cyrano de bergerac gets what he wants

fair warning my internalized tlp comes out in this one

the balcony scene

i tried to watch the new cyrano de bergerac w peter dinklage but the heroine suddenly started singing & i panicked. let me recommend the 1950 ferraras or the 1990 depardieu instead

there’s a tv trope named after this one. a love triangle between a pretty little parisian bluestocking,¹ a handsome musketeer, & a master swordsman/poet/dramatist w a disfiguringly giant nose

the girl falls for the handsome one christian, love at first sight no words needed. she tells the ugly swordsman cyrano that she wants a letter from handsome, & expects it to reveal the great soul she sees shining in his eyes. uh oh, christian’s a himbo. but wait–cyrano offers to write the himbo's loveletters for him.

& it spirals from there

ghostwriting love poems, memorizing speeches. when cyrano finally gets a chance to talk to roxane directly, if still pseudonymously—his words rising to her from the dark below her balcony, “your very voice is changed”—he earns christian a kiss. within the hour the beautiful ones are married.

but before the newlyweds can get tucked in, cyrano & christian’s draft cards come up (there’s a war going on btw). cyrano takes the excuse to write roxane secret, daily letters “from christian,” which are so effective that she comes out to the front to tell christian that she finally loves him for his mind, & to apologize for once loving him only for being beautiful. uh oh. christian insists cyrano tell roxane & make her choose, but before cyrano gets the chance, christian is killed. how can cyrano betray his brother-in-arms’ memory by telling her now?

so he lets her honor the himbo’s memory in a convent for fourteen years. but then, RIGHT before he dies—stabbed for being a satirist, of course—cyrano tells her everything. lets her cry over his dying body, lets her tell him she loved him all along, even honorably tells her to keep mourning christian. it’s all very noble, very tragic….unless?

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there is, i’m sorry, an undeniable cuck element in play here, which makes me think of the last psychiatrist, which makes me look for people working to deprive each other.

it’s so sad that cyrano doesn’t think a woman could love him. we know better. in the very first act we see the concession-stand girl at the artsy theater try to play cat person with him. but wait, cyrano was there too, he’s a smart guy, how did we learn something from this scene that he didn’t learn from it?

and then—as roxane herself asks—why tell her after all these years? “because he’s dying, of course.” because now that he’s dying, by telling her he can deprive her of himself too. he can deprive her of the meaning of the years she spent mourning. he even, in his honor, deprives her of any comfort from the idea that the one she really loved was there for her all along. he keeps bringing up christian. he can’t let her forget for a second that the thing she loved was him & christian, which is to say, no one.

notice that he never, to the very end of the play, tells her directly that he loves her, as himself. he reads her “christian’s” last letter, he lets her figure it out, he lets her tell him she loves him, but when she tells him she’s figured it out & that she loves him, what he actually says over and over again is, “no, i never loved you.” he definitely thinks he’s lying—still honorably covering for christian. i’m not so sure. at the very least i think cyrano, the dramatist, is playing out exactly the scene he wants to play out—flipping the unrequited-love dynamic between them.

at which point i can’t help but notice that when the play ends, roxane is a middle aged virgin. if cyrano had ever envied roxane her beauty, he could not have been more effective in depriving her of any satisfaction she could get from it.

1. for which read bluehair…plus ça change