Story is the hardest word

[Dave Monroe]

Story is the hardest word

How do you film an experimental novel about a man
'unstuck in time'? John Patterson salutes directors
who have brought unwieldy books to the screen

John Patterson
Saturday August 6, 2005

Guardian
"There is," Norman Mailer once wrote, "a particular
type of really bad novel that makes for a really great
motion picture." He might have been referring to such
superselling potboilers as Mario Puzo's The Godfather
or Margaret Mitchell's Gone With The Wind or, indeed,
any number of middlebrow literary atrocities whose
cinematic adaptations have entirely transcended their
trashy sources.

However, a proposition diametrically opposed to
Mailer's is equally workable: acknowledged literary
masterpieces, by and large, make for terrible,
terrible movies. In support of this claim let me
simply cite the lesser works of writer-director
Richard Brooks, the man who failed to tame Conrad's
Lord Jim for the screen. Rather more memorable (in
terms of world-beating badness, at any rate), was his
1958 version of The Brothers Karamazov, starring one
of my all-time dream pairings: Yul Brynner and a
brooding, young William Shatner. Similarly, John
Huston wasted a good half of his career on rotten
adaptations of good books. Moby-Dick is the most
famous of them, but he also soiled his CV with
versions of Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood and - ye
gods! - the Bible. Only when he picked orphan novels
or stories like Leonard Gardner's Fat City or B
Traven's Treasure Of The Sierra Madre did Huston
really earn his place in Hollywood history.

But there is a third, more fascinating category
somewhere between these two, and that is the novel
widely deemed "unfilmable" that has in fact been
transferred to the screen. We'll get to some of these
anon, but to start, we should consider some of the
things that render a certain kind of novel resistant
to adaptation from the page to the screen.

An obvious subcategory here - and one that has
steadily shrunk with the maturing of public
sensibilities and the decline of censorship since the
late 1960s - is the kind of novel that used to outrage
public decency; the kind, to borrow Mervyn
Griffith-Jones QC's famously ill-chosen words at the
Lady Chatterley trial, that you "wouldn't want your
wife or servants to read", those with the fabled
"tendency to deprave or corrupt" those who get their
filthy masturbatory mitts on them. That being said,
novels that once fell into this category have since
become the kind of property that self-proclaimed
"edgy" directors will stab one another to death in
order to film. When I read Last Exit To Brooklyn in
the 1970s, with its 10 capitalised pages depicting the
gang rape of the hooker Tralala, or its nauseating
description of a man masturbating his infant son, I
felt I could safely wager I'd wouldn't be seeing it at
the Odeon in Guildford any time soon. Well, director
Uli Edel and Jennifer Jason Leigh - who was Tralala -
have long since proved me wrong.

Likewise, various works of Henry Miller, Pauline
Réage, Jean Genet, James Joyce, JG Ballard and William
Burroughs, all of which thronged with penises,
vaginas, wayward sexuality, raw sodomy, extensive
heroin use or maximum sicko violence, have made it to
the screen, prompting short-lived expressions of civic
and critical outrage.

Certain of the last-named works were - and indeed
remain - unfilmable in a narrower, formal sense.
That's to say, they deploy certain formal techniques -
Burrough's "cut-up" process; Ballard's indifference to
narrative tension and "realistic" characterisation,
his reliance on startling, Daliesque imagery as the
core of his achievement; Joyce's radical upending of
everything from literary convention to punctuation and
typographic styles - that find no workable equivalent
in what suddenly, in the face of all these
innovations, seems the stubbornly inflexible and
primitively visual cinematic form.

The results are only occasionally successful as
movies. One that works very well is released this week
on DVD: George Roy Hill's marvellous adaptation of
Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, which switches
back and forth from the bombing of Dresden, a German
POW camp, post-war America and the fictional planet of
Tralfamadore, where the hero Billy Pilgrim is taken by
aliens and forced to mate in a glass dome with film
star Montana Wildhack (the impossibly pneumatic
Valerie Perrine). As adaptations of strange and
"unfilmable" novels go, this is one of the finest.
And, incidentally, as alien-abduction experiences go,
Pilgrim's is many notches above the usual
rectal-probing favoured by our intergalactic cousins.

Other writers have made a much greater effort to
ensure that their work remains unfilmable. Kazuo
Ishiguro, The Remains Of The Day notwithstanding, has
often stated his pride in the relatively cine-hostile
properties of his other novels, such as The
Unconsoled, a Kafkaesque interior monologue that
resists easy summary or even comprehension. Neither
should we expect to see Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's
Rainbow at the flicks: formal innovation and its
central image of shit-eating should put paid to that
idea.

Some directors take a novel's perceived resistance to
adaptation as a challenge. Take David Cronenberg, who
went from filming the unwatchable in his early horror
masterpieces of the 1970s to filming the unfilmable,
with immensely approachable, albeit free-form versions
of Burrough's The Naked Lunch and Ballard's Crash, the
twin gold-standards of unfilmability - until they were
filmed (he didn't attempt to visualise Ballard's image
of a woman whose breasts spurted liquid faeces, but
you can't win 'em all). Michael Cunningham's The Hours
was another succès d'estime long deemed impossible to
render on film, and yet it has been done, as have
Philip Roth's The Human Stain (very badly) and Chuck
Palahniuk's Fight Club. Indeed, the supposedly
unfilmable Palahniuk currently has no fewer than four
of his other novels in development. Even such
aggressive formalists as Marguerite Duras and Alain
Robbe-Grillet, avatars of the French nouveau roman in
the 1950s, have reached the screen - though often only
with screenplays, such as Last Year At Marienbad or Le
Camion, as baffling and alienating as their novels.

Whether it's all worth it can sometimes be gauged by
the reaction of the original authors. Ballard,
famously a lover of movies and bad TV, is an
enthusiast for adaptations of his work (I wish someone
would make the greatest grown-up British TV series of
all time from The Kindness Of Women, his most
beautiful and approachable novel). But Bernardo
Bertolucci must have blanched when he read the
reaction of Paul Bowles to his version of the deeply
interiorised The Sheltering Sky: "It should never have
been filmed. The ending is idiotic and the rest is
pretty bad."

Which brings us finally to James Joyce, he of the
monolithically unadaptable Ulysses, which, to my
astonishment, has been filmed three times. Not very
successfully, it has to be said, but there you go.
Ulysses bashed the novel form from within, upended
every variety of storytelling from stageplay to
newspaper item, and added plenty of dirty sex to
outrage Irish bluenoses and the princes of the mother
church. Joyce had everything going against him
cinematically, but nothing will deter a director like
Joseph Strick, who made his version back in 1967. The
Irish board of film censors only deemed it fit for
public consumption in 2000 - so he must have got
something right. He made quite the cottage industry
out of the unfilmable, following Ulysses with a
version of Miller's Tropic Of Cancer in 1970 and A
Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man in 1977.
Obviously the commercial drubbings the movies took did
not cool his ardour.

But pride of place in this regard must surely go to
one Mary Ellen Bute, who in 1966 undertook the insane
task of adapting Joyce's notoriously difficult last
work, Finnegans Wake. It pretty much sucked, and she
never shot another inch of celluloid, but yes, she
made it, and that was achievement enough.

http://film.guardian.co.uk/patterson/story/0,12830,1543411,00.html

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