Essay on Death by Hollywood
Death by Hollywood, a novel by Steven Bochco, is a study in the use of irony. Unfortunately, the legendary creator of cop shows like Hill Street Blues and L.A. Law probably shouldn't have tried to write a novel. Death is a strange book to read, with almost no literary devices, virtually no visual or sensual description. It reads like a pitch meeting in the office of a producer that was simply transcribed. One assumes the camera will show it all later. But in one way, Death by Hollywood is extraordinary. It's use of irony.
With Bochco, there's always a lot of good/bad happening simultaneously. It's a rich experience. You get a tingle of excitement, a sense of secretly enjoying something forbidden, like eating a whole pint of Ben & Jerry's Chocolate Fudge Brownie all by yourself, then stuffing the container into the bottom of the trash can and washing the spoon off so no one will ever know.
The story is Hitchcock's Rear Window with a twist. The narrator of the story is Eddie Jelko, a Hollywood agent, but the voice is all Bochco (raunchy, cynical, clever, blunt, outrageous, insightful). Jelko tells us about Bobby Newman, one of his screenwriter clients, who's fingers are spending more time wrapped around a bottle than tapping on a keyboard these days (by the way, the whole book is written in present tense, which is important to note). Bored, sloshed, spying on his neighbors through a telescope, Bobby sees the wife of a Hollywood billionaire having wild, animal sex with her Latin lover. They quarrel, she smacks him on the head with a golden acting statue, and Bingo! Bobby has the plot for the screenplay that's going to save his career.
Does he call 911? Of course not! Bobby...
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...egative. Irony gives your story much greater depth, a more sensual texture. The result is an ending that is, quite often, richly fulfilling.
The ultimate irony of Death by Hollywood is that just when we think we're Omniscient, we're not. We're lulled into god-like all-knowingness. And then Bochco springs his surprise on us. On the last page, agent Eddie Jelko explains that he's afraid for his life. Now that he knows about the detective's secret, Farentino might want to shut him up. Jelko tells us that he's placing the manuscript in a safe deposit box - to be released only in the event of his death. The guy who's been telling us the story all this time (in present tense), our narrator Eddie Jelko, is already dead, six feet under in a pine box. On the last few words of the last page, we discover that, alas, we never even suspected the biggest secret of all.
Irony, which is the use of words to express something different from and often opposite to their literal meaning, is placed throughout many stories and poems. There are many different forms of irony, dramatic irony, situational irony, and verbal irony. Although the most common and most frequent of the three is dramatic irony, all three are widely present in almost any story or drama that would be read.
Dramatic Irony is when you know something the main character doesn’t. This is seen a lot in horror movies. Like when the character runs into a room or into a hallway and they can’t see the killer but he
[7] DeWitt Bodeen. "Preface: Hollywood and the Screenwriter", Fiction, Film, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1986 (xviii).
In contemporary film making, “Hollywood-ization” generally refers to the re-creation of a classic work in a form more vulgar and sexually explicit than the original in an effort to boost movie attendance. After all, sex and violence sell. However, from the mid-1930’s to the 1950’s, “Hollywood-ization” referred to the opposite case where controversial books had to be purified to abide by the Production Code of 1934.[1] This occurred to many of James Cain’s novels as they moved from text to the genre of “film noir.” As has been said about Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, “The property, bought several years ago, was kept in the studio’s archives until now because of [Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s] “inability to clean it up.””[2] The sanitation of Cain’s novels greatly took from the strong themes of female emotional and financial independence that were rarely addressed at that time as they were adapted for the screen.
“Fear me,love me,do as I say,I’ll be your slave” says Jareth The Goblin King from the Labyrinth. By using irony, the author of a story can create a surprising events. Authors use multiple kinds of irony to make stories more surprising.
Beginning the mid 1920s, Hollywood’s ostensibly all-powerful film studios controlled the American film industry, creating a period of film history now recognized as “Classical Hollywood”. Distinguished by a practical, workmanlike, “invisible” method of filmmaking- whose purpose was to demand as little attention to the camera as possible, Classical Hollywood cinema supported undeviating storylines (with the occasional flashback being an exception), an observance of a the three act structure, frontality, and visibly identified goals for the “hero” to work toward and well-defined conflict/story resolution, most commonly illustrated with the employment of the “happy ending”. Studios understood precisely what an audience desired, and accommodated their wants and needs, resulting in films that were generally all the same, starring similar (sometimes the same) actors, crafted in a similar manner. It became the principal style throughout the western world against which all other styles were judged. While there have been some deviations and experiments with the format in the past 50 plus ye...
