Big Fish: A Novel of Mythic Proportions (1998)

I was lightly accused of taking too little time, when I previously did one of these reviews. In March, I spent about 20 minutes or so talking about The Lord of the Rings. Suzanne Barnhill came up afterwards and said, Well, that was short and sweet. So you can imagine, if I only spent 20 minutes on a thousand-page novel, I am nearly done talking about Big Fish already, and I haven't even started yet...

Yes, this book is itself also short and sweet. You can sit down and read it in just a slightly longer period of time than it will take you to watch Tim Burton's adaptation of it. So, because of the brevity and precision with which Daniel Wallace tells his tale, it's tricky to discuss Big Fish at much length. In a way, talking to you about this book is like telling you about a great joke, without actually telling you the joke itself. If I say too much, I'll ruin the punchline. So, simply enough--

Big Fish is the story of a man's life, Edward Bloom, told in retrospect by his son, William. It is a story told with a kind of resigned sigh. William never really knew his father, or at least not in the way he would have preferred to know his father. (And that can probably be said of most men, of their relationships with their fathers.) And so the story of his father's life is told in brief episodes, some no more than a page long. But this is not your run-of-the-mill biography. Edward Bloom's life is a collection of mythical convergences and bad jokes and familiar-feeling tall tales, all several strides beyond the territory walked by Walter Mitty and Brer Rabbit.

For starters, Edward is born on a miraculous day: the occasion of his birth apparently brings about the end of a withering drought, a drought so bad and so prolonged that people are putting their pets in stews and wringing out sweaty bandannas for drinking water and going mad and eating rocks. Edward is born, and it finally rains. Soon enough, he grows up and begins talking to animals and catching giant legendary catfish and running so fast he arrives in a place before setting out to get there, and befriending mermaids and saving his hometown of Ashland, Alabama, from a marauding giant named Karl.

This stuff has the same cadence as the stuff told to us by our fathers and grandfathers, stories angled to make us feel guilty for having it so good, essentially. You know the ones. Sonny boy, I had to walk twenty-five miles to school, uphill both ways, shoeless, through snowdrifts forty-feet deep, all the while fending off hungry wolves with just a pencil nub. Et ectera, and so on.

These stories are broken up by a series of longer chapters, each titled My Father's Death. These chapters describe a similar and archetypal deathbed scene, with William trying to eek from his father a final piece of real wisdom, a last glimpse into his father's personality, something that might guide him meaningfully and true through the rest of his own life. And each of these scenes differs slightly from the one preceding, with a progression towards urgency, on the part of William, who becomes increasingly (or at least more visibly) dissatisfied with the wild stories that surround Edward, none of which reveal his true personality, or at least no personality that William can perceive.

There's a bit more acceptance of the father, Edward, by the son, William, in the book than there is in the movie. At least, that's the way I read it. In the book, William has, even with misgivings, essentially embraced his father's self-mythologizing. It is William, from the first page, who is telling (or, more correctly, retelling) the wild stories of his father's life. The book, however, is more ambiguous than the movie (a concession the film necessarily makes in order to introduce narrative tension). In the book it is less clear whether Edward Bloom has told these stories about himself to his son, or if William the son has had to resort to making up these stories, in order to create for himself a proper, or at least acceptable, father-figure.

So maybe I should say there's a bit more acceptance of the practice of storytelling and mythmaking, than there is of his father, per se. The book is, after all, a kind of meditation and examination of how we weave our lives out of the stories we tell ourselves, and the stories we tell others, and how we come to believe those stories, and freight them with meaning to the point that they become the memories that haunt our heads. You can get all creepy and philosophical about it, but it still comes down to the old chestnut Life Is What You Make Of It, and that includes the white lies and off-truths that get you through the day. And (although it hasn't been laboratory proven -- yet) here in the South, we have a special, if not exclusive, lock on the business of weaving tall tales into our everyday lives.

On one of our last car trips, near the end of my father's life as a man, we stopped by a river, and we took a walk to its banks, where we sat in the shade of an old oak tree....
My father became a myth.

I have always felt a special connection to this book. It was first published in the fall of 1998, when I was working in the backroom of a local bookstore. We got an early review copy, and I was attracted by the cover design, and by the brief description on the back, so I opened the book and I read that opening section, what I just read to you.

And I stopped. And I slapped the book closed and put it down, and I thought, Later.

