Think of it as having a giant diamond in the middle of your river, one that obstructs the boats that try to travel down the river. "It's a diamond!" you keep telling yourself as boats hit the big rock and capsize. "I can't just get rid of a diamond!" But if your goal is running a river (please ignore the way my analogy is breaking down), that diamond must go.
And then I realized that the Dark Shadows writers never killed their darlings, they never threw away diamonds, they didn't care about the story as a whole, or the river or any other half-assed metaphor I might come up with. They cared about the good parts.
Which, of course, led me to William Goldman and The Princess Bride.
Everybody's seen the movie, of course. But before the movie was the book, and while the movie is really great, the book is fucking brilliant.
In the movie, we start with a little boy recovering from an illness being read to by his grandfather, and then we move into the story the grandfather is reading. Occasionally we come back to the boy and grandfather, but mostly it's the story-within-the-story that we see. It's only a little more complicated than a regular movie. They could have made the movie without the boy and grandfather. It would have been less textured, but it probably would still have worked because The Princess Bride is a magical movie. It even has a magical origin story.***
But the book isn't magical, it's brilliant. It's complex, fanciful, sophisticated, mythic, and smart. It's a cousin to Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, telling you not only the story it's telling you, but a few other stories besides. It's stories all the way down.
In The Princess Bride, William Goldman (a fictional character) is trying to find a copy of a book his father read him when he was a young boy. The book was the classic novel The Princess Bride, a swashbuckling tale of romance and adventure. It started Goldman's love of literature, and he wants to buy a copy for his son's birthday.
He buys a copy long-distance—he's in California, his son and the book store are in New York. He's hoping his son will be just as dazzled as he was by this incredible book.
Only, his son isn't. He's bored to tears. And when Goldman gets his hands on the book, he can see why. Yes, there's adventure in the book, but what the book is really about is the country of Florin, and much of it is parochial and dull. Goldman is baffled. What happened to the book he loved so much?
Well, what happened is, his father only read him the Good Parts, the parts he knew a twelve year old boy would like. And Goldman has a brainstorm: he will edit The Princess Bride down to the Good Parts and get that published.
What follows is the story you've seen in the movie, but there's so much more. There are footnotes, glorious, sometimes-page-long footnotes,**** hilarious, smart footnotes that are just Goldman talking to us, the readers.
I was about fifteen when I read The Princess Bride. I had no idea it was all a wonderful farce, that the real William Goldman had no son (he has two daughters) and that this was his Wuthering Heights,***** complicated and brilliant and wonderful.
Dark Shadows. I was talking about Dark Shadows.
Dark Shadows isn't the real novel The Princess Bride, because the real novel is a beautiful, well-crafted, highly-polished story. Dark Shadows is the story the fictional William Goldman's father read him. It's not just life with the dull bits cut out, but story with the dull bits cut out, it's distilled story. It's everybody's darlings, Dan Curtis's and Sam Hall's and Violet Welles's and yours and mine. It's soap opera on speed. It's the opposite of murdering your darlings, it's dress up your darlings and push them on stage, and who cares if the continuity is wonky, and time travel that makes Back to the Future look like a documentary, and sometimes it's astonishing and suspicious, this resemblance to an ancestor and sometimes nobody even notices, and sometimes the cemetery is five miles away and other times a little girl can walk there in a few minutes, and misspelled gravestones that wobble or disappear altogether, and I could go on all night in these dark shadows.
But I won't. Because what it is is us all being children together, and I'm going to be a ballerina and a queen and a fairy princess and an angel, all at once.
*Colby Granger
**I don't care what you've read about William Faulkner, Arthur Quiller-Couch said it first.
**The magical origin story of the movie The Princess Bride is thus:
Carl Reiner wrote a play called Something Different, which was on Broadway in 1967. That season, William Goldman was researching a nonfiction book about Broadway, and he went to as many plays as he could, some of them more than once. He also interviewed playwrights and other people involved in the theatre, which was how he met Carl Reiner. He loved Something Different (which did not do well) so much, he kept going back to it. He wrote glowingly of it in the book he ended up writing (The Season), and he sent Carl Reiner a copy. And, when he wrote The Princess Bride, he sent Carl Reiner a copy of that, too.
Which is how Rob Reiner happened to read it.
Which is how Rob Reiner happened to fall in love with it and want to make it into a movie.
Which is what happened.
****Maybe that's where I get my love of footnotes.
*****Wuthering Heights is complicated and brilliant and wonderful, but it's also goofy. Most people wouldn't use the word goofy to describe it, but most people don't remember (if they ever knew) how insane the structure of the story is. It isn't straightforward Cathy-&-Heathcliff. It isn't even narrator-telling-us-about-Cathy-&-Heathcliff. No, it's narrator-telling-us-a-story-he's-being-told-about-Cathy-&-Heathcliff. Who does that? Emily Bronte, and she was not to be trifled with.