1. Irony is a useful device for giving stories many unexpected twists and turns. In Kate Chopin's "The Story of an Hour," irony is used very effectively in her story. Situational irony is used to show the reader what is assumed to happen sometimes doesn't. Dramatic irony is used to hint to the reader something is happening to the characters in the story that they do not know about. Irony is used throughout Chopin's "The Story of an Hour" through the use of situational irony and the use of dramatic irony.
By definition, irony is the expression of one’s meaning that typically signifies the opposite. Authors have scribed irony in their literature since before pen and paper existed because even ancient bards such as Homer discovered the power irony can bring to a good story. Khaled Hosseini, the author of the novel The Kite Runner, masterfully weaves intricate and delicate examples of irony to enrich the story. Irony plays a pivotal role in the novel to develop the plot, by creating suspense, the themes, by informing the reader, and the characters, by showing their personalities and unconscious motives.
Due to production costs and financial restrictions, the director and screenplay writer can never fully reproduce an entire literary work into a screen version. With the complications of time restriction in major motion pictures, a full-length novel is compacted into a two-hour film. This commonly leads to the interference in the sequence of events, alternation of plots and themes, and the elimination of important characters or events. But the one true adversary of novel-based films is Hollywood fabrication. Producers, directors, and playwrights add or eliminate events and characters that might or might not pertain to the storyline for the sake of visual appeal, therefore defacing the author’s work.
Within more serious novels, irony acts as a way of comic relief and or irony can serve poetic justice to the respective antagonist of said novel, Poetic justice is sentenced to Jack through an occurrence of situational irony at the end of Lord of the Flies. In the ending sequence of Lord of the Flies the main protagonist, Ralph, is trying to escape from an island wide manhunt by Jack’s tribe. Jack’s sole intention for the manhunt is to claim Ralph 's head and thus his order would be marked as the most heinous to date. With pursuing tribes men close behind and a raging inferno even behind them, Ralph is cornered as he emerged on to the sand of a beach. When the reader is certain Ralph will be caught an act of deus ex machina presents itself when a naval officer is standing directly in front of Ralph. Unbenounced to the boys, their accidentally caused raging wildfire has ironically signaled a british naval vessel to come ashore and investigate. This is an example of both dramatic and situational irony due to two factors. One factor being that throughout the book Jack and his people were largely opposed to the prospect of rescued by way signaling ships through a fire. In addition, being that the boys rescue is due in part to Jack’s creation of an accidental signal fire contradicts his very nature; thus creating situational irony. As for the
In the stories “Story of an Hour”, “Everyday Use”, “The Necklace”, and “The Lottery” it is evident that irony was quite a large part of the short story. There is situational irony, which is when the situation turns out differently than expected. Also, dramatic irony is present, which is when you as a reader knows more than the character. The authors seem to base their whole story around irony to surprise their readers.
The face is of a statue in the cemetery where the Comedian is being buried, raindrops running down its face as though it is crying. This chapter focuses on the funeral of Edward Blake, known also as The Comedian. As such, this chapter centers around and is the first presentation of the theme of death, a common theme in Watchmen – both real and symbolic, or “ontological”. Ontological death is best described as “the phenomenon of ‘world collapse,’ which occurs when one experiences an incident so jarring to his/her personal reality that the thing which gives one’s fundamental life, or world, meaning – whether God or something else – no longer applies. Preconceptions are extinguished, pushing one into a ‘new world’ where a revised reality must established.” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Psychology, 2007. The Encyclopedia of Death and Dying,
...reshadow a death through the blinding process of moral values and actions taken by an individual that has, or whose family has been dishonored and wishes to regain their dignity. Sophocles in Antigone portrays the theme of dishonor through the cultural value of burial in the Greek society; Gabriel Garcia Marquez on the other hand, condemns the legate of marriage to honor in Chronicle of a Death Foretold. Both cultural norms manage in context to inflict with the character’s family honor, which leads them into taking immoral and ruthless actions that lead to the innocent death of Antigone and Santiago Nasser, both innocent individuals.
An example in the film that highlights the demise of the studio system is when Joe pitches a script idea to a producer of Paramount. Joe is quick to say that the film only needs one main character, has many outdoor locations and can be made ‘for under a million dollars’ (Joe Gillis, Sunset Boulevard, 1950), which highlights the idea of saving money on a s...
Irony is a useful device for giving stories many unexpected twists and turns. In Kate Chopin's "The Story of an Hour," irony is used as an effective literary device. Situational irony is used to show the reader that what is expected to happen sometimes doesn't. Dramatic irony is used to clue the reader in on something that is happening that the characters in the story do not know about. Irony is used throughout Chopin's "The Story of an Hour" through the use of situational irony and the use of dramatic irony.