Getting ‘Em in a Twist

I trekked down to Manchester a while back, to see Oliver, the Lionel Bart musical, in its current incarnation. A great show. Neil Morrisey, who I can remember from his days as Michael Elphick’s skinny sidekick in ‘Boon,’ as Fagin, was excellent. The kids ensemble was fabulous, and the production, from props, to sets, to lighting and sound worked amazingly and looked stunning. The theatre itself, The Palace on Oxford Street, was plush and truly traditional in red and gold – Dickensian in fact -with a Grand Tier at the top more steeply raked than the flanks of Hallin Fell.

There’s a but coming though, which is why, oh why, does this production feel the need to sex-up the action? A bit of gratuitous titillation is no bad thing. I’m usually ready to put my hand in my pocket for it, but in Oliver? Some tawdry simulated sexual horseplay, notably during the Oom-pah-pah number seemed uncomfortably out of place, and didn’t add anything to the story – though it did make me wonder if the producers doubted the power of the story…. after all it only has loss of parents, child poverty, virtual slavery, criminal exploitation, abusive relationships, corruption in public bodies and murder to offer. Georgian England, by all accounts, had been a much more rumbustious place. Fielding’s Tom Jones, written a century before Oliver Twist, has a much more prevalent violence, but one that is routine rather than shocking, and his Squire Weston, who is of the class above Dickens, has a mouth as foul as any of Dickens’ low lifes!

From the sublime to the black and white, I followed Oliver the musical, with Oliver the silent movie. Made by Jackie Coogan and released in 1929, preserved in a Czech film archive, restored and re-issued by the BFI, on dvd, this version of the tale is truer to the original than Bart’s enjoyable romp. It still cuts to the chase more simply than the novel, but retains the characters of Monks, and Claypole. The dog, is a star! But so is the young boy who plays Oliver, and the influence of live theatre is strongly there, that stage make-up, which turns all characters into caricatures is strongly in evidence. Beneath it though there was some serious acting, as well as theatrical projecting.

What struck me most though was the similarity of the costumes, and of the staging of many of the scenes, as if Dickens’ early novel has become almost a traditional tale, with a traditional presentation: the ambience and tone of the written work living on in its dramatic and technological descendants.

A Round Trip To The Islands

 I recently caught the last half hour os so of  The Maggie, a black and white movie from the middle of the twentieth century.

BHD writing on Lunga Island

It tells the story of a Clyde Puffer, an old-fashioned steamboat, and its wayward captain, who contracts to carry a cargo for a wealthy American from Glasgow to one of the western islands.

It’s one of those tales, where the sophisticated and worldy urbanite is confounded, and converted, by his experience of the feckless, but happy islanders he encounters. Comparisons cry out to be made: not least with Local Hero, the 1983 film based on an original script by Bill Forsyth and starring, not so much Burt Lancaster, as the village of Pennan near Nairn, and the beach at Camus Darrach, just north of Airsaig.

If there was a BAFTA for Best Supporting Beach, Camus Darrach, from Local Hero would get my vote, though, the beach, in The Beach might get a nomination! Best Supporting Village, for me, would go to Pennan rather than to Brigadoon, the eponymous village in the Gene Kelly 1954 musical – the same year as The Maggie, in fact. Here too an American urbanite is won over to Highland life. This is the most fanciful imagining of the Highlands, being shot in the Hollywood Hills. Primarily a love story, not a cultural one, the juxtaposition of Manhattan with Brigadoon though, carries the recognition that there is a different pace to life, and a different expectation of it between the deeply urban and the deeply rural.

In fact, when we start to look around there have been a shedload of films on this theme, a fascination not just with islanders, but with the people and culture of the Scottish western seabord and its islands, from Whisky Galore (1949) to The Whicker Man (1973). The earlier of these two was based on a Compton Mackenzie story, itself based on an actual incident on Eriskay, and became so iconic that it was spoofed in a TV advert. Once again, the sophisticates, in this case the government excisemen, are outwitted by the islanders who steal and hide the alcoholic cargo of a foundered ship.

One sub-strain of this genre has been films about St Kilda. I had the pleasure of visiting St Kilda in 2009, although I didn’t make landfall, being too sea-sick by the time we arrived even to sit up vertically, let alone stand. I slept like a babe though, in the gentle swell of Village Bay overnight, and stayed upright for the passage between Boreray and Stac Lee next morning, though after that I was horizontal during the force eight gale that chased us all the way back to the Butt of Lewis.

The earliest film about the island that I have seen is in a recent BFI collection. First released in 1928, but probably filmed, at least in part, during 1923, A Trip to St Kilda was made to promote tourism to the island, and follows a Glasgow steamship, and its party of trippers, from the Clyde to Oban, Skye, and beyond. Coming in to Castle Bay at Barra the view seems almost the same as that on the current TV series set there, only a bit jerkier, and soundless, and in black and white!

More famous, and what got me noticing this type of film in the first place, is Michael Powell’s The Edge of The World. Set on Hirte, but filmed on Foula, in the Shetlands, this tells the tale of change coming to St Kilda, which had been evacuated a few years before. I didn’t see Powell’s 1936 film until more than forty years later, when it was shown on TV, back to back with his documentary about the making of it, Return to the Edge of the World. This was made in 1978, by which time John Laurie was old, but still enthusiastic, and many of the original cast and crew had passed on.

Between these two Powell, by then working with Emeric Pressburger, had made I know Where I’m Going, set on the fictional isle of Kiloran, but filmed on Colonsay. This wartime romance, for me, is stolen by the amazing Pamela Brown, who makes the story, and the rest of the cast irrelevent whenever she is ‘on stage’. In this film the urbanite is socialite Jean Webster, played by Wendy Hiller, off to marry a rich businessman who is renting the island. Befogged at the ferry crossing though, she waits for a storm to break in the company of the Laird of the island, down to earth, and impoverished, played by Roger Livesey, with whom, of course, she falls in love.

