"The Book Was Better"

While discussing the Titanic in English I could not help myself from noticing that almost everyone compared Thomas Hardy's(who's name reminds me of the actor, Tom Hardy every time I see it) poem "The Convergence of the Twain" with James  Cameron's film Titanic. While we did juxtapose the  two tones regarding the event; awesome (in the litter, "evoking awe" sense) and tragic, respectively, we never touched on our perceptions of the film at all. This, of course, did not need to happen, Hardy's poem certainly had enough literary merit to discuss for the entirety of class. In fact, I am glad we never discussed it, now I can hoard this knowledge onto my blog. Anyway, I felt that we all made subconscious connections to the poem and the movie, and eventually everyone made a decision whether the film or the book did a better job of expressing the events pertaining to the Titanic. Now, Cameron did not base his film off Hardy's poem, but it still allows me to delve into my topic of the "the book was better" phenomenon. I am a firm believer that anything can get adapted into a spectacular film, but to do that one would need to rip its guts apart until it hardly resembled it's original form, to put it simply: I could make a paper airplane out of the Mona Lisa, but why should I? Given this belief, I usually advocate looking to the source material for any kind of artistic work, so I am in great support of this thought process, or at least an equal examination of both of the works side by side.

One film/book I would like to focus on specifically is Mary Harron/ Brett Easton Ellis's "American Psycho". I want to focus on this film, not as an example of how the original worked better and so on, but how one should properly adapt a novel into cinematography without butchering the source material or seeming to confusing, or bloated (Zoolander, a film based on an Ellis book Glamorama, and Watchmen serve as good examples for these respective result). American Psycho does not fall into the horror genre, but the satire genre. While horrifying, the book mainly focuses on the rampant and vapid consumerism of the protagonist as well as his, quite literally, cut-throat business strategies. The work satirizes the capitalism and consumerism of the 1980s and both film and book capture it perfectly, but in different ways. For example, the famous business card scene barely happens in Ellis's book, but Harron does not show the protaganist, Patrick Bateman's, obsession with designer clothes (going to the point of narrating every single brand someone that he meets wears. One of the major complaints I also hear when adapting a novel is when parts get left behind on the cutting room floor. However, some cuts need to happen; nobody will print a film that involves the highly graphic murders Bateman commits (one can see this with other films too, A Clockwork Orange had to change the ages of almost all of the characters because two adults having sex appeals more than a 15 year old raping two girls 5 years his minor) and some things just tend to drag or does not make sense. For example, for the last hundred pages or so of the novel, Bateman believes he is being followed constantly...by a park bench(which could lead me into a discussion about unreliable narration, but I will abstain), and while I love these delusions he has, the human psyche is not easy to transition into film without seeming completely out of place. So, final word: just because the film left something out does not mean they forgot or did it on purpose, they needed to do it, and some books work better as books and adapting them just does not seem practical.

Now that I am done with this, will you please excuse me? I have to return some videotapes.

A List of Literacy

5. Structure and mechanics serve just as important a purpose as your actual writing. For the longest time I believed that if I wrote a good enough paper I would not have to worry about any problems regarding grammar, the excellence of the actual writing would surely outweigh all the mechanical errors I made. Obviously this does not prove to be the case; you might write the greatest paper ever, but without good grammar and mechanics no one will understand what you wrote.

4. It turns out that writing is a scary, scary abyss that one can get lost in without a magical little tool called "pre-writing". Before I would think up one main theme or idea for the paper, jump right into the beginning, and then come up with all my examples along the way. Planning ahead essentially turns writing an essay into a connect the dots puzzle (execpt you created the dots and pattern, but I digress) from some horrible maze to try to find that one example that fits what you have tried so hard to put forward.

3. I am the Devil's Advocate. Through writing I have discovered that I often take unconventional opinions when offered a choice, not due to my unconventional beliefs, but because I love watching reactions of others to unpopular, sometimes even offensive opinions.  Basically, I am the guy who cheers for the bad guys to get everyone else mad; that will keep everyone arguing on a topic we all agree on just to argue something.

2. I have a bipolar writing tones. I often find myself, especially when writing these blogs, almost writing two completely different entries on the same topic: one humorous and one serious. It really can turn into a horrible problem when I have thought of a very clever and witty joke for the topic I writing about, but really probably should not put anything there due to the subject matter or reactions I would receive (I imagine some half offended-half amused laugh, or just absolute disgust). Maybe one day I can start writing one half under a pseudonym and turn into some half famous person that everyone sort of likes, maybe.

1. I do not write like anybody else. To sum up my most important realization, I always thought that most people wrote exactly the same way; we all wrote like awkward highschoolers and nobody really differed except for a few differing examples. I thought that writers got their books published due to a unique voice that did not resemble 99% of the population. Now I know the truth: we all write differently and writers get published due to their talent, not uniqueness, just because we all have our own little quirky writing styles does not mean they resemble anything worth publishing; "being special does not mean you are useful" happens to be the phrase I relate to the most on this subject.

Well that ended on a rather low note. By the way, to keep with my film-based theme, I watched Spartacus over the weekend.

Два человека смотрели на мой блог из России

I Felt Bad for Hitler

Pick your least favorite character in all of John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces. Pick the three that seemed completely irrelevant to the story, the three that you could not wrap your mind around, the three that seemed to simply exist without purpose, and so on. Now become them. Envelop their very existence; you have now taken the name of Timmy, Liz, Dr. Talc, and many others that you just judged so harshly. When I needed to write a poem on a character I felt had no purpose in the story; a character that I despised for wasting time in the book I panicked, I had no idea how I could pull off such a personal thing like writing a poem from their perspective. The only time I had felt similar to how I felt after writing my poem from the perspective or Mr. Gonzalez (said emotion could simply get categorized as an odd feeling of sympathy despite still holding strong negative feelings) was when I sympathized with Hitler that one time.

Okay, wait, hold on one minute, let me explain myself.

Said moment happened while I watched the German film "Der Untergang", translated to "Downfall", which follows Hitler's secretary during the final days of World War II in the Fuhrer-Bunker in Berlin (you might have seen a scene from the film with false subtitles on YouTube, just by searching the man's last name results in one of these parodies as the number one hit). The people in this film, all Nazi's by the way, go from a sense of naive optimism to crushing depression and hopelessness, and Hitler comes as no exemption to this. One still gets reminded of his horrible regime and the atrocities he committed, but one also sees his entire life fall apart, and that does not come easily for anyone. The film gets you with this emotion, it knows that you felt bad for Hitler, the evilest man to ever live, and then it makes you think about the implications of it and forces you to see why you exactly felt sympathetic to his misery. Do not be fooled through, the film does not try to show him in any kind of positive light, it just wants you to realize how one can feel pity and sympathy with even the personification of evil and atrocity.

Now I'm not saying that writing a poem from Mr. Gonzalez's perspective had nearly as much of an impact as feeling sympathy for Adolph Hitler, but the same emotions occurred at both events, so I thought it would be appropriate. I feel it appropriate to stress the point that such action comes as a reminder for us humans that nobody has a completely evil persona, despite views.

Finally, for fun, I'll give you a hypothetical question on ethics: "It is 1933. You are in Berlin, Germany. Somehow, you find yourself in a position where you can effortlessly steal Adolf Hitler's wallet. This theft will not effect Hitler's rise to power, the nature of World War II, or the Holocaust. There is no important identification in the wallet, but the act will cost Hitler forty Reichsmarks and completely ruin his evening. You do not need the money...Do you steal Hitler's wallet?"