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fzzr · 1 year ago

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What Is It About Dinner Parties?

Spoilers for:

Rocky Horror Picture Show

Shrek 2

A Civil Campaign (Vorkosigan Saga book 13)

The Nightmare Stacks (Laundry Files book 7)

I recommend every one of these works, with the caveat that you should really get into their respective series where applicable for the best results. Spoilers will not completely ruin the experience, but if you have the patience and opportunity to watch three movies and read several thousand pages, go do that first. (After is acceptable if you prefer.) When obtaining books remember to first check at a library or local bookstore. Do not buy from Amazon if you can avoid it. Audible is Amazon.

Content advisories: Works discussed here include depictions of sexual assault, murder, cannibalism, adultery, and various anti-LGBTQ+ phobias. (Rocky Horror is the main offender but some of the others contribute.) Additionally this explores awkward social situations in great detail, so you may want to skip if that sort of thing lives in your head.

I have noticed that fictional works often use scenes at dinner parties as key turning points in their stories. This is achieved through a combination of rising tension, humor, and tying together many plot threads at once. It's possible to do something similar without the humor (eg. the Hitchcockian suspense of a bomb under the table) but that's not what I'm looking at today.

A note on definition: when I say “dinner party” here, I mean a social event in which a group of people who do not share a household meet for the main purpose of sharing a meal. This is different from a regular party, gala, ball etc. where activities other than the meal are the focus.

In my observation, the anatomy of a dinner party is as follows:

Stage Zero: Setup

A key element will be the interactions between characters who would prefer not to deal with each other. There are a few ways to build the guest list to achieve this. You can have the simple case of someone bringing a plus one without warning in advance who (or what kind of person) they would be. It's also possible that invitations were sent before a conflict came up, or the host may be unaware of the issue. There may also be a broader social obligation on attendees, such as a holiday. Wholly uninvited guests usually don't happen in this sort of scene (those are more characteristic of less intimate social events, like a charity ball turned hostage situation).

Rocky Horror's dinner party takes place right after several less than fully consensual sexual encounters and a very bloody murder, with the characters being assembled through social force and implied threat of violence. Shrek 2 has it as the first sustained interaction between the title character and his royal in-laws after his elopement with Princess Fiona. A Civil Campaign spends about half the book just building up to this event, with protagonist Miles so focused on making it a success for his main goal that he loses control of the guest list, the menu, and even the staff. In The Nightmare Stacks, it's a family meal introducing two prospective (and unconventional) significant others to the parents at the same time.

Stage One: Civility

The scene begins with all parties acting superficially civilly. The threads of the narrative and the stressor are both on the back burner as action begins. There will be hints of the conflicts to come, especially as the principal characters become aware of the full guest list and its implications. This phase may be very brief, or even skipped if the story uses immediately previous scenes to establish sufficient tension.

The Rocky Horror party's first minute strains the definition of "civility", with awkward silence accompanying deliberately sloppy table service. Shrek 2 likewise uses silence to delay interaction as long as possible. A Civil Campaign has a very large cast to introduce, but the atmosphere is casual with just a hint of stress as Miles does his best to manage the bloated guest list. The Nightmare Stacks barely gets everyone in the door before the incompatibility of hosts and guests becomes apparent.

Stage Two: Interaction

This generally starts with the appearance of food and of necessity seating of guests. This is the point where the characters in conflict are first forced to interact rather than passively stay away from each other. It's possible for this stage to still be indirect, but proximity means that there's no way to sustain the illusion of civility.

In Rocky Horror they can't even finish singing "Happy Birthday" before things start to escalate. Shrek 2's initial interactions are wordless, using the series' signature facial expressions to show to what degree everyone is already hostile or unaware. A Civil Campaign has Miles realize his carefully arranged seating positions have been disturbed by someone with different priorities, but most of the social tension is surprise rather than hostility. The Nightmare Stacks stumbles past this step right into the next when it turns out the guests have mutually exclusive dietary preferences.

Stage Three: Conflict

Next, some minor issue arises, like one character breaking a social convention. There is almost universally some issue with the food itself as well. Depending on the number of characters and plot of the story, this can go on for some time. This is often where most of the comedy of the scene comes in. Events may become more and more absurd, allowing things to escalate without over-burdening the reader with stress. Often the issue isn't even directly related to the core conflict of the story, or starts with a lower-stakes side plot. In doing so, it can weave such plots into the main one.

