The Rifle in Your Hand: Confronting Audience and Adaptation in Response to “Jarhead,” Part II
15 November 2005
In my short time writing about film and my lifetime talking about it, I have tried as best I can to never compare a film to the book on which it was based. At least when reviewing it. "Oh, the book was better," the adage has come to say, and in the words of comedian Jim Gaffigan, "You know what I liked about the movie? No reading."
I make this forward claim because, as art forms, film and literature are about as similar as an elephant is similar to a freight train. They both move, and when they are moving, you do not want to be in their way (rather, you should be on board for the ride). But beyond that, they do not have much in common.
So which between literature and film is the elephant – the living, breathing, emotive force – and which the train – requiring an engineer, a gauge, a railyard, a traffic controller, a crew of maintenance men, and, indeed, a passenger to move anywhere (but when it moves, does it ever move)?
A discussion of the book-to-film film review is timely for two reasons: "Pride and Prejudice" and "Harry Potter." Both literary phenomenons. Both (re)appearing on screen soon. In fact, "Pride and Prejudice" (Joe Wright, 2005) is already out.
Jane Austen’s novels have at best a tenuous relationship with American cinema. While they have been a mainstay of the BBC – "Pride and Prejudice" first appearing on television in Britain in 1938 – they first surged in Hollywood in the late ‘90s thanks to financial backing from classically minded production houses like Columbia and Miramax; the latter, according to Peter Biskind’s book "Down and Dirty Pictures," "mined Jane Austen like a truffle-sniffing pig." Hence, "Persuasion" (Roger Michell, 1995), "Sense and Sensibility" (Ang Lee, 1995), "Emma" (Douglas MacGrath, 1996), and "Mansfield Park" (Patricia Rozema, 1999). To the moneymen who made them, these films were financial guarantees, thanks, it seems, to Austen’s presence in high school English classes across the nation. The films also had an outside shot at claiming critical recognition or Oscar nominations, mostly for their period-ness, notable among them Emma Thompson’s Oscar for best screenplay for "Sense and Sensibility."
In short, Jane Austen movies tend to serve as filler – "Masterpiece Theater-style, Oscar-grabbing" filler, says Biskind – plugging a production company’s financial and scheduling holes. The current "Pride and Prejudice" was made by London-based Working Title Films (a subsidiary of Universal) and released by Focus Features (independent films wing of Universal) on Nov. 11 alongside "Zathura" (Jon Favreau), "Derailed" (Mikael Hafstrom), and "Get Rich or Die Tryin’" (Jim Sheridan), for example. Wright’s film will get a wider release the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, but, simply, November is a month of water tredders and disappointments before the contenders come out pre-Christmas. Focus’ real Oscar hopeful – Ang Lee’s much ballyhooed "Brokeback Mountain"(2005), winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival – will be released Dec. 9, against "The Chronicles of Narnia" (Andrew Adamson, 2005). Universal, meanwhile, will release Steven Spielberg’s next film, "Munich," two days before Christmas.
The point is, given the role of Austen films as surefire money winners – but not so sure that they can slip into a Christmas slot – how does one begin, at all, to talk about "Pride and Prejudice"s writing? Isn’t there something more at stake here than values of artistic representation: the commodification of classic literature? Must we only focus on how well the movie transposes the book?
Apparently, yes. "Joe Wright’s ‘Pride and Prejudice’ is the best Jane Austen adaptation ever to hit the big screen," says Glenn Whipp’s four-star review in the Los Angeles Daily News. "Even the most rabid Janeites must allow that director Joe Wright, 33, has given Austen's novel a beguilingly youthful spin without compromising the novel's late-eighteenth-century manners," says Peter Travers in Rolling Stone (begging the question, does a director have to be young to be youthful?) On the other hand, Anthony Lane says in the New Yorker, "Any resemblance to scenes and characters created by Miss Austen is, of course, entirely coincidental."
I will not weigh in any more than I generally have on these critics’ claims, as I have not yet seen Wright’s film. I will instead turn the discussion to the other hot book-become-movie: "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" (Mike Newell, 2005). The film is set to be released in a scant three days (so there goes "Pride and Prejudice"s Thanksgiving Day money) and I am preparing for the most vehement discussions of film choice versus book detail since... well, the last "Harry Potter" movie.
