[One more time, we have two different blog posts inappropriately combined into one. In the first one we have a discussion of how do we know anything is real, and using the case study of truth and otherwise in "
Shakespeare in Love" and the crisis it is has generated. In the second part, we have a discussion of the comedy writing technique of "setup and payoff" that
Shakespeare in Love uses to great effect. Two different posts. One of these days I have to get my shit together.]
This has been a day from hell for me.
I spent several hours trying to write up a post about what was and
was not true in Shakespeare in Love (1998) and discovered,
through further research, that what I thought I knew here was far
more ambiguous or worse. Somehow I had read an article (or more
than one) somewhere in some reasonable place and it turns out to be
wrong. Of course society is full of such things and belief systems
that are incorrect, but it is both annoying and scary to run into one
yourself that you were completely unaware of. Of course I can't
remember where I read this article or who wrote it. Maybe I just
dreamed that I read such an article. Once you start doubting there
is no end to the depths that doubt can take you.
To give just one example, I thought I
knew very clearly that there was a major scandal involving either the
first performance or an early performance of Romeo and Juliet
involving a woman playing the role of Juliet because of a last minute
disaster involving the boy who had been expected to play the role.
It was Elizabethan practice for boys to play the role of women,
supposedly this was a way of avoiding licentiousness in the theatre.
And since using women on the stage at the time was illegal, the
theatre and the play were temporarily shut down. Thus I thought that
this incident in the movie was based, loosely, on something that had
happened in reality with this play. God only knows what I read or
where to think that this was true, but I have known this story wrong
as it may be for decades, well before Shakespeare in Love came
out but I can find no evidence of any such story on the bold new
internet paradigm and if this story had been true or even rumored, it
is likely I would find a reference to it without much problem on the
internet. But I don't find any such reference. So either I am
psychic and somehow channeled from the future this plot point from a
movie yet to be made, or I was just wrong.
This is just one example, there are
others, and I am now spooked and wish to retreat to safety.
Fortunately, there are a few topics
associated with this movie that I can talk about and have some hope
that they are true and correct. One of them is how I happened to see
this film, the second is to discuss a topic in the writing of comedy
which this film demonstrates with great skill referred to as "the setup and the payoff" or words to that effect.
But first, how I happened to see this film.
Arguably one of the best complements
you can give an artist or someone you know is to view their work
without realizing who did it. So, for example, say you see the work
of a friend without knowing it was your friend, really like the work,
and only later discover that your friend did it. Its really nice
when that happens, or so I think. Well, Tom Stoppard is not a
friend of mine, but obviously I knew of him, but somehow had not
realized that he had written (or co-written) Shakespeare in Love.
When Shakespeare in Love came
out in 1998, I really did not want to see it. The reasons for this
are complicated but it mostly had to do with my contrarian nature
responding negatively to the glowing effusions of praise that this
film seemed to generate, and because I doubted very much whether
someone was going to do an interesting film that I would want to see
about Wm. Shakespeare's love life. On top of that, I hated the
title. So I planned to miss this one.
But fate had other plans for me and
sometime later I was on a plane between NY and LA and this was the
movie they were showing. So after the movie started, I broke down
and bought a headset and started listening as well as watching.
And as I watched I started to wonder who had written this thing. It
was being very clever, and I am not used to clever in successful
films, I am more likely to think "stupid" than I am to
think "clever", generally speaking. But as I watched this
movie, I kept thinking: whoever wrote this has done a very good job
here, I wonder what happened?
What had happened of course is that I
was one of the few people in North America who did not know that this
film had been co-written by Tom Stoppard. Oh, I thought, when I
found out. That would explain it. Oops.
So now I want to seque to an important
non-sequitor, the comedy technique of "setup and payoff."
Setup and payoff works like this. You set up in the audience's mind
some situation or idea so that they know that something is coming but
the main character, generally, does not. Then in the course of
time of course something happens that you expected but the characters didn't,
and it is often very funny. I realize it does not sound funny at
first glance, these things rarely do, but some examples will
illustrate this. First from a different movie that also uses this technique well, and then from Shakespeare in Love.
In the important film,
Galaxyquest
(1999), we have several completely excellent examples of this
technique. The one that jumps right out at you of course is at the
basic premise of the movie. A group of former TV actors who had
experienced fame once by being on a TV series about a starship going
around visiting various alien planets (e.g. Star Trek) get involved
with a real group of aliens, the Thermians, who have also seen the
show but believe it is real, and try to get our protagonists to save
them from a real alien menace. So we know that these are real
aliens and real spaceships, but our heroes don't but at various times
discover the truth. And the inverse is true, the "good
aliens", the Thermians, have to discover that the people they
think are space heroes are really television actors who have seen
better days. So we have the setup, and then we have a series of
payoffs.
I have put on youtube an example payoff from the film. In this sequence the crew of the TV series think they are trying to join their colleague for some sort of paid fan experience, or job. They think these geeky looking "Thermians" are just badly adjusted fans of the TV series.
http://youtu.be/3yCFKT633j0
While we are on the subject of Galaxyquest, here is a link to a post by Ken Perlin in which he discusses a way to quantitatively rate a movie which is based on his experience of first seeing Galaxyquest. His post is not about setup and payoff per se, its about the bigger questions that this movie raises.
http://blog.kenperlin.com/?p=163
The supporting actors learn the truth about the Thermians
Getting back to Shakespeare in Love,
pretty much anyone who sees a film with a title like that, will know
that Wm. Shakespeare did not, in fact, write a comedy with the title
"Romeo and Ethyl, the Pirate's Daughter". But everyone
does know that Shakespeare wrote a tragedy called "Romeo and
Juliet". If they know nothing else about Shakespeare and his
plays, they know that much at least. And so we have a perfect setup
for a series of gags where Shakespeare is struggling with both the
story and the title as it evolves into a tragedy called "Romeo
and Juliet". The way Stoppard drags this out is spectacular,
and also has elements of the running gag to it. I do not have a copy
of the movie here so I can not count how many intermediate forms we
have to go through on our way to the final, but its a lot, and every
one is a payoff. And of course the audience knows where this is
going and feels a sense of relief, or at least I did, when we finally
get there. Although a "running gag" is a different
technique of writing comedy, this particular example also has a sense
of that going on as well. Its essentially setup and payoff combined
with a running gag (or so I think).
In a future post I hope to get to the
bottom of the real topic of this post, which is why I believed what I
did, but I can not write that today, because I do not know the
answer.
<ip>
