Scott Rudin the Hollywood producer known for bringing adaptations of contemporary literature to the silver screen – he was responsible for Wonder Boys and The Hours, for example – may be on his way out at Paramount. This means that several forthcoming literary adaptations could be in jeopardy, including big screen versions of three new books: Ian McEwan’s Saturday, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men. Farther along in their development are The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon and, of course, Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. Though adaptations can be a risky proposition, I do hope that some of these end up getting made if only to satisfy my curiosity. Here’s the story from the Hollywood Reporter.
Book to movie news
Artistic Refusal
One of the most morally and aesthetically interesting aspects of Werner Herzog's 2005 documentary film Grizzly Man, the enchanting and bizarre tale of Timothy Treadwell's life and death among the grizzlies, is Herzog's decision not to include the existing audio of Timothy Treadwell and Aime Huguenard's deaths. Treadwell and girlfriend Huguenard were eaten by a grizzly bear while living amongst the grizzlies in Alaska in the summer of 2003. Treadwell's video camera (at least its audio function) was on while the two were being attacked and this audio is now in the possession of one of Treadwell's friends. Herzog himself listens to the footage in Grizzly Man, and though viewers cannot hear it, they see Herzog listening to it, and hear him tell the audio's owner that the recording should be destroyed.A strict empiricist would disagree: If we are to understand an event or a life we must examine all of the evidence, however gruesome. But then, artists are not lawyers or scientists, and artistic justice is rather another thing than scientific or legal justice. Herzog's choice not to include the audio recording of these two surely horrific deaths is a question that many artists are confronted with. What aesthetic and ethical effects will the representation of a certain act, particularly something like dismemberment or rape, have on my audience? Will the representation of such acts necessarily invoke responses of arousal or morbid fascination in the viewer? While this might serve the purposes of certain artists intent on impressing upon us as visual consumers our complicity with the rapist, voyeur, or bear, it becomes deeply problematic when the artist does not want us to identify with the assailant.Those who have read J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace will know that the horror of a traumatic event that goes undescribed is not lessened, as will those who have read Samuel Richardson's Clarissa (1748). Sometimes referred to colloquially as "The Rape of Clarissa," Richardson's nearly 1600 page novel does not actually describe Clarissa's rape. It is through Clarissa herself that we get the novel's only approximation of a description of the event and her drug-addled memories are described only vaguely - shadows, a candle, the prostitutes (who, we later learn, held Clarissa down for her rapist). Richardson's choice to refuse description, like Coetzee's, is an ethical choice. It is a choice that absolutely refuses to offer us the possibility of aesthetic engagement with monstrous acts. If literary and other fiction is, as some hold, a means of playing make-believe, of trying on alternate identities, artists who refuse to represent horrific acts tell us something in these refusals. They do not want us to imagine these things, they do not want to provide the means by which we will be implicated in dehumanizing other people (even if these people are only literary characters). Even to write descriptions of such events would be, to whatever degree, to aestheticize them. And to make a rape into an object of aesthetic contemplation, aesthetic pleasure, is a sort of crime.Sofia Coppola's 2006 Marie Antoinette is the most recent example of this phenomenon that I have encountered. Coppola uses artistic refusal in her decision not to represent any social reality beyond Versailles until the very end of the movie, and then, only slightly. Occasionally, a court character mentions unrest among the people, bread shortages, increased taxes, but no physical evidence of it ever invades Louis XVI's court until the film's end, when a crowd of peasants surrounds the palace. In one of the movie's final scenes, Marie Antoinette (Kirsten Dunst) goes out onto a balcony of the palace and we hear below her (and even see the torches, pruning hooks, and scythes - though not the faces - of) the people below her on the ground. The scene astonishes because through it we realize that Marie and Louis had no idea what was happening beyond Versailles - had no idea these people truly existed, much less that they existed in exigency and anger. They have never seen them - they did not physically exist until this moment when it is too late. And we are made, like the monarchs, to have no idea of the anger and suffering of their people (no visual idea at least, though we all know their eventual fate). Is this refusal unethical? Does it mask the suffering of thousands to force upon us sympathy for two thoughtless, pampered fools or does Coppola's demand that we understand the king and queen's ignorance press for an even more scrupulous definition of justice?In "Weighing In," Seamus Heaney invokes "the power/Of power not exercised": Sometimes we say more and say it better by refusing to speak.
