At some point in the recent past I agreed with some friends to spend this month writing a short story based on a fairy tale. It's a venture we attempted once in the past but didn't follow through on as a group--although I personally came out of it with "The Long Dance," a longish short story that I am quite proud of and that would be in the mail on its way to an editor right now if not for some frustrating events at my local FedEx place grumble grumble never going back there again grumble. This time, everyone is more on board, I think.
The seed this time is "The Little Mermaid," which I initially protested was not a fairy tale in the strictest sense, but a children's story by Hans Christian Andersen. (My strictest sense of "fairy tale" is a subset of "legend," so having a single, definitive author is a disqualifier.) I was outvoted, though, and there are worse things than having to temporarily swallow my personal flavor of pedantry. I had never actually read the original story anyway, so my education in things everyone except me has already read continued.
It will be fun to see how other people interpret the task. Although I complained at first, the source material is rich enough to offer different solutions to the problem of what to keep and what to throw out. And that's without getting into the rich and varied tradition of other stories about aquatic females.
After some headbanging, a partial inversion, and a transportation to a fantasy world that I was already working on, my mermaid story (ahem) grew legs. Then, as is apparently inevitable, it stalled out around the halfway point. Today I started from the beginning and realized that I've done all this before--in fact, it may even be my "process" to write half a first draft and then start over with a second draft of the first half, and continue that straight on into a first draft of the second half.
Once I can see what the story is starting to be shaped like, I know how to tear it apart and shape it like something else, I guess.
I still don't know how this story ends, which vexes me, because given the source material I have no confidence that it will end happily.
Showing posts with label less-than-obvious adaptations. Show all posts
Showing posts with label less-than-obvious adaptations. Show all posts
Monday, September 16, 2013
Monday, May 6, 2013
The Sun Also Dances, and so does Gatsby
Usually I resent physical mail delivery, since there is hardly ever anything I want in it and yet it never. stops. coming. except on Sundays, I guess. But I have in hand an advertisement for something I would not have thought existed: it turns out that the Washington Ballet is adapting The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway.
If it takes an English degree to think that's funny then my college education has done me some good. It's not merely that I am still uncultured enough to find ballet itself funny when juxtaposed with just about anything (although that is also undoubtedly true), but a Hemingway-ballet combination is the sort of thing one imagines exploding utterly, like matter and antimatter. Hemingway was such a strange animal in himself, a hyper-masculine and eminently taciturn writer; The Sun Also Rises itself is so bleak and uneventful that what I managed to read of it, in my two separate attempts, is largely a lacuna in my memory. To make The Sun Also Rises expressive, to make it flamboyant--I can hardly imagine that Hemingway would approve.
But then we live in an age of maximalism. The pendulum is at its far extreme from 1926, and if this generation is lost, most of us got that way without ever actually seeing the war that scattered us. Some of the best social commentary in the last 10 years has involved Batman. We don't do understatement anymore. So while Hemingway almost certainly wouldn't approve, maybe something as overblown as ballet would be able to expose the trenchant pathos that he was content to leave unsaid.
On the back of the flyer, the ad announces the ballet as "following on the success of The Great Gatsby." So apparently that was a ballet as well, but I missed it. (Not that I was going to go to Rises, mind you. I'm still in the process of coming to my main point. Thanks for staying with us.) However, I think that Gatsby is a more amenable story to bombastic presentation. Fitzgerald was more comfortable with stylistic flourishes, and excess is in the bones of the story.
In fact, it was the idea of just such a presentation that excited me back when I first got wind of Baz Luhrmann's movie version of The Great Gatsby. In a book that trades so heavily on prose and tone, any straight adaptation of the plot will fall flat--one of those increasingly self-evident truths that I think the brains of Hollywood are immune to. Linguistic flair should translate to the screen as cinematic flair: style and cinematography, of which Mr. Luhrmann at least has no shortage. At any rate, until a movie has come out, you can really only pin your hopes on mistakes that the production has apparently avoided, and I think it's a safe bet that Luhrmann's Gatsby will avoid the mistake of being dull.
I wish I did not have as many hopes for this movie as I do, but I have been pessimistic about the summer movie season so far. Recalling my intense distaste for Iron Man 2, I have few hopes for this year's vaunted sequels (the Iron Men and the Star Treks), precisely because I expect the expectation of money to have thoroughly crushed the life out of the spontaneous originals.
The irony is certainly not lost on me (is any?) that the movie I anticipate most this summer is based on a book that I am ambivalent towards. It read The Great Gatsby in high school, and then again when I was actually old enough to understand it, and I appreciated it but certainly didn't clamor for more. It is perhaps this lack of investment that allows me to hope at all. There is little threat of actual disappointment, as with The Hobbit. I have respect but not affection for the source material. The movie's failings should not gall me; its successes should entertain me. It's all gravy.
