Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism

by John Updike

  In my very slight TV career, I have waited for my six-minute morning-interview stint in company with Muhammad Ali and Peter, Paul, and Mary, with a ninety-nine-year-old beekeeper and a seven-year-old chess player. The latter showed no less aplomb than the former. Radio and the cinema in their heyday tended to create an elite of the golden-voiced and the silver-skinned; almost anybody can be on TV, once the switches are thrown. Being natural beats any performing skill, and a German interviewer recently explained to me that, on television, being a bit ugly helps. Everything, in a sense, helps. There is no hiding from the camera; but, then, in this laid-back era of the global village, why hide? The studios themselves tend to be cozy places, with coffee and doughnuts in the green room, cheerful confusion on the set, and tinselly cardboard props leaning against the walls. The atmosphere is that of an underrehearsed high-school play: no matter how badly things go, it’s only our parents out there and we’ll meet at the sub shop afterwards to laugh about it.

  Once I found myself enmeshed in a televised spectacular. Three hundred “stars” were assembled, many of them nouveaux novas but all of them with an undeniable lustre, even a detectable radioactivity; the women had eyelashes like receiving antennae, and teeth shaped by laser beam. The taping of the unwieldy show, in the Radio City Music Hall, dragged on and on, through mistakes and retakes; the saintly patience of professional performers was amazing to a short-fused print-media type like me. Elderly actors and actresses (Jimmy Stewart, Ginger Rogers) already deep into apotheosis gamely went through their paces, and went through them again. The ordeal began in the morning and finished at two the next morning, when the grand finale was staged. We all assembled to sing a song whose words were flashed on cards behind the central camera. Most of the audience had melted away or was milling about in the hysteria of advanced fatigue. The moon was sinking over Manhattan. But were we in front of the cameras tired? No. We were on TV. Lillian Gish was in front of me, Cesar Chavez to the left, Dinah Shore and Raquel Welch somewhere in the vicinity. On my right, a tall enamelled female, unknown to me but no doubt known to millions, had a throat of steel as she warbled from the cards. A retake was called for; she and the others all sang louder, even more thrillingly, so that I felt lifted on wings of unnatural energy, pouring my miserly old scribbler’s heart into that lavender lens at two in the morning.

  Being on TV is like being alive, only more so.

  Being on TV—II

  IN THIS MEDIA-MAD AGE, one of the few questions that people still ask an old-fashioned word writer is how he feels about film adaptations of his work. My answer is, “Embarrassed.” I feel embarrassed, watching the gifted and comely actors writhing and grimacing within my plot, heaving away at lines of dialogue I put down in a few minutes’ daze years before, and straining to bring to life some tricky moral or social issue that once bemused me. I feel I have put them (along with the director and cameramen and set designers) in a glass box; like wide-eyed fish in an aquarium they bump their noses on the other side of the screen and ogle me helplessly. I yearn to break the glass, to set them free to do their own thing—juggle, jog, take off their clothes, put on some clothes, tell us what bemuses them these days, cook up their own story.

  For me, it is an act sufficiently aggressive to take pencil and paper in hand (or to switch on the word processor with its mind-curdling hum) and to forge sentences and paragraphs out of my flitting fancies and dimming memories. That these words are then turned, by a large and highly paid crew, into photogenic, three-dimensional, real furniture, bodies, and conversational tussles strikes me as rather horrible, in the way that an elephant tusk patiently carved and filed into many tiny interlocking figures, pagodas, and ginkgo trees is horrible.

  In the late Sixties two youngish men full of energy and flattery approached me about making a motion picture of my novel Rabbit, Run, and a deal was arranged. After some time, in 1970, I was invited to attend a showing of the result. My wife and I went to the appointed theatre in Boston and found ourselves the only audience in all the rows and rows of seats; an author, it suddenly dawned on me, was expected to organize a viewing party of agents, editors, and well-wishers. In lonely splendor, then, after a nervous consultation with the projectionist, we watched a giant flickering that began with my title and ended with the concluding sentence of my text flashed onto the screen, over the figure of a man running. In between, everything was mine yet not mine, and intensely embarrassing.

  Not that the film lacked good qualities or surface fidelity to the novel. There were admirable performances by James Caan and Carrie Snodgress and stunning views of Reading, Pennsylvania, whose steep streets of row houses had been in my mind as I wrote. But the voice of the novel, and the cogency of its implied argument, had vanished in a hash of visual images and coarse simplifications. The movie often failed, it seemed to me, to make sense. For instance, in a central early episode, my hero impulsively gets into a car and drives away from his wife and his life; within twelve hours he gets lost somewhere in West Virginia and realizes he has nowhere to go but back to Pennsylvania. The basic movement, out and back in, was rendered in the movie by an unintelligible montage of speeding automobiles and highway signs; when I mentioned this muddle in a telephone conversation with the director, he admitted that, when they returned from Pennsylvania to Hollywood, they discovered they had no “night footage.” You make a film, of course, out of footage, and if in some sequences you have nothing but, in another phrase of his, “deplorable footage,” you use that, or else leave holes that only the author, let’s hope, will notice.

