"What is it with coincidence? Without it, movies could barely function: of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, Bogart’s place has to be the one into which Ingrid Bergman walks. His liquorish rant against the odds of her doing so is a clever trick from the writers of “Casablanca”: it drains her arrival of silly contrivance and floods it, instead, with a sense of damnable romantic destiny. The big screen is crucial if that trick is to succeed: watch a Fritz Lang thriller like “The Woman at the Window” or “Beyond a Reasonable Doubt” on DVD and you find yourself scoffing at the unlikely curves and switches in the plot, whereas the same setups, viewed in the dreamy imprisonment of a movie theatre, feel like the machinery of fate. Every film attracts doubt, but the great ones stretch beyond our reason."
-Anthony Lane (from his May 26 review of Edge of Heaven)
3 comments:
There is no work in which holes can't be picked; no work that succeeds without a preliminary act of good will on the part of the reader. ...
Surely the author is not saying 'This is the sort of thing that happens'? Or, surely, if he is, he lies? But he is not. He is saying, 'Suppose this happened, how interesting, how moving the consequences would be! Listen. It would be like this.' To question the postulate itself would show a misunderstanding; like asking why trumps should be trumps. It is the sort of thing that Mopsa does. That is not the point. The raison d'être of the story is that we shall weep, or shudder, or wonder, or laugh as we follow it.
-C. S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism
Clown. Fear not thou, man, thou shalt lose nothing here.
Autolycus [a seller]. I hope so, sir; for I have about me many parcels of charge.
Clown. What hast here? ballads?
Mopsa. Pray now, buy some: I love a ballad in print o' life, for then we are sure they are true.
Aut. Here's one to a very doleful tune, how a usurer's wife was brought to bed of twenty money-bags at a burthen and how she longed to eat adders' heads and toads carbonadoed.
Mopsa. Is it true, think you?
Aut. Very true, and but a month old.
Dorcas. Bless me from marrying a usurer!
Aut. Here's the midwife's name to't, one Mistress Tale-porter, and five or six honest wives that were present. Why should I carry lies abroad?
Mopsa. Pray you now, buy it.
Clown. Come on, lay it by: and let's first see moe ballads; we'll buy the other things anon.
-- from Act IV, Scene 4, The Winter's Tale
Good point. My hat's off to Lewis.
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