Kingstonians are offered a chance to reconnect with their childhood nostalgia and whimsy.
Rob Reiner’s iconic adventure romance film The Princess Bride (1987) returned to theatres at Kingston’s The Screening Room as a part of their “Classic Movies” reruns segment that includes Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill (2003) and Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away (2001). On paper, The Princess Bride is a cliché story that has all the themes of a quintessential ’80s fantasy movie. Most people have definitely seen a movie like this one before, which raises the question of why audiences still cherish The Princess Bride so deeply, even 38 years after its release.
The movie’s based on the William Goldman novel and is a fairy tale that tells the love story between beautiful Buttercup and her true love and farm hand, Westley. They become separated, Westley is believed to be dead, and Buttercup is forced to marry the spoiled, rotten, and cowardly Prince Humperdinck. What follows is a swash-buckling tale of true love’s kiss, intense sword fights, bravery, the burning lust for revenge, and witty, dripping insults.
I mulled over The Princess Bride’s value as I watched the film, but kept returning to my personal memories of my dad and his love for the film. When I returned home after the film and mentioned The Princess Bride to my housemates, each one immediately recalled watching it with a parent as a child.
And then I had my “Aha!” moment, and it became clear as to what makes The Princess Bride so great: the story reminds us of the nostalgia of the fairytales and adventure stories of our youth while simultaneously engraving within us the timeless power of stories that are passed down from generation to generation.
After all, The Princess Bride isn’t only an adventure story about giants, pirates, and princesses. The story begins with a sick child who is bedridden for the day, and his grandfather comes over to read him this story. At first, the grandson is resistant, but the film ends with him asking his grandfather to come over and read it again tomorrow.
Not only is the grandson developing his love for the story, but he’s enriching his relationship with his grandfather, just like all of us subconsciously are with our parents when they show us the films they loved from their childhood. It’s the passing down of the fantastical childhood torch.
Loving The Princess Bride well into adulthood is almost always a result of childhood attachment, whether you grew up watching the film in the late ‘80s or grew up with your parents sitting behind you on the couch reciting some of the most quotable lines in film history, like “Inconceivable!”, “as you wish”, and “My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.”
The last line is certainly one I’ve memorized as my brother and I used to hop around the house, “sword fighting” with spatulas, pretending to be sword master Inigo Montoya, avenging the death of his father.
Watching the rerun of the film was a reminder that the fairy tales and connections to stories that we’re told as kids never truly leave us. As English poet George Eliot once said, “We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it.” The Princess Bride is a testament to film and art for the sake of joy and lightness that our world desperately needs.
Tags
nostalgia, Princess Bride, Rob Reiner, The Screening Room
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