Irony in Film

James MacDowell

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137329929
• eBook ISBN: 9781137329936
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Irony in Film is the first book about ironic expression in this medium. We often feel the need to call films or aspects of them ironic; but what exactly does this mean? How do films create irony? Might certain features of the medium help or hinder its ironic potential? How can we know we are justified in dubbing any film or moment ironic? This book attempts to answer such questions, investigating in the process crucial and under-examined issues that irony raises for our understanding of narrative filmmaking.

A much-debated subject in other disciplines, in film scholarship irony is habitually referred to but too seldom explored. Combining in-depth theorising with detailed close analysis, this pioneering study asks what ironic capacities films might possess, how film style may be used ironically, and what role intention should play in film interpretation. The proposed answers have significance for our understanding of not only ironic filmmaking, but the nature of expression in this medium.

© The Author(s) 2016

James MacDowellIrony in FilmPalgrave Close Readings in Film and Television10.1057/978-1-137-32993-6_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

James MacDowell¹

(1)

University of Warwick, Coventry, UK

End Abstract

This is a book about irony in film. Surprisingly, it is also the first book about this topic. ¹ 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 underexplored by film scholars. This is not to say that film critics and theorists 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. ² 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.

Before tackling 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. ³

Irony

There are, to say the least, disagreements about how best to define ‘irony’ (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). ⁴ And yet, of course, the further irony is that this joke itself seems to rely on 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. ⁵ 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 accounts of irony and its significance. ⁶ Moreover, the general tendency to approach irony as representing something infinitely more inclusive and general than a means of expressing oneself—as, say, scepticism or detachment, ambiguity or paradox—is also prevalent in many studies of irony in philosophy, anthropology, history, theology, critical theory, and psychoanalysis. ⁷ 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, ⁸ 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 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, ⁹ ironic communication has long been approached in terms 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). ¹⁰ 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. ¹¹ 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 the so-called New Criticism, where irony gradually came almost to represent something like ‘literariness itself’ (Dane 1991: 2). ¹² 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.

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 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 (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. ¹³ 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 ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Irony in Film: Theorising Irony for a Mongrel Medium
• 3. Ironic Filmmaking: Properties, Devices, and Conventions
• 4. Interpreting Irony in Film: Intention, Rhetoric, and Irony’s Edge
• Backmatter