Life Moves Pretty Fast: The lessons we learned from eighties movies (and why we don't learn them from movies any more) by Hadley Freeman
Authors: Hadley Freeman
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(Robin Wright), her true love Westley (Elwes), and their battles against Prince Humperdinck (Chris Sarandon), Vizzini (Wallace Shawn) and Count Rugen (Christopher Guest) and their eventual assistance from the brave swordsman Inigo (Mandy Patinkin), the giant Fezzik (the professional wrestler known as André the Giant) and Miracle Max (Billy Crystal).
Afterwards, we stood in the cinema atrium as our mother bundled us back into our coats.
‘Did you girls like it?’ she asked.
Standing there in her corduroy dungarees and T-shirt, Nell looked in a state of semi-shock. ‘I LOVED IT. I WANT TO SEE IT AGAIN RIGHT NOW!’ she practically shouted.
Now, The Princess Bride is wonderful, but in order to understand how unexpected this proclamation was, you have to know a little bit about my sister. Ever since she was old enough to throw a tantrum, my sister refused to wear dresses. She never played with dolls. She refused to let my mother brush her hair, and had apparently no interest in her physical appearance. She did not like mushy stories – she didn’t even like reading books. In other words, she was the complete opposite to me. How much of that was a deliberate reaction against me, a younger sibling defining herself in opposition to the older one, and how much of it was simply an innate part of Nell was already a moot point when we went to see The Princess Bride : Nell’s parameters were so firmly set by then that her nickname in our family was ‘the tough customer’. She would only consent to drink one kind of fruit juice (apple), and only by one brand (Red Cheek), and only if it came out of a can (never a carton), so there was absolutely no negotiating with her about mushy princesses. Lord only knows how my mother got her to see the movie in the first place. She must have hidden the title from her.
And yet, like the grandson in the film, Kevin Arnold, fn6 Nell found that, against all odds, she did enjoy the story, just as Kevin’s grandfather, Columbo, fn7 promises. I think Nell made my mother take her to see the film at the cinema at least three more times. As she wished.
When it came out on VHS, we bought it immediately and it was understood that the video cassette was officially Nell’s, just as the video cassette for Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was officially mine. When she found out that the film had originally been a book by William Goldman, who also wrote the screenplay, she asked my amazed mother to buy that, too. Nell read it over and over until the pages fell out, so she stuck them back in and then read the book again. The Princess Bride was the book that taught her to like books, as much as the movie taught her to relax some of her other rules. She developed a lifelong crush on Westley and, not long after, she started wearing dresses, too.
The reasons why Nell loved this film so much exemplify, I think, why it is universally adored in a way that, say, the vaguely similar and contemporary The Never-Ending Story , is not. It’s a fairy tale for those who love fairy tales, but it’s also a self-aware spoof for those who don’t; it’s an adventure film for boys and – for once – girls, too, but without pandering to or excluding either; it’s got a plot for kids, dialogue for adults and jokes for everyone; it’s a genre film and a satire of a genre film; it’s a very funny movie in which everybody is playing it straight; it’s smart and sweet and smart about its sweetness, but also sweet about its smarts. It’s a movie that lets people who don’t like certain things like those things, while at the same time not betraying the original fans. But most of all, The Princess Bride is about one thing in particular: ‘ The Princess Bride is a story about love,’ says Cary Elwes. ‘So much happens in the movie – giants, fencing, kidnapping. But it’s really a film about love.’
This might seem like a statement of the obvious, but it isn’t, actually. Yes, the film is ostensibly about the great
Afterwards, we stood in the cinema atrium as our mother bundled us back into our coats.
‘Did you girls like it?’ she asked.
Standing there in her corduroy dungarees and T-shirt, Nell looked in a state of semi-shock. ‘I LOVED IT. I WANT TO SEE IT AGAIN RIGHT NOW!’ she practically shouted.
Now, The Princess Bride is wonderful, but in order to understand how unexpected this proclamation was, you have to know a little bit about my sister. Ever since she was old enough to throw a tantrum, my sister refused to wear dresses. She never played with dolls. She refused to let my mother brush her hair, and had apparently no interest in her physical appearance. She did not like mushy stories – she didn’t even like reading books. In other words, she was the complete opposite to me. How much of that was a deliberate reaction against me, a younger sibling defining herself in opposition to the older one, and how much of it was simply an innate part of Nell was already a moot point when we went to see The Princess Bride : Nell’s parameters were so firmly set by then that her nickname in our family was ‘the tough customer’. She would only consent to drink one kind of fruit juice (apple), and only by one brand (Red Cheek), and only if it came out of a can (never a carton), so there was absolutely no negotiating with her about mushy princesses. Lord only knows how my mother got her to see the movie in the first place. She must have hidden the title from her.
And yet, like the grandson in the film, Kevin Arnold, fn6 Nell found that, against all odds, she did enjoy the story, just as Kevin’s grandfather, Columbo, fn7 promises. I think Nell made my mother take her to see the film at the cinema at least three more times. As she wished.
When it came out on VHS, we bought it immediately and it was understood that the video cassette was officially Nell’s, just as the video cassette for Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was officially mine. When she found out that the film had originally been a book by William Goldman, who also wrote the screenplay, she asked my amazed mother to buy that, too. Nell read it over and over until the pages fell out, so she stuck them back in and then read the book again. The Princess Bride was the book that taught her to like books, as much as the movie taught her to relax some of her other rules. She developed a lifelong crush on Westley and, not long after, she started wearing dresses, too.
The reasons why Nell loved this film so much exemplify, I think, why it is universally adored in a way that, say, the vaguely similar and contemporary The Never-Ending Story , is not. It’s a fairy tale for those who love fairy tales, but it’s also a self-aware spoof for those who don’t; it’s an adventure film for boys and – for once – girls, too, but without pandering to or excluding either; it’s got a plot for kids, dialogue for adults and jokes for everyone; it’s a genre film and a satire of a genre film; it’s a very funny movie in which everybody is playing it straight; it’s smart and sweet and smart about its sweetness, but also sweet about its smarts. It’s a movie that lets people who don’t like certain things like those things, while at the same time not betraying the original fans. But most of all, The Princess Bride is about one thing in particular: ‘ The Princess Bride is a story about love,’ says Cary Elwes. ‘So much happens in the movie – giants, fencing, kidnapping. But it’s really a film about love.’
This might seem like a statement of the obvious, but it isn’t, actually. Yes, the film is ostensibly about the great
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