'introduction To Irony In Film' 6q5v5h

Irony in Film (Palgrave MacMillan, 2016)

James MacDowell

INTRODUCTION

This is a book about irony in film. Surprisingly, it is also the first book about this topic.i Irony has been regarded as a vital subject by a great many disciplines – from literary theory, philosophy and psychology, to linguistics, theology and anthropology; yet it has remained startlingly under-explored by film studies. This is not to say that film critics and scholars do not allude to irony regularly in connection with other topics, and a smattering of (frequently valuable) books and articles do address the subject in relation to particular movies, directors, cycles, and so forth.ii There has, though, been very little work dedicated to investigating what it might mean either to create irony in the medium of film or to interpret it. That is what this book attempts. Across its three main chapters, Irony in Film focuses on three fundamental questions. Chapter 2 asks what capacities a filmed, audiovisual medium might have for creating irony; it does so in part by posing this question of other mediums too, and by exploring how film’s apparent relationship to these mediums may inform its ironic potential. Chapter 3 turns its attention to specific properties, devices, and conventions of filmmaking, asking how they can and have been used to ironic effect. Chapter 4 asks how we might best interpret irony in film, and confronts theoretical issues that irony seems to raise concerning intention, rhetoric, and the possibility of misinterpretation.

 

1

Before investigating any of these rather imposing questions, though, it is first necessary to address what I mean by describing this as a book about irony in film in the first place. Every word in this book’s title in fact begs several further questions; as such, I will expand on the aims and scope of this study by making clear what I mean by each one of them in turn.iii IRONY There are, to say the least, disagreements about how best to define ‘irony’ (see Dane, 1991). Indeed, definitions of the term have historically been so contentious that studies of the subject quite frequently feature variations on the joke that it is ‘somewhat ironic that, for all the effort […] [scholars] have devoted to understanding and using irony, no one can define irony’ (Littman/Mey, 1991: 131).iv And yet, of course, the further irony is that this joke itself seems to rely upon general agreement about at least one definition of irony. It is therefore not without a little trepidation – though not also without some hopefulness – that I attempt the task faced by any scholarly engagement with irony: explaining how one intends to use this treacherous term. Certain fundamental fault-lines have emerged within the fraught theoretical literature on irony. The most profound of these, though, may be between those who address irony primarily as a particular kind of communication or expression, and those who define it considerably more broadly. The latter approach is usually traced back to thinkers such as Schlegel, Hegel, and Kierkegaard, and to the concept of Romantic Irony.v Understood as ‘both a philosophical conception of the universe and an artistic program’ (Mellor, 1980: 4), the conceptual horizons of Romantic Irony stretch far beyond communication or aesthetic devices, and theorists building upon this tradition have produced some of the most ambitious s of irony and its significance.vi Moreover, the general tendency to approach irony as representing something infinitely more inclusive and general than a means of expressing oneself – as say, skepticism or detachment, ambiguity or paradox – is also prevalent in many studies of irony in philosophy, anthropology, history, theology, critical theory, and psychoanalysis.vii Although I have no doubt that definitions offered by such conceptual frameworks could plausibly serve as the basis for a study of irony in film,viii the concerns of this book lie elsewhere. One way of defining the parameters of this study might be to invoke one of the foremost theorists of literary irony, Wayne Booth, and say that I am attempting here ‘only  

2

a rhetoric of irony [in film] – not a psychology or sociology or metaphysics or ethics of irony’ (1974: 176). From the Socratic dialogues to contemporary scholarship in linguistics and cognitive science, ix ironic communication has long been approached in of rhetoric, which is to say: ‘the art of persuasion, or a study of the means of persuasion’ – often, in the case of irony, ‘persuasion “to attitude”’ (Burke, 1969: 46, 50). In arts scholarship too, a great deal of work on irony can be defined as broadly rhetorical. This means, in part, that much of this critical and theoretical work is dedicated to analysing and interpreting irony as a particular kind of expression – the methods artworks have found to create it, and how it can be understood (Booth, 1974: ix-xii).x It is perhaps this final assumption – that much ironic expression is intended to be and can be understood – which most clearly sets rhetorical approaches apart from some others. Thus, in contrast to Jonathan Culler, who claims (following Kierkegaard) that ‘the true ironist does not wish to be understood’ (1975: 154), I begin from the premise that all the films analysed in this book wish us to understand their ironies to greater or lesser extents, consciously or intuitively, and I shall be attempting to reach such understandings.xi This in itself could be said to characterise this study as offering a rhetoric of irony in film. Even among those who approach irony in the arts rhetorically, though, a firm definition can sometimes still appear elusive. The literary critic I. A. Richards, for example, conceived of irony in poetry as ‘the bringing in of the opposite’ – a poem’s balancing of apparently contradictory but in fact complementary themes, attitudes, or impulses (1925: 250). Similarly broad definitions abound in arts criticism, being especially common in other literary scholarship associated with ‘New Criticism’, where irony gradually came almost to represent something like ‘literariness itself’ (Dane, 1991: 2).xii Writing in 1951 of the uses critics had by then made of the concept, Cleanth Brooks suggested that ‘we have doubtless stretched the term too much, but it has been almost the only term available by which to point to a general and important aspect of poetry’ (1951: 732). Clearly, comparably general aspects of filmmaking also deserve pointing towards: thematic tensions, syntheses of opposing impulses, ambivalence, ambiguity, and so on. However, I suggest we risk lessening the utility of irony as a term if we habitually apply it to such multifarious phenomena. This book, at least, concerns itself primarily with other – rather narrower, but widely accepted – definitions of irony.

