The Reading Experience

Getting to Know You

This article on the adaptation of Russian "literary classics" to tv concludes:

One argument that producers brought forward when defending TV adaptation of classics a few years ago, when the trend had just started, was that teenagers who would have never read a book would at least watch a TV series based on it and get acquainted with literature classics in this way. And that argument seems to be valid. The rationale of those who argue that contemporary TV adaptations of classical novels are vulgar and simplistic may be right to a certain degree. But they are definitely missing one important point: literary classics have become part of pop culture and should be viewed in that way, not like something sacred.

What exactly does it mean to "get acquainted with literature classics" by watching a tv show? Simply to know that they exist? This was for a long time one of the implicit justifications of "exposing" students to great works of literature--make them aware that these books exist so that they might know where the "best" examples of human expression can be found, might be able to follow a conversation in which these illustrious names are mentioned, or might even--gasp!--one day read the books and take them seriously. But I doubt that E.D. Hirsch understood "cultural literacy" quite to mean that "literary classics have become part of pop culture and should be viewed in that way, not like something sacred."

I've tried as earnestly as I can to understand the logic behind the notion that it's good that "teenagers who would have never read a book would at least watch a TV series based on it." This is also a long-standing justification both for making adaptations of "literary classics" and for showing such films and programs to students as either a supplement to or an outright replacement for reading the works in question, but it has never made sense to me. It's based on the assumption that "literary classics" (specifically works of fiction) are stories about characters and that, since these visual media are able to tell stories about characters, if you faithfully tell the stories and present all the characters you've adequately reproduced the book. (Or even if you haven't, it's not a big deal because viewers will still get "acquainted" with it.) While it's true that some "literary classics," especially those written in the 18th and 19th centuries, have stories and characters, surely it isn't the case that they are conveyed to us in the same way from "classic" to "classic." What gets lost in the adaptation is narrative voice, fluctuations in point of view, subtleties in characterization, shades of description. Most importantly, what gets lost is the encounter with language. And this is unavoidably true even in adaptations that are not "vulgar and simplistic."

To believe that adaptations are acceptable substitutes for the works adapted is to believe that the experience of watching a film or television show, even the most intelligent and well-wrought shows, and reading a novel are essentially the same. Or at least the differences are negligible enough that the "essence" of the work is still getting through. It seems to me an implicit devaluation of what is actually the distinguishing feature of fiction--its status a patterned prose, as writing--to maintain that it can be translated into visually realized images without sacrificing its essence. A given adaptation of The Master and Margarita may work on its own, visual, terms. It may even be more successful than another adaptation at capturing something recognizably "Bulgakovian" in the treatment. But it still isn't The Master and Margarita, and viewers of the film who don't become readers of the novel still don't really know what it's all about.

A good television or film adaptation can certainly provide pleasures of its own, but they are the pleasures available in that medium. A good film requires careful attention, just as does a good novel, but the kind of attention being paid is not the kind required by fiction. It can provoke us into immersing ourselves into the mise-en-scene (in a way perhaps analogous to painting but not continuous with it, since the image moves) or force us to keep track of the information conveyed through editing, but this is ultimately the work of the eye and ear keeping pace with appearances. We have to look and listen. Fiction requires a kind of looking, but even our visual registering of word, phrase and sentence, and the way these elements arrange themselves in a "style" distinctive to the author we're reading, is more an internally-oriented mental process than an externally-oriented process of sorting sights and sounds (although a kind of "listening" is also certainly involved, as language manifests itself to our mental "ear"). Our imaginations then have to finish the job the writer has started. We have to mentally transform the words, phrases, and sentences into the "actions" or "thoughts" or "emotions" of the "characters" we agree are being brought to a kind of life. (Films, of course, do this work for us.) And we have to keep straight the way in which the characters and their actions are being presented to us in a particular sort of formal arrangement, an arrangement that is again mostly a phenomenon of our mental engagement with the text. Sometimes--as in some modernist and postmodernist fiction--this formal arrangement overrides our immediate connection to the characters and the actions and has to be processed before we can even comprehend the characters and actions.

I don't say that fiction is superior to film (I have a background in film study and criticism myself), but to the extent it makes the kind of demands on us I have described, it certainly is different in its aesthetic and psychological effects. For a "literary classic" to finally be appreciated, it has to be appreciated as literary. It probably doesn't do any harm to people (as opposed to literature) when they're allowed to be "acquainted" with literature through film, but I can't see that it does them much good, either.