Because, you see, my own father had died just a couple of months before. And something about Daniel's tone, and that scene, rung too loud and close a bell with me, even though that's not the way it happened for me. Absolutely no resemblance to me, or to my father, or anything we ever did together, or anything I even wished we'd done together. But that's just it. A good story reaches beyond your own experience, or the facts of your own experience, and touches a true, emotional core.

So then, as often happens with books you mean to read (and I know every reader has a stack and a wish-list of Books To Be Read One Of These Days), some time went by. Some years, actually. And then, by good luck, I happened to meet Daniel Wallace, on a brilliant spring day in 2001, in Monroeville, Alabama, at that literary confab they have there every year. And damned if he wasn't just a great and funny and affable guy, and it made me feel pretty guilty that I hadn't read his book yet. Especially after he took that Polaroid of my knee, but that's another story. (He was actually trying to take a picture of an interesting balustrade carving, and my leg got in the way). He was giddy with the news that his first book (he had two then out) had just been sold to the movies -- Steven Spielberg was attached to direct at that time, with Jack Nicholson signed to play the old man. (Personally, I'm glad it didn't turn out that way. Jack, being Jack, would have just been Jack all over the movie. So to speak.)

I hope you yourself will someday have the good luck to meet Daniel Wallace, but if you don't, I'll here insert here a few, brief words. Daniel is Birmingham born, Atlanta educated (Emory University), and currently lives in Chapel Hill NC. In addition to Big Fish, he's written Ray in Reverse (2000) and The Watermelon King (2003). Universal is juggling a screenplay of his, Timeless. His wit also takes shape in illustrations that can be seen not only on his website, but (to quote from that same website) "on refrigerator magnets, pins, T-shirts, and greeting cards, distributed through K. Floyd Designs." And he'll take a picture of your knee, if you happen to be a clod and you step in front of his camera.

So anyway, I went home and read the book immediately. Reading this book is like drinking an ice-cold bottle of Coke on an August afternoon -- it's quick and smooth and it's just what you need and it's gone before you know it. I actually tried to make myself stop reading, or at least slow down, but I couldn't. And during the read, I was kicking myself for not having read the book sooner. I was understandably feeling tender, of course, after the death of my own father, but this book was turning out to not necessarily be about dying, but about kooky tales and myths...

Wallace has written a story that is wryly sentimental, never maudlin -- a neat trick. Few modern writers attempt this kind of brevity teamed with such specificity, and succeed; many, in being brief, imitate Raymond Carver, and end up being unnecessarily obtuse, cloaking their message. But Wallace instead follows a precise pattern, more along the lines of Ray Bradbury -- his descriptions are clean and quick and they cut to the bone, and his timing is perfect. The characters are sparsely drawn, yet instantly recognizable, and the stories are punchy and funny and it all just rolls right along...

And then you get to the end.

I'm going to say right now, I'm glad Big Fish: the Movie, for all it necessarily changes about Big Fish: the Book, retains the very same ending. It is absolutely intact. If I were to outright ruin the punchline, and tell you how this story ends, you would get up and walk out now, thinking That's the silliest thing I ever heard. But you wait. Just you wait. It's incredibly apt, and fitting, and more than anything else, moving.

If you had read this book prior to seeing this film, you would think: "What a great book -- they would never be able to make a movie out of this." And you'd be right. They didn't make a movie out of this book. (If you don't believe me, read it and find out for yourself.) Daniel himself admitted so much last fall, when speaking to the Orange Beach library: "I have no qualms about telling people what a great movie this is," he said. "And there's no ego involved in my saying it, because it's really not a movie of my book!"

As I've said before, I'm a great believer in changing books when you re-imagine them for films. Translate is actually a better word to use. The written word is one form of language; the visual image is another form of language. The only way to get an idea purely from one form to another is a translation, and we all know that translations inherently change the properties of the original. So, best to go into the process of translation knowing and anticipating those changes, and using that change to your advantage. Otherwise you might end up with something like that old, famous rendering of the slogan Come Alive With Pepsi, which came out in Chinese as Pepsi Brings Your Ancestors Back from the Dead.

