Book-to-Film Problems

This post includes a bit of a spoiler about the Season Two premiere of OUTLANDER: BLOOD OF MY BLOOD.

"The book is always better than the movie." Well, not always. While I tend to agree in general, there are exceptions. Two prominent examples are THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER and ROSEMARY'S BABY, both satisfyingly faithful to their sources. SILENCE OF THE LAMBS is almost perfect but departs from the novel in a subtle shift of emphasis. It foregrounds Dr. Lecter more than Clarice Starling, mainly in the final scene. Although the movie is excellent, in my opinion, it's not quite the same as the novel. The wonderful Stephen King film SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION includes some justified minor deviations from the novella, such as merging the two wardens into one character, and an important one that disappointed me, the plot change that makes Andy more complicit in the warden's crimes than the original does. No adaptation of DRACULA, alas, has ever achieved the goal of complete fidelity, although the BBC miniseries with Louis Jourdan comes very close.

PRINCE CASPIAN is the most disappointing of the three big-screen Narnia films, not only because it unwisely rearranges the order of some events and inserts a completely unnecessary attack on Miraz's castle (which has no impact on the overall plot), but worst of all, it unpardonably distorts the portrayal of Peter's character.

The notoriously bad adaptation of WATCHERS, one of my favorite of Dean Koontz's books, repulsed me so thoroughly I gave up on it early in the film. The adult male protagonist of the novel encounters a friendly dog lost in the woods. The animal, genetically engineered to have almost human intelligence, has escaped from a secret lab. The newly bonded human-canine pair comes to the rescue of a shy young woman with whom a romance develops. Meanwhile, the government tries to track down and recapture the dog while another escaped beast, malevolent rather than kind and heroic, also pursues the dog. The movie changes this absorbing plot into a banal "boy and his dog" story. When one FBI agent, who's a sympathetic, reasonable authority figure in the novel, appeared as a total jerk in the film, I turned it off in disgust.

And I won't even get into the travesty of the movie version of Robert Heinlein's STARSHIP TROOPERS, except to mention that it follows the general outline of the book's plot while twisting it to convey the exact opposite of Heinlein's message.

The launch of the second season of OUTLANDER: BLOOD OF MY BLOOD brought this topic to mind for me. The storyline the writers have set up has an inherent problem that seems insoluble. As you may know, this prequel series deals with the parents of Jamie and Claire when the respective heroine and hero of the main series are a small child and a not yet born infant, respectively. There's no original source to follow; Gabaldon hasn't yet written her planned previous-generation book about the star-crossed lovers who will become the parents of Jamie. The problem lies with Claire's parents. The Outlander TV series, like Gabaldon's books, firmly states that this couple died in a car crash in Claire's early childhood. At this point, they've traveled through the standing stones to Scotland in 1715. Either they will get back to the twentieth century (Claire's father did so in the season premiere, but of course we don't know whether he'll stay there) or they'll settle down in the eighteenth century. They can't return to their own time and take up their former life, because that outcome would completely change Claire's timeline as it was already narrated in the main series. If they remain in the past, though, in the twentieth century we'd be left with a crashed car and no corpses. So how could Claire's uncle (who raises her) know for sure her parents are dead? The only explanation I can imagine is that, rather than upset her with a confusing story about her parents vanishing from the face of the earth, he allows her to grow up believing they died. In short, the creators of the TV program have written themselves into what strikes me as an inescapable trap.

Moral: If you want to adapt a novel or a book series into film, stick as close as practical to the source material! If you don't really like the original in the first place, why try to make a movie of it? (Granted, the latter doesn't apply to the Outlander prequel since, as mentioned, a print source doesn't exist yet.)

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

Language in Historical Fiction

I've just finished watching Season Four of THE CHOSEN, the streaming series about Jesus and his followers. (It seems likely the title refers to the latter.) I find it captivating, although naturally it's not perfect. In the first season, the Roman soldiers sometimes act like the Gestapo in a Nazi-occupied country, whereas from what I've read, the Roman occupation was more like the British Raj in India. The Pharisees are portrayed as if they wielded official authority, when in fact they were a self-appointed religious-political pressure group promoting strict observance of the Law. What the series brings to mind for me at the moment, though, are linguistic issues. How should characters in a historical novel or film talk in order to seem approachable by modern audiences yet also quasi-authentic or at least not blatantly anachronistic?

