How Rob Reiner inaugurated the ‘bipartisanship’ hoax
Rob Reiner lives rent-free in the heads of many conservatives. His 1987 film The Princess Bride, a fantasy of ethnic rivalry and revenge set in the Middle Ages, is often mentioned fondly when Republican pundits stretch to make pop-culture references — a desperate ploy in the culture wars that Democrats dominate. Criterion’s new 4K restoration disc of The Princess Bride in a deluxe presentation (a cloth-textured hardcover case with colorful, storybook drawings) almost rewards Reiner’s ultra-liberal political stances along with the film’s cult-movie status.
Reiner’s angry, deliberately offensive partisan posts on X, which appear on social media with psychotic regularity — as if the actor-turned-movie-director was intoxicated from playing a drinking game every time he heard the name “Trump” on MSNBC — ought to make conservatives suspicious of everything else the entertainer does.
After all, The Princess Bride is very like a Reiner tweet — sloppily constructed and so illogical that it must surely be a joke, even though it lacks wit. Half-spoofing the fairy-tale genre, TPB is full of trite showbizzy anachronisms that don’t require innocent audience belief but inspire snark. The framing device of a ten-year-old boy (Fred Savage) being read a storybook by his grandfather (Peter Falk) that turns into an elaborate picaresque vision is essentially TV stuff. (Columbo meets the future star of The Wonder Years.)
TPB owes its reputation to a generation who came of age at precisely the moment when Reiner, All in the Family’s liberal “Meathead,” found his second career (credited as “director” of the 1984 mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap), introducing mainstream media’s confusion between historical fact and pop flattery. It tricked the culture into smugness.
Cynical Hollywood screenwriter William Goldman — whose Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid previously, unforgivably, travestied Westerns — concocted a titular heroine named Buttercup (Robin Wright), her lookalike romantic hero (Cary Elwes), an evil royal (Chris Sarandon), and a motley band of rogues: Vizzini (Wallace Shawn), Iñigo (Mandy Patinkin), and Fezzik (Andre the Giant, inspiration for William Steig’s Shrek). They traverse the Cliffs of Insanity, a Fire Swamp, and the Pit of Despair. This facetiousness, matched with Reiner’s TV-skit clumsiness, made for a crude version of Hollywood swashbucklers. Yet the lack of sophistication pleased the giggly adolescent mindset that also indulged Reiner’s Stand by Me (1986), an insipid piece of Stephen King nostalgia.
In Criterion’s booklet, 45-year-old writer Sloane Crosley admits, “For my generation, this is not just a movie; it’s a facet of our adolescence and a building block of our worldview.” So it’s no wonder modern conservatives cannot reconcile their politics with that childhood appreciation. But loving TPB into adulthood shows cultural immaturity. Reiner and Goldman wrecked the visual and moral beauty of Douglas Fairbanks Jr. in Max Ophuls’s The Exile, Gene Kelly in The Three Musketeers, Burt Lancaster and Virginia Mayo in The Flame and the Arrow.
Now, decades later, TPB is notable for its lack of moral certainty, sarcastic love scenes, cartoonish sword fights, pratfalls and medieval torture, and verbal nonsense (Shawn repeats “It’s inconceivable!” to cover up the insufferable).
What’s unacceptable about this threadbare fantasy is its contemporary irrelevance. Reiner and Goldman betray the instructional tradition that fables and legends pass on. Instead, there’s a coincidental giveaway — a political warning when Elwes explains his black-mask disguise: “I think they’re terribly comfortable. I think everyone will be wearing them in the future.” It fits liberal Hollywood’s support of Covid obedience masks all too well.
Failing to create a great moral tale (or even an investigation into myths and folktales as in David Lowery’s The Green Knight), Reiner pitches his own self-satisfied obnoxiousness. This is epitomized in Billy Crystal’s silly-annoying Miracle Max skit (an unexpected steal of Mel Brooks’s ethnic vaudeville to contrast with the WASPy love story). Reconsider the generational Peter Falk–Fred Savage premise that parallels Reiner learning from his ultra-liberal patriarch Norman Lear (TPB’s producer). The protégé is a political stooge.
Contemporary conservative politicians so often seem unable to differentiate themselves from the morally insupportable positions of leftists (corporate media propagandizes this as “bipartisan”). It’s a weakness that has claimed The Princess Bride generation. Without that deleterious influence, phony bipartisanship would seem inconceivable.