Tim Burton has been known to take a film-wise liberty or two -- he's the guy responsible for the neurotic rendering of Batman in the late 1980s, and for exploding Washington Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" into a Grand Guignol gothic extravaganza. And here what he and screenwriter John August (who also scripted Go and the remake of Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory) do is extrapolate from the novel, and rearrange events into a more structured, conventional narrative. It's as if they took a highlighter to a copy of the book and said "Here's an element we can use, and here, and here..." (In fact, they even used Daniel himself: look for his cameo as an Auburn economics professor, having a little trouble with his overhead projector.)

Wallace has an admitted interest in Greek myth, and Big Fish is peppered with classic, if distorted, references. In fact, you can make a sort of parlor game out of finding them. Just as the movie rearranges his book, so Daniel, in his book, rearranges all the old familiar Greek stories, weaving a kind of mythological crazy-quilt. These are not straight-ahead re-tellings of Hercules or the daughters of Poseidon, but they are warped and rearranged to suit his purposes. Which is the point, really.

In Part One of the book, as Edward Bloom is born, grows, and becomes a man, he makes a journey through an Underworld on his way to the larger world, to make his fortune, meeting a form of lotus-eaters and having to not only shrug them off, but to outwit a Cerberus-like dog, which bites the fingers off of folks who try to leave. Later, after he marries, Edward has to perform several Herculean tasks (three rather than twelve), sweeping out eternally filthy dog kennels, selling a girdle to an impossibly fat woman (Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons, makes a cameo), and finally defeating yet another version of Cerberus the hellhound, this time saving the life of a little girl in the process. (Cerberus in the film becomes a werewolf, with Danny DeVito filling in for Lon Chaney -- this scene being Wallace's admitted favorite overall.)

But as the story progresses and Edward Bloom grows older and farther into his life as a traveling salesman (what other profession would a chronic joke-teller have?), eventually becoming a father, the myths lose their luster as supernatural tales, and become more like legends or folktales. His life is still outrageous, but just slightly more ordinary. And by the time William is cognizant, Edward is resorting to simple pranks -- like falling off the roof and pretending to be dead -- and telling elaborate jokes. Yet he still manages to have one of the strangest and most entertaining mid-life crises this side of Don Quixote. Even so, it is as if some of his power has dwindled. By turning into a father, Edward begins to recognize the inevitable pattern and scope of his own life, and the stories reflect that. He's somehow smaller, and yet remains no less mysterious, especially to William who is left, a bit literally at the end, holding the bag.

Recently I was having a conversation with my mother, about the time that has passed since my father died, back in 1998. And we talked about the grief you go through, and how you learn to live around the absence, when a family member dies. And my mother said, just sort of out of the blue, "Part of a person's spirit still lives, so long as someone remembers them."

I think almost everyone believes this, no matter what sort of faith you have, or if you believe in an afterlife or not. In the first of the chapters bearing the title My Father's Death, Edward asks William, who is trying to get somewhere beyond all the crazy tales that he's heard all his life, "Remembering a man's stories makes him immortal, did you know that?"

All story tellers of any ilk do is take an existing story kernel and try to grow a tree out of it. As Daniel Wallace himself puts it: History becomes what never happened. People mess things up, forget and remember all the wrong things. What's left is fiction. It doesn't matter. The story keeps changing, and it doesn't matter since none of them are true to begin with.

And that's all anyone wants, really -- no matter what pageantry we make of our lives, it all serves the goal to be remembered after we are gone. And since, by and large, most of us might admit to leading humdrum, patterned (if not downright dull, at times) lives, why not be remembered for something grand, or for being someone grand. Even if you never were. Quoting again from the book: We all have stories, just as you do. Lots of stories, big and small. They add up. Over a lifetime it all adds up.

Originally presented at the Fairhope Public Library "Consanguinity" Books-to-Movies Lecture Series, July 29 2004

Ode to the Headless Horseman

I did request to be last in this Consanguinity Lecture Series because I knew that a horror movie at 10am would run everybody off... The idea for this programming came, oddly enough, from an essay of mine that John Sledge published on the Mobile Register's Sunday Bookpage a couple months ago, and, to follow the analepse even further, the idea for that essay was born of a conversation I had about the movie O Brother, Where Art Thou? which is supposedly based on the Odyssey. "Loosely based" is I think the operative phrase.

