Abstract
As the name of the category of alea suggests, it is a kind of play based on chance. (Caillois suggested the name alea on the basis of the Latin term for dice.) This points to the primary characteristic of the alea category in games and playful behavior, since it is the main point of contrast with agon—the reliance on the role of fate or luck. As a result, “destiny is the sole artisan of victory, and where there is rivalry, what is meant is that the winner has been more favored by fortune than the loser” (Caillois, 2001, p. 17).
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Notes
- 1.
Caillois suggested the name alea on the basis of the Latin term for dice.
- 2.
An example of corruption of alea is Eddie Murphy’s Imagine That in which a father submits his fate to the prognoses of his daughter who in turn gets her information from imaginary friends.
- 3.
The series included seven films: Road to Singapore (1940), Road to Zanzibar (1941), Road to Morocco (1942), Road to Utopia (1946), Road to Rio (1947), Road to Bali (1952), The Road to Hong Kong (1962). Each of them parodied a different genre, the final one spy movies from the early 1960s.
- 4.
Swanson was impressed with the scene in which Hope, playing a doctor, enters the medical tent in search of his lost golf ball, that he lauded it as “an intriguing and thought-provoking instance of intertextual play drawing attention to the complex interrelationship of fiction and reality” were it to occur in “serious literature” and not a “wacky, anarchic and empty” American film comedy (1995, p. 80).
- 5.
The film he is watching is She’s Working Her Way Through College (1952) with Ronald Reagan, and as Whalley notes, the frivolousness of Reagan’s character singing along stands in contrast with the shots of pictures of Reagan as president handing on the walls (2010, p. 219).
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Skweres, A. (2017). Alea in Spies Like Us, Bowfinger, Taking Care of Business, and Brewster’s Millions . In: Homo Ludens as a Comic Character in Selected American Films. Second Language Learning and Teaching(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47967-5_3
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