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Saturday, March 06, 2010

Alice in Hollyland

I read two reviews of Tim Burton’s adaptation of Alice in Wonderland. The official site describes it as a “magical and imaginative twist” on the original.

I have no inherent objection to a creative reinterpretation of a classic. There is, however, a reason why a classic is a classic in the first place.

Due to advances in CGI, we are now able to make accurate, cinematic adaptations of certain classics in the science fiction and fantasy genre. To put on the screen what the author saw in his head. Alice in Wonderland is a case in point.

Before we reinterpret a classic, it would be nice to first see a faithful adaptation of the original. An adaptation which closely follows the original.

After that, it’s fine if a gifted director wants to use the original as a launchpad to give the story his own creative twist.

But the temptation to modernize a classic reflects a lack of historical curiosity. A lack of basic curiosity in other people, times, and places. Instead, it becomes a transcript or allegory of the director’s own life and times. Of the people he knows, the places he likes. Alice in Hollywood.

I don’t mean to suggest that Burton’s adaptation is a bad film. It may be an excellent film in its own right. But I’m just struck by the lack of interest in the original.

One of the striking things about modern archeology and the age of exploration was the xenophilic fascination of British, American, and European adventurers in exotic or ancient cultures. The irony of outsiders who took more interest in vanished civilizations than the locals. Who made the effort to decipher ancient languages and excavate buried civilizations.

Why are Hollywood directors so insular?

The literary Alice is a preadolescent girl. Probably an amalgam of real girls that Dodgson knew.

The literary Alice is one of the great female characters in world literature. And Dodgson’s two classics allegorize the long-lost world of Victorian Oxford.

Why is that of no interest to Burton?

To turn her into a 19-year-old superheroine destroys the inimitable charm of the original character. That’s the stuff of formulaic teen dramas. High school in Wonderland.

Does this reflect the secularization of our own society–especially among the cultural elite? Put another way, I wonder if the previous interest in peoples and cultures other than our own doesn’t reflect a Christian outlook.

When you study the Bible you enter a vanished world. To be missionary you immerse yourself in a foreign culture.

Christianity is outward-looking. But with the loss of Christian vision, the social circle contracts. We retreat into our xenophobic cubicles.

6 comments:

  1. I'm frustrated that Hollywood filmmakers *never* want to make a faithful adaptation of the literary stories they adopt. It seems like narcissism to believe that they can "improve" on the originals.

    As I watched, for instance, Peter Jackson's adaptation of Lord of the Rings, I frequently thought to myself "Jackson clearly thinks he is more clever than Tolkien in inserting these gross departures from the book." No doubt these departures were to make the film more dramatic, action-packed, and sexy. Too often the result was only to make the movies more childish and cartoonish. Indeed, as one critic said, "Peter Jackson has a nine-year-old's understanding of Tolkien." These departures were modifications, not adaptations of the books.

    No doubt that movie adaptations will always involve compromises, omissions, condensations, and so forth to bring the written story to the screen in a practical manner. But I can think of only one movie I have seen that does this without altering the main plot points or major details: Ron Howard's Apollo 13, which is an adaption of Jim Lovell's "Lost Moon". The only change from the book I detected was the addition of one sub-plot (spanning only a single scene). Everything else, down to very specific, technical minutiae - alarm lights and buttons the actors pressed in the spacecraft - was accurate.

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  2. I agree with your sentiments, David. But if I may don my fiction hat for a moment, there is a huge difference between screen writing and novel writing, to such an extent that for the average story it will be impossible to get anywhere near a 1:1 correlation. A large part of this is due to length. For a screenplay, there is a rough correlation between number of pages and the minutes of the movie. That is, a 120 page script will take about 120 minutes (2 hours). And this figure is based on the properly formatted screenplay too. To put it into perspective, a short novel begins at 50,000 words. A 120 page screenplay could have fewer than 10,000 words in it.

    The only way to really get a novel into a movie form without losing *ANYTHING* is to do so in the form of a miniseries. But audiences are not going to go to the theater and sit through 6 hour long movies (nor are theaters going to play it, when they can only sell one ticket for six hours instead of selling three tickets showing a two-hour long movie during that same span).

    Additional limitations include the fact that in novels you can have access to character's thoughts, which cannot be done in movies (except with cheesy narrators doing voice overs); and going the other way, you can see instantly on screen what takes a page to describe in the novel. The two mediums are quite different for conveying a story, and the fact remains that certain things do not transcribe across no matter how good you are at adapting films from movies.

    The upshot of this is that, IMO, books will nearly *ALWAYS* be better than movies, no matter how far movie technology advances. The only time the book will be worse is if the novelist is of poor quality to begin with (one example is "Forrest Gump" which is a much better movie than book). But sadly, it does mean your frustration over Hollywood directors never being faithful to the original text is going to be an eternal frustration.

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  3. Correction: "no matter how good you are at adapting films from movies" was meant to be "adapting films from novels." I blame Bush for this error.

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  4. I've been particularly annoyed at the over-promotion of Johnny Depp with this movie. It's possible the Mad Hatter has a much bigger role in this adaptation than in the book, but I doubt he has a bigger role than Alice; and the posters and trailers I've seen are covered with his name and image, not hers. I'm hoping this was just a typical marketing ploy of playing up the star factor and getting the not inconsiderable Depp-fan demographic, not a hint that Alice is going to be an ancillary character in her own story.

    I disagree with this statement, though:

    "Due to advances in CGI, we are now able to make accurate, cinematic adaptations of certain classics in the science fiction and fantasy genre. To put on the screen what the author saw in his head."

    We can certainly make films that aren't technically limited in depicting the director's interpretation of what the author saw in his head, but that's as far as it goes. No film will be an "accurate", as in objective, translation of a book. In terms of plot, the Disney Alice in Wonderland is a lot closer than Burton's, but I wouldn't be surprised if Burton captured the LSD non-sequiterish offbeat spirit of Lewis Carroll's imagination far more closely.

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  5. I thought Jackson improved on the Tolkien novels simply by not forcing us to put up with Tom Bombadil but I seem to be in a minority that thinks the Tolkien novels are seriously over-rated both as literature and as philosophy. Then again, I like Batman comic books so I'd rather say that I just don't quite get the appeal of Tolkien than to say he's a "bad" writer the way some of my college profs did.

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  6. I thought Jackson improved on the Tolkien novels simply by not forcing us to put up with Tom Bombadil but I seem to be in a minority that thinks the Tolkien novels are seriously over-rated both as literature and as philosophy. Then again, I like Batman comic books so I'd rather say that I just don't quite get the appeal of Tolkien than to say he's a "bad" writer the way some of my college profs did.

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