In contrast to these romances, the 1983 film, Ill Fares The Land, tells a more gritty version of the evacuation of S.Kilda. I have a copy, burned onto dvd, presumably from a video home recording, for it still has the early eighties adverts. In many ways these have aged more obviously than the film itself. What were we thinking of, dressing like that? That gritty realism though seems more of a dark fantasy than a true reality. To portray the islanders as isolated may be partially true, but there is a rather patronising air to the film, showing them also as being quite ignorant of the outside world, which I doubt they were. Fulton Mackay features here, as well as in Local Hero, released in the same year, two stories in similar settings, but in quite different tones.

What appeals to me about many of these films, is their almost co-incidental use of Scots Gaelic – a language that I had a brush with, until my video player conked out and I could no longer access the fifty or so episodes of Speaking Our Language. The Edge of the World, curiously, did not feature it, probably because on Foula there would have been none spoken. Of course, I can now listen to Radio Nan Gaidheal, and watch the Alba TV channel, which is where, by chance, a couple of weeks ago, I caught the last half hour or so of The Maggie, a black and white……

Co-operative Surgery

The writer Kurt Tidmore and I have been exchanging work over the internet for about five years now. He writes a mean short story.

Recently I sent him the almost final draft of a short story, to which he replied with an intriguing suggestion. That a final edit & polish would probably lose 10% of the text we would agree on, but what he envisaged was both of us having a go, independently, and then seeing how the results matched up.

The outcome was remarkable. Although we made different changes we made them in almost every case, at the same places. There were deletions in common too. What surprised me most of all was that we made a common addition, both sensing the need for an extra sentence near the end of the piece. The sentences we provided were not entirely dissimilar. Both of us gave one last image of the protagonist, who had completed a fairly long paragraph of speech, and was about to be asked the question, by his interrogator, that would lead on to his final statement.

We chose differently in what we had him doing. Kurt made him shrug. I made him bow his head and clasp his hands. The difference perhaps highlights our different guiding perceptions of the character, and of the story he is part of; and looking back at our various corrections I could see echoes of that difference in them. However, fact that we both chose to add at that point, and to add a similar image, shows I think, a shared understanding of the structural needs of the story.

When I am working on stories, not so much re-drafting as editing – and that means cutting out more often than not – I find that I’m taking out the same sort of stuff, and therefore have been repeating the same sort of errors! These are often havering words, like, ‘perhaps’, ‘almost’ or ‘maybe’, where it’s not the characters that are in doubt, but the narrator. Make your mind up, man, I tell myself. Is it happening or isn’t it? Another fault of mine is going on to explain something that I’ve already told you, as if I thought my readers weren’t clever enough to work it out. More likely, I was uncertain myself about having made my intention clear. That’s not somewhere to add an explanation though, but one to go back to and get right in the first place! It was additions like this that Kurt and I both took out of the story.

It was an interesting exercise both in its similarities, the high correlation of places where the changes were made, and in its differences, the separate stylistic and tonal roads we were walking. One other issue was raised for me. Where we diverged in whether or not a change needed to be made, the few places where I had left in something that he had deleted, or had left standing what he had changed, were ones where I could find a rationale for leaving it as it was. The exercise raised my awareness of my story, as well as raising my awareness of his interpretation of it.

I’m not sure that this sort of exercise would suit everyone, and certainly I would not recommend repeating it on a regular basis, nor with early drafts of a work, but there is no doubt that it was revealing, tending to strengthen, in this case, my concept of the story, rather than weakening it.  BHDandMe

Adaptation 12: Scrooge, you Muppet

A Christmas Carol -short story by Charles Dickens

The Muppet Christmas Carol, – film starring Michael Caine, and Kermit the Frog, oh, and Miss Piggy!

 

It being Dicken’s bi-centenary, I thought I should look at the adaptation of one of his stories. Dickens, like Shakespeare in an author whose works have been adapted for film since the earliest days of the motion picture and which are still being drawn upon. Every generation seems to need to re-assess, and re-present its view of the Dickensian world.

The connection is not merely one of continued popularity though. Taking into account Eisenstein’s essay on Dickens and D.W. Griffiths, we must recognise that the writer was not only one of the first to be adapted, but also was one of the major sources of the very techniques that film makers would develop for the telling of stories. It is easy to forget in our visually educated society that when the first movies were made audiences were likely to jump for safety when a speeding train bore down on them from the screen, to run for cover when a gun was fired (even silently), and to have no idea what was going on when they scene changed from one group of characters, or even one setting, to another. Eisenstein quotes Griffiths, who explains that he drew his concepts of jump cuts and montages (in particular) from specific verbal equivalents in Dickens’ work.

Much has been written about adaptations, often in serial form, of the Dickens novels, which themselves were all published initially in serial form. My choice is of his, perhaps most famous, short story. The BFI have recently released on dvd a collection of early Dickens’ films, and among them, with a dating of 1909, is a silent version of A Christmas Carol, entitled Scrooge. In effect it is a series a scenes, with one or two ‘titles’ in text, to explain what is coming next. These little cameos show Scrooge shutting up shop for Christmas, encountering Marley’s face in his door-knocker, and being visited, one by one, by the three ghosts. There is little information on the dvd, and the abrupt ending, as Scrooge sees his own and Tiny Tim’s grave, suggests it is not quite complete, but the main elements of the story are there. Scrooge’s distress at seeing his own past is powerful and moving, despite the obvious overacting of the period in which it was made.

