#gglam

[t4tgempearl]

Shoutout to Monty Navarro being the loverboy ever. He walks around and his eyes are shaped like hearts. Trust me.

[bowcard]

rip monty navarro you would’ve loved not pulling the lever during the trolley problem

[multidimensionalmusicalmess]

A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder and the subversion of expectations

I’ve been thinking a lot about GGLAM lately, and I wanted to write a quick post about the way it subverts expectations and why it’s so absurdly funny in a very particular way I don’t see often.

The plot of GGLAM—that is, what’s technically going on—is a tragedy right up until the last ten minutes. We have a poor, disowned man who, to avenge someone he dearly loved, is tempted into becoming a serial killer, in the process still fails to win (again, until the last minute) the girl he loves, and is captured for a crime he didn’t commit and ultimately planned to be executed. You could make a Shakespearean tragedy out of that and nobody would bat an eye.

Except that’s not how the story feels, because those are only the events. Despite having all the plot elements of a tragedy with a protagonist who engineers his own downfall out of a desire for revenge, through several bizarre twists of fate, he simply finds that vengeance is actually what he needed to be happy, gets all the money, and gets both of the girls.

There are also so many individual moments where the show sets up some audience expectation in a very stereotypical way and then just. Ignores it, which is where a lot of the comedy comes from.

For example!

Monty visibly leaves his scarf at Chisolmere, and then immediately worries in voiceover that he might’ve left something behind. Traditionally, this would come back to disadvantage him in the end. It doesn't, however; in fact, it never comes up again.

Monty ends up falling in love with Phoebe, someone whose beloved brother he murdered. We’d expect in any other story that, eventually, Phoebe would find out about this and it would ruin their fairy-tale romance—but Phoebe just never finds out, and ends up helping break Monty out of jail (more on that in a bit).

This is a brief one, but Monty temporarily vacillates over the idea of having to kill Asquith Sr, because he’s grown close to the man who helped him escape poverty. We wonder for a few seconds how he’s going to deal with this—

And then Asquith Sr. dies of a heart attack and Monty immediately shrugs and moves on, moral quandary forgotten by both him and the story.

Something similar happens with Lady Hyacinth—after being the hardest to kill, she shows back up again, and you wonder briefly if that might cause problems, but she dies in the very same twenty-second scene.

Now, none of this is especially unique; the show is a farce, after all. However, there's another layer of misdirection, because GGLAM not only subverts the conventions of non-comic stories, but of the ironic tone it sets up itself, particularly in act two.

In act two, we meet Adalbert and Eugenia D'Ysquith, the present earl and countess of Highhurst—and they're absolutely miserable in the position that Monty is trying to attain for himself. Adalbert clearly has PTSD, and while this is (successfully) played for laughs, his behavior calls into question the straightforward nature of Monty's quest for revenge. Essentially, seeing a character miserable in the position our protagonist is aspiring towards begins to create the expectation that Monty is simply trapping himself in an ironic cycle whereby he takes the place of the D'Ysquith family and inherits all of their miseries with it.

This is furthered by Chauncey's scene. This is a personal favorite of mine; in it, Chauncey (the janitor in Pentonville Prison) reveals himself to Monty as a D'Ysquith, and, when asked by Monty if he's never felt ill-treated by the family, says "They don't even know me. I ain't got none of the advantages of being a D'Ysquith, but I ain't got none of their troubles neither." This scene is just dripping with the energy of a moral lesson; Monty, on the eve of his probable execution for his crimes in the name of attaining a title and avenging his mother, meets a man in nearly the exact position Monty himself started in, who elected not to pursue anything ambitious and ended up content anyway. The obvious implication is that Monty has made nothing but trouble for himself with his actions, and will end up just another miserable rich person even if he isn't executed.

Immediately after that, this tone is compounded by Phoebe's arrival, during which (in direct response to Monty's expressed optimism, no less) she bursts into tears at the revelation that Sibella loves Monty. The love triangle has been revealed, and seemingly had its expected consequences. Everything is falling apart.

It's worth noting when this happens as well. From the beginning, the show has been set within a framing device of Monty's recollections as written in his memoirs, and, immediately after the conversations with Phoebe and Chauncey, that framing device concludes.

The show, however, does not—and immediately after Phoebe leaves in tears upon learning of Sibella's love for Monty, "That Horrible Woman" begins, in which it's made clear that the only reason either Sibella or Phoebe cares about Monty's unfaithfulness at this point is that it'll allow them to get him out of jail. Famously, the love triangle ends not in conflict, but with both women deciding to share Monty (and, we imagine, with the death of one Lionel Holland immediately after the show's conclusion, though that's a personal theory rather than anything specified).

Not only that, but a number of things quickly make clear that Monty is not inheriting the "troubles" of being a D'Ysquith; instead, his release from prison is greeted by cheering crowds and public acclaim, alongside Phoebe and Sibella. Rather than an ironic ending, we get a straightforward one: Monty just gets everything he wants. There are no consequences. Violence and power and the misery of the rich do not beget themselves. Having escaped the framing device precisely when everything looked darkest, we get a literal fairy-tale ending, and we realize that the writers have demonstrated masterfully their knowledge of how a normal story would conclude for the precise purpose of throwing that conclusion out the window. The grandest joke of the show is that the happy ending is not, in fact, a joke.

Of course, one might say that there's still an ironic ending—after all, Chauncey appears in the finale and is implied to attempt to murder Monty, continuing the cycle!

But this is an aftershock of the ending's joke, not a contradiction. Monty feeds Chauncey the belladonna flower from "Inside Out" during the curtain call—after the show has ended. Having constantly evaded any negative consequences of his own actions in the most unlikely and slapstick imaginable ways, Monty concludes the show by one-upping himself and retroactively deleting this particular consequence from outside the boundaries of the story itself. We are shown, once and for all, that the rules do not apply to Montague D'Ysquith Navarro.

Oh, and Chauncey's little segment in the finale also provides a nice twist on the moral implications of his first scene by literally inverting them; rather than Monty realizing the futility of his quest for revenge, Chauncey is inspired to to pursue his own. Luckily for Monty, it doesn't end quite as successfully for him.

[stargazingdustbunny]

Man, I love this iconic scene

(If you've never heard of A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder, it is a very fun show.)

[amaliabalash]

today in very unexpected thrift finds.

[godlessondheimite]

God I just had a fucked up experience. I saw Chess again and I thought, “Is Bryce Pinkham using an American accent for the Arbiter/Narrator now? I thought he kept his British accent last time. Weird.”

Then I watched a behind the scenes feature where he was speaking in an American accent and I was like “Wow, he’s keeping the American accent for bts stuff too? That’s…strange.”

Then I looked it up.

Bryce Pinkham isn’t British. He has never been British.

His name is Bryce Pinkham and he is from California.

[denhams-lilliesofthefield]

There's something about Monty and Sibella arguing over whether or not they would have made a good married couple being sandwiched in between Adalbert and Eugenia having the most dysfunctional marriage possible...

[deb-bee-art]

Stolas' first mission.