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The Little Strike That Could Do What, Exactly?
The ripples from the Hollywood writers' strike are felt well outside of the Hollywood pool. Broadway has gone darker than the plot of a Eugene O'Neill play as the stagehands show their solidarity. Production workers for NBC's "The Office" are out on their ear. Ellen DeGeneres caught in the middle (She and Oprah have both had tough Novembers). Others like Leno and Elaine from Seinfeld seen walking the picket lines with their pasty, underpaid worker bees (dust off the sensible shoes). The windows of houses across the nation glow blue with original "unscripted" Reality TV programming. One feckless young man with literary aspirations turns entrepreneur by selling shirts that read 'Striking Writer.' Somewhere, Aaron Sorkin weeps. Eugene Debs shudders in his grave. France smiles knowingly. Alex Rodriguez laughs.The rest presumably writes itself...
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Star Wars, Apatow, and the Death of Classic Comedy
Judd Apatow and friends, with their hyper-familiar brand of hairy-assed humor, have issued a crushing blow to the suspension of disbelief — and made the gap between old comedy and new unbridgeable.
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Ask a Book Question (#58): Books for Fans of Deadwood
Poornima writes in:My husband recently stumbled across an HBO series called Deadwood in the library. It's a television series set in the Black Hills (Sioux Country - Dakotas and Wyoming) around 1876 and features a whole assortment of historically famous/notorious characters including Wild Bill Hickock and Calamity Jane.I was wondering if you or your readers could direct us to some good historical fiction set in the period that captures the essence of Deadwood and the frontier spirit. It's quite a fascinating aspect of American history.Your interest in historical fiction in the same line as HBO's Deadwood brings Larry McMurtry to mind first. I'd be very surprised if David Milch, Deadwood's creator, hadn't read McMurtry. McMurtry's historical fiction about the American West - Lonesome Dove, Anything for Billy, The Streets of Laredo - is wonderful, and besides sharing Deadwood's historical milieu, it also shares its tone, that wonderful mix of emotional intensity, brutality, tenderness and humor.The book of McMurtry's that has the most explicit overlap with Deadwood is Buffalo Girls. This novel intertwines the stories of several different figures whose lives coincide with the winding down of the Wild West. Calamity Jane - so wonderfully portrayed by Robin Weigert in Deadwood - is one of these characters. McMurtry's stuff is historically responsible but it is also, as was Deadwood, clearly enchanted with the old West and interested in its mythic, larger-than-life personalities. Anything For Billy, which takes Billy the Kid as its protagonist, tells his life from the perspective of an Eastern businessman/writer of dime-novels.Willa Cather's novels too might be of interest. Quite a lot of them are also set at moments of shift from wildness and lawlessness to "civilization" in various parts of North America. Death Comes to the Archbishop, one of my favorites, describes the settling of what is now New Mexico by French Catholic missionaries. Cather also offers fictionalized legends of the American West - Kit Carson figures in Death, for example. I also really like Shadows on the Rock, which is about the settling of Quebec. Cather's work is a bit more lyrical and literary than McMurtry's but, depending on your mood, they can be more satisfying for this.I also have two cinematic recommendations: One is an indie Western called The Ballad of Little Jo. It tells the story of a wealthy nineteenth-century society woman who flees the East and her family, disguises herself as a man and lives as a cowboy in the West. That's if you’re interested in other artistic depictions of women in the West.A final recommendation is HBO's Rome. I know that historically this is rather far afield but, apparently, David Milch originally imagined what became Deadwood as set in Rome at the time of Caesar. Such a show, however - Rome - was already in production when he pitched his idea and so he shifted the setting to nineteenth century Dakota territory. Though not Deadwood's equal (I think Deadwood possibly the finest television show ever made), Rome shares something of Deadwood's interest in lawlessness, or a different version of law - a more Hobbesian vision of human society in which power and aggression and ambition have more of a role to play.Also recommended by The Millions for fans of Deadwood:The Ox Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg ClarkMost of the books by Cormac McCarthyWelcome to Hard Times by E.L. Doctorow (mood: brutal)Charles Portis' wonderful True Grit (mood: deadpan)Michael Ondaatje's The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (mood: dreamlike)Oakley Hall's Warlock
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Darren’s Ark: On Noah
Last week was a week for festivity and observance. On the second day, I attended a Seder, with 14 pounds of beef brisket. On the fifth day, I saw Noah, with Russell Crowe looking like 14 pounds of brisket in a distressed denim bag. On the sixth day, I wrestled with Robert Alter's Five Books of Moses and ate mini spanakopitas. On the seventh day, I rested; while others feasted on paschal ham, I watched Black Swan in bed with the curtains drawn. And it was good, all of it.
