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Halloween 2001: Westley
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I wore a costume this year, not as Zorro, but as Westley from The Princess Bride. I first wore the costume in high school. Then, as now, I wore my grandfather's sword, and a couple of people have told me I look like Westley. A well-chosen quote once helped me meet a very colorful group of characters.
Does anything deeper draw me? The movie has an attractive medieval appearance, irony, and something more... another world that puts a different mask on what in our world is masked by familiarity.
Literature scholars know a distinction between literature that is romantic and literature that is realist. Romantic literature includes a man and a woman falling in love, but there is more to it, far more. It paints, in gross and exaggerated strokes, the tale of the greatest hero that ever lived. In a different movie, the villains kill not only one person, nor a whole family, but a whole planet: Star Wars leaves no ambiguity about its villains. Romantics exaggerate, while realists are meticulous in showing things exactly as they are. People have their flaws--no hero is perfect--and accurate details are the substance of making things as real as they can be.
That's how a realist might describe it, at any rate. A gadfly might say that the romantics are more real than the realists. Why? The realist pays meticulous attention to every detail of a gnat, accurate as any biology textbook, and doesn't notice that a camel has slipped by. The romantic portrays the camel in wild, ludicrous strokes--but sees that the camel is there, and is more important than the gnat.
People know the movie isn't very accurate, but that's something besides the point. It captures what's lost when realism decides what truth is.
Is there anything more than a day's fantasy to this costume?
As you wish.
Photos courtesy of Les Barker and Innes Sheridan.
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Halloween 2001: Westley
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