My wife and I recently went to see an outdoor showing of the 1987 film, The Princess Bride. We had a heavy Portuguese blanket on which to lounge and a not-so-heavy Portuguese white wine to sip. We also had a seemingly bottomless picnic basket from which my wife, like a magician reaching deep into a silk topper, drew an impossible number of delicious snacks and treats.
Sitting in front of us was a young couple in puzzling dress. Their outfits were part Renaissance Fair, part Dungeons & Dragons: she, elfin; he, piratical. Dullard that I am, it took me a few minutes to realize they weren’t just in costume. They were in costume for the movie.
The pixie and her privateer-bloused beau were the first indications that The Princess Bride has a fan base more enduring and committed than I had ever imagined. It soon was clear that, not unlike at a 1980s midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the audience knew all of the dialogue, delighting in performing it in sync with the movie.
Aficionados of definitive films relish the opportunity to celebrate their favorite dialog. See Jaws with an audience someday, and you will find you’re part of a crowd that has come, more than anything, just for the opportunity to cheer Roy Scheider saying, “You’re going to need a bigger boat.”
The Princess Bride has more than its share of essential lines. The signature dialog comes from the brains (such as they are) of the gang kidnapping the princess. He is in the habit of declaring perfectly possible things “inconceivable.” “You keep using that word,” the gang’s swordsman finally has to say. “I do not think it means what you think it means.”
The audience, predictably, cheered.
But not all of the lines garnering crowd reaction the other evening were predictable (inconceivable as that may be). There were a couple of lines that I doubt have ever received a chuckle, let alone a cheer, that now produce roaring laughter. The kidnappers are being chased by a mysterious Man in Black wearing a Zorro-like getup, including a scarf with eyeholes that is tied over his head. The gang leaves their swordsman behind to deal with him. “You be careful,” the gang’s hulking strongman tells the swordsman. “People in masks cannot be trusted.”
A riot of cheers, laughter, and applause.
Later, the gang’s giant prepares to wrestle the Man in Black but asks him first: “Why do you wear a mask? Were you burned by acid or something like that?”
“Oh no, it’s just that they’re terribly comfortable,” Westley replies. “I think everyone will be wearing them in the future.”
Delirium.
Pandemonium.
I should point out that this was a large audience assembled at an outdoor venue in the northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C. Given the demographics of the area, the crowd was predominately liberal, with an outsize proportion of federal workers. In other words, if ever there was an audience likely to be dead serious about mask mandates, this was it. One might have anticipated waves of disapprobation punctuated with tut-tutting of the Faucian sort. For goodness sake, the venue itself was mask-happy. Though outdoors, we were masked from the moment we stepped onto the property until we were seated on our picnic blanket. (From then on, we ate and drank and, like all of the federal workers around us, did so with our masks put aside.)
The Right has been disproportionately anti-mask, seeing them as an unjustified governmental intrusion; the Left has been portrayed as aghast, shocked that anyone could be so selfish as to go maskless. But it turns out we’ve had the Left all wrong. They may be all doom-and-gloomy on MSNBC at the thought there are those not wearing masks. But away from the cameras, get a reliably liberal crowd together, and it turns out they find the whole mask business to be a hoot.
Inconceivable.
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?