The night I saw "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban" (Alfonso Cuaron, 2004) – incidentally, opening night, June 4 – I instantly considered it the best "Harry Potter" film made. In the discussions that followed – personally with friends, mentally with critics, globally with Harry Potter nation – I was inspired to write this argument the night of June 26, 2004, unpublished until now:
Cuaron has done something interesting with his treatment of Harry Potter: he has made it his own text, and not an illustrated version of the book. For if it is an illustrated Harry Potter we want, or a moving Spiderman or even and illustrated Troy, why do we not do the simplest thing imaginable? Why do we not open a book? Instead, what Cuaron has done is make a Harry Potter text unconcerned with Harry Potter. Die-hards do not like it because he rejects the very foundation on which they base his film's success: its commitment to Rowling's original. Instead, he makes Harry Potter his own story, creating characters with identities unsupported by the novel's pages, with locations unseen in Chris Columbus' first two films, and with a plot that indeed neglects to mention all of the little details; certainly, the importance of Padfoot and Prongs may have colored the film – as it colors the page – but it does not prevent the film from standing on its own terms. And the film has its own filmic terms that are part of cinema's language and foreign to Rowling's medium. I am, of course, referring to the repeated images of clocks, of the giant swinging pendulum, of faces in windows that foreshadow the ice of the Dementors, and, most cinematically, of his iris-based transitions, all which compact the film into a visual story as fluent and authored as the "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban" that appears on the page. That Cuaron's visual story did not match the various viewers' mental pictures is where he goes wrong. But how could he go right? With such a Harry Potter culture, how could anyone go right? We live in a society of Harry Potter scholars, and those who went to Azkaban without having read the books went with friends who could fill in the details – often without being asked – and those who did not go at all are forced to hear about it from their Harry Potter friends who did.
In short, I could not believe that anyone would fault Cuaron’s film simply for being a film, with neither the space nor the kinds of narrative tools available to authors to delve deeply into the internal lives and minds of their characters. It is the opinion I still have of "Azkaban" and plan on applying to "Goblet of Fire." It is the stand I continue to make.
A film should not be – and in my mind, cannot be – weighted against the book on which it was based. They are different mediums, with different rules, devices, methods of creation, possibilities for exploration, histories, reputations, and, generally, audiences. The problem lies in the desire for filmmakers and producers to create films-for-profit based on highly coveted books and the resulting inability of the people who covet those books to forget the novel once the films’ first images roll.
Therefore, one should never say, "why didn’t the director add that detail?," " "in the book, it was this way, which made this make more sense," "you had to know this from the book to really get at that," and so on. The film – as well as the book – should be able to stand on its own. If the book cannot, it will never be made into a film. If the film cannot, it lacks the detail or the effectiveness of filmmakers. Thus, when it comes to reviewing, books and movies should never be mixed. The one is separate and dissimilar to the other. The elephant and the freight train.
With that lengthy discussion and disclaimer, I will now, in the next few paragraphs, break that rule. For a purpose: to get at a larger question, "why didn’t a film work?"
This question brings us back – finally, fitfully – to "Jarhead" (Sam Mendes, 2005). In part I of this series, I wrote that "Jarhead" did not work because it refused to take a stand, one way or the other, on pressing issues surrounding war. That review never mentions the book. This review will.
"Jarhead," Anthony Swofford’s first novel, was published in 2003 by Scribner. Immediately likened to such literary works as "Black Hawk Down," "A Rumor of War," "Catch-22," and "The Things They Carried," "Jarhead" became a bestseller and, according to the paperback edition’s cover, an international sensation. Swofford himself became, in the words of my creative writing mentor from Ohio State, Michelle Herman, "one of those hip, young writers."