 

3

Beyond Romantic and New Critical definitions, three of the most common forms of irony are usually taken to be situational, dramatic, and verbal (or communicative) irony. Situational irony is observable in the real world, and it is this we speak of when claiming, ‘It is ironic that…’ It is this form of irony that is invoked by those recurring jokes about millennia’s worth of attempts to define irony coming up empty-handed. In situational irony, then, circumstances effectively conspire to subvert or invert expectations in a paradoxically fitting fashion (see Lucariello, 1994). Dramatic irony, meanwhile, is an expressive strategy found in aesthetic objects, and especially in storytelling. Dramatic irony is generally understood as the creation of significant and revealing degrees of ‘discrepant awareness’ (Evans, 1960) between audiences and fictional characters; the canonical instance of this is Oedipus searching for the person who has caused a plague to be visited upon Thebes, when the audience knows Oedipus himself to be responsible. Finally, there is what is commonly called verbal irony, but which this book will be referring to as communicative irony.xiii Again a form of either communication or artistic expression, when we use communicative irony we ourselves act as if we were in some sense like Oedipus – that is: as if we possessed a limited or naïve perspective – when in fact we are adopting that perspective in order to ironise it. The simplest linguistic manifestation of this kind of irony is sarcasm; an example used repeatedly in scholarship, for instance, is the gesture of turning to one’s friend while trudging through the pouring rain and announcing, ‘Lovely weather!’ Yet communicative irony is by no means restricted merely to meaning the opposite of what you say.xiv Numerous theories attempt to define this kind of irony in different ways,xv but one I have found particularly useful is the ‘pretence theory’, which takes communicative irony to be ‘the pretended adoption of a defective outlook’ (Currie, 2006: 121); as such, I will also frequently refer to this form of expression as ironic pretence. These, then, are the main understandings of irony with which this book engages.xvi I will not, it should be noted, be concerned to make claims about the inherent or potential aesthetic or cultural value of ironic expession in film.xvii Nor, for the most part, do I intend to periodise filmic irony by arguing that certain strategies might have become more common during certain putative historical moments – ‘classical’, ‘modern’, ‘postmodern’, and so forth. These subjects would certainly repay further study, and I have in fact touched upon both elsewhere.xviii Here, though, I am primarily interested in three main issues: film’s potential for creating the kinds of irony I have outlined (Chapter 2); some specific resources it might have for doing so (Chapter 3); and certain critical and theoretical  

4

questions raised by interpreting irony in this medium (Chapter 4). I look forward eagerly to future studies that pursue alternative understandings of and approaches to irony in relation to film. However, it seems to me that the first necessary task is to offer film scholarship some ways of conceptualising our medium’s relationship to these fundamental forms of irony, which have received quite thorough exploration in other fields.

IN This book is called Irony in Film – rather than, for example, ‘irony and film’. This simple choice of preposition in fact already reflects a series of theoretical assumptions, commits my study to a particular focus, and suggests a methodological approach. It is in keeping with my broadly rhetorical approach to the subject that I believe we are justified in speaking of the irony in films, and artworks more generally. This, again, immediately sets me apart from certain scholars, including some who have written about irony in relation to filmmaking. Lars Elleström, for instance – intentionally echoing theorists such as Stanley Fish (1989) – argues that any ironies we might attribute to films are never ‘actual qualities of the filmic texts’ (2002: 150); instead, irony should always be understood as ‘an interpretive strategy employed by the spectator’ (ibid: 149). I delve into this issue in some depth in Chapter 4, but it may be worth pointing here to one merely practical reason for resisting this theoretical premise. On the very same page as Elleström derides certain critics for believing that ‘ironies are “found” in films and are hence supposed to “be” there’ (ibid: 147), he nonetheless proceeds to use this very formulation while advancing his own argument that the ‘irony found in movies is not always specifically “filmic”’ (ibid: 147). I suggest that such contradictions arise because, if we do not allow ourselves to describe irony as something that can be ‘found’ in films, we render ourselves virtually unable to make critical or theoretical claims about it. This offers, at least, one provisional pragmatic argument for continuing to speak of irony as something that can exist in film: without itting this possibility, it would seem that the scholar of filmic irony is simply left with no reasonable way of mounting arguments about the object of his or her attention. A necessary corollary of conceptualising irony in this way is that I must offer some explanation for how irony can come to be present in films. In one sense, that is what this whole study attempts. Yet, more basically, I am in need of a definition of what it might  