The Wisdom of Crowds

Anyone who doubts that fiction has largely become subsidiary to film, even for writers, should look at Next Stop Hollywood: Short Stories for the Screen, an "anthology" recently published by St. Martin's. It is, literally, American Idol brought into print. From the introduction by editor Steve Cohen:

. . .The voice of the marketplace--indeed the wisdom of crowds--is far more powerful than the taste of any one studio executive. True, the studio executive can "green-light" a project. But they can't ignite a trend, build word of mouth, or get people to watch films they don't want to.

We believe there is a fundamental transformation taking place in the entertainment business. It is a shift in power from a few "experts" to the consumer--and Next Stop Hollywood is part of it.

That is why we are asking you--the readers, the moviegoers, the trendsetters--to tell us what you like and what you don't. Tell us, via our Web site. . ., which stories should be made into movies and who should star in them. We are also conducting competitions for the best move poster and trailer based on these stories. . . .

The stories were not chosen by Mr. Cohen. He sent submitted stories around "to lots of readers," who were asked:

[D]id a particular story work for you as a potential film? Were there characters--either heroes or villains--that you cared about? Was there a plot with a beginning, a middle, and an end? Would this be an easy or hard story to adapt to the screen? And lastly, would this story have a narrow or wide appeal?

In addition to revealing what Steve Cohen (a self-described "entrepreneur") thinks are the characteristics of a good movie--characters we "care about," linear plots, and a "wide appeal"--his project also reveals what, apparently, large numbers of people think fiction is worth: not much, unless it can be seen as a "potential film."

The stories in the anthology range from the professionally competent (Perry Glasser's "An Age of Marvels and Wonders" is probably the most proficient story, although it also contains the requisite degree of pathos to make it potentially appealing to Hollywood) to the utterly atrocious. Most of them lean to the latter. Very few of them are genre pieces. It would seem from the selections chosen for this book that appropriate movie narratives (which are, after all, what these stories ultimately aspire to be) are essentially realistic, with suitably dramatic plot twists and turns, and involve characters not so far removed from the ordinary that we can't identify with them.

To the extent that writers of "literary fiction" (here defined as the sort of thing encouraged by most creative writing programs and the editors of most literary journals) are also usually enjoined to think of fiction in this way (absent the more melodramatic flourishes of plot and executed more adroitly and in more polished prose), I find it hard to consider most of what gets published with that tag attached as any less designed to attract the attention of those holding the "green light" than what has been gathered in Next Stop Hollywood.

Market Penetration

In his recent disquisition on fiction's loss of audience to television shows about the Mafia, John Freeman opines that "America's most powerful myth-making muse long ago moved in to Hollywood" and that the novel has additionally "been whacked by a number of things," such as the decline of public education and the rise of advertising.

While the spread of a kind of voluntary illiteracy in American culture certainly doesn't help in the effort to perhaps entice a few current nonreaders into becoming readers, I really don't think The Sopranos has likely distracted the attention of many people who might otherwise have been reading novels, certainly not many people who under different circumstances might have spent their time with Nabokov or Beckett. Would it really be a coup for literature if some of those watching The Sopranos were instead reading James Michener or Mario Puzo, in reality the true "myth-making" alternatives to "the screen in its many incarnations"? And if by pointing out the dominance of the "language of advertising" Freeman is criticizing the "book business" for its marketing of trash of all kinds, including that which is sandwiched between covers and called a "book," then I certainly agree with him, although presumably he would be satisfied if such advertising were used to attract readers to real books. Indeed, later in his article Freeman lauds the way such writers as Thomas Pynchon, Ralph Ellison, and Jack Kerouac managed to combine literary ambition with "market penetration."

Freeman is probably correct, however, to cite competition from Hollywood as a detrimental influence on the standing of fiction, but its influence is not of the kind he imagines it to be. If the novel is being marginalized, it is not because too many people are watching HBO; it's because too many novelists are writing novels that are clearly meant to be made into movies. If fiction is being undervalued, by readers and critics alike, it's not because shows like The Sopranos are better, or more accessible, than contemporary novels; it's because fiction writers themselves implicitly concede that film and television are the narrative forms to which they ultimately aspire. If certain movies and the various cable miniseries programs seem livelier than fiction, it's not because fiction no longer "develops characters" on a grand scale, or has abandoned "some of the primary themes of the Great American Novel" or fails to render itself in "a deeply American language," characteristics Freeman believes are positively in evidence in The Sopranos; it's because too few novelists manifest any interest in sounding out the yet undiscovered possibilites of fiction as an alternative to the conventional narrative practices upon which film and tv continue to rely.

It is precisely the desire to achieve "market penetration" (a market that the movie business has not only penetrated but has saturated with its seed) that has caused fiction to become less and significant to the development of American culture.

