The Princess Bride Talks Back
When I was a kid, my sister and I used to watch a lot of movies together. This was especially true when we would go visit relatives. The adults would sit in the living room and talk about whatever it is that adults talk about, and we would scamper off to some back room with a CRT TV the size of a small dog to keep ourselves entertained with whatever VHS tapes said relatives happened to have picked up from the local grocery store.
The Princess Bride is property of Buttercup Films.
While I might have consumed my fair share of Disney Princess films in those first years of my youth, there came a point where I began to abhor anything I could perceive as girly. As I found myself less interested in Barbie and more interested in Pokémon, I started to feel alienated from my own gender. Girls around me and girls in my entertainment media were pretty and pink; they didn’t share much resemblance with the weird girl reading vampire books. This would eventually develop into an attitude many women will recognize: I’m not like other girls. This frustration should have been aimed at the patriarchal ideology telling me how to be a girl, instead of at my fellow girls who were just as much victims of that ideology as I was. Instead, it became internalized sexism.
It was that internalized sexism that kept me from watching a movie I now list among my favorites: The Princess Bride. My sister would grab the VHS case hopefully, and I would beg for us to watch anything else, even movies we’d seen already. I had determined that this was a princess movie—a girly movie—and that I had no interest in watching it. This was a position I would maintain for many years, until one day at summer camp.
I attended the Vanderbilt Summer Academy in Nashville, TN for many summers throughout high school, and one year the class I took was on in Philosophy of Comedy. As it turned out, the professor teaching the class intended to have us watch The Princess Bride to illustrate some aspect of comedy theory (no, I don’t remember what it was; I don’t even remember what year I took this class). I was not the most enthused about being required to watch it after so many years of avoiding doing so, but my rage towards the feminine had cooled to the point where I could occasionally wear a dress, so I just shrugged and sat back. And then I laughed more, and harder, than I ever had in my life up until that point.
If you’ve seen the movie, you know that the Grandson played by Fred Savage had my very same problem: he thought he wouldn’t like the story his Grandpa was trying to tell him, but once he actually gave it a shot, he loved it.
It would still be a few years before I would entirely discard my need to be the cool girl who looked down on the girls enjoying traditionally feminine things. But in watching The Princess Bride, I learned that avoiding girly things hadn’t made me any cooler; it just kept me from seeing a movie that I would end up wanting to watch over, and over, and over again. It had kept me from modern classics like Legally Blonde and Mean Girls.
I wholly understand why Teresa doesn’t want to watch The Princess Bride; I myself continue to avoid watching Game of Thrones purely out of spite towards everyone who insists that it is actually very good despite the stark (pun very much intended) white cast and the gratuitous depictions of sexual assault. The more someone insists that I absolutely need to watch something, the more I absolutely do not want to watch that thing. But rather than being a treasured childhood classic, for me, The Princess Bride was transformative work that allowed me to broaden the scope of my interests, and I will be ever-grateful to it for that.
Panda Jarrell is a green-haired all around good pal and has a love for Sailor Moon that rivals mine. Panda runs a podcast known as Imagine Me and Utena and sometimes writes for WeTheNerdy.com. She is my friend and I love her.
