Here’s
a pitch:
“She
walks like a man. She talks like a man. She wears a man’s clothes, although
they barely conceal the voluptuous curves beneath. Call her Ishmael? Call her
Male-ish. She steers a
harpoon boat by day and shows the other harpooneers who’s boss. She sneers at
rules: she’s a maverick, sailing close to the wind of insubordination. Together
with her crewmates, Goose and Iceman, she courts trouble at the hands of the
brooding and darkly-handsome one-legged ship’s captain. Will he curb her wanton
waywardness? Or will she unleash his repressed passion and join him in command
of the harpooning teams? Or will their turbulent love send them crashing on the
rocks? Oh, and there’s a whale in here somewhere, too…”
Too
much? How about this:
“Forensic
IRS investigator, Agent Eyre, is on the case. Her target is Rock Chester, CEO
of the corporation which bears his name. Warrant in hand, she gains access to
his inner sanctum, a cool world of hi-tech security and glass surfaces in his towering,
phallic skyscraper. For years he’s been declaring mysterious dependents on his
tax returns – dependents not seen by anyone, anywhere. Are they real? Or is
this the tip of some pyramidal scam with tentacles reaching who-knows-where?
And what about all the shady expenses at strip-joints and payments for high-class
hookers? Is he the victim of darkly lustful desires, or is he really “saving”
these women as he declares? And what really
happened to his enigmatic wife, the brilliant explosives expert reportedly lost
in an ambitious experiment-gone-wrong in the penthouse suite? Jane’s on the
case… if she can just keep her mind off Rock’s chiselled torso…”
This,
it seems, is where we’ve come to. The classics are being re-created as vibes; as
content; as springboards for facile reinterpretation. Nowadays, it appears, it’s
enough to take the title of a classic novel and a surface understanding of the
events within, transform it into some multi-million-dollar, multi-hour
spectacle and call it a ‘faithful re-telling’. I thought del Toro’s “Frankenstein”
was on the nose, but now we have a modern ‘version’ of Wuthering Heights
which claims to hit all the markers when in fact it entirely misses the point.
There
is a plethora of books being pumped out at the moment and most of them – from what
I’ve been able to discern – are simply pitches, angling to be picked up for
visual treatment, rather than being considered works of fiction in their own
right. Everything is style over substance; flash over burn. I give you Joe
Abercrombie’s The Devils as Exhibit A. It feels as though we’re back in
the days when a movie executive could throw a well-known book at a producer,
whack a crowd-pleasing title on the project and expect it to fly. This is how Jane
Eyre got to be filmed as “I Walked with a Zombie”. I shit you not.
“Brooding, brilliant Victor abandons his offspring, declaring him a “monster” despite his tall, good looks, inventive mind and nurturing nature. As Enemies, they flee each other’s company, wandering a strangely-familiar world, while a tonne of janky costuming seems to imply that the lead actress is some kind of beetle. Finally, they meet to confront each other in an Arctic steamship, trapped in the ice, where – with the Captain acting as referee – they air their grievances, exchange forgiveness and part company, but not before freeing the ship from its icy embrace. Friends at last! Hooray!”
Books seem now to be nothing more than a series of tropes – Young Boy becomes a Hero; Enemies to Lovers - banged together to replace any sort of bothersome plot. Why have a narrative arc when you can just run a tried-and-true routine? Why not, when we know that movie-makers avidly avoid anything that hasn’t been done a million times in the past? Characters become ciphers; plot becomes expectation; climax is a well-anticipated dopamine hit. Nothing is new: everything arrives pre-chewed and without pesky surprises.
But
isn’t this what we want from our literary entertainment? Don’t we want
to shocked? Don’t we want to be delighted by the unexpected twist? The complexity
of character? The taut resolution of narrative threads? Or do we just want to
be sedated by the cozy sameness of reiterated pap?
If
it walks, quacks and shits like a duck…
And
now here’s a version of “Wuthering Heights” that has so little to do
with Emily Brontë’s novel that the movie insists upon the quotation
marks around the title to give it some plausible deniability. The director,
Emerald Fennell, is on record as saying that her interpretation is based upon
her recollections of the work upon reading it at the age of 14. I would argue
that being 14 would allow much of the novel’s subtlety to skate way over the
reader’s head, and maybe that is what Fennell is trying to capture here – a compete
misunderstanding of the text. She is additionally on record as declaring that
the book is “too complex” to be faithfully represented, and so her work must be
considered a ‘riff’ more than an interpretation. Suffice it to say that the
movie lumps a bunch of Romantasy tropes together with some sexual titillation and
fails to do any justice to the original. “Hey Emerald! Here’s a copy of A Throne
of Fire and Whimsy; make a film of that and call it… Hmmm, I don’t know, ‘Pride
and Prejudice’?” Ba-doom! Tish!
This
is quite obviously an attempt to make bank off the title of someone else’s better
work. And maybe that’s all anyone is asking these days.
If
the desired result of this project is that people talk it about it on social
media, then I’d say that they’ve achieved their goal, and then some. Personally,
I think it’s money and talent wasted. I’m imagining the pitch for this piece of
tinsel and I’m thinking it went something like this:
“Personal
ad: ‘Cathy, 15-year-old heiress, who likes shedding her clothes and rolling on
the dewy moors, seeks tall, hunky dude with similar interests for two-hours
plus of heavy breathing. Also, light bondage.’”
Can we get back to some real creation please, and less of this slop?
