A&E
Oil and Water: Great literature and the big screen
By Alex Witonsky ’17
March 31, 2016
Tags a+e
To bestow American appellations on a non-American…
The late author Gabriel Garcia Marquez was both a Houdini and a Hendrix of the writing world: a technical virtuoso whose creations lit his name—and the hearts & heads of his readers—on fire. His patent version of the magical-realist aesthetic came at a time when the only competitors in the field were L. Ron Hubbard and Hugh Hefner.
Yet, it could be argued that Marquez, despite collecting the writing credits for some 20 films, was no Hitchcock. In fact, he was reluctant to have his own masterworks appear on the silver screen. For three years he staved off Scott Steindorff, famous producer and Hollywood “Bookman” for the rights to Love in the Time of Cholera, and only relented because of a cancer diagnosis that he thought would jeopardize his family’s finances.
When the movie came out in 2007, it was cursed by the dominant reviewers: Time Magazine assigned it a “D” rating, saying it was “a serious contender [for] the worst movie ever made from a great novel.” The L.A. Times—in a review that could have just as easily been about the latest attempt at remaking The Great Gatsby (2013)—described the film as “plodding, tone-deaf, overripe, overheated Oscar-baiting,” certainly a long-shot from Thomas Pynchon’s Times review of the book in which he declared it a “shining and heartbreaking novel.”
But what about the big one by Marquez? On adapting One Hundred Years of Solitude, Marquez said to producer Harvey Weinstein that if Weinstein and director Giuseppe Tornatore wanted the rights; “we must film the entire book, but only release one chapter – two minutes long – each year, for 100 years.” With Marquez’s death in 2014, One Hundred Years of Solitude describes not the title of a film-to-be, but rather the future of the book’s film rights.
For readers in general, film adaptions fail to rival, no less exceed, a great book’s degree of artistic achievement. Why? Is there something about each medium that prevents book-magic from transmogrifying into movie-magic? What is adaptation and which books are adapted? What’s a great book, anyway? Mostly speculation follows below.
When applying for an editorial position at Hamilton College’s magazine des beaux arts, Red Weather, I was asked to give up the names of a few of my favorite contemporary authors. I named Cormac McCarthy, which apparently puts me on par with the literary sensibilities of Professor James Franco, who some two years ago released twenty excruciating minutes of test footage for Blood Meridian depicting tight-lipped cowboys riding through Yosemite on their (quite) “tragic mounts.”
In fairness, this is pretty much all that happens in the novel, so why doesn’t it work on screen? Is it that Franco simply doesn’t have the goods, as perhaps indicated during his Faulkner Period, which saw the lackluster As I Lay Dying (2013) and The Sound and the Fury (2014)? Or, perhaps cinema and literature are simply incompatible? One may even hazard to say that the source material is trash to begin with and begets turgid film.
Rather than answer these question directly, I’ll turn to Blood Meridian’s oldest spiritual predecessor, John Milton’s Paradise Lost. More Transformers in Talaria and less epic meditation on the Bible, science and why it’s hard to be happy, the film adaptation was almost entirely shot in motion-capture, featuring a fire-breathing worm and hitting the silver screen in February under the new title Gods of Egypt.
According to director Alex Proyas:,“the [Gods of Egypt] story is not dissimilar to that of the Judeo-Christian parable.” Manohla Dargis over at the New York Times writes, “If Gods of Egypt were any worse, it might be a masterpiece.” Interesting observations both…
According to Proyas’s above statement, he adapted Milton’s Paradise Lost into Gods of Egypt by first considering the original’s ease of ability to become a Hollywood movie. The literature must be able to fit the Hollywood archetype.
Under this model, filmmakers salvaged from the book a plot line, thereby recruiting an important, though not essential, part of the book to create the movie’s meaning. Plot is the primary component to undergo transformation in adaptations. This partially explains the box-office success of Stephen King’s works. His novels (which are not well written) have great plots––great Novels For Hollywood in that they prioritize clear narrative order over aesthetic.
By contrast, great books’ density of content and lack of a straightforward or crucial plot in many great literary works (on the level of plot alone, Anna Karenina is a daytime soap-opera) are two of the biggest factors preventing successful adaptation. It is a novel’s perceived simplicity, which invites an adaption. I assume this is what attracted Paul Thomas Anderson to adapting Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice, one of the author’s easier books.
So down with the director, up with the auteur and save the Great Book-Movie?
Regardless of artistic intent, even directors like Kubrick have often failed to present the source material in a way that is pleasing to readers. This is especially evident in Kubrick’s weird take on A Clockwork Orange (1970), a film in which the most imagination was spent constructing the set of The Korova Milk Bar, where characters drink from lactating statuettas before gearing up for rape and murder.
One wonders if part of the ostentation in the Korova set—and in taking on the troubling themes inherent in A Clockwork Orange in the first place—is the residue left over from a clunky go at Lolita in 1962, a kind of violent machismo asserted through a willingness to take on “great literature.” Anyways, even King himself was quite unhappy with The Shining (1980): “The book is hot, and the movie is cold; the book ends in fire, and the movie in ice.”
Simply plotted or dense, done by blockbuster directors or auteurs, derived from great literature or not adaptations, which are unfortunately compared to their pre-op state, films fail to carry the same signifcance as the books.
Instead, successful adaptations use the grammar available to filmmakers to make great films, which just so happen to tell a similar story and share a title with the original work. A few shining examples that come to mind are Joe Wright’s Pride and Prejudice (2005), Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility (1995) and Sally Potter’s Orlando (1992).
‘What are adaptations but a type of homage? What is homage but ritual to aging idols? Film-adaptations are the orphaned bête noire of books, a category worshipping the pain of their existence while propagating all the old sins.’ Instead, those who claim membership with the demimonde may wish to identify film as the site of a rhythm of constant renewal and purified power, the rhythm to which all reels flicker.