5

mean for a film to contain irony – a theoretical question taken up most rigorously in Chapter 4. For now, however, I offer the following as an operative assumption. I assume, with those such as Douglas Muecke, that – if considering irony as form of expression – ‘a work can be ironical only by intention; being ironical means deliberately being ironical’ (1969: 57). Clearly, as Linda Hutcheon notes, it can seem controversial to ‘raise issues of intentionality in a post-Derridean, post-Barthesian, and post-Foucaultian age’; and yet, as she also goes on to acknowledge, when studying irony, ‘it seems to me to be unavoidable’ (1994: 11). I too many others in considering the concept of intention indispensible for the discussion of ironic expression.xix There are several reasons for claiming this, not least of which is that intention appears to be a non-negotiable feature of what makes irony a particular form of expression in the first place. In advance of this argument being pursued in greater depth, though, suffice it to say: the claims offered throughout this book depend upon the supposition that to speak of irony in a film is to attribute ironic intentions to that film or its makers. Another outcome of concentrating on irony in film is that my focus is drawn away from something Elleström alludes to above: ironic reception strategies. It is plainly possible to discuss all aspects of aesthetics in relation to, for instance, cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1984), or taste cultures (Gans, 1974); but irony may be especially conducive to such methodologies.xx There is certainly a valuable book to be written about irony and film which focused on ‘one of irony’s most common manifestations: as a strategy of interpretation’ (Hutcheon, 1994: 112), and the reception contexts in which such interpretations might take place. Some research into ironic reception as a way of watching films already exists: for instance, work on ‘cult’ cinema, camp culture, and films appreciated for being ‘so bad they’re good’ (indeed, I have myself previously written on the last of these subjects).xxi My particular focus here on irony in film, however, means that this methodology cannot be my own. This book instead dedicates itself to the detailed analysis and theoretical investigation of films themselves. The methodology of close analysis is another necessary consequence of committing myself to a broadly rhetorical approach, and to the premise that irony is something intentionally present in films. Chapter 3 offers perhaps the most sustained engagement with the material particulars of individual movies, consisting almost entirely of close analyses of moments where sound, editing, mise-en-scène, cinematography, and performance help create irony in a host of disparate movies. Chapters

 

6

2 and 4 analyse far fewer films in far greater detail, with these analyses also assisting me in addressing certain theoretical questions. Thus, when I ask in Chapter 2 what kinds of irony a filmed medium might be capable of creating, I attempt to answer this question partly via extended analyses of three films: Dr. Strangelove (Stanley Kubrick, 1964), Rope (Alfred Hitchcock, 1948), and There’s Always Tomorrow (Douglas Sirk, 1956). Chapter 4, meanwhile, focuses primarily on a single film – Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979) – in order to contend with some questions that irony raises for the practice of interpretation, especially concerning intention, as well as the proposition that ‘irony always offers the possibility of misunderstanding’ (Culler, 1975: 154). I suggest that detailed close analysis remains equally essential when addressing such theoretical questions, since I am generally in agreement with Andrew Britton that ‘no film theory is worth anything which does not stay close to the concrete, and which does not strive continually to check its own assumptions and procedures in relation to producible texts’ (2009: 373).

FILM It could seem strange that a book calling itself Irony in Film should draw its examples almost entirely from the one – ittedly broad – filmmaking tradition considered by this study: namely, American narrative cinema. This decision, though, was made for a number of reasons. Firstly, this happens to be my research specialism. Moreover, choosing to focus a book around one’s area of greatest expertise seems particularly advisable when grappling with irony. It is a generally acknowledged fact about linguistic irony that ironic communication has a greater chance of being understood ‘the greater the mutual familiarity of speaker and hearer with the presuppositions involved in the act of irony’ (Warning 1982: 258). The same is surely true across all means of expression, which ensures that we seem bound to write the most incisive studies of irony in relation to those contexts with which we are most familiar. It is, then, perhaps first and foremost the contextual nature of ironic expression and interpretation – that is: ‘the shared context necessary to understand irony’ (Hutcheon, 1994: 87) – which has guided my choice of corpus. Secondly, within the existing film scholarship on irony, American cinema is also by far the most frequently referenced. It therefore seems logical for the first book on this topic to be able to draw together and draw upon that literature with reference to the filmmaking tradition that overwhelmingly gave rise to it.xxii Finally, in selecting this focus I  