I have been looking forward to Noah. I love epics, I love Russell Crowe, and I’m willing to admit that my taste in cinema is basically that of an 11-year-old girl (“Harriet thought the movie was a gas. Zeus was very angry all the time and made a lot of temples fall over every time something displeased him”). I also love weird things, and the very fact that Darren Aronofsky was at the helm of a Biblical epic was sufficiently weird to thrill me. David Denby, patriarch of film critics, called Aronofsky's Black Swan “a luridly beautiful farrago,” and about Noah, forsaking all synonyms, he spake thus: “an epic farrago.” This was reason enough to spend $30 on movie tickets and Sour S'ghetti -- in addition to the above, I also happen to love a good farrago.
Epics can be purveyors of wonder and disappointment in proportion with their outlandish budgets, and there’s a mysterious measure -- like something Biblical no longer in use -- of magic that makes one epic pleasing while it maketh the other to blow. This is why I love Gladiator and find Troy, which I managed to see four times in the movie theater, a sandy, sterile flop. I don’t know what I was expecting of Noah, exactly. It wasn’t the corny gold font of the credits ("Ten Commandments," my viewing mates called it) or its robin’s egg sky like unto that of a 1970s nature film. I didn't expect the giant rock angels, like Ents created for The Neverending Story, and I expected even less to be finally moved by them, to feel the agony of trapped light in mangled stone bodies. I didn't expect Russell Crowe to look so old, nor did I expect to cry at the sight of his leonine grey head lavishing kisses on babies cradled by Hermione Granger. And yet all of these things came to pass.
Like someone examining the carcass on an abandoned holiday table, Darren Aronofsky is good at finding new meat in seemingly sparse and picked-over stories. Because here’s the thing about the Real Story of Noah: it’s short, boring, and incomprehensible. Everyone is hundreds of years old. Enoch begets Mehujael, who begets Mathusael, who begets Lamech, who begets Jabal and Jubal. And yet, at the same time in some parallel but separate family tree, a different Enoch begets Methuselah, who begets Lamech, who begets Noah. Reading even Robert Alter's wonderful translation, I found these dueling genealogies so maddening that it hardened my heart against Genesis 6:1 to 10:32.
It is ever thus for me and the Testaments, old and new. I come from the Christian tradition, in my pallid, heterodox little way, but for me the drama of the stories, the occasionally overwhelmingly beautiful language and imagery of the sacred texts always comes up against, not only the begats, but what James Wood calls “the stony reticence” of Biblical style, where, for example, “Joseph’s response to his brothers works by starving us of information.” I love God's breath on the surface of the waters, but then there are five different Enochs and so many quotas of bricks, so many bales of straw, and nary a good chunk of fulsome exposition about the things that one feels really matter. I'm a "In the beginning was the Word" type; I need Robert Alter, or James Wood, to glean for me the surprising charms of Old Testament mode. And evidently I needed Darren Aronofsky, because, brought up as I was in the Tomie dePaola, cute-animals-on-boats school of Biblical exegesis, I had never really thought about what Noah was asked to do.
