I offered a definition of tropes long ago, back in 2018, but the best breakdown is that tropes describe actions: "orphan must learn the secret of his birth," "hero may refuse the call to adventure but must in time answer said call and do heroic things." In contrast, icons are like "solidified" tropes, concretized into particular entities, forces, or settings in order to invite the identification of a work's audience. -- MY SHORTEST POST YET.
...I don't even expect plots to be fresh. They are like skeletons. I think one skeleton looks more or less like the others, but when they are fleshed out, you get a unique person. So with movie plots. -- poster "atenotol" on Classic Horror Film Board (quoted with permission)
I doubt that I'll ever again use the terms "obvious" and "unobvious," given that I only did so in response to my having read George Orwell's 1942 essay on Rudyard Kipling. Though in part 2 I disagreed with many of Orwell's criteria for evaluating Kipling, I must admit that his calling Kipling's works "a monument to the obvious" is almost as quote-worthy as many of the familiar phrases of Kipling. Indeed, the fact that Kipling's "gnomic" utterances were so eminently quotable was the main reason for Orwell to call him "monumental"-- though if familiarity of quotes were the sole measure of one's obviousness, then Shakespeare would outdo Kipling there by that appeal to across-the-intellectual-spectrum familiarity.
It was also mostly a coincidence that I happened to have read Orwell's online essay a few days before the end of October, which is also when I re-screened, for the first time in perhaps 30 years, the famous "bad movie" BLOODY PIT OF HORROR. Thus I began thinking about what elements of PIT were or were not "obvious," not so much in the specific way Orwell used the word but in the general sense. I noted how much PIT owed to many other Gothic narratives before it, stating, "BLOODY PIT is really not very different from dozens of other Gothic stories in which travelers show up at an old castle or manor and fall afoul of the malefic entity therein." The unobvious element, though, was the idea that said entity "looks like a cross between a masked wrestler and the hero of an Italian muscleman movie." I was of two minds on the effects of the scripters' plunge into unpredictability. On one hand, it caused a lot of viewers to make fun of the film, though on the whole PIT has more mythopoeic content than the average "so bad it's good" flick. On the other hand, PIT's foray into a very unobvious type of menace made a lot of people watch the film who would not have watched the similarly themed PLAYGIRLS AND THE VAMPIRE.
Now, in the terms I've established in my above definitions of the terms "trope" and "icon," the basic setup for PIT would be the master trope of the story. But no audience can relate just to a trope, which is just a base description of plot, sometimes with a smattering of a character-arc. Tropes must be "solidified" into icons to make them relatable. If one boiled Orwell's screed down into a trope-icon argument, then Orwell would be saying that Kipling was popular because his tropes were so simple and direct that anyone, no matter how intellectual or non-intellectual, could relate emotionally to them, so in that sense, Kipling's tropes would be appeals to the obvious.
But in my disagreement with Orwell in Part 2, I stressed that emotional appeal was not enough; that Kipling was celebrated because he was a master of literary myth. No matter how improbable intellectuals might deem the author's Cockney soldiers or talking animals, they succeeded because Kipling had an "unobvious" approach to such material. If there was an "obvious" appeal to one of his tropes, like that of a common British soldier seeking to profit from the Raj's presence in India, Kipling was capable of "fleshing out" that trope. His fiction, then, might be considered more of a "monument to the unobvious," since he radically reinterprets the basic structure of the trope he emulates and puts a personal spin of some sort upon it. The same is true of the writers behind BLOODY PIT OF HORROR, though they did not receive, and probably will never receive, much credit for their relative innovation. (I add that being innovative alone is not my sole criterion for distinction. BLOODY PIT and TROLL 2 are both "unobvious" transformations of familiar tropes, but PIT carries an abstract meaning and TROLL 2 does not.)
I also find the poster atenotol's metaphor of skeletons and flesh persuasive. Tropes may not all be alike in design-- and indeed, all human skeletons aren't exactly the same, either. But tropes are always structuring principles, just as skeletons provide scaffolding for all the rest of the human body's organs. Human flesh, particularly with respect to countenances, provides social relatability in the real world, while in the literary world, we need icons-- even when they may be as far from flesh as Lovecraft's "Colour Out of Space"-- in order to make the power of the trope come alive.
6 comments:
And, indeed, the villain of "Blood Pit Of Horror" was played by the actor who had more than once before played "the hero of an Italian muscleman movie."
Mickey Hargitay, winner of the 1955 "Mr Universe", famous among us age 65-and-older muscle-fanatics as a world-class physique contestant during the bodybuilding era before anabolic drugs exponentiated muscle mass to the Schwarzenegger size.
Besides starring in such peplum as "The Loves of Hercules" and "Revenge of the Gladiators", Hargitay was also famous for captivating the attention of Jayne Mansfield while he was appearing in Mae West's stage show; they subsequently married.
Your Trivia-For-The-Day, Gene!
Also, about a year before Hargitay made BLOODY PIT, and a little before he and Mansfield divorced, the two of them were in some Italian mondo film, PRIMITIVE LOVE. Mansfield has a large part while Hargitay is just a small role. One of the writers of LOVE, Massimo Pupillo, was the guy who later directed (but probably did not write) BLOODY PIT. Coincidence-- or DESTINY?
Hargitay on his own was a reasonably adept actor, and though his biggest roles were in Europe, he did remain a name for almost the next ten years.
Long before I was even able to hold a dumbbell-shaped baby rattle, Hargitay had paved the road for my dad accepting my teen-and-young-adult passion for bodybuilding-for-aesthetics-sake as "strange" but hetero-normative during the early and mid-1970s.
