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The Trouble with Adaptions
Jacob Jones-Goldstein • Oct 14, 2019
It, The Goldfinch, and Doctor Sleep
In September of 2018 I took a seat in a favorite movie theater in Fairfax, VA. I had a bottle of water, a bag of popcorn, and a whole lot of trepidation. I was there to see the new adaptation of Stephen King’s seminal novel “It”.
I saw the original It TV mini series as a kid when it aired and fell in love with it, even though I didn’t read the book till much later. It was a well told coming of age story, filled with fascinating characters, and a scary-as-hell Tim Curry
as Pennywise. The special effects are pretty dated, but otherwise I think the original holds up pretty well. It does a great job getting at the core themes of the book. Themes like friendship, loyalty, fear, bravery, and the sepia-tone haziness of childhood summers as puberty exploded our emotions in a million intense directions.
When the lights came up in the theater, I had very much enjoyed the new film. I liked it more when I saw it a second time a few weeks later, but that’s almost always the way with adaptations. The first time through tends to feel more like watching a checklist than a movie. “Ok, so they did the scene with
Bev in the bathroom, but they left out the deadlights? Huh.” The second time through I was able to take it in on it’s own merits. It certainly had problems but overall did a good job and made for a really entertaining movie. It also made a metric ton of cash, and so the sequel got fast-tracked. After enjoying the first one, I was very excited for the follow up.
It Part 2 was one of two adaptations I was looking forward to seeing over the last month. The other was “The Goldfinch”, based on the magnificent novel by Donna Tartt.
“The Goldfinch” is the story of a young man who loses his mother in a museum bombing and becomes utterly un-moored in life. As the novel progresses, each time he starts to find his footing, something happens to pull the rug out from under him. Through it all, he holds onto a painting he took during the bombing as a talisman and a constant. It’s a profoundly moving and sad novel. As wonderful as the novel is, when they announced they were making a movie of it, I was mystified. It’s a very methodical novel, much of which is centered around the main characters internal struggles. Large parts of it delve into antique furniture restoration in fascinating detail. Making a movie out of it just seemed unwise.
As it turns out my expectations should have been switched. I enjoyed the Goldfinch movie, and very much disliked It Part 2, although I would say both movies highlight the trouble with adaptations.
It part 2 never gives itself a chance to breathe. Despite the terrific cast, it doesn’t let the characters grow or change, everyone plays their part as if they’re holding up a mirror to the childhood actor who preceded them. The way the book works is that it shows how we grow up and are affected by our childhoods and the way we change and don’t change. The movie never gives the adult actors time to show any evolution. We simply meet them in a bit of a rush, and then they’re off to each have their own individual scares.
The scares themselves don’t really work either. One of the issues I had with the first movie was it leaned way too much into Pennywise, with him featuring heavily in all of the kids fears, rather than focusing on the stuff they were scared of. Essentially the monster was too present to remain particularly creepy. The sequel has the same issue, but it’s exasperated by the repetition of character x walking into slightly off place y, only to be confronted by Pennywise in some morphed fashion. One of the scare scenes even plays a clip of music as a gag, completely neutering any fright the scene might have contained. As it went along I began to be keenly aware of the movies run time, which is never a good sign. The final confrontation is overlong, bloated, and to my mind, completely misses the point of the story in the novel and the original mini-series. I left the theater disappointed, although the folks I saw it with liked it to varying degrees, so my guess is most people’s mileage will vary on this one.
The trouble It Part 2 had was that didn’t really know what it was. The director and writers wanted to make a large story more concise, while hitting important scenes from the original material. The trouble is it just ended up feeling bloated, and didn’t work at all as a horror movie. Part one had some failings in this department too, although it worked very well as a coming-of-age story, which made up for it’s horror-issues. Part 2 didn’t work as a reunion story at all, and so couldn’t cover up it’s bloat and lack of identity.
I was pleasantly surprised when I saw the Goldfinch a few weeks later. The movie is filled with competent performers who do a good job portraying the essence of the characters from the book, although none of them really stood out. Finn Wolfhard
was probably the most memorable performance as Boris. Coincidentally, he’s probably the stand-out performance in It as well as the young Richie Tozier.
The movie itself is slow and methodical. It takes it’s time as it moves through the book, hitting all the major scenes and at least touching on most of the plots, while doing a reasonable job of bringing out the central themes of the book. That said, I do understand the poor reviews the movie has received. Even though I enjoyed it, I imagine it would be utterly incomprehensible to someone who hasn’t read the book.