There may well be earlier adaptations of the story. There are certainly later ones, starring actors as varied as Alistair Sim, and George C.Scott. I have seen, twice, a wonderful stage version at Keswick’s excellent Theatre By The Lake. My favourite though, and I have watched it every year since my daughter was about five, is The Muppets Christmas Carol. In fact, and I’m a fan of Zulu, and Get Carter, and Mona Lisa, but not Alfie, I would say that it was Michael Caine’s finest hour.

What I particularly like about this muppet adaptation is its inclusion of Dickens himself, and of his ‘ideal reader’, the rat, Rizzio. This brings an element to the tale (if not the tail) that is authentically Dickensian, despite being absent from the published text, for Dickens was a pioneer, and is still perhaps the most successful practitioner, of the authorial public readings. Compared to him, in terms of number of performances, and size of audiences, those who have followed are but rank amateurs!

There’s a deeper authenticity too however, for the authorial Dickens, though he does not appear with Rizzio beside him in the short story, is a presence, speaking directly to us throughout his writing. In fact, he makes us all, his readers, into little Rizzios. Dickens, in his readings and his writings, was not embarrassed by giving his audiences a goodly shoving in the emotional directions he wanted them to go. Modern authors rarely display overtly such strength of conviction – we are far too conscious of the liberties of our readers.

 

A Christmas Carol was the first, and most successful of Dickens’ Christmas stories, which for a few years became a tradition for him. It formed part of his repertoire of public readings, was popular throughout his life, and has remained so ever since. Along with O Henry’s The Gift of the Magi, it is perhaps the best known Christmas story in the English speaking world, and probably beyond. It is a muscular tale, the painful truths of which, about the corrosive effects of selfishness and lack of charity, the inability to give and receive love, are not weakened by what we think of as the melodramatic style of the story. The Muppet adaptation captures both, and the fact that Scrooge is an actual human among the puppets (though not quite the only one) strengthens both the melodrama, and those truths. The film highlights his isolation, and emphasises what he is losing by shunning the society of his nephew’s family and friends.

The ghost of Christmas yet-to-come is the most threatening of the three in all versions of A Christmas Carol. It shows Scrooge, not only the death of Tiny Tim, but also his own. It calls from him the question that we ask for ourselves: can the future that has been laid down by our actions in the past be changed by our actions in the present?

It is the Ghost of Christmas Present however, that raises the issue of the two orphans that lurk beneath its robes. Named as Ignorance and Poverty these are the spawn of selfishness and greed, the consequence of irresponsibility and indifference to the condition of others. Squeamish re-tellers of this tale, and here the Muppet version comes under the cosh, will omit these two orphans, who both shame and threaten our society, as they did Dickens’ own, and this is the significant difference between the short story and several adaptations. Dickens never lost sight of the fact that his story was not merely an entertainment, but was also related to the moral situation of his society. However, perhaps the difference is not simply one of omitting an element in order to narrow the intention behind the story. It may be that the modern re-tellings are more concerned with the individual, with Scrooge’s moral trajectory, in which case the issue of the two orphans seems peripheral rather than central, perhaps even a distraction. The implication behind this would be that we like our stories to be about individuals, who are of interest, rather than societies, of which we may be believe there are no such things!

 

[This will be my last adaptation essay for a little while. I need to watch some films, and read some books, and write some essays! But the blog will continue, hopefully twice a month, helped out from time to time by the wisdom of Kowalski, but otherwise with the further animadversions of BHDandMe.]

A Trumpet Voluntary

Nnorom Azuoyne, editor of Sentinel Literary Quarterly, recently took me to task over my Highly Commended story The Mackwater Seam, and other issues.

Firstly, I’d omitted to put a link to the SLQ on the blog. There’s a link there today.

Secondly I’d omitted to tell people about my story, The Mackwater Seam getting a highly commended in the SLQ competition. OK. Well, here it is: My story The Mackwater Seam got a Highly Commended in the SLQ October-December 2011 competition. On account of this the story appears in the recently published Sentinel Champions 8. Which brings us to the thirdly:

Nnorom thinks I should buy some extra copies and give them to my friends

 

Friends, I would never (ever) do such a thing. Funny, when the chips are down, how you’d rather be thought mean than needy! (I would encourage you to buy your own copies though, via the aforementioned link!)

You might look out for the Earlyworks Press anthology of Science Fiction pieces too, due out soon. My story, The Cover Story, got the second prize in their competition (the first sci-fi tale I’d attempted). Last time I was in an Earlyworks Press I was a mere (I do mere rather well I think) filler, alongside Christine Howe, one of the writers that attends my Facets of Fiction workshops here in Cumbria. There’s an EP link for you to follow too!

all for now….

Adaptation 11: Living On An Island

Book: The Island of Dr Moreau, H.G.Wells (Signet Classics ePub-edition)

Film: The Island of Dr Moreau, (dir)Don Taylor, Orion Pictures, 1977.