7

am following the example of many works that attempt to grasp comparably generalised aspects of film art.xxiii When first trying to understand a subject with potential relevance for any and all filmmaking traditions, it has often seemed beneficial initially to concentrate primarily on what we might broadly call the popular American cinema. Not only has this cinema’s mode of filmmaking to a significant extent also constituted ‘the world’s mainstream film style’ (Bordwell/Staiger/Thompson, 1985: 4), but many other filmmaking traditions can fruitfully be understood, ‘in part, as reactions against the traditional patterns of narrative and narration that popular commercial film has so heavily relied upon’ (Wilson, 1986: 12). Thus, if we can begin to understand the medium’s capacities for ironic expression in films like these, we may place ourselves in a better position to address the topic in filmmaking traditions that oppose or diverge from this cinema’s tendencies.xxiv I therefore believe that American narrative cinema represents a productive starting point – by no means a terminus – for the investigation of a subject as far-reaching in its relevance as filmic irony.xxv One reason that, regardless of its corpus, the concerns of this book have such potentially broad implications is that the medium of film in general has often been charged with finding it difficult to create irony.xxvi It is perhaps not hard to see why this suspicion might arise. In many discussions of the subject, irony is repeatedly tied to definitions of meaning that are rooted firmly in written or spoken language. We frequently encounter variations on the argument that communicative irony, at least, is created by establishing differences between a ‘literal’ meaning, and the ‘implied’ meaning an ironist intends to communicate. xxvii Clearly, such concepts as ‘literal’, ‘implied’, and even ‘meaning’, become far less secure when applied not to spoken or written language, but to a medium such as film, whose expressive properties are not – or not only – linguistic, but rather constitute a ‘mongrel’ (Durgnat, 1976) ixture of linguistic, pictorial, dramatic, narrative, and aural forms of address. I suggest, though, that there is at least one available route past this apparent problem. Taking stock recently of a broad swathe of work dedicated to defining ironic communication in general, Marta Dynel notes that, ‘besides [...] agreeing on the literal vs. implied meaning distinction, most authors are unanimous that irony inherently expresses the speaker’s attitude, and thus serves as a vehicle for an evaluative judgment’ (2014: 540; original emphases). We do indeed find variations on this proposition in a wide range of theoretical writings on irony. xxviii In fact, surveying the literature on the subject, it quite

 

8

quickly becomes evident that terminology of this sort appears virtually unavoidable – whether we agree with H. P. Grice that irony is ‘intimately connected with the expression of [an] attitude, or evaluation’ (1978: 124), or with Dell Hymes’ argument that ‘when the notion of irony is pursued, it can be found to be a matter of perspective’ (1987: 300). Perspective, evaluation, attitude – while not interchangeable, terminology of this kind helps emphasise one apparent corollary of ironic communication: what we might call an implied stance. Much scholarship addressing irony in relation to different artistic fields similarly suggests that – rather than irony necessarily being confined to contrasts between literal and implied meanings – it is instead ‘perspectival difference [which] is the necessary canvas upon which ironies are aesthetically constructed’ (Kaufer, 1983: 462; emphasis mine). For instance, referring primarily to literature, Brooks regards irony as ‘a device for definition of attitudes by qualification’ (1947: 257). Addressing theatre, William Storm proposes that ‘irony arises in juxtaposition […], with a point of view that is generally implied rather than stated’ (2011: 3). Recognising the usefulness of such concepts for discussing music too, Robert Hatten argues that ‘irony [is] a bracketing or framing of musical discourse, such that it [...] might constitute a “perspective”’ (1996: 94). Finally, approaching the pictorial arts via the aforementioned ‘pretence theory’, Gregory Currie defines irony in this medium in of a picture ‘pretending to adopt a point of view, thereby expressing a view about the defects of that point of view’ (2011: 152). Approaches like these begin to suggest some possible ways of conceptualising irony in film, and gesture towards terminology appropriate to this task. For example, given the language frequently used to describe the phenomenon, a term that would seem indispensible to a critical dialogue about ironic filmmaking is point of view. In particular, one concept common to much of the voluminous theoretical work on point of view in both literature and film seems especially apposite to discussions of irony: the ‘relations of proximity to and distance from […] characters’ (Wilson, 1986: 5). Such ‘proximity’ and ‘distance’ may be affected by many factors, including our spatial and temporal access to the narrative; our degree of knowledge relative to characters’ knowledge; and the ethical evaluations we feel encouraged to make of characters.xxix The potential relevance of these aspects of point of view for a discussion of irony suggests itself immediately. The ‘discrepant awareness’ associated with dramatic irony, for instance, is only possible if a film highlights for us salient facts about the story of which certain characters remain

 

9

ignorant; equally, we might think of what Northrop Frye calls the ‘ironic mode’ in fiction, which is said to feature a protagonist who is ‘inferior in power or intelligence to ourselves’ (1957: 33). Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, point of view is a concept referred to not infrequently in the few extant scholarly engagements with filmic irony,xxx and one to which this book will often return. Another term that seems appropriate to the cluster of terminology associated with irony is tone. Douglas Pye, who has done most to theorise this under-explored concept in relation to film, suggests that, whereas point of view refers primarily to the perspectives a film provides of its characters and narrative world, tone also encomes ‘the relationships of a film to its material, its traditions and its spectator’ (2007: 8). In particular, tone is useful for articulating the way films can assume an ironically distanced attitude towards generic, stylistic, or representational conventions. Pye suggests that ing that a film may be adopting such an attitude towards its own stylistic conventions, say, has something in common with ing in conversation that someone is employing conventional phrases with a certain ironic distance […] [or] that their use of a phrase carries implied “quotation marks”. […] The difference in the use of film conventions is that we do not hear a voice. We have to make a judgement about the film’s relationship to its methods, based on our assessment of how particular decisions function in their context. (ibid: 44) In the absence of the tonal inflections of a human voice, in such cases we must seek to discern a film’s tone by determining the degree of distance at which it appears to be holding not merely its characters or fictional events, but its own representational conventions and modes of address (Pye, 2000: 12). I shall be arguing that this aspect of filmmaking is especially relevant for understanding communicative irony in this medium. As we might expect, tone is another concept that recurs relatively frequently in existing work on ironic filmmaking,xxxi and is another to which we will return throughout this book. Of course, a single volume cannot address all the manifold varieties of irony a medium can create, nor attempt to answer all the theoretical issues the subject raises. Nonetheless, I hope that much of what follows might prove useful beyond the scope of my corpus, and beyond my particular conceptual field. I suggest that, regardless of where we find ironic expression, and whatever definitions of it we use, we will be required to  