If a historical person's speech includes jarringly contemporary slang -- unless it's humorously meant as parody, of course -- it throws the reader or viewer out of the story. On the other hand, characters who speak "forsoothly" can feel emotionally distant rather than engaging. Worse, some writers have a tenuous grasp of archaic language and season their texts with random peppering of "thee," "-est," "-eth," etc., with no regard for the actual grammar of premodern English. Obsolete words can lend the narrative an authentic flavor but, if the meanings aren't obvious from context, may confuse the reader. I admire the way Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's Count Saint-Germain novels refer to clothing and some other everyday items by the terms used in the respective historical periods rather than substituting modern approximations. But, then, Yarbro is an expert with many decades of experience, and even so, I'm not always certain what a particular article of clothing looks like; her skill, fortunately, always gives the reader enough to go on with.

Then there's the issue of narrative and dialogue meant to be understood as translating from a foreign language. Some old war movies show enemy soldiers speaking with German accents, as if they're foreigners to themselves. The new miniseries adaptation of SHOGUN makes the bold decision to have Japanese dialogue spoken in that language with English subtitles, immersively realistic but rather demanding on the audience. The filmmakers do give us a rest by letting the European characters talk to each other in English when they're presumably speaking Portuguese. In my opinion, THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER made an excellent choice with scenes on the Russian submarine. For the first few minutes, the actors speak Russian with subtitles. Then we have a conversation when the captain (Sean Connery) is reading aloud from a book written in English. His spoken dialogue segues from Russian into English, and thereafter Russians talking among themselves do so in English "translation." When foreign languages in historical fiction are "translated" into English, as in most novels and movies, it seems appropriate to render casual speech from the supposed original language into colloquial modern English rather than making the characters talk in an unrealistically stilted, formal style. With one precaution -- the writer should take scrupulous care to avoid anachronistic references, such as metaphors based on technology that didn't exist in the particular past era, e.g., "like a broken record" before the 20th century. But how far should the dialogue go in the direction of informality to be accessible without the intrusion of jarringly modern slang?

I'm ambivalent about the way THE CHOSEN handles that question. Mostly I like the casual, colloquial dialogue, but sometimes the characters use trendy phrases that I think make them sound too much like contemporaries of our Gen-X children. I don't object to words such as "okay," though. That's been around since before the mid-19th century. As for accents, it puzzles me that the locals speak with what I guess is meant to be a Middle Eastern accent, again as if they're foreigners to themselves. Logically, the Jewish characters should speak unaccented English and the Romans, as the outsiders, should have an accent -- maybe a hint of Italian? I winced, by the way, when a Roman soldier stumbles over the name "Peter." It's Greek, the common language of the eastern Roman empire; of course he would know it means "rock"! (Furthermore, for maximum realism the disciples should address Peter by the Aramaic word for rock, Cephas.)

The regional and class issue should also be taken into account, in my opinion. Dorothy Sayers, in the introduction to her radio play cycle THE MAN BORN TO BE KING, discusses accents in this context. Should Jesus and his disciples speak more correctly than the working-class people around them, as if the disciples weren't part of the same population? Jesus and his mother need to share the same accent, but would it make sense to have them talk differently from his followers? Sayers also brings up and dismisses the complication of regional dialects. THE CHOSEN doesn't allow for that, either. I wish they'd taken into account the fact that Jesus, his mother, and several of the disciples come from Galilee. Since inhabitants of that area were considered uncouth by people from around Jerusalem, the dialogue should reflect that difference. I'd like Jesus, Peter, et al to have a distinct regional accent, maybe a tinge of Scottish or Irish, something I've never seen in any film version of the Gospel story. I wonder how THE CHOSEN will handle the moment during Peter's denial scene when a bystander recognizes him as a disciple by his Galilean accent?

Writers of fiction set in past eras or foreign cultures need to strike a delicate balance between annoying purists and baffling casual readers.

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.