I began to ponder these issues well before reading Freeman's article. I have long thought that most mainstream "literary fiction" was inspired less by writers' familiarity with literary history and more by the narrative demands of film. This doesn't necessarily mean that most writers want to produce plot-driven thrillers and melodramas or sweet romantic comedies. Indeed, the sensibility exhibited in much contemporary literary fiction is perhaps closer to that informing the "art film," the "independent" movies that can be described as "quirky" or "offbeat" or, simply, "serious." This kind of film has the advantage of combining a degree of artistic credibilty with some plausible prospect of popularity, should the film in question "find its audience," manage to accomplish a measurable act of "market penetration." With many writers, my impression is that their most deeply-held ambition is to see their work adapted into such a film, which would allow them to maintain their artistic cred while also having the work affirmed by those attuned to and sanctioned by our "most powerful myth-making muse."

But I was especially provoked into examining this phenomenon more closely when I recently watched Todd Field's adaptation of Tom Perotta's novel Little Children (screenplay written by Perotta himself.) I found it to be a reasonably pleasant, mildly "quirky" satire of suburbia, one that especially zeroes in on Americans' increasingly fraught attitudes toward parenting, fraught because so many parents have hardly ceased being "little children" themselves. My impression of the novel, based on the reviews and weblog discussions I'd read at the time of its release, was that it was a relatively unquirky literary satire written by someone specializing in the "youth" scene (his previous novels were Joe College and Election, the latter also made into a well-known film.) I decided to read Little Children to see if I had perhaps too quickly discounted him as a writer, although I suspected I would find the novel just another in the very long line of mediocre works of fiction that Hollywood directors and scriptwriters had managed to elevate into better films.

What I found was not just a mediocre work of fiction that managed to be transformed into a watchable film, but a mediocre novel that was mediocre precisely because it was obviously written in order to be so transformed.

If ever a movie could be said to have "filmed the book," the Field/Perotta version of Little Children is it. Very little of the book is left behind in the transference to film. The plot remains virtually undisturbed, much of the dialogue comes from the novel verbatim or with very minor changes, and almost all of the characters introduced in the novel are included in the film (although a couple of them, such as the husband of co-protagonist Sarah, have a diminished role, and the husband's subplot in particular--concerning his obsession with an online porn vixen--is pared back). The novel's scenic narrative structure, by which relatively brief, self-enclosed scenes, alternating primarily between those involving Sarah and those involving Todd, the "Prom King" with whom Sarah begins an extramarital affair, move us forward in a leisurely, episodic fashion is faithfully reproduced in the film. The ending is changed slightly, but not in such a way that the novel's underlying point ("boy, aren't these people pathetic!") is lost. One can easily imagine the screenwriter making his way, page by page, through this novel and converting its prose into scene headings and dialogue.

And yet the film, as an aesthetic experience, is an improvement over the novel. It's not a great film, but as "quirky" independent films go, it holds one's attention and provides the occasional amusing insight into the reverse trajectory (it's all downhill after college) so many Americans have followed in the last few decades. (In this way the film--but not the novel--is reminiscent of Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road, although Yates's novel is much bleaker, less content with mere amusement.) The novel, on the other hand, is a slog, full of uninspired prose and hackneyed observations. And this difference, in my opinion, is all the difference in the world. The movie spares us Perotta's labored, cliche-ridden, "unobtrusive" writing. It spares us passages like this:

Aaron had discovered his penis. Whenever he had a spare moment--when he was watching TV, say, or listening to a story--his hand would wander southward, and his face would go all soft and dreamy. This new hobby coincided with a sudden leap forward in his potty training that allowed him to wear big boy underpants at home during the day (at night, during naps, and in public he still needed the insurance of a diaper.) Because he often had to sprint to the bathroom at the last possible moment, he preferred not to wear pants over the underwear, and this combination of easy access and an elastic waistband issued a sort of standing invitation that he found impossible to resist.

Almost every sentence here is built out of banal phrasing and worn-out expressions: "had discovered his penis"; "a spare moment"; "soft and dreamy"; "a sudden leap forward," etc. The last sentence in particular is a headlong accumulation of cliches. (I can't decide if the "standing invitation" is meant as a pun--a bad one--or is just lazy writing.) This is supposed to be a "plain style," but its effect is precisely, through its very shoddiness, to draw attention to itself rather than away. I spent more of my time wincing at the woodenness of the prose than following the story, and without "story" a novel like Little Children has nothing. The film rescues the story from the writer, as the director has at least some "style" in cinematic terms. The novelist has none.