10

confront the sorts of questions this book tries to tackle: what capacities does this medium have for creating irony? How can the medium’s characteristic devices be put to ironic effect? And how should we go about interpreting irony in this medium? The aim of this book is to offer some analytical groundwork and theoretical tools that might us better answer such questions.

Bibliography Allen, Richard (2007) Hitchcock’s Romantic Irony. New York: Columbia University Press. Babington, Bruce & Peter Evans (1990) ‘Another Look at Sirkian Irony’, Movie 34/35, 47– 58. Barbe, Katharina (1995) Irony in Context. Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing. Behler, Ernst (1990) Irony and the Discourse of Modernity. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Booth, Wayne C. (1961) The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Booth, Wayne C. (1974) A Rhetoric of Irony. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bordwell, David, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson (1985) The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960. New York: Columbia University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre (1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Branigan, Edward (1992) Narrative Comprehension and Film. New York: Routledge. Brill, Lesley (1988) The Hitchcock Romance: Love and Irony in Hitchcock’s Films. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Britton, Andrew (2009) Britton on Film: The Complete Film Criticism of Andrew Britton, Barry Keith Grant (ed). Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Brooks, Cleanth (1947) The Well-Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry. New York: Harcourt Brace. Brooks, Cleanth (1951) ‘Irony as a Principle of Structure’, in Zabel, Morton D. (ed) Literary Opinion in America. New York: Harper & Row, 729-41.

 

11

Brütsch, Matthias (2015) ‘Irony, Retroactivity, and Ambiguity: Three Kinds of “Unreliable Narration” in Film’, in Nünning, Vera (ed) Unreliable Narration and Trustworthiness: Intermedial and Interdisciplinary Approaches. Berling: De Gruyter, 221-244. Burke, Kenneth (1969) A Rhetoric of Motives. Los Angeles: University of California Press. Carroll, Noël (2002) ‘Andy Kaufman and the Philosophy of Interpretation’, in Krausz, Michael (ed) Is There a Single Right Interpretation? University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 319–344. Colebrook, Claire (2004) Irony. New York: Routledge. Collins, Jim (1993) ‘Genericity in the 90s: Eclectic Irony and the New Sincerity’, in Collins, Jim, Hilary Radner & Ava Preacher (eds) Film Theory Goes to the Movies. New York: Routledge, 242-264. Comolli, Jean-Louis (1985) ‘The Ironical Howard Hawks’, in Hillier, Jim (ed) Cahiers du Cinéma: 1960-1968: New Wave, New Cinema, Reevaluating Hollywood. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 181-6. Culler, Jonathan (1975) Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature. New York: Routledge. Currie, Gregory (2006) ‘Why Irony is Pretence’, in Nichols, Shaun (ed), The Architecture of the Imagination: New Essays on Pretence, Possibility, and Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 111-33. Currie, Gregory (2010) Narratives and Narrators: A Philosophy of Stories. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Currie, Gregory (2011) ‘The Irony in Pictures’, The British Journal of Aesthetics, 51: 2, 149-167. Dane, Joseph A. (1991) The Critical Mythology of Irony. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Davis, Kimberly Chabot (1999) ‘White Filmmakers and Minority Subjects: Cinema Vérité and the Politics of Irony in Hoop Dreams and Paris Is Burning’, South Atlantic Review, 64: 1, 26-47. De Man, Paul (1996) Aesthetic Ideology. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Doane, Mary Ann (1979) ‘The Dialogic Text: Filmic Irony and the Spectator’. PhD. Thesis, University of Iowa. Durgnat, Raymond (1976) ‘The Mongrel Muse’, in Durgnat on Film. London: Faber & Faber, 17-28. Dutton, Dennis (1987) ‘Why Intentionalism Won’t Go Away’, in Cascardi, A. J. (ed) Literature and the Question of Philosophy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 194–209.  