So that begs a question -- Loosely Based -- what should that mean in terms of converting stories in books to stories in movies, and why should it be a good thing? The idea I tried to put across in the article is that Books and Movies are two different types of storytelling, using different languages. Words in books seep into consciousness and memory, they play upon what we've experienced and felt. Movies do the same thing, but the language of icons and images, as opposed to words, is more immediate. With movies, we're given the experience. Now, I'm not saying one form of storytelling is better or more legitimate than the other. (I can be a Snobbish Reader -- I've worked among books for the past twelve years, in bookshops and in libraries. But I love movies too.) After 100+ years, movies have certainly established themselves as an artful form of storytelling. What I'm saying is that it seems to me, because I so often hear the phrase The Book Was Better, that these two essentially different forms of storytelling are being unfairly, if commonly, compared.

So there are two regions of responsibility for avoiding this. One is on the head of the Reader, and one is on the head of the Filmmaker. As Readers, we have to let go of our preconceived notions about the way our favorite stories are told on the page. By proxy, when we read stories, they become ours -- we fill in the holes left by the writer with our own images, the characters look like ourselves or our friends (or -- gasp! -- our favorite actors), the locations are our favorite places, real or imagined. The way the characters are revealed to us, through their own memories and reflections and interior monologues -- all the things that make us feel that we personally know these characters -- these things are impossible with film (unless the filmmaker resorts to a cheesy voice-over narrative, which makes everything sound like it was written by Mickey Spillane).

For their part, the Filmmakers must recognize this and move on with what's best for the Story (with a capital S), no matter what their source material, be it a book or a play or a picture, or even some form of stationary art -- anything that carries a narrative idea. I think it was Marshall McCluhan who said of TV and movies that in their pure form, you should be able to take away dialogue and sound, plug up your ears and still be able to interpret the action and follow the story, which ought to be told in an entirely visual way. But of course, we rely on dialogue and language even in movies, since that's our primary form of communication in daily life, so maybe that's where some of the confusion is so easily brought to bear. At any rate, I think Filmmakers should bear that in mind, and strive to create something new, and not have us expect exactly the same of their films, because in doing so they are doomed to fail. And we are doomed to be disappointed, if we don't allow them to create something new, and to accept the film on it's own terms.

Actually, some of the criticism that I heard and read about Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, which came out last fall, speaks to this argument. Chris Columbus tried too hard to simply mimeograph scenes from the book onto celluloid, and it came out stilted and lifeless. If he'd played with the material more, perhaps he could have avoided that. It's difficult to say. Certainly the Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, which was fairly faithful to the events of the book, in my opinion maintained a lot of drama and passion. I've read those books I-don't-know-how-many times, and yet I was on the edge of my seat. And although it's not a book or a movie for everybody, Terry Gilliam's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, based on Hunter S. Thompson's well-known book about drug use in the 1970s, managed to capture the manic, chaotic energy even while sticking close to the book. So maybe there is a level of moviemaking skill that transcends this argument, as well.

Okay, that was the gist of my original idea, and my essay for John. Though truth be told, my very original idea for such an essay goes back even farther than the O Brother Where Art Thou? conversation, to the time when this movie, Sleepy Hollow, came out.

I have loved Washington Irving's story for a long time, since I was a kid and so young that I can't tell you exactly when or how I first encountered it. I know I saw the cartoon version on Wonderful World of Disney, one evening near Halloween, but it seems that even then I was already familiar with the "Legend" in some way or other, that the parts making up the story -- the goofy underdog hero, the terrifying Night Journey, and of course the dreaded Headless Horseman -- were already a part of my understanding of the world. They are archetypes, of a sort. (Indeed, the Night Journey has become such an integral part of American Literature, from Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown meeting the Devil in the woods at night, to Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, up to Oedipa Maas' venture into midnight 1960s San Francisco in Pynchon's postmodern fable The Crying of Lot 49 -- this symbolic rendition of a Dark Night of the Soul is surely so much more than a foppish schoolteacher spurring a donkey through a darkened dell, trying to outrun a hellish, headless revenant. Surely it's more than that... There's some reason we're all secretly afraid of the dark, right? There's some truth to this Legend, right?...)

