Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story

by Anna Pulley

One of the requirements of the English Honors program at my university was to spend an entire semester on Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Not exaggerating, a whole semester. It’s taken me nearly three years to recover from that harrowing experience enough to want to see Michael Winterbottom’s Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story. But how glad I am that I did! Tristram Shandy the novel is somewhat of an amalgam, which crosses between sentimentality and sexuality, progression and digression, narration and the exploration of narration itself. And the film certainly follows the spirit of the novel with its constant tangents, satiric jabs at the movie industry, the enormous egos of those involved in it, and its exploration of how to make a film-within-a-film at the same time that it’s being filmed.

 
The metatextual rendering of Tristram Shandy the movie is reminiscent of Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation, in that it’s a hyper-self-conscious attempt to reach a point where the narrated self becomes the narrating self. Faced with the difficult task of filming the unfilmable, Winterbottom of course doesn’t film the story of Tristram Shandy (if there even is one), choosing instead to film Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon sparring over who has more of a “leading man nose,” what precise shade of yellow Rob’s teeth are, and who appears to be taller onscreen. Coogan also spends time preparing for a scene in which a hot chestnut is to be dropped down his pants (and then having one actually dropped down his pants), warding off a journalist who’s trying to blackmail him for having sex with a stripper, singing “My Bonny Lies Over the Ocean” to his infant son, ordering innumerable vodka tonics and kissing a production assistant who goes off on existential diatribes about the meaning of Tristram Shandy and filmmaking in general, then telling Steve to “fill me with your babies.”
 
In the 800 page novel, about three actual events occur in Tristram’s life: his conception, his birth and concurrent nose-breaking, and his circumcision by a window. The rest are digressions, lessons on how difficult it is to write a novel, Sterne berating the reader every other page, and the anecdotes of his father Walter, Uncle Toby, and various other pointless happenings that occurred before Tristram was born. As Steve Coogan, who plays a version of himself, Tristram and Walter, attempts to tell Tristram’s story, the process of the film is continually halted, discussed, shot, argued, and recast (with Gillian Anderson playing a hilariously brief dream sequence as Widow Wadman) before it’s shown on screen to an unenthused audience who can hardly muster a pity clap at the end of the “film.”
 
The incongruity of the film is as hilarious as it is maddening, which is fitting if you consider the definition of a cock-and-bull story as “a long rambling, idle story” and “tedious, disconnected, or misleading talk.” Both Sterne and Winterbottom poke fun at our limitations through imaginative control, the reader’s/viewer’s expectations of how a “novel” or “film” are supposed to function, and to reveal the infinite ways in which ideas of all calibers distort our minds and imaginations in humorous ways. As Tristram remarks, “The truest respect which you can pay to the reader’s understanding, is to halve this matter amicably, and leave him something to imagine, in his turn, as well as yourself” (77). When reading an unreadable novel or filming an unfilmable film, it’s really best to save yourself the trouble and end with a competition of who can do the better Al Pacino impersonation.