I’m the kind of person who finds it very easy to get lost in fiction. Books and movies both. I live in my head a lot of the time anyway, so when I read or watch something that I find very engaging, the world around me disappears. This is definitely a family trait. My dad has ADHD, and the only thing he could ever focus on was reading a book. I remember him going through dozens of mass market paperbacks from The Destroyer series, sitting in his recliner, otherwise dead to the world. I could have lit him on fire and he wouldn’t have noticed. On the other side of the family, my maternal grandfather (who my mom thinks I am just like) could lose himself in reading a shampoo bottle. I recall one time that I was staying with him and my grandmother for a few weeks one summer, and I walked into the kitchen one morning to find him reading a Baby-Sitters Club book that I’d left on the table. He was probably in his early 80’s at the time, but he had no problem getting into a book for tween girls. If it had words on it, he was going to read it. In that respect, my mom is right. I’m just like him. My biggest sorrow in life is knowing that I will die before I can read everything. I plan vacations around what I am going to read. Before e-readers existed, my carry-on bag for a plane ride would be filled to the brim with books so I could be sure I had an option for any mood that might strike me.
In times of trauma, my connection to books, movies, and music is even stronger. When I’m sad, there are certain things I have to have to feel better. I will invariably want to listen to Crowded House records. Re-reading a deeply familiar and beloved book may be the only thing I can focus on besides my grief or depression. And I am probably going to want to watch The Princess Bride. Because I want to visit the old friends who got me through the first time I experienced mental health issues.
We like to focus on the good stuff over at Comfort Films. I think we figure that you have enough bad things in life to deal with to want to hear our troubles. At the very least, if we do mention anything sad, we try to make it funny. But I can’t fully address my love for The Princess Bride without talking about trauma, because I probably wouldn’t love it if it didn’t show up when it did.
When I was 12, my parents got divorced. Twelve is kind of a terrible age anyway, but I had a particularly rough time of it. I changed schools the same year, moving into 6th grade at a tiny private school where everyone had known each other since toddlerhood and most folks were related to each other down the line somewhere. I was not part of that. I had moved from a much bigger town the year before and attended 5th grade in a local school with only 2 other students my age. This had already been a culture shock, since I’d previously lived in Oxford, home of Ole Miss, and a pretty cosmopolitan town for Mississippi. I was highly advanced academically compared to the other 6th graders, a lot more physically developed, and a stranger. I was also desperately poor. When my mom and dad got divorced, my sisters and I stayed with my mom, who made around $14,000 a year working at a library. My dad paid for our school tuition, but everything else came out of my mom’s extremely meager salary. Thus, it was back to wearing charity clothes for me, and my mom and I often skipped breakfast and lunch to make sure my sisters had enough to eat. I kind of developed a “gatherer metabolism” at that point in life, with my body holding on to all the calories it could get, and in spite of what must have been pretty serious malnutrition, I still gained weight. I was made fun of for my glasses, my weight, my poorly fitting Salvation Army clothes, my intelligence. Pretty much anything that anyone could find out about me became ammunition to mock me.
At home, things weren’t going so great either. My dad wasn’t taking the divorce well and public scenes were made. He was clearly depressed and would start crying, which was something I wasn’t used to. After a few months, things started to calm down, but then both my parents started dating, and I began to have to deal with that too. Meeting girlfriends and boyfriends and their kids. I started to feel like my sisters and I were relics of my parents’ previous lives. My sisters were younger than me, and less sensitive in some ways. Also they were eating three meals a day and because of their standard-sized bodies, they had a lot more options from the literal charity pile of clothing in my mom’s bedroom to choose from. They’re also twins, so they’ve always had each other. I felt more alone. In Oxford, I’d had a lot of friends. In Holmes County, I had none.
Sometime around mid-year, my dad started dating Sallie. She was an old girlfriend from his college days, so they already knew each other pretty well. When we would go with my dad for the weekend, we would swing by and see Sallie on the way to his place. We’d eat at Morrison’s, which was this cafeteria-style place at the mall. I’d eat one of the two biggest meals I could expect for the month, and then we’d go back to her house. She had a very young daughter, so after dinner, she and my dad would usually go talk and try to get the kid to sleep, and she’d park my sisters and me on the couch. My sisters would invariably crash out right away. They’ve always been able to fall asleep immediately and sleep through anything (in one case a Guns N Roses concert—no lie), but that’s another way I am unlike them. I had horrible insomnia, especially at that tween/teen age. I once failed to go to sleep for six days, finally catching about half an hour of shuteye while watching Hoosiers at a church lock-in (thanks Hoosiers, I owe you one). Sallie thought The Princess Bride was just great and that I would think so too, and that was what she selected for us the first night we went to her house. I would subsequently watch it every single Friday night that we went to Sallie’s, sitting on her comfortable couch with a real television and the unfamiliar sensation of a full belly from a real meal.
As I said on the podcast, I’m pretty sure she picked it because she thought I’d have a crush on Westley, like she did. She didn’t really know me or anything about me, but I think she considered it a safe bet that a 12-year-old girl would like a dreamy and dashing bad boy with a heart of gold. That first night when she put in the tape, she stayed to watch the first 10 minutes or so, with Westley and Buttercup falling in love before he leaves to make his fortune. With a sigh, Sallie said Cary Elwes was the most attractive man in the world. I was less impressed, but I don’t like blond guys. (Sorry blond guys, it’s not you, it’s me.) Then Buttercup got kidnapped, and I met Inigo and Fezzik, and things changed. I watched their friendship, created through their shared experience of being bullied by Vizzini, and I wanted to have friends like that. I was like Fezzik’s before, as described by Vizzini, but minus the brainless part: friendless, helpless, hopeless. If he could find companionship, why couldn’t I? The movie went on, and my new friends teamed up with the new Westley, who was much more interesting now that he had been Dread Pirate Roberts for a while (although he still couldn’t have my heart, since it already belonged to Inigo by then). Vizzini was gone, but now they all had the much scarier and more powerful Count Rugen and Humperdinck to face. And they did it, with good humor, intelligence, teamwork, and passion. And it felt like I was a part of that too. For once, I could vanquish the bullies and ride off into the sunset with my good friends. So I wanted to do that every chance I got, and I did, at least until my dad and Sallie broke it off and I lost access to her VHS tape.
I mentioned on the podcast that I have a different response to the frame story with the grandfather and grandson than I used to. When I was a kid, I really didn’t like those parts. I kind of wished I could edit them out, because they served as a reminder that the inner story was just a story, and that the characters to whom I felt so attached weren’t real. As an adult who has now processed a lot of trauma and come out on the other side with a lot more coping tools at my disposal, I don’t necessarily watch The Princess Bride to become part of the team anymore. It’s now more like revisiting old friends who you haven’t seen in a long time. There’s an unreality to that type of experience, and most of the time during those visits, you’re talking about old times in the same way you’d tell an old story. But the comfort is still there, increased and enhanced by the familiarity. Is it weird that I get such a deep sense of calm and comfort from a movie? Probably. It’s weird for a barely teenage girl to crush on Inigo instead of Westley too, so I’m okay with weird because I have to be. The weird is coming from inside the house. But the message of The Princess Bride is the same as the message from our other recent Rob Reiner movie, When Harry Met Sally... I can be weird. I can be annoying. I can be too fat or too tall or too different. And someone will love me anyway.
Comfort Films Episode 15: The Princess Bride (Release January 7, 2022)