Irving is considered our first successful American writer -- that is, he was the first to make a living at it. (Others wrote before him, obviously, like novelist Charles Brockden Brown.) The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is the last story, or chapter, in a book called The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, published semi-anonymously by Irving in 1819 and 1820. In the main it is a kind of diary or journeybook kept by an anonymous traveler, leaving America and revisiting the Old Country. But embedded within these earnest and true-to-life sketches and impressions are three short stories, planted like red herrings. The other two are The Specter Bridegroom and Rip Van Winkle, and all the stories are told as if they are true, just as true as the other things described throughout the book, such as the English customs of Christmas Eve. Not that I've done any real digging in the interest of research, but I wonder what some of the man-on-the-street reaction was to these tales, at the time of publication. It amuses me to think, and it's not an entirely ridiculous notion, that some folks might have been rightfully confused by this context -- much as were many people several years ago, when the movie The Blair Witch Project appeared. That movie supposes itself a documentary about some vague, spooky manifestations in the New England woods, and all the commercial hype surrounding it played the story as "true." There were "making of" specials on TV to promote the movie, and these too were done as serious documentaries. Many were fooled, including a couple of my own friends, by this angle. In this day and age, this ostensible Information Age, if it's that easy to hoax someone with a movie, surely in 1820, a lot of people took the Headless Horseman as fact... as did I, at the tender age of eight.

At that age, I was even taken in by that key word in the title: the Legend. Sleepy Hollow sounds like a real enough place to me. And a Legend, isn't that like an old story, a true story, passed down through time? At that age I was also scared easily, and I watched what I could of this affable, harmless-enough cartoon through fingers I held up in front of my face. So my comprehension of the story, filtered through fear and the resulting inability to watch, was a little iffy. (I saw it not long ago, and you can't imagine a more docile horror story -- I mean, it's narrated by Bing Crosby, after all.) So for a long time I "understood" the story of the Horseman to be describing some event, distorted perhaps but still an event which really happened...

Imagine my disappointment, then, when I finally read the story in 8th grade, still too young to appreciate all the intricacies, all the details, the careful structure, and most especially Irving's distinctly ironic, American humor that makes it, still, one of the best short stories ever written. I was only irritated to discover: Dammit! There's no actual Headless Horseman! It's just Brom Bones acting like a jackass to run Ichabod Crane out of the country, so that he can have the full attention of Katrina Van Tassel. And let's face it: none of these characters are really very likable. Brom is a sulking bully, Ichabod is a blustering coward who is most interested in marrying into the family that will feed him best, and Katrina is feckless, attaching herself to whichever man is still around at the end of the day. They need a headless horseman to come along and keep them in line.

So I was pretty happy when Tim Burton came along with his version of events, Sleepy Hollow. I don't know much about Burton personally, but I like his movies, which are typically dark, atmospheric, and contain huge doses of comic irony. His first big movie was a surreal look into the afterlife called Beetlejuice, then he directed the first two Batman movies, ten years ago; Mars Attacks makes fun of the 1950s alien invasion movies; Edward Scissorhands, also with Johnny Depp, is one of the strangest romantic comedies you'll ever see; and Ed Wood is about the man who made some of the worst low-budget movies in Hollywood history (Martin Landau won an Oscar for playing Bela Lugosi in that movie).

Sleepy Hollow takes the characters and premise of Irving's story, tosses everything into a kind of blender, along with other tropes cribbed from the Gothic Novel, popular in the early 1800s. And for my money, for as much as I've learned to appreciate Washington Irving, this version is a little closer to what the kid in me expected, those decades ago. Here you will find an actual ghastly Headless Horseman galloping across the countryside, chopping off heads of the citizenry. So it becomes a murder mystery, and a bit of a campy one, with a supernatural twist. (And it doesn't spoil any of the major plot when I tell you here that, at last, Brom Bones gets what he deserves.)

In approaching this movie, I don't doubt that Burton recognized the need to shuck the original story and concoct something new using only the essential elements. And he's done it so wildly, viewers have no choice but to accept or reject this movie on its own terms. It's a moot point to say that Irving's story is better than Burton's movie. But consider this: I think Washington Irving would have appreciated what Tim Burton did. Irving, for his day, was a pretty experimental writer, and he loved toying with the conventions of storytelling. Looking back on his canon of short stories -- and following these successful experiments showcased in the Sketch Book, Irving for a while dabbled very seriously in fiction before turning back to nonfiction, such as his biography of his namesake, George Washington -- Irving has left us many templates for the form, and it can be said that, along with writers like Guy de Maupassant, he helped to popularize short-form fiction. I think of a story called The Stout Gentleman, a first person narrative told from the POV of a man staying in a wayside inn, who knows this unnamed Stout Gentleman only by reputation and a few things he's overheard. And the whole story is this narrator, himself unnamed, imagining what this Stout Gentleman might look like, and what his business might be, and what his private life might be like... and all the while the reader is being led to the conclusion that the Stout Gentleman will eventually be revealed. Well, not to ruin it, he isn't, and the story becomes a clever joke on the reader. It's to Irving's credit and charm that the reader isn't simply aggravated by the twist ending to this tale, just as the reader doesn't moan in disgust at the end of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, with all its fops and nitwits. You've been entertained. And at the hands of a master storyteller.