The trouble the Goldfinch runs into in making a credible beat for beat adaption of the book is that there isn’t enough time to delve into the characters motivations or internal lives, or really their emotional reasoning. It shows each scene, but without having read the book to fill in the gaps, it would make little sense how we get from place to place. For example, the movie shows us the bond between Boris, and Theo, the main character, but does nothing to show us why it formed so deeply other than offhandedly saying “They were lonely”. Without this bedrock, each choice seems to come out of nowhere. If you’ve read the book, the spackle between the tiles is all there in your head and you can simply enjoy seeing the characters come to life, but if you haven’t? It’s just a bunch of loose tiles.
At least with “The Goldfinch” I know who the movie is for. I’m less sure with “It Part 2”. It doesn’t work as a horror movie at all, and strips out most of the central themes of the original story. It tries to replace them with other themes, but never really finds a center like Part 1 did with it’s coming-of-age plot.
Both “It” and “The Goldfinch” are huge novels with tons of vivid characters and themes revolving around growing up, childhood trauma, and how we as adults try and deal with the things we can’t ever really leave behind. The books have room to breath and explore and try to understand those themes. The movies made out of them have to pick a path, and unfortunately neither really work.
Next month a new Stephen King adaptation is coming out. This time of his novel “Doctor Sleep”. The book is a sequel to one of King’s earliest novels, “The Shining.” The original adaption of “The Shining” is one of the most lauded movies made from a book of all time, even if the author hates it. The movie and the book are very different, including how they end and the very essence of the characters. The movie Jack Torrence
is pure evil, one of the scariest screen villains of all time. In the book? Much more of a tragic figure.
The “Doctor Sleep” trailer looks like it’s trying to be a sequel to the movie, rather than an adaptation of the book it’s based on. Having my expectations flipped with adaptations recently, and seeing all the problems and pitfalls with them played out on the screen recently, I can’t say I’m holding out much hope.
There's something I recently realized about myself. It begins with an internal dialogue I had about dividing authors up into two types. The first type of author I thought about was the author, who is writing a story for you, the audience. It's going to be a story with certain expectations that make it a mystery, romance, or some other type of established genre. They know what you are looking for, and you are going to get it. I want to be clear; I am not bad-mouthing these stories. Many established writers can be unique and clever in their own right and still fit this idea, like James Patterson. The author can really put their own sense of self and cleverness into their story. Though, in time, this too can be expected by you, the reader, and becomes another binding. In the end, they are writing for you, and you are the final decider. Then, there are the types who are not writing for you. In fact, it has nothing to do with you. Yes, they hope you'll buy it. Yes, they hope you'll read it. Yes, they hope you'll love it. But in the end, none of that mattered in its creation, because it was never about you.
“You’re going to submit something to Scary Stuff?” I remember both Jacob and Nicholas looking at me with raised eyebrows when I told them that I was going to submit a story for our first submission-based anthology. I’ve always had a very rocky relationship with the genre. Bad things happening to people for no reason gives me nightmares. Fiction was always an escape, a chance to slip into a world where heroes did heroic things, and evil always carries the seeds of its downfall. In horror though, most often the bad guys win. Even if the villains don’t win in the end, the heroes always lose for the majority of the narrative. That kind of story, which usually is supposed to fire your adrenaline and allow you to live vicariously through situations that you would never survive otherwise, just keeps me up at night and gives me anxiety. Something funny happened though. I read through the submission guidelines, and it suggested to read Creepy and Eerie magazine to get a feel for the tone to strike in your story. I hadn’t read either before but I headed online to see if I could find some examples. What I found was an archive of the old eerie comics, and in reading through them I discovered a world of horror that I never knew about. It shouldn’t have been surprising that the genre is not body parts flying through windows and heavy gore, but if something was labeled as horror I would just take a pass. The few movies that I have seen that might qualify as horror ( The Universal Monster movies , Resident Evil , Aliens ) are not horror movies for me. They are all either black and white films from an era where the limits of special effects neuter the impact of the horror, or are action films that happen to use a few horror elements. So when asked if I would like to see/read/hear about horror, I would politely decline.
This upcoming Saturday, November 9th, Oddity Prodigy Production s will be launching an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign for our upcoming anthology “ Scary Stuff !” This is our very first crowdfunding campaign and we’re all pretty excited.
I legit cringe every time I hear that question, and as a hobby costumer (more on that later), I hear the question, nay, judgement, a lot. My humble beginnings as a child in love with playing dress up are fairly standard, but my journey to sleep-deprived costume fairy was fraught with side-eyes and etymology shade. If you’re even a little curious about the cackling voice you hear during our Oddity Podigy episodes, grab an over-sized mug of Earl Grey and I’ll rant a bit about why I’m here--both on this blog and in my hobby.
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