Billy Wilder quotation
Below is what seems to me to be a perfect example of verbal irony. It's from Cameron Crowe's book of interviews with Billy Wilder. Wilder is talking about how it would take Marilyn Monroe many, many takes to say simple lines like "It's me, Sugar!" (From, 'Some Like It Hot'.) Here's the text from the book (Wilder is speaking):
"We spent quite a few takes getting 'It's me, Sugar!' I had signs painted on the door: IT'S. ME. SUGAR. 'Action' would come and she would say, 'It's Sugar, me!'. I took her to the side after about take fifty, and I said, 'Don't worry about it.' And she said, 'Worry about what?' The fiftieth take, that was, and then there was the fifty first, and the fifty second.... As I've said before, I've got an old aunt in Vienna who would say every line perfectly."
"We spent quite a few takes getting 'It's me, Sugar!' I had signs painted on the door: IT'S. ME. SUGAR. 'Action' would come and she would say, 'It's Sugar, me!'. I took her to the side after about take fifty, and I said, 'Don't worry about it.' And she said, 'Worry about what?' The fiftieth take, that was, and then there was the fifty first, and the fifty second.... As I've said before, I've got an old aunt in Vienna who would say every line perfectly."
posted by Charles P. Everitt at 2:50 PM
3 Comments:
Why does the spacing get so screwed up on my posts? It ruins the tempo of one's reading, making it hard to enjoy the humor of it all.
I have a harder time hearing the irony in this quotation than you do. To me, it sounds more like a case of Wilder implicating how stupid he thinks Marilyn Monroe is, by stating how his grandma could do it easily.
How would you explain the irony in the quote?
Well, the irony is that while it is true that he has an old aunt in Vienna who would say every line perfectly, thus solving the problem at hand--which is to get a female actress to say, "It's me, Sugar"--this wouldn't really solve his problem, which is to get an attractive female actress, namely Monroe, to say this line. What's ironic about it is that it is both a solution and not a solution, true and not true, at the same time. (I don't know if that helps. I'll say more.)
You said you think it is about how stupid Monroe is. While I agree, of course, that it implies that, I don't think that's Wilder's point at all. Wilder's point is that this is the kind of Catch-22 situation one finds oneself in in directing movies. To put his point bluntly: movies are only interesting if they have people like Monroe in them, but people like Monroe have a hard time saying lines as simple as "It's me, Sugar". But what's ironic about his statement is that he doesn't just say, "It's really hard to make movies that are interesting because interesting actresses have a hard time saying simple lines." Instead, he describes the kind of difficulty that working with Monroe involves, and then says, ironically, that he could've just done the same thing without her very easily--the point being (and the reader is left to figure this out for herself), that then it wouldn't be the same thing, of course.
It's not sarcastic, because it's true that he has an old aunt in Vienna who would say every line perfectly--and I'm sure there's a sense in which in a moment of despair he may have thought to himself: "There's a million other actresses who could say this line in one take." But it's meant ironically, of course, because those other actresses wouldn't be interesting on screen in the way Monroe is. I guess a less obvious but equally ironic comment would've been for Wilder to say "As I've said before, there's a line of actresses that goes around the block that would say every line perfectly." But because the irony of that comment would be less obvious, I don't think it would be anywhere near as funny.
By the way, I figured out how to fix the spacing on my posts.
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