And because many of his short stories were retellings of older folktales from the oral tradition (the same strategy as Chaucer, by the way), I think Irving had a great sense of how yarns spin themselves anew, every so often. And here in Tim Burton's movie, we have a full-tilt homage to Gothic Horror, such as it was in Irving's day, in the novel form rather than the short story. The most famous of these novels are The Castle of Otranto by Walpole, and The Mysteries of Udolpho by Radcliffe, and The Monk by Matthew Lewis, which is a great, late 18th century stew of sexual decadence and political prurience and deals with the Devil, all of which ends horribly; you'd never think those folks back then could be so bad. So in this movie, the ghosts are real, and the characters believe in them to a point nearly of the grotesque, and there's some phantasmagorical... gore thrown in just to make it boil over the top.

A careful viewer will notice lots of elements from Irving's story, including several things that are only mentioned by Irving, but which Burton expounds upon, like local legends about "the great tree where the unfortunate Major Andre was taken," as there's a significant tree in the movie; and "the woman in white, that haunted the dark glen at Raven Rock" also makes an appearance. There are more obvious similarities: Ichabod Crane is still a blustery wuss, though his station in life has changed from schoolmaster to early American detective. The iconic midnight ride is acknowledged, complete with flaming jack-o-lantern, as is the covered bridge, and the churchyard which marks the border of the Horseman's power, though all in a very different light than in Irving's version.

The film is also atmospherically and texturally beautiful, and does a fair job of depicting the dark, dreamy, slightly ominous atmosphere that Irving sets up in his early paragraphs. Burton's ultimate message regards the fact that our technological advances have never really outstripped our capacity for superstition. But mainly he does a brilliant job of evoking Washington Irving's story, without actually copying it. And in that sense, it's entirely successful.

Originally presented at the Fairhope Public Library "Consanguinity" Books-to-Movies Lecture Series, July 29 2002

Pentimento: Paper Projections

Before I saw the movie myself, I took in several reviews of Billy Bob Thornton's take on Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses, most of which echoed a lazy sentiment: The Book Was Better. I've been a reader since before kindergarten, worked among books for more than a decade now, and this phrase increasingly annoys, belying as it does a blanket disregard for storytelling in a medium other than that of the printed page. If the filmmaker made a bad movie, okay. But saying "the book was better" is a reaction particular to one's appreciation of a book, not a review of a film. In that regard, what I would really want to know is whether or not the film does justice to that source material -- the Story Itself -- and not the novel by which one came to first know that Story.

I believe there exists, like a diamond floating somewhere on the ethereal plane, an Essential Idea for a story, of which a book, channeled through one particular writer, is only a single facet. It should be that Essential Idea which is followed -- a smart filmmaker should reach beyond a novel and into that idea -- fully aware he's using a different medium (nobody would expect a painting or a radio show or a stage version to be the same as a book -- why do we expect it of film?).

Writers like John Barth or Kurt Vonnegut, whose works present particular difficulties for the Silver Screen, might be the first to argue that a story is, first and foremost, in the telling. It was an argument good enough for Twain, after all. But moviemaking is a specific and very different way of telling a story than is writing. The currency of language is images, not words. Think for a moment about great movies which were conceived as movies -- and how poorly they might fare as novels. Citizen Kane. O Brother, Where Art Thou?. Even Night of the Living Dead draws a great deal of its effect from what is seen (and also by what is not seen) and heard; a textual version would lose a fair amount of impact -- unless of course major changes are implemented.

A few movies do manage to change or even transcend their source material. Jaws. Love Story. Forrest Gump. Think what you like about their content -- the makers of these movies openly accepted the books as mere source material, and by not attempting mere visual translations of what was already on the page, but warping the situations to befit the celluloid medium, perhaps they produced something that improved upon the textual basis, and perhaps revealed more of the Source. Why should we think a book is automatically the best way to tell a story, simply because it appeared to us first?

