My dear Adso, it’s elementary
Sunday, June 29th, 2008No cinema visits in the past fortnight, and evenings have been dominated by Euro 2008. With any luck, normal service will now be resumed after this midsummer break.
The Name of the Rose (1986)
Or a palimpsest of Umberto Eco’s novel. So what is a palimpsest anyway? Put simply, it’s a text written on top of another text, and, appropriately enough for a story principally concerned with the power of the written word, it dates back into the history of writing itself. It’s also the mot juste for that most vexed of cinema topics: is the book better than the film, or is the film better than the book? Or are they, as more illuminated commentators have come to realise, entirely different entities, and questions of “better or not” are obfuscatory blurs particularly ill-suited to two opposing and contradictory media.
The classic quote on this from the writer’s point of view goes something like this: “There’s a tale about the writer who was asked how he felt about Hollywood ruining his books. His answer was to point to the bookshelf and note that the books were sitting right there and hadn’t actually been ruined at all.” I’ve seen this attributed to Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and James M Cain, and lately even Stephen King. I’ve also seen it appropriated by other writers who’ve quoted it and applied it to their own work without acknowledging that it might be a quote with a history. It may even be an urban myth. Regardless, the point of view it expresses is a valid one, and rather than Raymond Chandler (whom I haven’t read enough), I’m going to use Stephen King for a few examples (of whom I’m a constant reader). But I could just as easily use John Grisham or James Ellroy, popular authors whose work has been filmed with varying degrees of success. (As a side note, it’s interesting to me that as John Grisham has become less formulaic and more interesting as a writer, the film adaptations of his work have more or less dried up.)
Stephen King has been particularly ill-served by Hollywood. Obviously, we know the Stephen King film adaptations that are any good: Carrie (1976), The Shining (1980), The Dead Zone (1983), Stand by Me (1987), Misery (1990), The Shawshank Redemption (1994), Dolores Claiborne (1995) and The Mist (2007). There are a number of other adaptations that have their moments – Christine (1983) would fit into this camp – and then there are way too many absolute dogs like The Lawnmower Man (1992) and The Running Man (1987). Why is the writing of Stephen King so difficult to adapt successfully to cinema?
The principal problem is that although one of King’s strengths is narrative, and in film, for the most part, narrative is all, it isn’t his only strength. King is particularly strong in character, dialogue and tone, and tone is perhaps the most difficult to adapt to cinema. I’ve recently acquired Warner Bros’ R1 DVD release of The Maltese Falcon (1941), which handily includes the two earlier adaptations of Dashiell Hammett’s novel, a pre-Code version with the same title filmed in 1931 and a light comedy adaptation starring Bette Davis in 1936 called Satan Met a Lady (good title). And yet the only one to click with both the public and the critics and that has entered the pantheon of classic films is the 1941 version that a) got the tone absolutely spot on and b) has been successfully retrofitted by the French as a key entry in the film noir genre. I think this is the main reason that Frank Darabont has hit three for three with his Stephen King adaptations: he gets Stephen King’s tone, and has been able to reproduce it successfully on film.
Stephen King was so ticked off by what Stanley Kubrick did to The Shining (ie. made a modern masterpiece that, particularly in its longer American cut, continues to improve every time you see it, but which departs from King’s novel in many ways) that he was able to persuade an American TV network to readapt it under the aegis of Mick Garris in 1997 and so see a more faithful version of the story produced. Naturally enough, since no one seems to have much of a good word for it, I’ve avoided it like the plague. When you’ve got what Kubrick did, why would you want some second rate, allegedly more faithful, compromise produced for US TV? Writers can be particularly poor judges of the end result of film adaptations. King’s always struck me as a highly perceptive and insightful writer, but it does amuse me that he can’t appreciate how good Kubrick’s film is. So it goes.
Which more or less brings us back to The Name of the Rose. UK purchasers of the DVD have been irritatingly shortchanged by Warner Home Video, who elsewhere in Europe have issued the film as a 2 disc set with an excellent 2 hour interview in French (subtitled in English) with the articulate director of the film, Jean-Jacques Annaud, on disc 2. Among the gems of information Annaud lets slip is that both he and Eco didn’t want to cast Sean Connery (in what is one of his best roles), Christian Slater would only audition his love scene with Valentina Vargas and not the two other women also up for the part, and that Feodor Chaliapin Jr was struck by falling masonry during the filming of the climatic scenes in the library but was more concerned whether or not they got the shot than with being hurt.
I am now re-reading Eco’s original novel, and it’s interesting to see how bits and pieces of Eco’s prose made it into the film, sometimes from dialogue, but sometimes from descriptive passages. As just one example of the magic of adaptation, in the novel the library is on the top floor of the large tower in the monastery, and both the kitchen and the refectory are also located inside the tower; in the film, the implication is quite clear that the tower only contains the library – the kitchen and the refectory magically disappear. Eco also loads the novel with a ton of historical exposition, which Annaud and his four screenwriters have successfully filleted down to the bare minimum for the atmosphere of the time to be established.
There is one particularly odd outcrop of the film publicity machine that remains more than a little baffling: the novelisation. And surely, you say, Hollywood has never made a film from a book and then ended up with another book adapted from the film (or, as is more common, the film’s screenplay)? And you would be wrong. Before I was old enough to see it, I was quite proud to own the novelisation of David Cronenberg’s Scanners. But now? There is, quite literally, only one novelisation that is worth anyone’s time and that is Orson Scott Card’s adaptation of The Abyss, which was produced to such a tight deadline and in such close collaboration with James Cameron himself, that it more closely resembled what eventually became The Director’s Cut of The Abyss than the initial theatrical release it was meant to be promoting. There is one more: horror writer Dennis Etchison wrote a pretty neat version of Videodrome under the pseudonym of Jack Martin. Everything else novelisation wise is pretty much an ecological blight and a waste of trees.
A palimpsest on top of a palimpsest is a palimpsest too far.