COMM 337: The hills are alive with the sound of ... irony?

I guess irony's the right word. It's a tone that doesn't have enough bite to be sarcastic, but it quietly "give[s] full expression to contradictory or complementary impulses, attitudes, etc., especially as a means of indicating detachment from a subject, theme, or emotion." That's from a definition of "irony" that I don't remember from my days teaching English. But Dictionary.com says it's "especially [used] in contemporary writing," and it's worth mastering in our own writing. In this era of postmodern ambiguity, we do want to be contemporary, don't we?

So here's a cute little story on the British Broadcasting Co. website by Bethany Bell, a foreign correspondent based in Vienna (she's also reported extensively from the Middle East), on a revival of "The Sound of Music" in Austria". The vintage musical comedy doesn't have many fans in Austria because, well, its writers and producers obviously didn't know much about Austria.

Which gives Bethany Bell a field day.

Her headline is straightforward enough - "Taking the Sound of Music home to Salzburg." (Of course, the headline isn't hers. Count on a headline writer to get the tone of your story wrong! Not always, but all too often.) For all of that, her tone is tongue-in-cheek all the way through.

Her lede paragraph, for example. "How do you solve a problem like The Sound of Music in Salzburg?" It's an echo of a song about Julie Andrews' character in the musical, "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria/" Readers of a certain age will get it immediately, at least in English-speaking countries. And it isn't the only song echoed in Bell's article.

On the whole Bell's story is a balanced account. And at the end, she has kind words for the people who are trying to adapt the stage version "The people of Salzburg still have to be convinced about The Sound of Music, but this production might be a very good place to start." After her lede, she gives some background and goes directly to a nut graf:

The Hollywood film starring Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer has a fanatical following in the English-speaking world.

It tells the true story of Maria the novice nun who sings her way into the hearts of Captain von Trapp and his family - and then flees with them as Austria is annexed to Nazi Germany.

The 1965 film, with its soaring shots of the mountains around Salzburg, attracts thousands of tourists to the city every year.

But many Austrians can't sing a note of it.

It's partly because the piece celebrates a Hollywood fantasy vision of Austria. While it may be one of Fraulein Maria's favourite things, no self-respecting Austrian would ever eat schnitzel with noodles - only with potato salad, or possibly with chips [french fries]. ...

And so on ...

There's one of Bell's sly references to Julie Andrews' songs, by the way, this time to "My Favorite Things."

Later on Bell notes that some errors were corrected when the musical was translated into German. "A couple of plot details have also been changed. The von Trapp family no longer escapes over the mountains into Switzerland, because everyone here knows that if you climb over the mountains near Salzburg, you end up in Germany." Not exactly where you'd want to go when you're escaping the Nazis, as everyone in a Salzburg audience would know.

Bell interviewed a German academic who tried to explain the maovie's lack of authenticity to an English reporter in terms English readers would relate to:

Reinhold Wagnleitner, a professor of history at the University of Salzburg, who specialises in American studies, says the movie is not "the real thing".

"It's too syrupy, it's kitsch," he told me.

"It's as if an Austrian author would make a film in German about the Mersey Sound with an Austrian crew in Liverpool and expect the Liverpudlians to think it is a great music film."

The Mersey Sound was the combination of rock, skiffle, doo wop and soul that the Beatles and other bands in Liverpool popularized in the 1960s. So Wagnleitner's comparison would resonate with people from Liverpool [who are called "Liverpudlians"] and English music fans in general.

Before we move on, try your hand at it: Take Herr Professor Wagnleitner's metaphor and "Americanize" it. For example, I might say "... it's like an Austrian writer shot a movie about the Chicago blues with an Austrian crew on the South Side of Chicago." But you can do better than that. It doesn't have to be about music, or Chicago, as long as you get the idea of outsiders trying to explain the nuances of something they don't understand. Maybe "... like Martha Stewart coming to Springfield and telling us how to make a horseshoe sandwich" or "... like an elderly college professor trying to talk about postmodernist nuance." Give it a try, and post your metaphors as comments below.