12

Dyer, Richard (2007) Pastiche. New York: Routledge. Dynel, Marta (2014) ‘Linguistic Approaches to (Non)humorous Irony’, Humor 27: 4, 537550. Elleström, L. (2002). Divine Madness: On Interpreting Literature, Music, and the Visual Arts Ironically. London: Bucknell University Press. Empson, William (1930) Seven Types of Ambiguity. London: Chatto and Windus. Enright, Dennis Joseph (1986) The Alluring Problem: An Essay on Irony. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Evans, Bertrand (1960) Shakespeare’s Comedies. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Fernández, James W. & Mary Taylor Huber (2001) Irony in Action: Anthropology, Practice, and the Moral Imagination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fish, Stanley (1989) ‘Short People Got No Reason to Live: Reading Irony’, in Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies. Durham: Duke University Press, 180–96. Frye, Northrop (1957) Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Gans, Herbert (1974) Popular Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste. New York: Basic Books. Garber, Frederick (ed) (1988), Romantic Irony. Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Gibbs, John (2012) ‘Balancing Act: Exploring the Tone of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou’, New Review of Film and Television Studies 10: 1, 132–151. Gibbs, Raymond W. & Herbert L. Colston (eds), Irony in Language and Thought: A Cognitive Science Reader. New York: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Grice, H. P. (1978) ‘Some Further Notes on Logic and Conversation’, in Cole, P. (ed), Pragmatics, vol. 9. New York: Academic Press, 113–127. Hatten, Robert (1996) ‘Review of The Practice of Performance, by John Rink’, Indiana Theory Review, 17: 1, 87-117 Hermerén, Göran (1975) ‘Intention and Interpretation in Literary Criticism’, New Literary History, 7: 1, 57-82 Holland, Glenn S. (2000) Divine Irony. London: Associated University Press. Hymes, Dell (1987) ‘A Theory of Verbal Irony and a Chinookan Pattern of Verbal Exchange’, in Verschueren, Jeff & Marcella Bertuccelli-Papi (eds) The Pragmatic

 

13

Perspective: Selected Papers from the 1985 International Pragmatics Conference. Amsterdam: Bejamins, 293-338. Hutcheon, Linda (1994) Irony's Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony. New York: Routledge. Kaufer, David (1983) ‘Irony, Interpretive Form and the Theory of Meaning’, Poetics Today 4, 451–464. Kierkegaard, Søren (1966) The Concept of Irony, with Constant Reference to Socrates (Translated by Lee M. Capel). London: Collins. King, Geoff (2013) ‘Indie 2.0: Change and Continuity in Contemporary American Indie Film’, New York: I. B. Tauris. Kotthoff, Helga (2003) ‘Responding to Irony in Different Contexts: on Cognition in Conversation’, Journal of Pragmatics, 35: 9, 1387-1411. Kozloff, Sarah (1989) Invisible Storytellers: Voice-over Narration in American Fiction Film. Los Angeles: University of California Press. Kroeber, Karl (2006) Make Believe in Film and Fiction: Visual vs. Verbal Storytelling. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Leigh, Jacob (2012) The Cinema of Eric Rohmer: Irony, Imagination, and the Social World. London: Continuum. Littman, David C. & Jacob L. Mey (1991) ‘The Nature of Irony: Toward a Computational Model of Irony’, Journal of Pragmatics, 15: 2, 131-151. Lucariello, Joan (1994) ‘Situational Irony: A Concept of Events Gone Awry’, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 123, 129-145. MacDowell, James (2010) ‘Notes on Quirky’, Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism 1: 1–16. Available at: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/film/movie/contents/notes_on_quirky.pdf (Accessed 6 February 2016). MacDowell, James (2012) ‘Quirky: Buzzword or Sensibility?’, in King, Geoff, Claire Molloy & Yannis Tzioumakis (eds) American Independent Cinema: Indie, Indiewood and Beyond. New York: Routledge, 53-64 MacDowell, James (2012) ‘Wes Anderson, Tone and the Quirky Sensibility’, New Review of Film and Television Studies, 10:1, 6–27. MacDowell, James (2014) ‘The Andersonian, the Quirky, and “Innocence”’, in Kunze, Peter (ed) The Films of Wes Anderson: Critical Essays on an Indiewood Icon. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 153-169.

 