One might say that since Perotta himself wrote the screenplay he was able to preserve most of the story another screenwriter might have altered, or that since it is his story he clearly does have some talent as a writer. But these claims only reinforce for me the conclusion that the novel was probably written with the screen version in mind and that the talent Perotta has is precisely a talent for screenwriting. The concepts of "story" and "character" his novel manifests are those prized by moviemakers. Aside from the adultery plot and the supporting cast of "offbeat" characters, Little Children (the novel) has little else to offer, nothing readers who read novels that in one way or another advance the form (even a little bit) would find compelling. I understand that practically everyone in the world has a "screenplay" in the works, and that few of them will ever be produced, but if you're going to write a novel that exists only as a proto-movie, why not just write it up as a script to begin with?

Plot-Wise

David Denby asserts that

The cinema, in which actors appear to be moving in consecutive time through patches of genuine space, has always created a strong expectation of realistic narrative. But here’s the paradox: thanks to the mechanical nature of the recording medium (still photos, or digits, strung together in rapid succession), playing with sequence and representation is almost irresistible. As soon as film was invented, experimental film was invented. Some of the fooling around was just exuberant exploration of a fabulous new toy, but some of it arose from political or philosophical convictions, and was intended to turn us upside down.

In my previous post, I suggested that while fooling around with chronology is more or less identified as the one properly "experimental" mode of fiction writing, few critics and reviewers express much interest in, or tolerance for, other kinds of literary experiment. Here Denby also equates "experimental film" with "playing with sequence." He is discussing a cluster of recent films, such as Babel, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Memento (all of which in turn, claims Denby, are in a lineage that began with Pulp Fiction) that "disorder" time, and he ultimately questions the efficacy of such manipulations.

When himself casting back in time for "classic" precursors to today's fractured narratives, Denby offers Alain Resnais as an example:

Of all the highbrow directors of the late fifties and sixties, Alain Resnais, working with experimental writers like Alain Robbe-Grillet and Marguerite Duras, and drawing on ideas developed by those writers in their fictions, played the most extreme (and infuriating) games with time and narrative. In “Hiroshima, Mon Amour” (1959), two lovers, one French, one Japanese, mainly lie in bed trying to retrieve their memories of the war. The movie ceases to move forward in any conventional sense; and the past, it turns out, becomes ungraspable, even irrecoverable, leaving us stranded in an elegant time warp. In Resnais’s “Muriel” (1963), a variety of distancing devices hold at arm’s length an unendurable recollection—a French soldier’s experience of torturing an Algerian girl. At the same time, the present-tense narrative is developed intermittently, and without the usual climaxes and tensions, so that the structure of the story’s emotions, rather than their power, becomes the subject of the film.

That Hiroshima, Mon Amour "ceases to move forward in any conventional sense" and that Muriel's "present tense narrative is developed intermittently, and without the usual climaxes and tensions" does not, it seems to me, make them the inspiration for the jumbled chronologies of current films. Resnais is looking for alternatives to the "power" of narrative; these films want to see if cinema can carry on without "story" in the Hollywood sense, not to find novel ways of presenting story that continue to convey its dramatic force. Films like Babel and Memento (and I actually like the latter film a great deal) do not focus on "the stucture of the story's emotions." They are all "climax and tension," if anything only reinforcing the importance of story: Reassembling the fragments of narrative we are given into a conventional story becomes perhaps our primary prerogative as viewers of such movies. Story remains all.

Part of the problem with Denby's formulation of "the new disorder" is that he opposes it to "realistic narrative." He confuses "realism" with conventional storytelling. Resnais's films are hyperrealistic, even while they do abandon story conventions. Indeed, "experiment" in film is more likely to move toward greater realism than toward ever more frenzied disruptions of narrative line, at least as long mainstream filmmaking continues to be focused on delivering greater and greater narrative punch. Efforts to achieve realism in either mainstream or independent filmmaking are more likely to draw out fresh and innovative approaches to the art of cinema than the admittedly exciting but finally story-bound "scrambling of time frames" that Denby describes. This is not to say that realism is preferable in cinema, just that what Denby calls realism is really just the use of storytelling strategies that don't call attention to themselves.

Denby concludes from the perceived failings of Babel that a return to tried-and-true storytelling techniques might be necessary, that they might lead to "the paradise of a morally complicated but flawlessly told story." I'm all for moral complication, but I don't see that this must be the Holy Grail of filmmaking. I don't see why experimenting with the possibilities of film can't be a sufficient justification for making one, just as similar experiment with literary form has often been for writing a poem or a novel. If Neal Gabler is right and "movies can no longer be the art of the middle," then all the more reason not to single-mindedly pursue the mass audience with more gaudy refinements of "plot." Or mollify them with a "flawlessly told story."

