What do we mean by a “trope”, asks Anna Webster from Poulton-le-Fylde?
“My dictionary defines it as a metaphor,” she says, “but this meaning seldom seems to apply or make any sense. One is entitled, I think, to expect a cliché (as ‘trope’ now is) to be readily understood. It has even invaded the crossword and the setter seems to think it means ‘motif’. Well I suppose he would know.”
Well yes, he would. The Concise Oxford, which along with Collins English and Chambers dictionaries is a reference work for Times crosswords, offers “A significant or recurrent theme; a motif”. The clue to which “trope” was the solution was “Motif left over at end of page (5)”: “left” gives port, turn it round (“over”) and then add an e, the “end of page”.
Beyond the crossword, “trope” seems to have become one of those vogue words whose use is chiefly confined to the Arts pages. TVtropes.org, an admirable and entertaining wiki (collaborative website), neatly explains why a trope is not simply a figure of speech: “For creative writer types, tropes are more about conveying a concept to the audience without needing to spell out all the details.”
This wiki began as a comment on television but has now expanded to other media, film in particular. It identifies a huge range of tropes, including the Damsel in Distress: “A female character who continually needs others to rescue her”; the Big “NO!”: “Shouting ‘NOOOOOOOO!’, usually in frustration or despair” and the Freudian Excuse: “When the writers give an excuse on why the villain is evil (eg when he was a child his father would beat him)”.
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While innumerable examples of all these spring to mind, I can’t help feeling that filmgoers who spend their time trope-spotting rather than following the plot may be missing some of the finer points of the art form, but to each his own.
Forgotten heroes
The release of Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk (a rich vein of tropes including Mark Rylance as “Badass Grandpa”) prompted Kevin Maher to assert in his review that this episode in our history had been “shamefully underrepresented on film”. Cue objections from fans of Mrs Miniver and In Which We Serve, and from several advocates of Dunkirk (1958), starring John Mills and Richard Attenborough and directed by Leslie Norman (father of the late film critic Barry).
“I am aware of this one,” Kevin says, “but it’s never been considered a ‘classic’ and, well, it’s 60 years old. It’s certainly not in the Longest Day/Saving Private Ryan stakes.”
Away from the epic events on the beaches Roger Usher, in a letter published in the paper this week, described how his father was one of the BEF contingent who were left behind to defend the retreat and spent the rest of the war as a PoW in Poland. My father was another, so I second Mr Usher’s suggestion that their sacrifice should also be remembered, even if their story might not lend itself to shooting on Imax and 65mm cameras.
After my mother died I found a handwritten letter to my father which she wrote when he failed to return, with no hope that it would ever be delivered. One remark, added after his capture was confirmed, was probably typical of how people were feeling about Dunkirk this side of the Channel: “When I first thought of you as a prisoner I felt so sorry to think that you would never really know what was going on because you would be told pro-German lies about the situation. Lately it seems I needn’t have worried, because if they have told you the truth you probably haven’t believed it and are feeling more cheerful than we are.”
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Cat with two lives
Ann Treneman awarded a sizzling four stars to Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at the Apollo in her review on Tuesday, and Wednesday, at least where Kelvin Lack was buying his newspapers. “How come you can regurgitate the identical article on two different days?” he asked.
I was able to reassure him that this wasn’t a brainstorm on the part of our editors. The First Night review is written more or less as the curtain falls in order to make the late edition of the paper which, generally speaking, is distributed in London and the southeast. For those who get earlier editions, the review is reprinted the following day and then replaced in the late edition that night. On Wednesday it was Kevin Maher on a new film, Detroit, that took its place.
It’s unusual for us to hear about a déjà vu experience like this, and I can only assume that it was a rare distribution glitch or else Mr Lack was buying his papers on the move.
“Am I the only person who finds the usage ‘quite the’ arch and unpleasing?” asks Moira Strachan. “I certainly never hear this said in Aberdeenshire. Is it a London thing?”
Well it could be. Or Oxford perhaps. The example which vexed Ms Strachan (“quite the education”) was in a diary story about Gyles Brandreth and Maurice Bowra. I suggested that, in this context, archness was pretty much the right sort of tone, but she wasn’t mollified.
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“There are many good things about Aberdeenshire and a distinct lack of archness is one of them. There’s a saying of my youth about a person who was considered to have too great a fancy of himself: he thinks he’s Archie but he’s only Archibald.”
In a spirit of academic inquiry I tried to track down the origins of Archie and Archibald. The best Google could offer was that Ms Strachan’s saying refers to the architect Archibald Simpson who built the Aberdeen Lunatic Asylum. A sub-section of chatroom society favours one Erchie or Archie Pluff, whoever he is, but I prefer to believe in Mr Simpson and his pride in the glories of the granite city.