"Whattodowheretogohowtodowithoutyou?
You're-my-pole-star!"
Caravan Palace - Jolie Coquine
Watching the first half of the latest Dune movie, I was reminded of one difficulty in adapting the book. A disproportionate slice of its events are interpreted through omniscient narration of various characters' internal monologue, especially Paul's. Think of scenes like the vision after his and Jessica's escape. It's not so much the event itself as an intelligent, highly educated young man's awareness of its implications that lends it its gravitas, that ego-effacing triskelion of convoluted cross-purposes and pitfalls, of being turned into a channel for the flow of history against one's will, of standing on the brink of apotheosis and at the same time a potential end to all that has been. I won't deny young Timmy Shammy's a durn fine thesspeen and did what he could with it, but the scene simply does not work in film. Instead of momentous, it feels dragging. Certainly you're not left with the spine-tingling impression of having just witnessed the story's cusp, and in turn that lack saps subsequent chapters of much of the change in tone beyond "ah crap, dad's dead" or a change of palace/sietch scenery. Yet trying to convey visually the verbal description of Paul's inner realizations would not only eat up screen time but turn the scene into a truly Lynchian acid trip. (And that's what the water of life scene is for.)
But other alterations can be excused far less readily. Take for instance excising Princess Irulan's epigraphs and replacing them with Chani's cheekbones for the sake of shilling the pop tart. Irulan's narration helps not only foreshadow coming chapters but contextualize the story's conflict in historical terms, not merely as the aimless lurching and clashing of hordes of brainwashed simpletons but as the informed machinations of superior intellects within a sophisticated social milieu. And in this case, they could easily have been overlaid on establishing shots as voiceovers.
In other adaptations (sticking with good ones) even omissions minor in length lose their justification for the original passage's illustrative scope.
Unlike some, I never saw much problem with leaving Tom Bombadil out of The Lord of the Rings, he mostly serving to work up the fairytale atmosphere without plot tie-ins. I did lament removing the entire greater Old Forest / Barrow Downs sequence, which presaged both the ents and wraiths of later chapters and showed the wide reach of evil in Middle-Earth, and let the hobbits earn their plot-critical shortswords. Worse yet: leaving out the dunedain. Aragorn
is not only the son of Arathorn, not merely royal brat #594 riding into
town on his high-horse and demanding a throne jus' 'cuz, but the latest leader of a
millennium-running guerilla resistance movement. Gathered support from his northern kinsmen cemented the good guys' historical, geographic and political continuity. Replacing them with a random visit from a lone Elrond not only came across as... a bit goofy... but partly restricted the scope from Tolkien's more mature worldbuilding approach toward a standard power fantasy adventure wherein designated heroes save the world.
Or take as another example Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, set in a world experiencing at least partial ecosystem collapse - hence the title, artificial pets having become a luxury item as more species die off. Blade Runner pretty much ignored that angle, but I've always been irked by the loss of a very minor scene in which a tiny spider futilely struggles to bite through human skin. The various juxtapositions of human/android/animal interactions set up a creeping existential dread backed by "as above, so below" comparisons* largely absent from the more character-centered movie... albeit partly compensated by Rutger Hauer's inspired rewrite of his final speech.
While we're on PKD and creepy-crawlies, Linklater's otherwise excellent adaptation of A Scanner Darkly left out the recounting of a sexy chick who'd rallied three male junkies to her apartment to rescue her from a bug invasion. Though eager to get in her good graces (and pants) they protest the singular bug in question is harmless. Her reply "If I had known it was harmless I would have killed it myself" becomes a lynchpin of the novel's attempt to humanize addicts in comparison to nominally healthy, mockingbird-slaying human psychology. Given the exchange's brevity and its reflection on the rest of the story (hint: where else does the word "harmless" show up?) was it not more plot-relevant than the sex scene?
Sometimes changes truly are warranted by the medium. The Road was brilliant in both book and movie form, but the book winds up with a passage which never fails to bring a tear to my eye:
"Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You
could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of
their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your
hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were
vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps
and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right
again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man
and they hummed of mystery."
I don't care how many screenwriting/directorial awards you've won, I give you little chance of doing that paragraph justice on screen. It was replaced, however, in poignant fashion, with the screen fading to black and fading in aural ambiance evoking a different brand of irreparable loss of the mundane. A well-conceived and well-executed compromise.
But more often than not, such changes are simply concessions to the movie-going public's presumed mental feebleness compared to the page-flipping public. Innumerable books' nuance or emotive punch has been sapped by a Hollywood happy sappy ending. Even when the ending itself is not ruined, its setup still can be. The classic adaptation of H.G. Wells' The Time Machine from 1960 omits a short episode after escaping the Morlocks. The traveler stops so far into the future that the Earth has become tidally locked with the Sun. No trace of civilization lingers, not even ruins. Along an endless, freezing beach naught survives but smears of planktonic scum and oversized, scavenging crabs. No sound greets him but the wind, and the chill of eternity encroaches ever closer. Faced with the futility and finality of existence, the time traveler hops back to his own time, to save the degenerate, yet cozily familiar and reassuring, Eloi. In the movie version, omission of the final shore leaves the impression of a hero rushing to the year 802,701 to lead a glorious rebellion of the meek against the predatory. But in the book this doubles as a retreat from ultimate reality. Is continuing the good fight a quixotic limitation of human intellect then? The vapid gesticulations of a short-lived and short-sighted ape incapable of grasping the fullness of its own place in infinity? Or a humble admission of same limitation and resolution to work within one's means? And why is this added layer presumed off-limits to the payer of a ten-dollar movie ticket yet not a ten-dollar novel?
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* I still maintain PKD hit that theme more solidly in his best story, Second Variety.
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