What Happens Internally

A while back, Stephen Hunter wrote an essay for the Washington Post in which he examined the differences between fiction and Hollywood films taking fiction as "source." At one point he makes this claim:

. . .The primary issue in prose is motive: You have to understand why the people do what they do, or else the whole shebang falls apart as illusion. The minds of the characters have to be consistent to be believable; action has to flow from character. Fiction writing is about what happens internally, even if lots of guns come out and stuff blows up.

I know that a lot of people believe that this difference between the external and the internal is an important distinction to make between fiction and film, and that drawing it usually results in an implicit--or not so implict--valorization of fiction over film. Fiction gives us access to "the mind" of a character in a way film cannot; a corrollary of this is that the internal view is perforce a defining feature of fiction, that those stories and novels (particularly the latter) making a claim to be "serious" must provide it or risk being dismissed as not properly literary.

It is true that often the difference between a given novel and its adaptation to film is the greater focus on "mind" in the former. But this is a difference that is really only palpable when otherwise the novel and the film have much in common, when it was possible to adapt the novel to film to begin with because they both emphasize character, setting, plot in more or less conventional ways. (When finally the guns do come out and stuff does blow up.) In my opinion, the internal/external oppositon is not a very solid peg on which to hang one's hat in promoting fiction's putatively greater sophistication. We all recognize the ultimate tradeoff: immediacy in film vs. "depth" in fiction. But what makes depth the more valuable property? In aesthetic terms, why is it important to provide such depth in the first place? If you're more interested in "empathy" or "motive" than in art, perhaps.

What if you don't really care about "believability"? What if character is something you're not really interested in at all, except insofar as it enables the fiction's aesthetic design? Is such a writer (or reader) not being serious? What if it doesn't matter whether action follows from character? Couldn't character follow from action, if incident and event comprise the engine of aesthetic effect? Couldn't you dispense with action altogether? Couldn't you dispense with character altogether? (Think Beckett's later work.) Some writers want the "whole shebang" of illusion to fall apart. It's precisely a way to divert the reader's attention to some of the other aesthetic possibilities of fiction. Why is this less "serious" than writing the same old character-based story in which we get supposedly "luminous" glimpses into that abstraction called "human consciousness"?

Such fiction as I am describing would indeed be (mostly) unfilmable, at least according to currently reigning ideas about what film properly does as well. But wouldn't this be the whole point? We wouldn't need to have advice about how to approach a film based on a novel. They'd each have their own separate and entirely respectable jobs to do.

Spurious Motives

Katherine A. Powers loves a "good read":

In fiction the qualities essential to a good read are generous portions of character, character development, and plot; a palpable sense of place and material reality; reoccurrences of situations and quirks that become an inside joke between writer and reader; some seriousness -- though not solemnity -- of purpose; and, above all, consistency and follow-through. You have to trust your writer not to let you down: not change the tacit rules of the narrative or simply be sloppy. He must not disobey the laws of nature or time. He mustn't cry wolf more than once or twice, or trump up spurious motives. And he will never be forgiven for simply calling it a day, leaving a mess of loose ends at the end. . . .

Perhaps this description is an acceptable enough account of "escapist" fiction, but why must such escapism be equated with a good read? Is this truly what makes reading worthwhile? Encountering a novel that's so predictable, so easily reduced to "generous portions" of character development, plot, "material reality"? That doesn't challenge one's accepted notions of "consistency and follow-through"? Isn't the implicit message here that a "good" read is an easy read?

What among Powers's list of desirable attributes couldn't be done just as readily in a film, or even a situation comedy? What on this list gets at the distinctive qualities of reading, those qualities that involve not merely being mesmerized ("intoxicated" is Powers's preferred term) by the secondary effects of prose fiction ("generous portions of character," "the tacit rules of the narrative") but lead to reflection or rumination, or to an enhanced appreciation of the possibilities of writing and reading? That ask the reader to participate in the creation of meaning or value? Would a book that encouraged its readers to engage in these sorts of activities rather than sit back passively, as Powers would have it do, be a "bad read"?

This implicit equation of the pleasures of reading with mindlessness is one reason I can't accept the commonly-held notion that getting people (especially young people) simply to read--it doesn't matter what, as long as they're reading--should be the goal of language/literary instruction. The idea seems to be that once we've encouraged non-readers to find in book form the equivalent of what they enjoy in movies or video games they'll move on to more challenging books providing other, more complex reading experiences. I don't see how this could happen. If what you want can be offered more readily, with more immediacy, in these other media, why would you settle for the diluted version in a book, much less seek out different kinds of gratification in more difficult books? What service to either reading or writing is it to suggest that books are worth our attention because sometimes they're almost as good as movies?

