If John Waters Could Only Save One Film…
John Waters is so damn enthusiastic about art that you can just wind him up and watch him go.
Just before Christmas last year I had the chance to chat with everyone’s favourite dirty uncle of cult cinema, and there’s a lengthy chunk of the interview now online.
Even when I haven’t thought much of one or two of John Waters’ films, I’ve always admired him for how excited he remains about other artists’ work, and not just his own. Film, theatre, fine art, you name it. So in the grand tradition of the Heathers lunchtime poll I asked him the following: if 1950s-style aliens arrived on earth to destroy all our movies and you could only save one film, what would it be?
His reply: Boom!
It’s the best failed art film ever. Elizabeth Taylor plays Sissy Goforth and Richard Burton plays the Angel of Death, a gigolo who comes to live with rich ladies before they die. It is staggering to see this movie. I could watch it over and over and shout out all the dialogue. It has Richard Burton saying for no apparent reason: “Boom… the sound of knowing the next moment you’re alive…”
(He gave me some good advice about surviving Christmas, too. While he loves it, he said he “understands people hating it. I think the biggest mistake you can make about Christmas is ignoring it.” Next Christmas, as Stephen Colbert would say: pick a side! We’re at war!)
Go read it, because he’s awesome. There’s some more of the our conversation – including why he thinks the Marquis de Sade is more famous than the Beatles – in the latest jmag.
I think the biggest mistake you can make about Christmas is ignoring it.
Congratulations And Mystery Packages
This will be an entirely content-free review. Even though Matt DeBenedictis’ Congratulations! There’s No Last Place if Everyone is Dead is only two dozen pages long, I still haven’t managed to read it yet. What I wanted to share is this pictorial lesson in how to make me excited about your self-published chapbook.
Send me a mysterious package tied with yellow string and sealed with wax.
Fill said package not only with your book, but with an audio CD, some instant coffee, and a handful of Yo! MTV Raps trading cards.
Include reading instructions, after presumably intuiting that, yes, I am easily confused.
Make me feel like I’m a unique snowflake. (Happy star optional.)
See? It’s that easy. Now I can’t wait to read the book inside. I just hope it lives up to the genuinely gleeful experience I had unwrapping it. You can read more about it at the Outside Writers Collective.
Adaptations: What’s The Point?
That’s not a snarky internet question, a la “is it actually possible for you to be any more stupid than you are right now?” I mean it. Because about halfway through John Hillcoat’s faithful-as-possible version of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, I suddenly couldn’t stop wondering: what’s the point of a film adaptation of a book?
I don’t mean for the film studios, because for them the point is the Daffy Duck-style dollar signs appearing in their eyes. A quick calculation by SlashFilm found that only two of the top 30 grossing films of last decade were original stories: Finding Nemo and Kung Fu Panda. Adaptations are great business decisions. They come pre-hyped, risk-reduced, and with a built-in audience ranging from curious onlookers to rabid fans.
And if you haven’t read the book in question? You probably don’t care where it came from. You might feel some of the pitfalls of books-to-film adaptation – too many characters, bloated running times, plot points stuffed in until the screenplay is oddly shapeless – but you might not.
No, I’m talking about the specific sensation of watching a faithful adaptation of a book you’ve already read. For example: you couldn’t say Hillcoat’s The Road is a bad movie. In many ways, it’s great, and some of the problems I had with it were those I already had with the source material. (Yes, I’m someone who thinks that the ending is a cheat, and one that’s almost on par with “he woke up and it was all a dream…”)
I’m a book-rereader and a movie-rewatcher, so it’s not knowing what’s going to happen that bothers me. The movie of The Road was faithful enough that I knew how it would happen, too.
I’ve ranted before about how movies like Watchmen suffered from too much fidelity, and would’ve been better served by taking more chances. That would help make them more medium-specific, but it’d also give them more of a reason to exist in the first place. With comic book adaptations, it’s not enough to just get to see the pictures move. With adaptations of a novel like The Road, it’s not enough – for me, at least – to create a visual landscape that matches the one the prose planted in my head.
(Which the movie did, without doubt. It’s one of the most convincing apocalypses ever put on screen.)
So: what’s the point? Is it to have an excuse to enjoy the story again? To see how it matches against what flickered in your imagination as you were reading? To spot the small, inevitable changes to the narrative? To hear how the dialogue sounds, spoken out loud? Is it curiosity about whether or not the movie got it ‘right’? Or that the movie experience is an upgrade, flat-out superior to the one offered by a novel?
Or are the two mediums so different that you don’t feel redundancy in even the most faithful adaptation – and I should just shut up about it?
Jack Bauer Vs. Wolverine Vs. Well-Deserved Peace
Poor Jack Bauer. He managed to snatch less than ten minutes of grandfatherly bliss – in real time, no less – during the season premiere of 24 this week. Unsurprisingly, he was then dragged back into the hyper-violent patriotism that makes the show a hit.
Jack’s fate is typical of how the never-ending stories of TV series and comic books guarantee these violent heroes will never know peace for more than a few minutes or pages at a time. At the end of 24’s (admittedly terrible) season six, Jack Bauer had had enough. After all these years of torture and gunplay, he wanted his “life back”. He was told in no uncertain terms:
“Jack, simply getting your life back isn’t gonna change who you are… and you can’t walk away from it. You know that. You’ve tried it. Sooner or later you’re gonna get back in the game…”
We’ve seen this in endless Hollywood Westerns: the hero, the only one capable of Doing What Must Be Done, has to walk away from the domestic life he dearly desires. In 1992, Clint Eastwood’s meta-mythic Unforgiven bundled up every cowboy he’d ever played into the story of William Munny, dragged inexorably away from his family and back to the gun. The coda says that he returned home, sure, but I’m not entirely sure we’re meant to believe it.
At least once the credits roll, William Munny’s story comes to an end. While ratings hold, Jack doesn’t have the same option to put down his gun. Somehow I don’t think Jack Bauer: Kindly Grandpa has the same network appeal. (Opening voiceover: “The following visit to the zoo takes place between 11am and 12pm.”)
It’s worse for violent comic book characters – and aren’t they all? Wolverine, for example, is basically immortal. His mutant healing factor keeps him in fighting shape, year after year, so he looks just the same now as he did fighting in World War II. In New X-Men #148 (2003), there’s an example of how all this death has taken its toll. “All I’m good for’s killing,” Logan thinks at the telepathic Jean Grey. “If you knew what I was, you’d hate me.”
Recently, he too had a moment of peace, albeit in a story called ‘Old Man Logan‘ set in a grim possible future. And he was older, too, finally, a grey-haired pacifist and family man. But – you guessed it – he was forced away from his spartan home for one last job. It’s an utterly shameless steal of Unforgiven, except with all Eastwood’s well-earned heartbreak replaced with pointless Marvel Comics trivia for long-term fans. I don’t think William Munny would approve.
Back in regular comic book continuity, the needs of the status quo have been crueller to Wolverine than most. After his debut in 1974, he seemed to be on a decades-long character arc to a better place. He turned from an amnesiac, animalistic killer to a more noble sort of warrior: self-controlled, samurai-influenced, and even a mentor to young X-Men like Kitty Pride. Wolverine’s readers don’t want to give up their favourite hack ‘n’ slash antihero, though, so Logan is never allowed to put his berserker rage behind him once and for all.
But Jack Bauer’s lack of a mutant healing factor is, in fact, his secret weapon. Day by day, his mortal host – Kiefer Sutherland – is getting older. At some point, suspension of disbelief will snap and he’ll be judged too decrepit to be kicking ass on 24. Only then Jack will get some well-deserved peace.