H.G.Wells published his novel in 1896 and over the hundred or so years since there have been half a dozen film adaptations. Of these Wells or his executors approved some, and disapproved others. The Island of Lost Souls (1933) was the first of three authorised adaptations, according to Dr John Flynn, writing a postscript to the Signet ePub edition. He points out that this was banned in Britain and the Comonwealth until the late 1950s, and it might be worth knowing that the BFI is due to re-release it on dvd later this year. In common with the 1977 adaptation, which Flynn cites as the best, it features a female character not present in Wells’ original. This is the element of the adaptation that I would like to explore. In Don Taylor’s film Barbara Carrera plays Maria, love interest for second lead Michael York’s Braddock (the film’s equivalent of Wells’ Prendick), and possibly too for Moreau himself, played by Burt Lancaster. It would be easy to dismiss the presence of Maria as mere Hollywood; the need to provide the film with some female eye-candy. Indeed Maria wears some pretty frocks, flashes her undoubtedly attractive eyes, and gives us a show of embonpoint that is second to none! She gives us too, in dramatic terms, a cause of friction between Braddock and Moreau, and a conventional ‘lovers escape’ storyline to round off the plot. It is implied by her behaviour and words, as well as Moreau’s, though never explicitly stated, that she is one of the Doctor’s beast-folk, a creation of his medicine. This ambiguity allows the film makers to slide rather slyly off one of the tenets of the story in both film and book, which is that the beast nature will always re-assert itself over time, an outcome that, in this film, would mar the happy ending! Here already we are in to differences in what the story is about, but before going deeper into them, let’s linger on the very presence of this woman in that story. Other adaptations have her too, in various guises. In the 1933 version she is Lota, the Panther-Woman. In the 1959 version, Frances, wife of Moreau’s sidekick. I have even seen a stage version, in which the Panther-Woman morphs from the nurse who tends a recovering Prendick as he recalls his adventures from his hospital bed.

There is simply no such woman in Wells’ story. Yet she is not, I would suggest, merely the addition of some sex appeal to liven up an otherwise dull and sexless tale, for the fact is that although Wells has no single equivalent female character he does have the implication of one. Indeed her presence lies in the subconscious of the novel from start to finish, growing more insistent as the story develops, and becoming explicit in its final pages. In fact those final pages, as we have found with other adaptations, are quite different in the two versions, and so are the opening ones. Wells, as he does in other stories, gives us a portal through which we must pass on our journey as readers. He places his story within a story: the finding of Prendick’s written testimony by the nephew who then presents it to us. The film begins with Braddock in the open boat. This in itself changes the way we engage with the story. We begin and end with Braddock’s arrival at, and departure from the island. It is his adventure we observe. In the novel we have Prendick’s account presented to us, and are told of his arrival. We are given a plausible historical setting for it. This both detaches us to a certain extent, but also, and I believe more importantly – for a novel (or any written fiction) does something different to a film (or any acted out fiction) – it invites us to judge the story in a way that the film does not. This is why the film ends, quite abruptly, with Moreau freshly killed and his compound still burning, whereas the novel continues, after his death and that destruction. It goes on to deal not only with Prendick’s subsequent experiences amongst the reverting beast-people, but also with his life after the rescue, and the effects on his perceptions of that life which he attributes to his experiences on the island. It is these perceptions that the novel ends upon, not his escape from the island. Strong in those perceptions is the one that stands out in relation to women, and not to the female beast people, but to those of his ‘normal’ society: ‘prowling women would mew after me’. This single remark carries a deal of weight, and its words are carefully chosen. In particular, ‘prowling’ and ‘mew’. These feline images over the course of the novel have acquired a potency out of all proportion to what they would have if standing alone. Montgomery, a debauched drunk in the novel, a cynical mercenary in the film, refers to the ‘cats of Gower Street’. These are not four-footed cats. He is referring to that London underworld of prostitution and vice in which he has lost, beyond all hope of recovery, his self-respect and reputation. He puts the issue of sexual vice into our heads, subtly, implicitly, in his talking about his past, and in his reported relations with the beast-folk. It is the puma though that gives the real potency to ‘prowling’ and ‘mewing’.

The puma is mentioned at the very beginning, even before Prendick’s narrative has begun. It is singled out in the nephew’s historical setting for the events we are about to witness. Then we are repeatedly reminded of it. Subtly but insistently Wells plants the awareness of it in our minds. It is ‘the puma’ mostly, sexless to begin with. It has a chapter of its own: The Crying of the Puma. Moreau himself talks of it, and of what his intentions for it are, and he is the one who reveals to us, eventually, that it is a she. The crying of the puma is what drives Prendick out into the island, and the sight of it, strapped to the vivisectionists table is what sparks his first confrontation with Moreau. Later, it is the puma, and suddenly described as ‘she’, that escapes, and kills Moreau, projecting Prendick into his nightmare world of life among the beast-folk. Vivisection, in Wells’ time was ugly and brutal. Acid and the blade are Moreau’s tools. Pain is its consequence, and when the ‘House of Pain’ is mentioned in the book, we have a sense of how awful that threat is. By contrast the film posits a more psychological pain. When Moreau tries to turn Braddock into an animal it is done with a hypodermic, and a good deal of pseudo-scientific flapdoodle! I thought at first that this was a misogynistic tale, but on reflection I am not so sure. The way Moreau moulds the puma to his wishes is not something that Prendick (nor Wells?) admires. Perhaps misanthropic is nearer the mark. There are females in the book. Females among the beast-folk are often mentioned, and again towards the end, when Prendick dwells among them, a specifically sexual issue is raised: ‘some (…..) all females (…….) began to disregard the injunction of decency’, and later, ‘attempted public outrages upon the institution of monogamy’. Are we here getting to the core of what this horrific story is about? I recall Stephen Fry causing outrage sometime ago with his tweet about the heterosexual distaste for sex. This surely is what Wells is poking his snout into here? The heterosexual male’s fear of women, and his disgust at what he finds within himself in relation to them. Moreau, remember, tries to re-create the puma as a female human, but one that he will not lust after. Moreau’s vision of humankind is that it will no longer be driven by ‘pain and pleasure’. That is the sort of human female he is trying to make. There are a couple of female servants in the film, but they are never fore-grounded, and, like Maria, it is impossible to tell if they are human, or beast-kind. All the beast folk who are seen in close up, who speak and act, are male. Maria alone represents woman in the film, and apart from her odd speech, and her, by the stereotypes of the time in which the story is set, unconventional behaviour in seducing Braddock, she is and remains apparently entirely human. This juxtaposition of the human and inhuman features of course in films such as Blade Runner, and again comparison with the book reveals a different level of interest between the two.

