Saw "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead" last night, and it got me thinking about theater and metafiction. Because the show totally plays with the awareness of text--Ros and Guil are peripheral characters who know it, who exist only in the margins and are aware of it, and this allows you to make really sexy points about theater and story and fate and watching.
I was thinking--can you do that sort of thing? The only film that I can think of that does it successfully is "Baron Munchausen," but then again I reads as very theaterical to me. It feels more like a show than a movie.
Actualy also connects with the Tiptree Awards flummox, I think, because fanfic and prolit intersect in the same ways that stage and screen do. Fanfic watches itself watching, the way that theater does (the way that women do?). And some things just can't be translated, even though you can make a movie of a play. I love the film of "R and G," but it's not like the play. For one thing, they can leave the stage in the film. There's not the same awareness that they are characters caught on stage, unable to enter or exit. And when you lose that you lose a great deal of the meta.
Theater conventions simply don't work in movies. Theater is always larger than life, almost grotesque in the intensity of it all. Look at stage makeup, look at projection. You have to be frenetic in order for it to come off to the audience at all. Is fic like that? Think about how strange stage make-up looks up close. It's great on stage, but it doesn't work outside of its context. I feel the same way about the Tiptree sitch--it's fic out of its natural environment, and it looks grotesque. But on stage it's lovely.
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