I had the pleasure and the honor of hearing Swofford read at a "non-partisan," get-out-the-vote rally in Columbus, Ohio, prior to the Bush-Kerry election (the event was, in fact, wonderfully partisan. Try to guess which one). In keeping with the spirit of the event and the other readers – "hip, young authors" Dave Eggers, Stephen Elliott, Julie Orringer, Jim Shepard, and Vendela Vida – Swofford read a short story about his first experiences voting, deciding whether or not to chose the Republican candidate (Reagan) simply because Swofford planned to join the Marines. Swofford the man struck me as highly intelligent, wildly engaging, deviously articulate, and physically large. His writing I admired so much that I bought his book in the lobby during intermission. I immediately read it, cherished it (so much so that I gave it to my brother as a Christmas present). I considered it brilliant.
Fast forward a year and a month, and we have a film version of the book, which I consider less than brilliant.
I cannot deny that my admiration of the book exacerbated, perhaps, my disinclination for the movie, once I decided I did not like the movie. I can, however, write with complete honesty that I did as much as I could to enter the theater with an open and receptive mind. At that point, as Emerson says, "the picture waits for my verdict: it is not to command me, but I am to settle its claims to praise."
So, why didn’t the picture work when the book did?
First, the book undoubtedly takes a stand. "The warrior always fights for a sorry cause," Swofford wrote, in a passage I quote often now. "And if he lives, he tells stories."
Second – and more open to interpretation, deliberation, debate, and second-guessing – the narrative of the book is broken up; i.e. rather than writing chronologically, Swofford directs his reader throughout time, from Swofford’s home in California after he has left the Corps to a war zone Saudi desert to boot camp to the death of spotter Troy and the ensuing bar fight back to the desert and so forth. The result: clarity within an unclear progression. Swofford’s disenchantment and in some sense disinheritance with the Marine Corps develops in relation to his experiences in war, his responses as a result of the war and his training, and the characters that surround him in both situations. All of that is juxtaposed by chapter throughout the book.
Mendes’ film is told chronologically, from boot camp to sniper training to the desert and back home. The "back home," so pivotal to the book that the first chapter and several subsequent and lengthy chapters are devoted to it, constitutes no more than two minutes of montage literally an afterthought on to the end of the film. The montage’s only point, it seems, is to show the dead spotter Troy, and the film actually ends with a quote repeated from the film’s beginning, that the hands of the soldier who has held and fired a rifle never forget the feel of that rifle. Whatever point the montage was meant to make is therefore left ambiguous: is it good or bad that the soldier still feels the rifle?
As far as can be gleaned from still fresh production notes, Swofford himself had no hand in adapting "Jarhead" to the screen. Mendes and company instead relied on a script by veteran screenwriter William Broyles, Jr., whose previous adaptations include "The Polar Express" (Robert Zemeckis, 2004), "Planet of the Apes" (Tim Burton, 2001), and "Apollo 13" (Ron Howard, 1995).
Should Mendes and/or Broyles have kept "Jarhead" so much in the spirit of its original text that it keeps the same narrative format? Certainly not. As I have said, literature and film are two different arts. Where a book might be able to effectively juxtapose large jumps in time, a film might not.
Rather, the filmmakers have only the responsibility to stay true to the tenor of their base material, to make sure that the film makes the same statements as whatever arts piece was good enough to inspire the film to be made in the first place (unless, of course, the director purposefully wishes to change the themes of his material, at which point, the title should not be allowed to remain the same). One would think that coveting a book so much that investing $72 million (the budget of "Jarhead") to put it on screen for whatever reward – larger audience, broader artistic interpretation, monetary returns, gold statuettes – would dictate such artistic responsibility.
But perhaps not. "Jarhead" the movie did not work. It does not take a stand and, moreover, comes off as a sort of Cliffs Notes version of the book on screen, showing only the most gruesome or controversial highlights: the bashing of heads into the wall, pointing live weapons at fellow soldiers, extensive discussions of masturbation. The film did not have the soul or tenor of the material on which it was based. Nor did it have the same courage.
A final question, then: should "Jarhead" have been made into a movie at all? Would it have been better to leave well enough – indeed, financial and critical success – alone? That I will not answer, because as long as people finance several movies a year, and as long as those people want a return on their investment, the movie-going audience can be assured of one thing: it will always get Jane Austen in November.