The Tributes... the next Jane Austens in the art of parodying?

            Now that my group’s video project, a parody trailer of The Hunger Games which incorporates the Gothic themes from our class, has been presented I wanted to comment on what I’ve been thinking about parodies and the art of parody.  Though the video focuses more on and features the characters from Frankenstein, The Monk, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, “Manfred”, and “Christabel”, and therefore none of the characters from Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, the one Romantic novel we read this quarter that parodied other Gothic works was this one. 

            A parody is defined by Merriam-Webster as a work which “closely imitates” another for “comic effect or for ridicule”; also “a feeble or ridiculous” imitation.  What interests me is that adjective feeble to describe an imitation.  Since full-on imitations are frowned upon as plagiarism, how could you make an imitation that wasn’t feeble?  Still, it is interesting that artists would intentionally create a work that is feeble, and what is even more fascinating is that’s what makes the parody funny.  A parody of a bomb explosion wouldn’t involve an explosion with a bigger fire or more impressive detonation; it would make fun of the original with a “wimpier” fire, so to speak.  As I was watching my group’s completed video in class today, I caught myself laughing at all the moments that were intentionally weakened in comparison with the imitated moment in The Hunger Games trailer—that’s why it was both helpful and necessary that we showed the original trailer before showing our own parody trailer.

            Northanger Abbey employs similar tactics to parody the popular novels of the Gothic era.  Henry fantasizes playfully about a fearful storm during Catherine’s first night at the abbey, and though there actually is a storm at the abbey during which Catherine is sleeplessly terrified, as Tricia pointed out in her oral presentation there is no more terror in the storm once it is over.

            The second volume of the novel hones in more closely on Catherine’s point of view, and ironically, this part of the volume seems more realistically Gothic than Gothic parody even though we are seeing the action through the eyes of the character being parodied for her obsession with Gothic novels.  As we discussed in class, by this transition away from the tone of parody it almost seems that Austen began Northanger Abbey by trying to parody Gothic literature but got swept into the terrific elements in the narrative as she continued writing.  Not to mention that in parodying the obsession readers in Austen’s time had about other Gothic novels, Austen’s description of the obsession itself and the way Catherine succumbs to her imagination is, in fact, terrifying.

            My group had a similar experience as we delved into the planning of our video.  When we started, we wanted to use modern Gothic literature (The Hunger Games) to play off of Gothic themes from our class, but spoofing it was not initially in the plan.  When we looked up the original movie trailer, we stumbled upon independent parody trailers that other people had made for fun, and our videos is similar to others in that the most intense moments in the trailer are the exact ones we chose to weaken and therefore parody in our own video, for example the countdown scene when the tributes are preparing to run at the start of the games.

            Before making these connections, I didn’t know making a parody was such an art.  Maybe my opinion is based on the fact that my group just completed a project parodying Gothic literature for a class that spent all quarter studying Gothic themes, but I think parodying Gothic themes is the most fun to parody of all the other literary periods.