In Which Zooey Deschanel is Pretty Cute

So yesterday, I watched (500) Days of Summer, which was pretty neat. It was, at times, a trifle contrived (not in places like the dance interlude and what have you, which might be considered sort of obviously contrived, so much as in smaller things like character naming), but on the whole it was great.

Naturally I did that thing everyone will do where you watch it and go "I'd love to be that sort of girl and have that effect on people" but secretly know that you much more closely resemble the slightly pathetic but ingenuously adorable hero. (Note, this is not me saying "I'm adorable", this is me saying "I reckon I'm more of a haver of crushes than a crushee"). Also, at one point the heroine rides a bike which is the exact bike I've spent the last week lusting after, so I'm glad I saw the move afterwards, rather than beforehand, so as not to feel derivative.

Anyway, obvious neurosis aside, what really struck me was the sort of thing which drew me to the characters; distressingly, these were pretty wanky. Thus, not all of the indie-hip-beautifulness or lyrical appeal of Zooey Deschanel held as much appeal as the throw-away lines which allude to a wider literary wossname. So our hero carries on about how he believes in love and the great Romantic ideals, and she refers to him casually as "Young Werther". Now call me a geek if you like, but I really do love that. I mean, I've never even read Goethe, but I'm all "ha! You said something funny and obscure and I got it! We are both so clever, we should totally be friends!".

(Clearly) it's sort of tragic, really. I do the same thing generally, I fear. Certainly I find Russell Brand more amusing when he uses phrases like "labial fricatives" or even just words like "denoument" than when he's making blow-job jokes. Does this make me a snob? Maybe (but since I don't find blowjob jokes all that amusing at the best of times, it doesn't really worry me).(Note: it helps that he's ridiculously attractive, as well.)

Conversely, at the end of the show I watched yesterday he did that "You've been a lovely crowd, good night," thing, but then followed it with "Hare Krishna". The problem with which is that my knee jerk reaction to a guy like that using a valedictory comment like that is to go "huh, tosser". If I actually thought he (or anybody, of course) actually adhered to that whole belief-set, it'd be a different story. Maybe the problem is just that I've known many more twits who say that sort of thing because that's their schtick than people who actually believe it or generally even know what it means beyond "being deep" (this also goes for that sort of head bow over supplicatorily joined hands thing some lads do in lieu of a wave of greeting).

I wonder what effect it has on us, this sort of cheapening of these gestures and words. It's an established point that swear words lose potency with repetition (thus one surprised "shit!" from a sweet old lady who never says anything harsher than "darn" in ordinary circumstances is usually more impressive than yet another "fuck" from a twerp lad in a pub who says it as punctuation). But does that work with words that have been holy too? I suppose it must, since serious high concepts become very bad blasphemies become merely mediocre swear words become the adorable archaisms of children's books, as a sort of inevitable continuum. (Thus, knights in kids books can say "Zounds!", people's mums say "bloody" to describe the traffic, and so on). (For those of you not down wit da lingo, "zounds" was originally "Christ's wounds!", a pretty big deal, back in the day, blasphemy-wise, and "bloody" was "By Our Lady", likewise, natch.)

Anyhow, it’s a funny thing, how appealing it is when people refer in passing to things that you happen to know about. Maybe it’s a validation thing? Like “you know that thing? I know that thing! We should be friends! If you like things that I like, I must be ok.” I sort of hope there’s more to it than that, but fear that there mayn’t be. I know that when The Lucksmiths tell you that they were “drunk in the haze of happy hour”, for instance, that’s a bunch more interesting and clever than it would be if the Smiths had never been “happy in the haze of a drunken hour”.

I fear this may all be snobbery again. I’ve been reading Kipps by H. G. Wells, this week. It’s a social commentary-type comedy thing about a young lower class man who unexpectedly inherits a small fortune and rises to the upper middle class. Basically the book is full of that vaguely awkward Pretty Woman which-fork-is-the-one-for-the-salad sort of awkwardness. It’s odd, though, the character has one of those accents which is written out with the lower classinflections. Like Hagrid. You know the one, where the character says “orf” rather than “off” every time. It’s strangely jarring, because I don’t think I’ve ever come across a novel before where the hero, rather than some comic-relief bit-parter has one of those accents. Not one which the author painstakingly writes out, anyway. It always seems to be an instrument of comedy, like being less well-educated is the same thing as being amusingly stupid.

I was about to be all “we must be such snobs for finding it intrusive, for noticing every time, what does it say about our subconscious beliefs about class” and such, but I’ve just had a reassuring thought. Since, right, language as written in a novel is not written as it sounds (otherwise American books would ‘ahl luhk as iyf thay werrr naht i Ninglish att ahl’), then the intrusiveness of a written accent in perforce a deliberate authorial move. Essentially, every time he chooses to write a line of dialogue, the author is deliberately choosing to reinforce the otherness of the hero. Since the character does not set out to say “orf” but means to word “off”, then anything written from his point of view, anything written truly sympathetically, would be written with the words he means, rather than the words he pronounces.

On the whole, that’s fair enough, I suppose, since the point of this book is that he’s a fish out of water, all alone and, to mix metaphors appositely, hopelessly out of his depth. It’s funny that 100 years ago, books about culture clash between the lower and upper classes were all about how the lower class people were amusingly out of place and all that, whereas although that certainly remains a major element in the equivalent texts today, there’s a great deal more of the making fun of the toffee nosed plum-in-mouth snobs. This would presumably reflect the shift in access to the texts: the viewers of the comic movies are more likely to identify with the less-classy characters, whereas the readers back then either were upper class, or liked to fancy themselves so. Back then, everyone wanted to be a little bit “better” than they were, which is still the case. But they didn’t raise their eyes to high as to judge their “superiors”, whereas now we have so much access to information, and now that we all have votes that count for the same amount, and all that, we’re much more inclined to wish them down to our level, rather than wishing ourselves up.

I guess that accounts for Celebrity Big Brother and Prince Harry, as phenomena?