Except in spite of my protective disinterest, I find myself in a sort of informational purgatory. I want to read reviews, partly because they will help me determine what I'm doing with me weekend, and partly because I'm bored. Partly because while I'm not invested in the movie per se, I'm invested in my prediction that Baz Luhrmann is a good match for the source material, and I want to find out if people agree with me. All this in spite of knowing full well the aggregate reviews of this movie will be useless. 25% of viewers will hate Baz Luhrmann on principle. 25% of viewers will hate Leonardo DiCaprio on principle. 25% of viewers will want to flaunt their literacy by complaining about how the movie missed the spirit of the book. 25% of viewers will love it as empty audiovisual spectacle. 25% of viewers will be convinced that Gatsby and Daisy are a love story for the ages, no matter how shallow and awful they are supposed to be.
So we'll see. Or, anyway, I probably will.
If it takes an English degree to think that's funny then my college education has done me some good. It's not merely that I am still uncultured enough to find ballet itself funny when juxtaposed with just about anything (although that is also undoubtedly true), but a Hemingway-ballet combination is the sort of thing one imagines exploding utterly, like matter and antimatter. Hemingway was such a strange animal in himself, a hyper-masculine and eminently taciturn writer; The Sun Also Rises itself is so bleak and uneventful that what I managed to read of it, in my two separate attempts, is largely a lacuna in my memory. To make The Sun Also Rises expressive, to make it flamboyant--I can hardly imagine that Hemingway would approve.
But then we live in an age of maximalism. The pendulum is at its far extreme from 1926, and if this generation is lost, most of us got that way without ever actually seeing the war that scattered us. Some of the best social commentary in the last 10 years has involved Batman. We don't do understatement anymore. So while Hemingway almost certainly wouldn't approve, maybe something as overblown as ballet would be able to expose the trenchant pathos that he was content to leave unsaid.
On the back of the flyer, the ad announces the ballet as "following on the success of The Great Gatsby." So apparently that was a ballet as well, but I missed it. (Not that I was going to go to Rises, mind you. I'm still in the process of coming to my main point. Thanks for staying with us.) However, I think that Gatsby is a more amenable story to bombastic presentation. Fitzgerald was more comfortable with stylistic flourishes, and excess is in the bones of the story.
In fact, it was the idea of just such a presentation that excited me back when I first got wind of Baz Luhrmann's movie version of The Great Gatsby. In a book that trades so heavily on prose and tone, any straight adaptation of the plot will fall flat--one of those increasingly self-evident truths that I think the brains of Hollywood are immune to. Linguistic flair should translate to the screen as cinematic flair: style and cinematography, of which Mr. Luhrmann at least has no shortage. At any rate, until a movie has come out, you can really only pin your hopes on mistakes that the production has apparently avoided, and I think it's a safe bet that Luhrmann's Gatsby will avoid the mistake of being dull.
I wish I did not have as many hopes for this movie as I do, but I have been pessimistic about the summer movie season so far. Recalling my intense distaste for Iron Man 2, I have few hopes for this year's vaunted sequels (the Iron Men and the Star Treks), precisely because I expect the expectation of money to have thoroughly crushed the life out of the spontaneous originals.
The irony is certainly not lost on me (is any?) that the movie I anticipate most this summer is based on a book that I am ambivalent towards. It read The Great Gatsby in high school, and then again when I was actually old enough to understand it, and I appreciated it but certainly didn't clamor for more. It is perhaps this lack of investment that allows me to hope at all. There is little threat of actual disappointment, as with The Hobbit. I have respect but not affection for the source material. The movie's failings should not gall me; its successes should entertain me. It's all gravy.
Except in spite of my protective disinterest, I find myself in a sort of informational purgatory. I want to read reviews, partly because they will help me determine what I'm doing with me weekend, and partly because I'm bored. Partly because while I'm not invested in the movie per se, I'm invested in my prediction that Baz Luhrmann is a good match for the source material, and I want to find out if people agree with me. All this in spite of knowing full well the aggregate reviews of this movie will be useless. 25% of viewers will hate Baz Luhrmann on principle. 25% of viewers will hate Leonardo DiCaprio on principle. 25% of viewers will want to flaunt their literacy by complaining about how the movie missed the spirit of the book. 25% of viewers will love it as empty audiovisual spectacle. 25% of viewers will be convinced that Gatsby and Daisy are a love story for the ages, no matter how shallow and awful they are supposed to be.
So we'll see. Or, anyway, I probably will.
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