14

MacDowell, James (2015) ‘Buffalo ’66: The Radical Conventionality of an Indie Happy Ending’, in US Independent Filmmaking After 1989: Possible Films, eds. Claire Perkins and Constantine Verevis (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 35-44. MacDowell, James & James Zborowski (2013) ‘The Aesthetics of “So Bad it’s Good”: Value, Intention, and The Room’, Intensities, Autumn/Winter 2013, pp. 1-30. Melbye, David (2016) Irony in The Twilight Zone: How the Series Critiqued Postwar American Culture. London: Rowman & Littlefield. Mellor, Anne (1980) English Romantic Irony. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Muecke, Douglas Colin (1969) The Com of Irony. London: Methuen. Newmark, Kevin (2012) Irony on Occasion: From Schlegel and Kierkegaard to Derrida and de Man. New York: Fordham University Press. Ong, Walter J. (1976) ‘From Mimesis to Irony: the Distancing of Voice’, The Bulletin of the Midwest Modern Language Association, 9: 1/2, 1-24. Perez, Gilberto (2009) ‘Errol Morris’s Irony’, in Rothman, William (ed), Three Documentary Filmmakers. Albany: State University of New York, 13-18. Perkins, Claire (2011) American Smart Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Perkins, V. F. (1972) Film as Film: Understanding and Judging Movies. London: Penguin Books. Plantinga, Carl (2009) Moving Viewers: American Film and the Spectator’s Experience. Los Angeles: University of California Press. Pye, Douglas (2000) ‘Movies and Point of View’, Movie, 36, 2–34. Pye, Douglas (2007) ‘Movies and Tone’, in Gibbs, John & Douglas Pye (eds) Close-Up 02: Movies and Tone/Reading Rohmer/Voices in Film. London: Wallflower Press, 1–80. Richards, I.A. (1925) Principles of Literary Criticism. New York: Harcourt Brace and World. Robertson, Pamela (1990) ‘Structural Irony in Mildred Pierce, or How Mildred Lost Her Tongue’, Cinema Journal 30: 1, 42-54. Roche, David (2015) ‘Irony in The Sweet Hereafter by Russell Banks (1991) and Atom Egoyan (1997)’, Adaptation 8: 2, 237-253. Rorty, Richard (1989) Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Roth-Lindberg, Örjan (1995) ‘Skuggan av ett Leende: Omfilmisk Ironi och den Ironiska Berättelsen’, PhD thesis, University of Stockholm: Bokförlaget T. Fischer & Co.

 

15

Rothman, Stephen (2011) ‘“Isn’t It Ironic’: The Films of the Coen Brothers’, Comedy Studies 2:1, 55-62. Sconce, Jeffrey (2002) ‘Irony, Nihilism and the New American “Smart” Film’, Screen 43: 4, 349–69. Smith, Murray (1995) Engaging Characters. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Sperber, Dan & Deirdre Wilson (2007) ‘On Verbal Irony’, in Gibbs, Raymond W. & Herbert L. Colston (eds), Irony in Language and Thought: A Cognitive Science Reader. New York: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 35-55. Storm, William (2011) Irony and the Modern Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stringfellow, Frank (1994) The Meaning of Irony: A Psychoanalytic Investigation. Albany: State University of New York Press. Thomas, Deborah J. (2009). Ambivalent Fictions: Youth, Irony and Affect in American Smart Film. PhD Thesis, The University of Queensland. Elsaesser, Thomas (1974) ‘The Cinema of Irony’, Monogram 5: 1–2. Toles, George (2001) A House Made of Light: Essays on the Art of Film. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Vlastos, Gregory (1991) Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Warning, Rainer (1982) ‘Irony and the “Order of Discourse” in Flaubert’, New Literary History, 13: 2, 253–86. White, Hayden (1973) Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Wilson, George M. (1986) Narration in Light: Studies in Cinematic Point of View. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Zborowski, James (2015) Classical Hollywood Cinema: Point of View and Communication. Manchester: Manchester University Press.                                                                                                                   i

There do, though, exist two PhD theses on the topic: Doane (1979) and Roth-Lindberg (1995); Thomas’ (2009) thesis also discusses filmic irony in relation to American indie ‘smart’ cinema (Sconce, 2002) ii For instance: Elsaesser (1974), Kozloff (1989: 102-26), Robertson (1990), Babington/Evans (1990), Collins (1993), Davis (1999), Sconce (2002), Allen (2007), Perez (2009), Perkins (2011), Gibbs (2012), Leigh (2012), King (2013: 23-76), Brütsch (2015), or Roche (2015). There are also studies that address film briefly but usefully in the context of broader discussions of irony; see, for instance, Hutcheon (1994), Elleström (2002), or Currie (2010). I will be drawing upon the insights of many of these scholars throughout the book. iii A hat-tip to Richard Dyer’s Pastiche is due for inspiring this introductory structure (2007: 1-6). iv See de Man (1996: 165), Enright (1986: 7), or Barbe (1995: 71). v Schlegel, for instance, defined irony in poetry not as a discrete device used to create particular effects, but more holistically, as ‘permanent parabasis’ (1958: 85). Kierkegaard, for his part (via Hegel), famously

 