Why not let movies do what they do, and books do what they do--which is something qualitatively, not just relatively, different? Wouldn't even Katherine Powers more reliably find what she thinks of as a "good read," something to which she can "surrender," at her local cineplex?

The Irreplaceable Conditions of Prose

According to Andrew O'Hagan, "There may be a coming generation who will know the literary classics only from television's adaptation of them, but that knowledge is better than no knowledge at all."

This is wrong. It couldn't be more wrong. What good is it to have "knowledge" of books if they go unread? Would O'Hagan say the same thing about, say, music? Better to have "knowledge" of Bach's Brandenburg Concertos, even if one never listens to them? A faint memory of the excerpt that used to be played on William Buckley's Firing Line will do?

O'Hagan continues:

I'm a novelist, so I'm hardly going to argue against the irreplaceable conditions of prose, the pattern and rhythm and truth of good writing. But literature is also about narrative and morality; if it takes a television show to get some of that over to an audience - and possibly to send them to the original source - then there are small grounds for moaning.

I haven't read any of Andrew O'Hagan's books, but if he really believes this, he can't be much of a novelist. Literature without the words is good enough? If television (or film or "graphic novels") can provide "narrative and morality" as well as fiction, which O'Hagan seems to concede here, why bother with fiction in the first place? The other forms are clearly more popular, so if "getting over" some morality to an audience is what you're after, wouldn't it make more sense to use them instead?

In saying all of this, I am not denigrating these other narrative forms. I would simply maintain that tv is tv, film is film, fiction is fiction. Indeed, I have always found television adaptations of "classic" novels to be among the least interesting uses of this form, and much more likely to frighten viewers away from the "original source" than provoke them into reading. The best film adaptations of novels tend to be of those novels less tied to notions of "literature" in the first place, leaving the filmmakers with much more freedom to alter the source in ways that emphasize the strengths of cinema without leaving the novel's fans feeling outraged. If you prefer the visual to "the irreplaceable conditions of prose," fine. But let's not pretend that tv versions of fiction manage to negotiate some blurry terrain between the two modes. It's still just television.

"My stepsons are fairly good readers," writes O'Hagan, "but, recently, they have begun to say that reading is boring":

I find it hard to imagine what they mean, except that when I see them watching stuff on television I see that their eyes are lively. In this situation, are you going to force them upstairs to read Kidnapped, or are will you guide them towards the BBC's recent adaptation of Kidnapped starring Iain Glen as Alan Breck?

I would do neither. I'd let them watch whatever television program they want to watch. I'd suggest to them that Kidnapped is a pretty good book, but I wouldn't force them to read it. If they're going to grow up to be non-readers, I guess I'd just accept it. Maybe I'd try to teach by example by skipping that night's tv lineup altogether and reading a book instead. But watching Iain Glen rather than reading about Alan Breck isn't going to make anyone a Stevenson fan.

Serious

It's no wonder that the very term "serious art" is so completely misunderstood, the art it names so often dismissed and laughed at, when reviewers and arts journalists seem so often not to have a clue as to what it actually might mean. This article in the Boston Globe is a good example. Ed Siegel tells us:

It often seems that there's as big a gap between so-called Hollywood movies and "serious films" as there is between red states and blue states. Hollywood movies cater to adolescents and families at megaplexes, while what are loosely, and usually inaccurately, termed independent films cater to those looking for more celluloid thoughtfulness in art houses.

But:

What is particularly interesting about the serious film as opposed to the Hollywood movie is how there are traces of Hollywood in even the most serious of films, whether they're the brainchildren of auteur directors, playwrights, or Booker Prize-winning novelists.

Of what do these "traces of Hollywood" consist? Apparently it is in the "happy ending," which, according to Siegel, even "serious" filmmakers can't quite resist:

In Hollywood films of old, the leading man almost always got the girl. But as girls became women and directors in the 1970s started subverting the Hollywood film, escapism became a thing of the past in serious films.

Sort of.

Now the aesthetic has become: The guy may or may not get the girl. Thus "Sideways" ends with Miles knocking on Maya's door. This implies some ambiguity, but the opinion on the way out of the theater seemed to be that they would get together.

It is striking that in differentiating serious films from "Hollywood" films Siegel can only point to the way in which these films conclude. (He does speak of an "emotional honesty to all these films that make the quasi-happy endings something between forgivable and desirable," but it isn't very clear what he means by this.) The unhappier the ending, the more serious the film? Because this implies a more "serious" view of life? It's not a bed of roses? No matter how slipshod or dishonest the rest of the film might be, if you tack on an unhappy ending this redeems the whole enterprise?