And so what if he was never asked, as in the film, to smite down babies issued from previously barren wombs? Genesis has miracles! Genesis has people making unreasonable sacrifices at God's behest, or his perceived behest (people still argue about this). Some viewers have been awfully pedantic about the Biblical inaccuracy of Noah, but what's silly is thinking about Noah all on its own. You need the context of Genesis proper, which, as Alter points out in his invaluable introduction to his translation, "has set the terms, not scientifically but symbolically, for much of the way we have thought about human nature and culture ever since." The context of "ever since" doesn't hurt either. For all that you can find Noah's outfits or its rock monsters or its Anthony Hopkins ludicrous, there's really nothing wrong with its message, from my veteran youth grouper perspective -- the gnarliness of the Old Testament is blended with the warm fuzzies of the New. God is unreasonable. Man is unreasonable. Bad things are going to happen. Good things, too. Love one another, as he purports to love you. Moreover, the particulars are necessarily informed by the problems of our day, which have to do with our ravaged environment, and which promise to achieve Biblical proportions.
The best stories are ones we’ve heard before, in some form. I also get bogged down around the last third of Swan Lake, another story with somewhat shrouded (if more recent) origins that has received the Aronofsky treatment. I love the music and I love ballet, and yet it’s very long. But where I am lazy, Darren Aronofsky is imaginative; he respects these laconic but meaningful stories enough to think more about them, and he is not deterred by their inconsistencies or their longueurs. At the same time, he is sacrilegious enough to make weird new things out of them, things that work for some and fail for others. Why should Swan Lake carry within itself the possibility of Mila Kunis and Natalie Portman in flagrante, in a dingy bedroom filled with stuffed animals? And yet, for me, it worked. And for me, his take on Noah as a vegan environmentalist, irksome to the most literal- and bloody-minded Christianists, worked. His goofy effects, irksome to some of the heathen viewers, worked. Me, I would have welcomed more, more disco Instagram colors, more stop-motion nature footage, more animals. I love a good farrago, and Darren Aronofsky never phones his in.
Coming to a Theatre Near You
EW has a story today that Robert Zemeckis will direct the film version of The Corrections. Tom Hanks is always in Zemeckis movies. Does this mean that Hanks will be in the movie? Would he play Gary? (shudder) Jonathan Franzen, who is highly unlikely to be in charge of casting, nonetheless has some ideas: "If they told me Gene Hackman was going to do Alfred, I would be delighted. If they told me they had cast Cate Blanchett as Denise, I would be jumping up and down, even though officially I really don't care what they do with the movie."While I am rather skeptical of The Corrections: the Movie, it does give me the opportunity to play The Corrections parlor game, wherein you pick which of the five members of the book's Lambert family you identify with the most. The game stems from the idea that these five characters - Alfred, Enid, Gary, Denise, and Chip - represent five distinct and mutually exclusive personality types. I identify with Gary. Mrs. Millions identifies with Alfred. What about you?
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When Costner Was King: An Actor’s Rise and Fall (and Rise?)
With 1989’s Field of Dreams, my Costner man crush truly began. I honestly don’t remember seeing it in the theater. It must have been VHS. Either way, I remember the feeling. That film, pie-in-the-sky as it may be, still gets me.
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Book to Movie News: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
Michael Chabon provides an update on the progress of a movie version of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay on his Web site. Somewhat cryptically, he writes "The fate of this project--whether it will move at last from the nebulousness of pre-pre-production into really-truly pre-production, with a budget and cast and everything, will be decided on or around 12 July 2006."He adds that Natalie Portman "is a strong likelihood" to play Rosa, and then provides some quick answers to what will and will not make it into the big-screen version of the book: "Golem: yes. Antarctica: yes. Gay love story: yes. Ruins of World's Fair: no. Long Island: no. Orson Welles: no. Salvador Dali: yes. Loving reference to Betty and Veronica: no. Stan Lee: no."Meanwhile, IMDb as of this writing has very few details about the film. Just that Stephen Daldry, director of Billy Elliot and The Hours is set to helm and Scott Rudin is the producer. Rudin was also behind the excellent big-screen version of Chabon's novel Wonder Boys.On a somewhat related note, Chabon's next novel, The Yiddish Policemen's Union is to come out in May of 2007.