There's terminology in the painting arts to describe evidence of change to the original composition: pentimento. Often the opaque pigment with which the artist covered a mistake or an unwanted beginning will, with time or injudicious cleaning, become transparent, and a revelation of original intentions will become visible through the finished composition. A celebrated example is Caravaggio's Lute Player (in the Metropolitan Museum of Art) in which X-ray photography was used to uncover evidence of the painter's original intention. 

Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow, for example, uses Washington Irving's famous tale as a transit point for a loving exposition and homage to Gothic storytelling traditions. Irving's legendary headless specter was an excuse for a bit of fun between rival suitors, a 19th century version of The Blair Witch Project; in Burton's version, the Horseman is a visceral revenant, summoned forth by a witch for purposes of greed and revenge. In execution, the stories are nearly mirror-opposites, but both respect a central idea -- the way we weave tales in our lives ultimately gives shape to those lives.

On the other hand, the filmmakers of The Name of the Rose didn't pretend they could bring to the screen all of Umberto Eco's philosophical and religious musings, the intricate symbolic structure, the deep political machinations of the Inquisition. At best, within a 2-hour celluloid environ, these things could only be mentioned or evoked, rather than expounded and invoked. Indeed, the opening credits name their attempt a "palimpsest" of Eco's novel -- terminology for a partially erased and written-over manuscript. But boiling the 500-page novel down to its murder-mystery core was a moot exercise -- all the meaning of the book lay in the clues, not the solution -- and the filmmakers offered nothing new or different as an offset.

Billy Bob Thornton faced the same sort of puzzles by taking on Cormac McCarthy. Celluloid cannot possibly convey the moment young John Grady Cole looks out across the plain and envisions the exodus of the Indians: "…nation and ghost of nation passing in a soft chorale across that mineral waste to darkness bearing lost to all history and all remembrance like a grail the sum of their secular and transitory and violent lives." It is, in total, a passage less than a thousand words -- but an equal number of pictures (about 41 seconds, at 24 frames per second) could never match their worth.

A moment later Cole picks up, Hamlet-style, a horse skull he finds in the sand, and turns it, and listens to the sand shifting inside it. And while that alone is certainly a filmable event, the narration that precedes and follows it, which lifts the scene aloft in meaning and character, evokes things which cannot be seen, or filmed. Film, therefore, must necessarily try something else.

Thornton, for his part, tried to reach beyond McCarty's prose; he spent a lot of time capturing the sweep of the Mexican vistas, but ultimately finally fell victim to the same trap as did, say, Demi Moore's version of The Scarlet Letter (for which, I am sure, Nathaniel Hawthorne is still a-spin). In these books, much of the action takes place by way of character monologues, or observances and impressions -- Thornton follows McCarthy's book too closely with his camera, and when the characters finally open their mouths to explain themselves, the results are staged, stilted speeches. The only way around this would have been to change the story itself to fit the visual medium (well, I'll give Moore's Letter an A for effort in that regard -- I sure don't remember any sponge-baths in Hawthorne's novel).

These are also matters of perception and expectation, in our visual age. We have to acknowledge that movies can't be books, nor should they want to be. Still, a rare success, when truly successful, fuels that expectation -- and so we sit through a thousand more bad film adaptations, hoping to be treated again. The film that comes to mind is To Kill a Mockingbird, which I recently (and correctly, in my opinion) heard described as a "perfect distillation" of the novel, to the point that "we think we're remembering the book, when we're really remembering the movie."

I can think of only one other book that could be paid such a compliment -- Dracula. The nuances of Stoker's elongated Victorian melodrama are now all but forgotten as we recall simply the icongraphic mugging and hypnotic gaze of Bela Lugosi, who drills down to the very sinister heart of the character and takes viewers through the story in just 70 minutes. Lugosi was chosen for the film (after Lon Chaney turned down the role) thanks to the strength of his performance in the stage production. Which brings us back, finally, to what someone else once said, about being true to the Muse, about the Play being the Thing…

Originally published in the Mobile Register as "Double Images: On Paper, On Screen," March 24 2002

See Also:
Ode to the Headless Horseman
The Scales of Myth