I'm sure that Siegel did not intend to imply such things (or I hope not), but it's what happens when the "seriousness" of a film (or any work of narrative art) is reduced to what the "moral" of its story seems to be. And this is essentially what a fixation on happy/unhappy endings amounts to. Of course one could dispute that such films as Sideways or Closer, upon which Siegel bases his analysis, are particularly serious films to begin with, but surely even these films display features that separate them from run-of-the-mill Hollywood product: Narrative ingenuity? Attention to detail? Care in composition and camera work? Directorial style in general? These sorts of things can even be brought to bear on films with conventional happy endings. Is an unhappy ending all that a filmmaker needs to provide to be taken seriously?

Ultimately Siegel's focus on how the story turns out is symptomatic of much criticism of both film and fiction. It is finally a way of reducing a film or a novel to its story. I suppose that when story is everything--as opposed to the artful ways in which stories can be told, or even to the attempt to get by without "story" in this most simplistic sense--the ending is going to take on extra gravity. In determining what is "serious" about films or novels, however, such a consideration is more often just dead weight.

Aesthetic Heroes

Terry Teachout recently put up a provocative post on the adaptation of fiction into film in which he raises at least two very interesting issues. The first has to do with the critic's responsibilities in reviewing films adapted from fiction:

. . .full-time film reviewers. . .rarely have sufficient time to do the research that would allow them to intelligently compare film adaptations to their sources. The classics, yes—we all at least pretend to have read them—and it’s also taken for granted that film-to-source comparisons will be made in the case of Gone With the Wind-type blockbusters, if only because the first thing everybody wants to know about such films is how faithful the screen version is to the original book. But when it comes to old movies adapted from obscure novels, who bothers?

Terry seems to conclude that finally it isn't necessary to read the book from which a film has been adapted, affirming the principle more or less accepted ever since George Bluestone's Novels Into Film (1957) that fiction and film are separate media embodying separate artististic ambitions that need to be judged by critical standards appropriate to each. And as Lance Mannion points out in a response to Terry's post, "it's generally agreed around Hollywood that the best movies are made from the worst novels." In other words, the artistic goals of the two media are so disinctive that, by and large, good novels almost never make good films (they were not written to be films in the first place), whereas bad or pulpy novels, which often borrow heavily from movie conventions and are usually so focused on plot or punchy dialogue they can be adapted fairly directly, often make great ones. They were movie-friendly to begin with.

But Terry draws another conclusion from this that strikes me as rather peculiar. "Most of us prose-oriented types," he writes, "have a sneaking suspicion that film is by definition a lesser art form than the novel. We like the idea that every word of a novel is personally written by the person who signs it (even though we also know that an anonymous editor may well have played a more or less substantial part in its creation). . . ." Although he accepts that "[i]t’s the work that matters, not the attribution," still "there’s a difference between knowing that to be true and feeling it in your bones. It takes a special kind of confidence to buy an unsigned painting without a provenance, based solely on the evidence of your eye. Most of us aren't nearly so sure of ourselves. We like to see that signature in the lower right-hand corner." Speaking as a "prose-oriented type" myself, I don't believe that "film is by definition a lesser art form than the novel," just that it's different, and different in ways that are important to remember. What's most peculiar in this passage, however, is the apparently Romantic preference (I wouldn't have expected Terry Teachout to express such a preference) for the "signature," the assurance that the work in question is the product of individual vision. Would Terry think less of Shakepeare's plays if it were discovered that not just one or two of them had been written in collaboration with other playwrights, but several of them, even some of the best ones? I would not, but if he really believes what he says here, one would have to conclude that Terry Teachout would have second thoughts about them.

The second issue has to do with the so-called "auteur theory." Writes Teachout: "Film, after all, is a radically collaborative process in which creative responsibility can only be assigned tentatively and on a case-by-case basis. This is something that all but the most rabid auteuristes accept as a given. . . ." And later: "In short, most of us stubbornly persist in believing in aesthetic heroes, a belief which I think goes a long way toward explaining why the auteur theory caught on. It goes against human nature to accept the attributional ambiguity inherent in the process of making films, in the same way that you’d think less of, say, Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony were some musicologist to discover that it had been orchestrated by a student of the composer." Terry thinks the auteur theory goes too far in assigning "authorship" of films to the director, that it doesn't sufficiently account for the "radically collaborative process" of making films. The "radically" here is telling. Plenty of art forms are collaborative: classical music (where would the composer be without the orchestra?), dance, theater, etc. Why is film "radically collaborative"? Is it more collaborative than opera?

