![]() This is intentionally employed to break the tension of scary or sad moments, as when Buttercup is about to be eaten by a giant eel and the grandfather snaps us back to the 1980s to calm down his grandson (and, in parallel, us).Īnother poignant example of parallelism would be the film's climax, in which two plot lines are concluded almost simultaneously. The two stories take place in parallel as we hear and sometimes see the man and boy interrupting the epic tale to engage in humorous banter. One example comes from the fact that there are two stories going on simultaneously: the story of the princess bride herself, and the framing story in which the grandfather reads the book to his son. The Princess Bride is rife with parallelism. Identify and describe 2-3 examples of parallelism in The Princess Bride and how they affect the story. Other examples of understatement come through the many overly polite conversations that Westley shares with various opponents, including when he and Inigo exchange casual greetings as he dangles off a cliff, as well as when he says to Fezzik, "Frankly, I think the odds are slightly in your favor at hand fighting," which of course we know to be more than true given Fezzik's staggering size. ![]() The irony, however, is that he himself arranged for her to be killed, so while his concern is, on the surface, underwhelming and therefore funny, in reality it's consistent with his malicious intentions. ![]() One moment comes when Prince Humperdinck is hunting down Buttercup's kidnappers and remarks rather casually that if he finds her dead, he'll be "very put-out." The joke, of course, is that one would expect him to be significantly more grief-stricken were he to discover his love murdered. There are several examples of understatement that aid in the film's hilarity. Identify 2-3 of these moments and describe the role that understatement plays in them. The Princess Bride derives much of its comedy from characters underwhelmed by dramatically tense situations. When Buttercup is about to be eaten by a giant eel, when she dreams that she actually did marry Prince Humperdinck, or when we're about to get the sweet, satisfying final kiss from her and Westley, we are suddenly torn back into 1987, a reminder that this is a story and nothing more, and that treating it as importantly as real life is fool-hardy and missing the point of an entertaining fictional tale. To counter any over-investment on the viewer's part, the film frequently takes us out of the moment through an interruption by the grandson of the grandfather in the framing story as a way of paralleling their experience with our own. This is a difficult task given the sometimes depressing or scary moments present in such an epic tale. The Princess Bride's goal above all is to keep its audience from taking it too seriously. How does The Princess Bride use its framing story to influence the tone of its embedded story? ![]()
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