Don’t Make My Classics Toothless, Please
This is So Wrong. A movie adaptation of The Bell Jar, with Julia Stiles seeking to make the story less depressing.
Thus begins The Bell Jar, a novel whose film adaptation Julia Stiles will star in and produce. Sylvia Plath’s 1950s-era drama centers around Esther Greenwood, who - while spending a summer in Manhattan - grows troubled and eventually descends into mental illness, attempting suicide several times. She likens her depression to being trapped under a bell jar, struggling for breath…this is a dark novel, exploring the dark side of the human psyche. Yet according to Variety, Stiles wants to make the film…lighthearted, and keep focus on the more uplifting elements. Celine Rattray, of Plum Pictures (attached to produce the film with Stiles), says “Esther Greenwood has a strong outlook on life, and we’re really looking to bring out the humor in the character. We don’t want to do a depressing descent into the world of suicide.” (Gothamist)
Christ, pass the razor blades. How exactly is Julia-frocking-Stiles going to make electroshock “uplifting”? Call the Clue Police, because someone’s Clue Bag has gone missing.
I don’t mind movie adaptations of books. Really, I don’t. But egregious betrayal of the very core reason and theme of a book? That I mind. Like Reese Witherspoon trying to make Becky Sharp more sympathetic. Or Keira Knightley trying to make Elizabeth Bennet a 90s woman. (Maybe it was just her bee-stung, solo-zip-code lips.) And how about those bad comic-book adaptations? (I’m looking at YOU, Ben Affleck. Daredevil was an abomination of a character I loved.)
But then again, I’m a geek.
Classics are classics because they have teeth. To pull those teeth in order to make a classic “more accessible” or “less harsh” is a violation of the very soul of the work. Can you imagine Tale of Two Cities without the threat of the guillotine? Or Count of Monte Cristo without the pathological hatred, class warfare, and opium? Can one imagine Pride and Prejudice without a stiff-necked Darcy and a stubborn 1800s Elizabeth? Or a Stephen King movie adaptation without rock music?
Hey. Shut up. I think King’s a modern classic, and you will not disabuse me of that notion.
The recent LOTR and Narnia movies kept some of the darkness of the books intact. They had bite–admittedly, in Narnia’s case, all provided by the glorious, incomparable Tilda Swinton. I remember going with my sisters to see Fellowship of the Ring and at the very end, letting out a pent breath. My sisters and I looked at each other, and in chorus we said, “At least it didn’t suck. Thank you, God.”
It’s hard to turn a book into a movie, Lord knows. But to compound the difficulty by trying to pull a classic book’s teeth in the process? That’s just stupid, and wrong, and will turn your movie into a flop faster than Uwe Boll can. It’s just ridiculous.
Part of the problem is, Hollywood is like the publishing industry. It is by default a more conservative beast, because the point is to make money and hence the things that made money in the past are trotted out again. Then you add in the process of making a movie or a book proposal by committee, and you have a piece of work that is seriously watered-down before you even begin.
Conservatism isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I tend to think it creates a counterweight to mad bounding forward that can run one straight into a wall. But too much ballast just makes constipation, and bloat ensues.
Really. *chuckles to self* Trying to make The Bell Jar uplifting. What next? Trying to make Oliver Twist an action flick? Or how about making The Scarlet Letter an HEA? Oooh, or turning Moby Dick into a stirringly-uplifting Gone With The Wind romance with a double-wedding ending and some Bollywood musical numbers?
*stares aghast into space*
I think I need to go back to bed.
