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THERE’S
an old joke of sorts—attributed to, or maybe it was
Hemingway—about how writers should respond when studios
start sniffing around their work. “Drive to,” the punch
line goes, “throw your book over the state line, and
wait for them to throw the money back.”
Here we
have a cautionary tale, about the corrupting influence
of Hollywood, the way the industry will take first your
art and then your soul. Yet, it also offers a more
philosophical message, having to do with the ambiguous
place writers hold in the movie business, the
century-long push and pull between words and film.
For the
last few months, the relationship of writers to
Hollywood has been a loaded subject, no matter what side
of the picket lines you were on. It’s telling, however,
that even during the height of the Writers Guild of
America (WGA) strike, book writers remained somehow
marginalized.
In a
January 28 post on the National Book Critics Circle blog
“Critical Mass,” former San Francisco Chronicle Style
editor Paul Wilner lamented that at the Screen Actors
Guild Awards, “almost no actual writers were
acknowledged for their contributions” to the winning
films. “I waited in vain to hear...Cormac McCarthy
mentioned in conjunction with the multiple honors for
‘No Country for Old Men’,” Wilner wrote, “or a nod
to...Alice Munro for the short story upon which ‘Away
From Her’ was based...Daniel Day-Lewis’s tribute to
Heath Ledger was moving, but somehow Upton Sinclair’s
role as the progenitor of ‘There Will Be Blood’ was not
noted. [The film was inspired by his 1927 novel ‘Oil’!]”
This is
an old story; Ken Kesey, Wilner notes, went
unacknowledged when ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’
won the Best Picture Oscar in 1976, and 19 years later,
Winston Groom was similarly slighted after ‘Forrest
Gump’ took the top prize.
Such a
disconnect is particularly ironic this year because so
many films, nominated and otherwise, have roots in
literary work. Not only is there ‘No Country for Old
Men’ and ‘Away From Her’ but ‘The Namesake’ and
‘Atonement’; not only ‘There Will Be Blood’ but ‘Persepolis’.
Literature figures even in ‘The Savages’ and ‘Margot at
the Wedding’, which deal, in part, with the struggle to
come to terms with writing, its odd and at times
parasitic connection to the world.
What
does this signify? I have a friend who believes people
tend not to trust something that lacks an established
lineage, that there is a cachet—for producer and
audience—in a film that comes from an iconic book.
Sure,
movies have been inspired by books since the beginning:
Georges Méliès’ 1902 film ‘A Trip to the Moon’ was based
on Jules Verne’s ‘From the Earth to the Moon’ and H.G.
Wells’s ‘The First Men in the Moon’. But how many times
has a great book been made into an awful movie? Or a
mediocre novel fueled a classic film? Think of ‘The
Godfather’ or ‘Being There’, both of which were
transfigured brilliantly by adaptation. Then consider
all the literary masterpieces (‘Under the Volcano’,
‘Last Exit to
Brooklyn’, ‘Naked Lunch’) that have died on-screen.
That’s
what makes the current crop of books-to-movies so
compelling, the idea that Hollywood may be developing a
more consistent approach to literature. For me, this is
a matter of sensibility, of complexity and nuance, the
way these works take on bigger issues, the uncertainties
and irresolution that mark our passage through the
world.
‘No
Country for Old Men’ has been criticized because one of
its main characters is killed in the middle of the
movie. But isn’t this like real life, where the only
thing we can count on is that we never know what’s
coming next?
Yes, the
movie has its flaws—a diffuse narrative, too many loose
ends, far too casual a relationship with violence—but
these are also the flaws of the novel, which is far from
McCarthy’s best. More important is how both book and
film reflect a moral ambiguity, a sense that the
universe is if not cruel then utterly indifferent, that
evil is real and if it finds us all, our faith and
fantasies will never be enough. Such stark truths have
long been the territory of the novel, but
Hollywood has traditionally turned away.
The same
is true of ‘There Will Be Blood’, which transforms
Sinclair’s socialist passion play (the novel’s final
lines deride capitalism as “an evil Power which roams
the earth, crippling the bodies of men and women, and
luring the nations to destruction by visions of unearned
wealth, and the opportunity to enslave and exploit
labor”) into something far more elemental, a vision of
one man’s desperate determination to break existence to
his will.
“I have
a competition in me,” explains the film’s protagonist,
oilman Daniel Plainview. “I want no one else to succeed.
I hate most people. There are times when I look at
people and I see nothing worth liking....This is serious
stuff, fundamental human material, raw and
irreconcilable. It gets to the heart of our experience,
our petty jealousies and ambitions, our insecurities and
our weaknesses, our bravado and our lies.
“We all
take from life,” notes the character Margot, herself a
fiction writer, in ‘Margot at the Wedding’, although one
of the film’s key tropes has to do with her inability to
determine whether it’s her life or the lives of those
around her that she’s taking from. As we watch her
interact with her family, we observe the border between
reality and illusion grow porous, until what she
believes and what she sees are indistinguishable in her
mind.
That’s a
highly subjective vision—fluid, personal, interior. It’s
also literary in the broadest sense, since these are the
dynamics that mark our relationship to books.
And yet,
if these kinds of movies have anything to tell us, it’s
that interiority can sometimes play itself out on
screen. Is this an indication that Hollywood has finally
become more sympathetic toward writers, that we might
move beyond a century of misunderstanding and disdain?
Not very likely, the settlement of the WGA strike
notwithstanding.
But what
it does suggest is equally unexpected: that good books
can indeed make thought-provoking movies, which means
there may be less difference than we imagined between a
successful novel and a successful film. |
