Cock & Bull Story

It’s true, I’ve watched battle scenes in movies before, but I had never seen anyone put hot chestnuts down his pants. The chestnut scene of TRISTRAM SHANDY was definitely unique in my movie watching experience. Also unique was several seconds of black screen in the middle of the movie. You can watch and hear the actors talking and suddenly you don’t see them any more. Then just as you fumble find the remote to adjust your set, the picture comes back and you realize the joke’s on you, it’s all over you, again and again time.

The movie wiggles back and forth across the lines of reality and fiction until the lines look like the squiggle signatures on the Constitution. I’m not sure why the deleted scenes were deleted, or why the “Behind the Scenes” was included on the DVD extras. The whole thing plays like a “Special Features” movie edition. I can only assume that it is simply modern custom, the template of DVD production, to set aside some segments. There’s probably a computer program that automatically removes three to five scenes from any given feature-length film and stuffs them under the file allocation “Deleted Scenes.” It’s probably not a decision from the director at all, because what human being would delete the baby tossing scene? Filmed in true cinematic fervor, we see the baby’s head emerge from between two knees, and carefully held, cuddled, then tossed about from one cast member to the next in a heap of overjoyment that can only be appreciated at the absolute smashing point of reality with fiction.

Steve Coogan is the British actor who seems to be vigorously famous but no one’s heard of him in this country. He plays himself, Tristram Shandy, and Tristram’s father in a mixed up folly that’s all really one person. Furthermore, he makes comments on the child actors who portray him, giving them acting tips and discussing how little or much they resemble him. I don’t think he mentioned the dummy baby they tossed about, but that scene was deleted anyway.

When I was in college, my English English professor…that’s not a mistake, he really was English by nationality and taught English literature…my English English professor handed me a completely unreadable book: THE LIFE AND OPINIONS OF TRISTRAM SHANDY by Laurence Sterne. I tried to read it for a week, until the professor told me that it wasn’t meant to be read in any sort of linear fashion. Towards the latter half of the text, Sterne employs meandering diagrams to describe the progress and aim of the plot, and very nearly comes close to outlining the intricacies of a bee dance for directions to honey. The nectar of the book, and the movie, is the complete farce of one man’s life, even from conception. Coogan describes it as being Post-Modern, before there was a Modern to be Post about—something like that, I’ve misquoted a paraphrase. Perhaps I shall not be indicted for plagiarism this week. Sterne finished writing TRISTRAM SHANDY in 1767 and died the next year. He predates the debut of Monty Python’s Flying Circus by two hundred and two years, yet enjoys the same royal flare of entertainment.

The cinematic version is a happy acknowledgement to any literature student who has tried to read the book with the same heart by which you would approach a Jane Austen wood brick or any fibrous masonry from the Bronte sisters. For those who have not read the book, you don’t need to. Laurence Sterne would give a standing ovation from his grave for the movie. Threatened as an unfilmable story from an unreadable novel, the filmmakers did the only thing they could do: they were true to the book. It’s a cock and bull story.