The 1977 film of The Island of Dr.Moreau, and perhaps those that preceded it, by making the female explicit and individual, rather than implicit and general, waters down the sexuality inherent in the original. Its story remains safely about ‘them’ – about Braddock, and Maria, and Moreau, and the beast folk, all of whom are killed during the closing scenes, whereas Welss’ original becomes, as Prendick returns to normality, progressively, dangerously and uncomfortably, about us.

Two Types of Vanity – A parallel reading

I’m taking a break from Adaptations with this one, though both the books I write about have been made into films:

 

The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexander Dumas (E book edition)

The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe (Vintage, 2010[1987])

 

It’s a commonplace of the Creative Writing tuition industry that being a reader will make you a better writer.

I recently bought an e-reader that was pre-loaded with several dozen books in English. Among them was The Count of Mote Cristo, and it was that which I chose to read to surrender my e-reader virginity. A short time later I was loaned a copy of Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, and wanting to return it quickly, set into that one too!

The coincidental parallel readings threw up an interesting comparison of these two long novels, so widely spaced apart in time, yet dealing in many ways with similar themes. I can imagine Dumas and Wolfe sitting together in that circular room which Forster proposes in his Aspects of the Novel (Arnold, 1927).

The differences between the novels are obvious. Dumas’ story covers decades, and deals with one man’s quest for revenge upon a group of people who have ill-used him in the first fifth of the thousand page epic. Wolfe’s story covers only a few months, and describes the way one man’s folly is exploited by a group of people around him. Yet where there is difference we instinctively search for similarity. Both stories are firmly rooted in their ‘one man’, and use him to explore his wider society.

Their settings, centuries and continents apart, are the same, the worlds of high society and high finance, in both cases, being contrasted with the worlds of low-life criminality and the judiciary. Paris is the New York of its time, and Wolfe’s character Arthur Ruskin makes the connection: ‘This city is what Paris used to be’ (Wolfe, p590), but the main protagonist, Sherman McCoy has done so five hundred pages earlier: ‘There it was, the Rome, The Paris, the London of the 20^th century.’(Wolfe,p81)

The two cities are in the nature of characters themselves, and their natures are themes of the respective stories. Though the word is not used in either book, celebrity is at the heart of them both. Whether it is to weddings or funerals, the crowds come to gape in The Count; and in Bonfires, again in the mouth of Ruskin, we are reminded that living in New York is about being seen: ‘she can’t sleep nights thinking that ( ) the people ( ) in New York might not know who the hell she is.’ In both books the crowds are drawn to the courtrooms, and in both books critical turning points are reached in those courtrooms. In The Count, both Fernand, and Villefort suffer their decisive defeats in the Courtroom, and the climactic scene of Bonfires takes place there too.

It is not only celebrity and the justice system that is examined in common however. Behind both of these stands the inequality in financial resources that is at the heart of both societies. Both books deal in currency, quoting figures that by the time of my reading are almost equally meaningless in representing value. We understand them, not because of their detail, but because of their contexts. Monte Cristo’s hundred million would not get him onto the Rich List these days, and $150 is about average for a decent restaurant meal nowadays, even out in the provinces where I live! Yet we know that the figures being quoted are always breathtakingly high to the characters quoting them and in both books money, the need for money, as much as the love of it, drives them on.

What I found interesting, among other things, was that Bonfires, on its covers, is pitched as a comedy, something which I did not find in it, until quite near the end, as Judge Kovitsky’s courtroom spirals into riot, and I wasn’t sure that it was intended that way. The Count is certainly no comic creation, as the man who was Dantes, enriched beyond the dreams of his time, plans and executes, the destruction of those who incarcerated and betrayed him.

Here again, in the two so different stories, I found similarities, for as Monte Cristo first sees, and then reacts to the true nature of his avenging persona, so McCoy goes on a personal journey, becoming almost an avenger himself by the novel’s end.

The similarities throw me back onto differences though. Whereas both books have a strong ‘love’ interest, their treatment of women is surprisingly different, with Wolfe’s story seeming, to me at least, to treat its women more contemptuously than Dumas’. The X Rays and Lemon Tarts, even the apparently successful Judy are portrayed as essentially useless; none have the nobility of Valentine, Eugenie, or even Mercedes. Dumas’ presentation of Eugenie must have been daringly positive in his time, as he makes the point that though they book twin beds, during their flight from Paris, she and her female companion are using only one when Andrea bursts in upon them.

The foregrounded relationships between the sexes disappointed me too, especially in The Count, seeming to be between ‘roles’ rather than people, and that between the Count and Haidee I found the most disappointing of all. At least McCoy’s Mrs Ruskin had something about her that he could respond to without her being entirely submissive to him. They remained individuals, though they came to see through each other in the end.

In the matter of race, I found Dumas’ world less inherently racist than Wolfe’s, though both categorise people by their ethnicity. Dumas’ characters’ racism seems to have less self-conscious malice about it, and in Wolfe’s novel it is so insistent and all pervading. Of course, this may represent a heightened distaste for it in the later novelist, rather than a greater prevalence of it in the society he depicts.

Another difference was the parochialism of the stories. Despite the mention of Lake Como, and the 747 Middle Eastern air flights, mention of places outside New York are rare in Wolfe’s book, with the exception of his, to me, surprisingly large, English influences, whereas Dumas’ characters inhabit a wider world. Bearing in mind the comparative modes of transport this is even more surprising. Hardly any of the major characters in Bonfires travel, yet most of them in The Count do.

