Romance is the genre that dramatizes our dreams of ideally effective action against the forces of evil. The white knight learns from his tutelary figure how to defeat the black knight, the ogre, the dragon, and the sorcerer in defense of the damsel and in doing so revives the entire community. He fights for the values that bind the community, earning the deepest gratitude of everyone in it who identifies with the forces of good. This gives dimension to his heroism and explains why he has been a focus of projection for boys since forever.
Irony is the genre that slaps us awake in the middle of those dreams. It apes the structure of romance but fills it in with realistic details that won't cooperate with the fantasy--e.g., Don Quixote tilting at windmills. Irony presents stories based on our lowest estimates of ourselves, saying to us, in effect, "You can fantasize all you want, but you're no hero and your plans never work out as satisfactorily as you hope." (Critics who complain that ironists look down on their characters manage to be correct and to miss the boat at the same time.)
Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy
In practice, however, irony and romance aren't so cleanly antithetical. There's often a breaking point at which irony turns into romance. It can be a drag, for example, in the Robin Williams or Jim Carrey comedy that goes soft, "redeeming" the character whose outrageousness has been our main source of entertainment. A lot of us prefer our irony neat, and Will Ferrell's Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy is a straight shot of that good stuff. In last year's Elf, the turning point after which you knew that James Caan's daddy figure would be reborn and Ferrell would be happily integrated into his family came so early it killed the comedy. Anchorman makes up for that with total singlemindedness.
Ferrell plays the star local newscaster in '70s San Diego who resists the introduction of a female co-anchor even though he's dating her (having won the competition with his colleagues over who will lay her). The elements of romance are burlesqued from beginning to end--jousts in the form of vicious rumbles against rival stations' newsmen, a spiritual crisis brought on by the death of his dog, a heroic return occasioned by the need to cover a much-anticipated birth of a panda at the zoo, and a rescue of the damsel from the zoo's bear pit in which he and his resurrected dog collaborate. Ferrell is an even more poker-faced skit artist than Mike Myers, and he has a more specific and more generally serviceable specialty, playing characters who are oblivious to the chasm between how they picture themselves and how they come across.
Napoleon Dynamite
Anchorman was the funniest American comedy this year until Napoleon Dynamite, which is likewise a deadpan parody of a romance. The title character is a gape-mouthed, drowsy-eyed high-school kid in small-town Idaho who longs for the kind of skills that he imagines will make him popular with girls. (Among the things he considers "skills" are having a "sweet" bike and being able to grow a mustache.) To compensate for his lack of skills he fantasizes, exaggerates, and lies, and it isn't clear that he knows the difference. (He covers notebook pages with drawings of the "liger," a hybrid of lion and tiger "bred for its magical powers," and he talks about this beast not only as if other people could have heard of it but as if it were real.) Napoleon is a loser by most external standards and we're free to laugh at him because he's not even loveable. He has the petulance of an adolescent who's always ready to snap at people because they aren't able to guess what he's thinking. They actually have to ask him questions to find out. Idiots!
Article comments