Rocky Horror is already under so much stress that it takes just the smallest spark to get things burning. Shrek 2 likewise gets here quick, as Shrek's cluelessness with regard to etiquette kicks off an escalating series of indirect and then direct criticisms. In A Civil Campaign the awkward seating arrangement makes social interaction difficult, and Miles realizes that the menu has been undermined in a way that could cause an uproar and deeply offend some very senior guests. The Nightmare Stacks lays on the dramatic irony, where a conservative father is too busy learning about gender nonconformity to worry whether his son is actually dating an Unseelie Fae princess (the answer is "unclear", but only about the "dating" part).

Stage Four: Eruption

The issue that led to the tension established before the scene is exposed to all present. More often than not this is caused by something in the comedic action accidentally exposing concealed information or causing a stressful event to be discussed or even repeated. Sometimes the comedy itself is the issue, with the disruption alone being enough to expose the issue eg. if it’s due to contrasting social norms. Regardless, this is the climax of the scene where everything comes to a head at once.

Shrek 2 kicks into high gear, with characters becoming so incoherent they can only scream out each other's names. Rocky Horror and A Civil Campaign reveal the truth about the meal they've been eating. The lack of coordination in A Civil Campaign causes Miles to move forward his social plans to disastrous effect. The Nightmare Stacks has the meal collapse into such disarray that the protagonists are able to escape unscathed.

Stage Five: Tone Shift

The comedy is (usually) suspended and drama kicks in. This is often also a turning point in the larger story. It may mark an act transition (typically second to third) or just a change in the intensity of the conflict. In a romantic comedy, this is a prime opportunity to get into the things-just-got-serious phase where the core relationship is under threat.

Rocky Horror's dinner party serves to launch the climax by getting everyone in place for the final showdown. In Shrek 2, where it's the act two kickoff, it establishes the stakes that Shrek can't simply slide into place as a socially acceptable fiancé for Fiona. In both A Civil Campaign and The Nightmare Stacks, the result of the dinner party is the revelation of the true intentions of a main character, respectively openly courting another (it's complicated) and tricking her counterpart into meeting her parents (it's complicated). They both leave the protagonists with few paths open to them and even fewer good ones.

Why do they work like this?

I think the main thing that makes the dinner party so effective at progressing a story in both plot and tone is the contrast between natural and unnatural human interaction. Sharing food is one of the most basic interpersonal activities, with archeological evidence going back further than anatomically modern humans. This is in tension with the artificiality of the actual situation, where precise details of food presentation, respect for social norms, and personal behavior are under scrutiny from individuals you may not fully trust. Food in general also has a visceral impact on everyone. No one is sophisticated enough to willingly eat all of "Meatloaf", escargot, "bug butter", and vegan "pizza", so you as the consumer of the work are forced into empathy with the characters.

Given a scene where everyone is under stress by default, you add on the wider context of the story. Any plot where progress is blocked by "well what if everyone who isn't getting along just avoids each other" is immediately reinvigorated. It's often the case that not everyone is aware of other moving parts, so things can move forward by broadening the impact of ongoing issues to the rest of the cast. If it's too early in the story for things to really blow up, the dinner party can still raise the stakes or expose fault lines that were previously unseen.

If you accept either of the theories that humor is built on tension and unexpected relief or on juxtapositions between the familiar and the incongruous, the natural/artificial split in the dinner party setup also provides these. Everyone on both sides of the fourth wall expects a certain degree of decorum, but it soon goes out the window and leaves you and the characters equally off balance. Likewise, the sharing of food presupposes that everyone can actually partake in the food presented, and undercutting that is a further violation of the common vision of what a dinner party should be. The way characters react to that challenge is another easy hook for comedy.

Conclusion

Putting it all together, dinner parties really do it all. Tension and release, humor and drama, heightening and resolution - the dinner party has the tools you need. Next time you read or watch a dinner party scene, think about the role it plays in the story and the way it's constructed to fulfill it. They're some of my favorite scenes, and I bet they could be some of yours too.

Detailed Examples

Originally I planned to give each spoiler-warned work a stage-by-stage breakdown, but they needed so much context that tumblr's editor broke. Instead I will give them dedicated posts and update this one as I go.

#tropes #shrek #shrek 2 #rocky horror picture show #the laundry files #the nightmare stacks #charles stross #vorkosigan saga #a civil campaign #lois mcmaster bujold #writing #dinner party #long post #literature #original post

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