My dad, I discovered late in my teens, was aware (probably envious! lol) of Hargitay's relationship and marriage to sexbomb Mansfield.
So, contrary to the prevailing stereotyping and consequent disdaining of bodybuilders as effeminate and homosexual regrettably typical among men of his generation, he never questioned my orientation.
I've (almost) never encountered the assertion that bodybuilders were either gay or effeminate. Even BLOODY PIT OF HORROR only asserts that the Hargitay character has become lost in some sort of auto-erotic narcissism. It's true that my eyebrows went up a bit when i noticed that the only servants in his castle were two jacked musclemen like himself. However, since narcissism was the main assertion, it would make far less sense for the character to dabble in homosexual rather than hetero sex, since the former is certainly prone to be more, shall we say, invasive-- and the character above all wants to see his body as a pure temple.
I said "almost" because your post reminded me of one book from over 20 years ago. I recall glancing through it in a bookstore and being skeptical of the author claiming that the Italian peplum films were appeals to gay culture. I thought that nonsense. Whether all real women are crazy for big muscles or not, the focus of all the films I've seen is the idea that ripped deltoids are as catnip to all the kittens.
I didn't remember the book's name but quickly found it as "RETRO STUD" on this peplum site.
https://www.peplumtv.com/2018/07/article-of-week-peplum-books.html
Bodybuilding, like many subcultures at the fringe of public notice, accumulated the inevitable misconceptions the public assigns to unfamiliar lifestyles.
The thinking, especially during conformist post-WW2, became something like "men can utilize barbells to enhance athletic performance, and if he develops a muscular body in the process, that's acceptable; but to pursue body aesthetics is feminine; women compete in beauty contests; therefore, if a man is focused on developing his muscles solely for the sake of his appearance and posing in contests, he's behaving like a female; and, if a man is effeminate, then he's probably homosexual."
We Baby Boomers, especially the later, probably became more accepting of "building muscles to look impressive" partly by the influence of the advertisements for bodybuilding courses in the comics of 1960s; not only the classic Charles Atlas but also others such as this in "Mystery in Space", November, 1963:
https://readcomiconline.li/Comic/Mystery-in-Space-1951/Issue-87?id=88677#35
However, especially among unfamiliar adults, even when I began bodybuilding in 1971, the homosexual attribution persisted.
That's evidenced by the landmark October 14, 1974, article about competitive bodybuilding, centerpiecing Arnold Schwarzenegger (who'd become known to the public with the subsequent 1974 publication of the book "Pumping Iron" then the 1977 release of the film "Pumping Iron"), in the popular "Sports Illustrated" magazine. In its exploration of competitive bodybuilding, the article directly addressed and discredited the homosexuality stigma.
Ironically, although the majority of competitive bodybuilders are heterosexual (and the initial motive for many young guys who begin bodybuilding, whether with physique competition as their goal or not, including myself, is to try to look more attractive to women), bodybuilding shot itself in the foot repeatedly since its late 1890s origin (the Schwarzenegger of that era, Eugene Sandow, a vaudeville strong man who also possessed an aesthetic physique, popularized the first wave of muscle-building in early-1900s Europe and North America).
One self-inflicted wound being some magazines which Weider published as a side-line to his actual bodybuilding titles during the 1950s. They appealed to what the publisher knew was a homosexual market. Under the guise of being "just-another-bodybuilding-magazine", a couple of Weider's titles were simply pages of as-naked-as-possible-under-1950s-laws beefcake with just enough copy to excuse them as legal. They discontinued by the 1960s, but the fact they'd existed remained influential until the 1970s.
Another self-wound being that, despite the majority of competitve bodybuilders being heterosexual (not all but most, as statistically unsurprising regarding orientations), "gay-for-pay" among competitive bodybuilders existed. Because of the expense of the enormous quantity and quality of food required to build and sustain that degree of muscle; because of the need for consistent long hours of sleep, as well as rest, to recover from workouts; because of the hours required for workouts; and, after the advent of anabolic drugs, because of the,cost of those pharmaceuticals...well, a few competitive bodybuilders, especially during the four to six months leading up to a contest, realized a couple hours of "gay-for-pay" (which ranged from photographic sessions to actual physical interactions) easily augmented their income or freed them from a 40-hour-per-week job. Most of them didn't engage in it, but, at least sometimes, enough did (today, business sponsorships pay their bills). That prostitution was deliberately hidden, but enough people knew, and that awareness inevitably seeped out to influence outsiders' perception of bodybuilders.
Anyway...lolol...this is another example of the domino chains set off in my ever-churning mind when a thought-particle strikes it.
All you were doing is exploring "The Bloody Pit Of Horror", and here, I'm off on a comet again.
Nobody can beat me as far as going down conceptual rabbit-holes. My next post will be devoted to finessing something I wrote thirteen years ago...
Fascinating history; I didn't doubt that you knew more than I about the subject, and your commentary about the "gay-friendly health" magazine echoes the one example of which I knew, that RETRO STUD book that had no interest in the peplum movies, only in their impact upon gay culture. And there's at least some of that in a few critics who perked up their ears in response to Frederic Wertham's accusations re Batman and Robin.
I think Sandow might get a mention in Chabon's KAVALIER AND CLAY. The book also makes an involved link between Clay's relationship to his bodybuilder father and Clay's realization of his gayness. I like and recommend the book, But it too makes a somewhat odd linkage between gayness and the world of superheroes, who were like peplum dominantly aimed at hetero readers-- even if Golden Age comics only showed the male rescuing the damsel, but not getting rewarded by her.
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