Does this reflect the cultural differences between two times, or between two cultures, or is that a spurious question? Certainly, it seems to me that the world view of Dumas’ Parisians is somewhat broader than that of Wolfe’s New Yorkers, even among the poor.

What both stories do, in their similar and different ways, is to examine the way that we spend our time, and to draw attention to the fact that, unlike our fortunes, it cannot be built up or replaced. Death, and the certainty of it, is contemplated throughout them both. The Count ends with Monte Cristo sailing away with Haidee, while Morrel is reassured by his beloved Valentine that we must ‘wait and hope’, which might be taken for two words that sum up the burden of the story. Wolfe’s novel ends with a press report, taken from a year after the closing events of the main text. As a Dickensian ending does, the author here ties up a few loose ends by outlining what has become of his major characters. Wait and hope though seems to have morphed into endure, but that might be my reading of the novel.

Comparing the two, being aware of the two, gave me a greater sense of each, of how they handle their themes, and settings, and characters, and stories, which makes me wonder, if being a writer might help you to become a better reader.

Adaptation 10: A Non Accidental Transformation

The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler, (Vintage, 1992 [1985])

The Accidental Tourist by Lawrence Kasdan (dir), Warner Bros.1988.

Remarkable in this adaptation is the opening scene of the film, in which the protagonist Macon Leary, returns home to his wife, to be told over the kitchen table that she wants a divorce. What makes it remarkable is not the fact that it is an entirely created scene, absent from the book. Many films have that. Rather it is the fact that among the extras on the dvd edition is an alternative opening scene; one that almost exactly replicates the book’s opening. What’s more, it’s a scene that works just as well as in the book, and arguably better than the one chosen for the released film.

Here’s a clear case then of an adaptation that chooses to reject a scene, even though it can perfectly well be filmed, and in fact has been! Frustratingly, the director’s short interview on the dvd makes no mention of what prompted this decision. Yet there is no doubt, from what he does say, that he wants us to understand that he considers this to be a faithful adaptation.

There are other elements of comparison worth looking at. Why, for example, near to the end of the film, is the confrontation between Macon and his wife handled so differently? The scene in the book where Macon leaves does not have the speech of justification that the film puts into his mouth, and his wife is not quite so accepting. I can’t help feeling that here the two storytellers, Tyler, and Kasdan are making judgments about what their respective audiences will accept, and in practice that means that Kasdan, being the adaptor, is making them.

What really intrigues me in this story though is not a difference between the two tellings, but the way that both of them push the viewer/reader down the right road when it comes to rooting for the woman whom Macon will finally end up with. It is a curious story concept that we should want, in effect, to cheer on a man who is leaving his wife. Much more common, in our culture, are stories where women leave their husbands. In fact, our default setting might be that the one is a form of desertion, whilst the other is an act of liberation. Yet here, Anne Tyler’s story goes against that grain. How does she do that, and get us to go along with it?

One way is to have the woman leave her husband first. Macon is shown as boring and repressed right from the start, but her asking for a divorce, and him wanting to keep trying puts him, in dramatic terms, in the right, and her in the wrong. Having prejudiced us that way, Tyler only has to keep her ‘unsympathetic’ and we are half way to accepting his later actions.

We have to like Muriel too. In the film Muriel’s appearance is a little more quirky and, I suppose, she is intended to be more attractive. There is a bit of stereotyping here I’m afraid. She is younger, and slimmer, and whereas the film studiously avoids any eroticism, much is made of her long legs and short skirts. These are clichés, and as such disappointing. Tyler’s text has to be a bit more subtle. In the book those legs are described as being ‘like sticks’, not a description guaranteed to arouse, I’d say. Muriel gets her brownie points in the novel, not only from her quirkiness, but from the dog’s reactions to her, and her interactions with it. If the dog likes a character, we know, as readers, that the character is OK! The film doesn’t make so much of this. Perhaps we are not so good at observing the moving image of a dog as we are at interpreting the words in which one is described.

‘Edward grinned up at her and folded his ears back inviting a pat. She bent and stroked his head.’ (The Accidental Tourist, p27) This is a good start for Muriel, and on the next page ‘Edward licked her cheekbone’. Get a stage dog to fold back its ears and half the audience will think it’s scared. Get it to lick your leading lady and half will think Yuk! But an author can tell us, or nudge us towards understanding what it means.

A stark difference between how we understand pictures and words is shown right at the end of the movie. Seeing Macon in his cab, Muriel smiles. It is a relatively long shot, in terms of duration – a cinematic way of saying, take note of this smile! Then we cut to his face, and he is smiling too. Then we cut to the final credits, over black. Those two smiles are the final images of the story in film.

In the book the final paragraph is longer, and more complex, but ends in the same place. Here are its closing words:

‘And there on the curb stood Muriel, surrounded by suitcases and string-handled shopping bags and cardboard cartons overflowing with red velvet. She was frantically waving down taxis – first one ahead, then Macon’s own. Arretez! Macon cried to the driver. The taxi lurched to a halt. A sudden flash of sunlight hit the windshield, and spangles flew across the glass. The spangles were old water spots, or maybe the markings of leaves, but for a moment Macon thought they were something else. They were so bright and festive, for a moment he thought they were confetti.’

No smiles then, but ‘spangles’ that need to be interpreted. In the book, Tyler interprets for us. They make him think of confetti, and she makes us think of weddings, and that tells us that Muriel and Macon will get married, and live happily ever after. Spangles could have been done on film, but how could they have been done to ensure that we gave them the correct significance? And what if those smiles, which we could see and understand perfectly on film, had been used in the text? They wouldn’t have ‘told’ us enough, I suspect. They would have been not quite specific enough. In film Muriel’s smile shows us that she understands what is happening. Macon’s smile confirms it. Had Tyler told us that they ‘smiled’ she would have been raising multiple possibilities, not nailing down an outcome.

