Grumbling About Adaptations

The second season of the current INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE series has begun. I'm ambivalent about this project. It has lots to admire. The series format allows far more delving into and expansion on the novel than the movie did. The TV version restores the subplot of Louis's religiously devout brother, replaced in the movie by a simplistic premise of "my wife died young, so I have nothing to live for." Presenting the interviewer, hardly more than a boy in the book, as an aging, sickly, cynical veteran journalist revisiting his youthful conversations with Louis to set the record straight impresses me as a stroke of genius. Among other things, this technique cleverly justifies discrepancies between the novel and the new adaptation.

I dislike two major changes made by the series, however: First and less critical, the aging-up of Claudia from a little girl to a 14-year-old. Of course, the metafictional reason is obvious. A child actress would outgrow the role too fast, whereas Claudia is supposed to be frozen at the age when she was turned. But making her old enough to pass for late teens or even early twenties (though we haven't seen her do the latter) loses both the horrifying and tragic dimensions of an adult mind potentially stuck for centuries in a child's body. The preview of next week's episode, though, does show her exploiting that frightfully perverse situation as an actress in the Theatre des Vampires. She wears a frilly baby-doll costume and introduces herself as a murderous vampire trapped in the shape of a little girl.

More importantly, I was disappointed by the time shift. Sure, early 20th-century New Orleans has exciting possibilities as a setting, but so does antebellum New Orleans from the original source. Although the producers claim they didn't think audiences would find the early 19th century interesting or relatable, I suspect them of being too lazy or stingy to recreate the period. What, TV audiences didn't embrace GAME OF THRONES (medieval-style fantasy world) or OUTLANDER (mid- to late-18th century Scotland and America)? Antebellum New Orleans had a thriving "free colored" population (as richly portrayed in Barbara Hambly's Benjamin January historical mystery series). I would have loved to see Louis as a free Black businessman in that era. A fantastic opportunity wasted, in my opinion.

I recently read FRANKLY, MY DEAR, a film scholar's in-depth analysis of GONE WITH THE WIND, mostly the movie but with cogent comparisons to the novel as well. As epic movies go, this one mostly sticks about as close to the source material as could reasonably be expected in the allotted running time. A miniseries version, which would allow inclusion of the subplots left out of the movie, would be highly desirable -- except that it's hard to imagine a convincing new Scarlett with Vivian Leigh lingering in the audience's mind's eye. Not to mention Rhett Butler. (I didn't mind the replacement actress in the sequel, SCARLETT, because she's older there than in most of the novel, so it's believable that she would have changed some. Rhett, though -- to me, Rhett IS Clark Gable.) The censoring of language, required by the film code of that era, is more amusing than annoying. It's not as if we don't know what they really mean, and the director doubtless had to make concessions to earn Rhett's final "damn." For instance, Prissy can't say she'd be skinned alive for entering a "ho house"; she has to say something like "Miz Watling's place." The prudishness rises to a level of absurdity, though, when Scarlett banishes Rhett from her bedroom. In the book, he tells her, "Keep your chaste bed." In the film it's, "Keep your sanctity." A mention of chastity was considered obscene? LOL.

The one major change I disapprove of is the omission of Scarlett's first child, the boy fathered by ill-fated Charles Hamilton. We don't miss her daughter by Frank Kennedy, who's little more than a cipher in the novel anyway. But Scarlett's first pregnancy helps to explain how she could get through Melanie's rough delivery with only the dubious help of Prissy, who notoriously doesn't know anything about birthin' babies. In the real 19th century, well-to-do women often provided aid to poor families during occasions of sickness or childbirth, as Scarlett's mother does in GONE WITH THE WIND. Unlike Marmee in LITTLE WOMEN, however, Ellen O'Hara apparently shelters her daughters from such activities. So Scarlett's first pregnancy serves a plot purpose in the book, and its omission in the movie leaves her relative competence in the Atlanta childbirth sequence unexplained.

While I reluctantly realize that fiction and film are two different media and no movie or TV adaptation can capture everything in its source material, for me the book is always primary. When viewing a film version of a book, I want as faithful a rendition of the original as possible. For example, ROSEMARY'S BABY is practically perfect in that respect, and THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS comes close. The miniseries versions of WINDS OF WAR and WAR AND REMEMBRANCE (available on DVD) do an impressively good job, not surprising with a script written by the author of the novels, Herman Wouk. If the producers and directors of an adaptation don't really like the story as it comes to them, why do they bother making a movie or series of it? (Such as the travesty of STARSHIP TROOPERS, which lifts the title and superficial plot elements from Heinlein's novel to construct a script that leaves out the most important scenes of his book -- the flashbacks to the high-school ethics course, one fragment of which is included but twisted to convey the opposite of what's meant in the novel -- and directly contradicts its core message.) So the first thing I look for in a book-to-film transformation is respect for and maximum feasible fidelity to the author's story. After that, one hopes for all the other elements to be good, too.

Margaret L. Carter

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