16

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              regarded irony as ‘infinite absolute negativity’ (1966: 26) – a philosophical worldview or attitude of radical scepticism towards existence and the self. For a useful overview of various traditions related to Romantic Irony, see Garber (1988). vi Claims, for example, that it is ‘inseparable from the evolution of the modern consciousness’ (Behler, 1990: 111); that it is ‘built into the formal representation-relation that is the basis of human culture’ (Gans, 1997: 74); or that it possesses the power to ‘destroy the immediacy and sincerity of life’ (Colebrook, 2004: 3). vii For instance: Rorty (1989), Fernández/Huber (2001), White (1973), Holland (2000), Newmark (2012), and Stringfellow (1994), respectively. viii I certainly agree with Elleström, for example, that ‘irony as a worldview or a philosophy of life may be found in movies’ (2002: 148). Indeed, some existing film and television scholarship could broadly be described as proposing or debating the attribution of such a worldview to specific directors or texts; see, for example, Comolli (1985) on Hawks; Brill (1988) and Allen (2007) on Hitchcock; Leigh (2012) on Rohmer; Toles (2001) and Rothman (2011) on the Coen Brothers; or Melbye (2016) on The Twilight Zone (CBS, 1959-1964). ix See Vlastos (1991), for instance, on Plato’s Socrates. For a valuable overview of various linguistic and cognitive s of irony, meanwhile, see Gibbs/Colston (2007). x As Kenneth Burke notes, in the realm of literature, the study of rhetoric frequently involves ‘the analysis of […] attitudes, as expressed in literary tactics’ (ibid: 126). It is for this reason, for example, that Burke considers William Empson’s analyses of literary ironies in Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) to deserve ‘an important place in the New Rhetoric’ (ibid: 126) – even if Empson might not consider himself a scholar of rhetoric per se. xi Whether or not this means they have been created by ‘true ironists’, I leave to the reader to decide. It may be that most of the examples of irony I engage with could be described as ‘stable’, as opposed to ‘unstable’, in Booth’s (1974) ; yet, as he notes, even irreducibly ambiguous ironies, which may not it singular understandings, nonetheless ‘rule out some readings – namely, the unambiguous!’ (ibid: 127). xii For an overview, see Dane (1991: 149-58). xiii This is due to the immediately obvious inappropriateness of the term ‘verbal irony’ for film; in referring to this form of irony as ‘communicative irony’, I follow Currie (2011). xiv For criticism of this merely ‘antiphrastic’ definition, see Hutcheon (1994: 56-64) and Currie (2006). xv For instance, see too the Gricean (Grice, 1978) and ‘echoic’ s (e.g.: Sperber/Wilson, 2007). xvi Although, for reasons that should be apparent, dramatic and communicative ironies receive greater focus than the largely real-world phenomenon of situational irony. xvii In their own distinct ways, Davis (1999), Toles (2001), Sconce (2002), Thomas (2009), and Leigh (2012), for instance, each offer considerations of ethical issues associated with irony in film. xviii See MacDowell (2010, 2012a/b, 2014, 2015). xix For instance: Booth (1974), Hermerén (1975), Dutton (1987), and Carroll (2002). xx Two scholars who have profitably approached irony in film in such are Sconce (2002) and King (2013: 23-76). xxi MacDowell/Zborowski (2013); see also Dyer (1987), Sconce (1995), Taylor (1999), McCulloch (2011), and Bartlett (2015). xxii Though this is not to say, of course, that we should not hope for and expect future studies to broaden these horizons considerably. xxiii Say, V. F. Perkins’ Film as Film (1972), George M. Wilson’s Narration in Light (1986), Sarah Kozloff’s Invisible Storytellers (1989), Edward Branigan’s Narrative Comprehension and Film (1992), or Carl Plantinga’s Moving Viewers (2009). xxiv Since this book is also focused for the most part squarely on fiction films, there is certainly, for instance, much work still to be carried out on irony in documentary filmmaking; though see Perez (2009) for one useful discussion of this. xxv Having said this, even the ‘classical’ Hollywood films I analyse exhibit extremely disparate approaches to irony – due partly to the disparate nature of their genres. Furthermore, my examples in fact take us some way beyond this already-roomy tradition, encoming areas such as the ‘Hollywood Renaissance’, 80s blockbuster cinema, American independent filmmaking, and even – on occasion – non-narrative experimental film. xxvi For instance: Ong (1976: 18), Elleström (2002: 147), Kroeber (2006: 59), or Currie (2010: 169). xxvii Marta Dynel observes that one premise most theorists of irony agree upon is that, ‘the literal import of an ironic utterance differs from the implicit meaning the speaker intends to communicate’ (Dynel, 2014: 540). xxviii Helga Kotthoff, for instance, considers ‘the special achievement of irony to be its ability to signal a contrast in evaluation. An attitude is attributed […] from which the ironist wishes to contrastively distance him/herself’ (2003: 1392). Sperber and Wilson’s influential ‘echoic’ of linguistic irony similarly stresses the importance of attitude – specifically, ‘the speaker’s attitude to the opinion echoed’ (2007: 40).

 

17

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              Even philosophical definitions of irony are often indebted to such terminology: Claire Colebrook, for example, uses comparable language to define irony as a philosophical disposition, describing it as both a ‘sensibility or attitude’ (2004: 7), and as ‘the adoption of a point of view’ (ibid: 133). xxix See, for instance, Booth (1961) in relation to literature, and Wilson (1986), Pye (2000), and Zborowski (2015) in relation to film. Smith (1995) also usefully investigates these aspects of our relationship to characters (though he distances himself from the concept of point of view); in her turn, Thomas (2009) has made use of Smith’s models to discuss ironic distance from characters in American indie ‘smart’ films (see Sconce, 2002). xxx See, for instance, Wilson (1986: 103-125), Allen (2007), and Leigh (2012). xxxi In addition to Pye (2007), see Smith (2000), Sconce (2002), Allen (2007), Thomas (2009), Perkins (2011) Gibbs (2012), MacDowell (2012b), and King (2013: 23–76).

 

18