In the book we only need Macon’s confirmation. We know what Muriel wants. We have known since she first asked ‘can’t you leave him hone with your wife?’ We know this in the film too, but the book has taken us inside Macon’s head in a way that the film does not. We know his decision, and for him to perceive the spangles as confetti is enough to tell us that all will be OK.

What if we had not been won over to Muriel though? Then the story would be a tragedy. The fool has left his wife, and after he had had the good sense to go back to her! After she had the sense to come back to him! In both versions it is important that we want him to leave her, so that when he does it is ‘our’ happy ending.

Again, moving pictures and printed words present the story differently: the former ‘shows’, and the latter ‘tells’. Words work through our interpretation of them. Moving pictures work through our observation of them.

It is curious to me that it should be at the very beginnings, and at the end, that I notice the greatest changes between the two versions. We set out from and arrive at different places, and that means that we have taken different journeys.

Adaptation 9: Rivers of Darkness

Film: Apocalypse Now Redux– Francis Ford Coppola (dir), 2001(1979)

Book: Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad, Penguin Popular Classics 1992 (1902)

 

Heart of Darkness is a novel set in Africa in the late nineteenth century. Apocalypse Now is a film set in Vietnam during the late twentieth. Yet here is an example of one story being knowingly sprung out of another. The differences are massive, but the references to the earlier work are explicit and intentional. Coppola was not merely taking Conrad’s story and using it for his own purposes, but was insisting that you, the viewer, knew he was doing so.

            Coppola’s film, in the making, was itself almost as much of an epic as the story it tells. Interrupted by a war (the helicopters came back with real bullet holes, and real bloodstains), threatened by out of control budgets, almost losing its star to a heart attack, it has been the subject of a documentary (Heart of Darkness -) almost as exciting, certainly as bizarre. Consequently it is a rich source of speculation and debate. I shall stick to a bare couple of threads that I feel make an interesting comparison between the ways in which books and films might get on with their jobs of entertaining and engaging us.

            The most obvious parallel is, I guess, that both versions are a quest for Kurtz, a rogue trader in the book, a rogue soldier in the film. Both stories are built around the balance between our expectations of Kurtz, created and examined during their journeys, and the realities of him on arrival. In both stories the narrator is forced to reassess himself and his values as a consequence of the encounter. In fact there is a second comparison to be made here between the Redux version of the film, a cut that, to my way of thinking, presents a much fuller and more rounded Kurtz, and therefore demands a much more thoughtful reaction to him, and the original general release of 1979. AN Redux is much more than a re-issue of the earlier film with extra minutes bolted on. As it says on the tin ‘it is a completely re-thought, re-mixed and re-edited interpretation’. 

The other element that I am interested is that of the river-quest. It is the way the river journey is presented, in text and pictures, that interests me and along the way I’ll dip my paddle in a few other comparable journeys.

The boat is a curious concept. Not surprising that early flying machines were air-‘ships’, nor that spacecraft are space-‘ships’, because the boat is a device that enables us to exist in an environment for which we are not equipped. It floats upon a medium in which we cannot survive for long, connecting us with and detaching us from normality at the same time. In the film, following their brush with a tiger, a character tells himself ‘never get off the boat’. The boat is not only the means of reaching a Prospero’s Isle, where all things may be experienced and reflected upon, but can also be a version of it. The boat is what carries us, but it also becomes our proxy world; and on a river, as opposed to the sea or a lake, it carries us in a particular direction.

By way of contrast, in the film Fitzcarraldo, the boat itself is carried overland, but when finally launched reasserts its own authority over the story, and the characters in it! There have been other overland boats. The story of Hugh Glass, the American Mountain man is one, and so is Peter Shankland’s excellent account of the WW1 ‘naval’ campaign on Lake Tanganyika, not quite a parallel to The African Queen.

Bogart and Hepburn’s story though is primarily a river story. The boat carries them, though they pull it from time to time, and the river sets the course of the journey. River journeys fall into two types. Those who go downstream are carried by the current. Those who go up battle against it. In Deliverance the primitive violence of the river is paralleled by that of the local hillbillies. The ‘city-boys’ are carried from one danger to the next, all the way down to their final denouement. In Lord of the Rings, the Fellowship takes to the Great River and is carried south to its fateful meeting with the Orcs above the Falls of Rauros.

The search for Kurtz though, is upstream, and through unknown territory. In penetrating into the hinterland, in both book and film, the narrator is taken deeper into mystery and danger. Coppola neatly parallels some of the passages in the book, and passages is an apposite word here, for it is not only specific locations and incidents upon the river that test the characters in both stories, but sections of the river. Passages within the greater journey have their own identities.

Perhaps the most specific parallel is the attack out of the mist (p64 in the Penguin Classics edition), where the natives shoot ‘sticks’, and where a black man in both cases, dies with a spear through his chest. In the film this signals a distinct move away from the realistic ‘horrors’ of the Vietnam War, towards the nightmarish ones of Kurtz’s world.

There are other more general echoes though: the film’s photographer at Kurtz’s village parallels the Russian manager at the book’s trading station, and it is the same figure in both who tells us first of Kurtz’s writings, and of his voice. In film and book it is he who tells us ‘you don’t talk with that man, you listen to him’. Even the French outpost of the Redux film (absent from the earlier general release) reminds me of one of the abandoned stations Conrad’s boat calls in at.