I understand that the word "auteur" has been horribly abused by those who, if they've read the Cahiers du Cinema critics or their American followers at all, have interpreted the notion of the cinematic "auteur" in the most simplistic and reductive ways. However, it is worth remembering that the auteur critics were responding precisely to the collaborative nature of filmmaking and were attempting to rescue, specifically, American cinema from the assumption that this sort of collaboration meant films could not be accomplished works of art. If movies were in effect assembled rather than made, if creative responsibility was too dispersed for the result to be considered artful in any meaningful way, why were so many films from the 1930s and 40s (or from the silent era, for that matter) so good? The auteurists posited that directors were in the best position to provide a film with its signature style and outlook, and that the best directors (not all directors) did just that, as any careful analysis of the body of work of a John Ford or an Alfred Hitchcock would manifestly show. Can anyone really examine the careers of directors like these and deny that their films are of a piece, products of an artistic vision as coherent as any other artist's, and this despite the fact that the screenplays of their films were mostly written by other and diverse hands?

For people like Truffaut and Godard--later Andrew Sarris--directors like these were indeed "aesthetic heroes." (Although perhaps Sarris could be charged with diluting the strength of the auteur theory in his book The American Cinema by in effect spreading it too thin, celebrating too many truly minor directors at the expense of obviously accomplished writer-directors such as Billy Wilder. Still, The American Cinema remains one of the most consequential books I've ever read, having literally changed the way I watch movies.) Perhaps Terry is only explaining why movies do still appeal to us as works of art, challenge us to account for this effect by identifying the "artistry" involved. In this sense, something like the auteur theory was inevitable. It has resulted in its share of excess in its application, and any number of hack directors have illegitimately claimed its favors, but it did indeed save many great movies from unwarranted neglect.

Since TEV has worked as a screenwriter, I'd be very interested in his views on this subject.

Freedom to Roam

Over the weekend I watched Woody Allen's Anything Else on DVD. (I believe I am correct to say it is his most recently released film.) To sum up the experience quickly, it was very painful.

As the author of a "scholarly" essay on Allen, as well as other such essays on film comedy more generally, I feel like I do have some modest authority to speak on this subject (as well as to occasionally change the focus of this blog from literature to film), and to judge that Anything Else is a complete dud, perhaps the most disheartening failure of Allen's career. (Interiors was bad, but for other and to some extent understandable reasons.) This may be the first time Allen sets out to be funny in the manner of his earlier films--at least the "romantic" comedies Annie Hall and Manhattan--and just isn't.

The jokes are generally tired and derivative (with a few exceptions, as when the protagonist's girlfriend tells him (in essence) she can no longer stand to have sex with him, but that of course it has nothing to do with him), but that is really the consequence of the film's lack of authenticity more generally. The film's main characters are young--even younger than Allen and his own co-stars in their "younger" days in the 70s--and Allen seems to have no clue what to do with them other than rehearse the old routines in what is only a superficially similar mileu.

How much more interesting it would be to see Allen attempt to portray--comically, of course--characters of his own age (60s) dealing with the kinds of problems they still confront, rather than, as he does in this film, trying to keep up with the kids. There aren't that many precedents for either slapstick or romantic comedies about older folks, but one would think that someone as unconcerned about Hollywood and its conventions and as bold a filmmaker as he once was, at least, would be willing to tackle such a subject. Allen's comedic talents and joke-making facility in this context might produce something "edgy" indeed.

Of course, that Allen has chosen in Anything Else to make a conventional romantic comedy focusing on younger people--unmarried people--may just be an obvious sign of the kind of audience to which filmmakers must appeal. It's certainly possible that a film of the sort I've described would fail miserably at the box office (although it probably couldn't fail more miserably than Anything Else apparently did), since the audience for even the "mature" subjects that do get screen treatment now is assuredly small and perhaps getting smaller. However, if a filmmaker as free to do as he pleases as Allen has generally been can't break out of the constraints of the "youth market," who can?

In this way writers of fiction still have an advantage over filmmakers. In some ways their biggest obstacle lies in the opposite direction: actually cultivating a youthful audience for fiction. Still, literary fiction generally depicts the full range of available experience, from childhood to old age, if anything is able to explore the less familiar if not deliberately ignored circumstances of the various kinds of "marginal" people movies don't always like to examine. (And if they do, frequently they're movies based on novels.) Perhaps novelists and short story writers ought not to aspire to the kind of popularity movies enjoy, if it would mean giving up this freedom to roam through the whole open territory of human experience.