Fairy Tale Genre and Self-Aware Comedy The Princess Bride (1987)

The genre context the film entered

In 1987, the live-action American fairy-tale film was at a low ebb. The Disney animated revival was still two years away (The Little Mermaid, 1989). The major recent live-action attempts — Jim Henson's The Dark Crystal (1982), Ridley Scott's Legend (1985), Ron Howard's Willow (1988) — had been technically ambitious and commercially uneven. The genre was widely considered, at the studio level, to be a difficult sell to teenagers and adults who had aged out of unironic fairy tale and not yet been given an ironic alternative.

What William Goldman's 1973 novel had been doing — and what Reiner's film picked up — was different from any of these. The novel was not a fairy tale or a fairy-tale parody. It was a fairy tale wrapped in an explicit conversation about why someone would want to read a fairy tale at all. The frame was the answer to the genre's marketing problem before the marketing problem had been articulated.

Self-aware without being ironic

The film's most distinctive achievement is to be metafictional without being ironic. The grandson interrupts. The grandfather skips ahead past the kissing. The narrator pauses to note Buttercup's nightmare is wrong and the wedding will not happen. The film knows it is a fairy tale and knows the audience knows it is a fairy tale — and yet none of this knowledge is used to undercut the romance or the swordfights.

This is harder than it looks. The standard 1980s American move when handling fairy-tale material was either earnest pastiche (Lucasfilm's Willow) or parodic dismantling (Mel Brooks's later Robin Hood: Men in Tights, in which Cary Elwes effectively plays Westley as parody-of-Westley). The Princess Bride refuses both. It treats the genre's emotional content with full sincerity and the genre's conventions with full awareness, and finds that the two are compatible because the frame device makes them so.

"The film has the rarest of all qualities — it is a sincere fairy tale that is also a comedy about being a sincere fairy tale, and the two never collide. Most films that try this collapse. This one doesn't." — Roger Ebert, RogerEbert.com (Great Movies, 2001)

What the genre conventions actually are

The film hits the canonical fairy-tale beats almost without exception:

• A poor farm boy and a princess (Westley and Buttercup)
• A long separation across the sea (the Dread Pirate Roberts apprenticeship)
• An evil prince and an arranged marriage (Humperdinck)
• A monstrous swamp full of named terrors (Fire Swamp, R.O.U.S., lightning sand)
• A revenge quest spanning twenty years (Inigo and the six-fingered man)
• A cantankerous wizard with a hut at the edge of town (Miracle Max)
• A storming of the castle with bluffs and disguises
• Four white horses for an escape at the end

Every beat is hit, and almost every beat is hit with the metafictional commentary the frame allows. The grandson asks why the kissing keeps happening. The grandfather skips ahead past it. The narrator names the eels at sea, then recaps without them. The grandson protests when Buttercup marries Humperdinck. The grandfather answers honestly that nobody kills Humperdinck — he lives.^b32

The Shrek comparison

The film's nearest descendant in the canon is Shrek (2001), which adopted Princess Bride's self-aware-fairy-tale register and pushed it harder toward parody. The differences are revealing. Shrek is built on the assumption that the audience does not believe in fairy tales and needs the genre's conventions ironized so that the romance can be smuggled past their defenses. Princess Bride makes a different bet — that the audience does not believe in fairy tales and needs the genre's conventions explicitly named so that the romance can be reintroduced to them, with the grandson as the audience surrogate getting talked back into them.

The two strategies have different yields. Shrek and its sequels have grossed several billion dollars; Princess Bride has not. But Princess Bride has produced a generational handoff and a body of conversational quotation that the Shrek franchise, despite its commercial scale, has not. The difference is sincerity.

Goldman's bet

Goldman's novel was published in 1973 — at the absolute low point of American sincerity in popular fiction. The early 1970s were the years of MASH, Catch-22, Slaughterhouse-Five, the New Hollywood films of Altman and Coppola. The notion that an American writer would publish a fairy-tale romance with no irony except a frame device was, at the time, structurally weird. Goldman's bet was that the frame device made the structural weirdness work — that you could deliver an unironic fairy tale to a cynical readership if you provided them an explicit avatar (the sick boy, the listener) for their cynicism.

The film, fourteen years later, won the same bet for the same reason. The grandson — the avatar for the audience's defenses — is converted to the story across the running time. By the end he is asking for one more reading.^b40

"The argument the film is making, structurally, is that earnestness can survive cynicism if you give cynicism a chair and read on. Most films that try to be earnest about love don't make this bet. The Princess Bride does, and wins." — Mark Harris, Grantland (2012, archived)