The narrator/protagonist in both cases is isolated from his compatriots aboard their respective boats, and it is his isolation that gives perspective to his changing view of Kurtz, again, in both cases.  The final location for film and book is similar too, with its hanging bodies and naked warriors, more so in the Redux edition. It is in the earlier version film alone that Kurtz’s village is obliterated at the end. Both though, like the book, use his repeated mantra: ‘The horror. The horror’

A difference between film and novel is in where the story is being told from, in where a story can be told from. The novel begins on a boat in the Thames, and after a seemingly conventional first person introduction, resolves into a story being told, also in the first person, by one of the characters introduced to us by the original narrator. This is not an unheard of technique. H.G. Wells does something similar, for example in The Invisible Man, allowing his eponymous hero to give his own account of events, at length, to another character just before the climax of the otherwise third person narrative. In Conrad’s story, the second narrator dominates until the end, with only brief interjections by the original narrator. Coppola, through voice over in the voice of Willard, his equivalent to Conrad’s Marlowe, mimics this, but cannot talk away the viewpoint of the camera which is always a narrator beyond.

 

 

Rivers are a powerful metaphor. A contemporary road-oriented view emphasises their quality as a barrier. They must be crossed; forded, swum or bridged. That emphasises the country on the other side; the what that lies beyond. The decision making process is emphasised too; we ‘cross the Rubicon’, and are committed to our ventures, and adventures. We seize, hold or burn our bridges.

            At first glance the ‘road’ movie may seem a contemporary version, but to my way of thinking roads are less prescriptive than rivers, though they have their ports of call, at way stations and homesteads. They too bring us into, and take us out of situations, but their byways and turnings allow more choice, for both characters and stories.

            Besides, rivers were once the routes of humankind, not their obstacles, and that element of the metaphor is still understood, and retains its potency. From ‘Deliverance’ to ‘Fitzcarraldo’ the river carries us into our uncertain futures. Going down-river we are borne onward to our destinies, The African Queen to battle on the Lake, the Fellowship of the Ring to its breaking above the Falls of Rauros, Aguirre to his solitary denouement on the endlessly flowing waters.  Going up-river we battle against the current, and are taken deeper into the hinterland, eventually into mountains, where we must disembark and face Kurtz, in any of his guises. At either end, a river journey brings us to changes and final confrontations, to the mountains or the sea and their equally powerful associations. 

            But what sort of adaptation is this? Care has been taken to make the connection throughout the story, even to the point of stretching credulity, yet it is not a retelling of the same story. Coppola is making a film about war, not about ivory trading. He is making a film about America in Asia in the late twentieth century, not one about Europe in Africa during the nineteenth. Is it therefore a sort of homage to the earlier work, rather than a re-working of it? Was it Coppola’s intention to borrow the aura of that work, the way gardeners sometimes borrow a view that lies outside their own garden, but which may be seen from within it? Or did Conrad’s Heart of Darkness merely provide a useful template for Apocalypse Now’s similar journey of discovery, and self-discovery?

            It is Kurtz, as much as the river that binds the two tellings together, or should that be three, because, as I mentioned before, the Redux version differs from the earlier release as much in its handling of Kurtz than in any other aspect. The raw footage that has been added, in terms of minutes duration may not centre on Kurtz, but the scenes that include him significantly change our perception of him. In particular we see more of him, and we see him more clearly. We see Willard listening to him. In Conrad’s novel Kurtz dies, and his story is taken back to a fiancé, who makes of her memory of him almost a religious experience. Coppola’s Kurz is given a family, and lays on Willard the task of taking back, and communicating a testimony to Kurtz’s son. He carries too Kurtz’z typescript testimony.

            The endings of book and film diverge here, but how could they not? Conrad’s Kurtz has a personal meaning for his narrator, and that fiancé, but Coppola’s must carry a public statement about the Vietnam war. Conrad was not, I think, making a political point about imperialism in the way Coppola was about America. The endings of the two films diverge too, for in Redux we end with the boat leaving to make the return journey, while the rains pour noisily down to a soundtrack of ‘local’ music. In the earlier film, as the boat leaves, a silent bombardment obliterates Kurtz’s village. These are two quite different statements to make at the end of the ‘same’ story, two different responses to it. In all three cases though, that repeated ‘the horror’ is present.

            Both book and film strive to show us that ‘horror’, and to take us on a journey towards it. In both cases we are shown a Kurtz who has made that journey, and a Willard/Marlowe who has tried to understand him. Is whether or not we, as viewers and readers, can accompany either of them dependent on what we bring to the stories, as much as what we have been told, and shown?

Seasonal Greetings!! from BHDandMe

I’ve been watching the Muppets Christmas Carol, which I do around this time of year. It’s one of Mr Caine’s best movies, IMO! I like Gonzo as Dickens, and Rizzo makes an ‘ideal reader’ as Mr King might say.

Interesting how, like a very good stage version I’ve seen a couple of times at Theatre By The Lake in Keswick, those two orphans, Want and Ignorance, are left out…. which turns the story more towards the personal redemption of Scrooge, and away fro the wider socio-political focus of Dickens’ story. Maybe I should do an adaptation piece on that!

I’m reading Peter Ackroyd’s biography of Dickens (didn’t his brother have a spot of bother with Agatha Christie? – no, not Dickens’ brother!), and wondering what there is left for Claire Tomlin to say!

My other favourite Christmas story is The Tailor of Gloucester, whose little house in Cathedral Close I made a pilgrimage to earlier this year! There’s a good film version of that too…. but I can’t remember who by, (OK, by whom, then)because I only have it on video and nothing to play those on anymore!

May your Yule logs crackle and spit. A very Merry Christmas to you all… Maybe in 2012 I’ll get a keyboard with a proper M on it!

BHDandMe