Or so I argue in a post that’s only obliquely relevant here, but which some small slice of you might could be interested in.
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11 comments
July 18, 2009 at 10:02 pm
Ahistoricality
Reading the title of your post here, it strikes me that we need a notation to indicate whether the reference is the book or the movie in cases where the title is identical.
In context — that the movie just came out — I suppose it’s not really necessary, but since our discussion over there is mostly about the disparate and combined effects of the print and film versions, it seems like it would help, in the long run.
July 19, 2009 at 12:05 am
SEK
Being mysterious is titillating, so I want everyone to think that we’re discussing whatever it is that they’d most like to discuss . . . that and, as you say, I’m relying on context to make my intent meaningful.
But seriously, I’m just trying to make the work of future intellectual historians a little more difficult. I mean, if I’d had access to Google Everything (as they will), my dissertation would’ve been done in a day. We need to make sure they have to work at least one forty-secondth as hard as we had to, so if I can throw a Wrench of Titular Confusion in their works and delay the instantaneity of their gratification, I’m doing all of us a service.
July 19, 2009 at 9:43 am
Charlieford
Re the original post: shorter
July 19, 2009 at 11:29 am
Ahistoricality
Charlieford: that stopped being funny a long time ago.
July 19, 2009 at 12:02 pm
MarciaMarcia
Just wanted to note that test audiences gave the original cut a lukewarm response. Yates subsequently extended, cut, and/or reshot entire sequences of the film. Not sure that makes any difference to your critical analysis. I had only one major quibble: the “climax” at the end of the movie. Yates altered and curtailed the denouement of the book. But I suppose that caveat strengthens your argument concerning adaptation.
July 19, 2009 at 12:57 pm
oldsalsahigh
I liked the movie, although it was a bit long.
July 19, 2009 at 2:29 pm
Charlieford
When I’m trying to be funny, it will be obvious.
July 19, 2009 at 3:05 pm
Walt
You try to be funny? On the internet? How vulgar. The internet has really destroyed any distinction between private and public. Get Ben Domenech on the line.
July 19, 2009 at 3:08 pm
Walt
You try to be funny? On the internet? How vulgar. The internet has really destroyed any distinction between private and public. Better get that Ben Domenech fellow on the line.
July 19, 2009 at 3:59 pm
Charlieford
Just a form of mental aerobics.
July 20, 2009 at 9:36 am
Sir Gnome
Isn’t posting about Sarah Palin inadvertently supporting her? Don’t think of a purple elephant, don’t think of a purple elephant… oops. Sarah Palin on a purple elephant just crushed my dreams of mental autonomy from this self-perpetuating Ionesco.
You make a good case for seeing the movie, but I probably won’t. I probably still won’t read the books either. And I probably don’t think comparing books to movies is ever very fruitful conversation, by way of precluding the elements that are original to each medium. There are very good books that became horrid films, and bad books that made for wonderful movies (I get moist each time I hear “larda**” a la Reiner’s Stand By Me). As well, there are very good books which also yielded very good movies (No Country for Old Men), but only in so far as those movies were artistically original representations. Point being, any form of inter-medium adaptation is purely representational, and thus, separate from its original work to a greater degree than whatever incidental similarities exist (see one “Bill Shakespeare”).
If you want to see a truly populist-revisionist movie displaying Palinesque cultural mythology, the inverse of the Harry Potter example, see Eastwood’s Gran Torino. That movie truly routed my stomach, none the better because of the praise it received by the same class of critics who’ve nixed Harry. Its only apparent project was to create a space in which to indulge in hidden suburban stereotypes by soliciting fifties nostalgia and dispensing with a nauseating cascade of banalized epithets. I don’t know how to fittingly describe the disequilibrium when the audience guffawed through the racism and sobbed over an ending that was, on the contrary, incredibly fragmentary and nihilistic in relation to its appeals to fictional, golden-years homogeneity.
But, oh look! A post-Vietnam hot rod! Vaa…room!