  Since 1970, as of 1986, only television movies have been made of my stubbornly verbal works: two short stories, “The Music School” and “The Christian Roommates,” were produced for public television, and a two-hour film, given the title Too Far to Go, was fashioned from a set of linked short stories. In the first two instances, the choices struck me as strange. “The Music School” is a monologue whose principal action lies in the leaps of the narrator’s voice, and “The Christian Roommates” attempts to render the nuances of relationship within a group of Harvard dormitory-mates in the early 1950s. Both adaptations appeared, as I watched them on television, lugubrious. My hero in “The Music School” is troubled by guilt but on film he is positively sodden with it; on film the roommates’ jittery antipathy turns downright pathological. As I watched, my attention gratefully flew to bits that weren’t in the story, or were a matter of a word or two: in The Music School, a science-fiction episode eerily emerges through a violet filter, and we witness the lively industrial process, staffed by nuns in full habit, of the baking and cutting of communion wafers; in The Roommates (my “Christian” was dropped, as perhaps too provocative), the hero’s sketchy home-town romance is elaborated with a delightful wealth of period make-out music and exposed underwear. Many details, indeed, in “The Roommates,” which was spun out to two hours, were admirably full and careful. The college students glowed with health and beauty, and Northwestern’s buildings (not Harvard’s) posed handsomely. But of my short story the point itself—that one of the Christian roommates was so distressed by the other that he lost his faith—was serenely omitted.

  In fairness, can any film adaptation fail to seem, to the author of the original, heavy on detail and light on coherence? Would any representation of the troubled married couple in Too Far to Go have failed to embarrass me? Perhaps inevitably, the suburbia became a movie suburbia, free of peeling paint and crabgrass, and the adulteries movie adulteries, skinny plot-turns as predictable as, in other cinematic contexts, pratfalls and shootouts. Footage problems arose when a car accident that I had located in a snowstorm was implausibly transferred (because of seasonal filming, or a studio shortage of soap flakes) to a rainstorm; not even a monsoon could have sloshed so many buckets of water across the windshield behind the entangled couple.

  Words have a merciful vagueness wherein readers can—nay, must—use their imaginations. Movies are, like sharp sunlight, merciless; we do not imagine, we view. Writ
ten images perforce draw upon imagery our memory has stored; no one reads the same book, and each reader is drawn into an individual exchange with the author’s voice. A seductive relationship is in progress, which the reader can terminate more easily than involvements in real life. Film, instead, breaks upon us like a natural phenomenon—ungainsayable, immediate, stark, marvellous, and rather bullying. My exposures to adaptation, it should be said, were the work of talented people who were fond of my writing; my impulse was all the stronger, then, to break the glass box and let them out, to do their own things, while my text, safe between covers, did its.

  Books into Film

  MOVIEMAKERS, like creative spirits everywhere, must be free; they owe nothing to the authors of books they adapt except the money they have agreed to pay them. In the case of the first book to be made into a film, Ben Hur, not even a financial indebtedness was acknowledged; the movie would be good publicity for the book, it was argued, and General Wallace should be acquiescently grateful. He and his lawyers disagreed, establishing a happy precedent for those of us who, as the saying goes, take the money and run. And hide, ideally. For the author owes, at least, his Hollywood benefactors a tactful silence.

  A film adaptation of a novel of mine† is about to be released. It bears the book’s title, and my own name will presumably scurry by in the credits. One would have to have an ego of steel not to be pleasantly dented, or dimpled, by such attentions. Otherwise, the movie will bear, indications all agree, little resemblance to my text—which exists, however, in hardcover and paperback editions and even in a large-print edition for the dimsighted. That is one of the charms of the authorial business—the text is always there, for the ideal reader to stumble upon, to enter, to reanimate. The text is almost infinitely patient, snugly gathering its dust on the shelf. Until the continental drift of language turns its English as obscure as Chaucer’s, the text remains readily recoverable and potentially as alive as on the day it was scribbled by one’s own hand. Not so film: its chemicals fester in the can, it grows brittle and brown, its Technicolor bleaches, it needs a projector and a screen, it is scratched and pocked and truncated by the wear and tear of its previous projections. So let’s not begrudge it its moment in the sun—the moment when, in the darkened theatre, the movie bursts upon us as if it were the sun.

  Let’s hear it for filmmakers. They bring their visions to market through a welter of props and egos, actors and bankers that a mere wordmonger would be overwhelmed by. Considering the vast number of fingers in the pot, and the amount of financial concern that haunts the sound stage, it’s a wonder any motion picture comes out halfway coherent. Lack of coherence—the inner coherence works of art should have, the ultimate simplicity of one voice speaking—is surely a failing especially of today’s films, in the absence of studio control and of the adult, bourgeois audience that filled the movie palaces in the palmy Depression days. Now only adolescents have strong and recurrent reason to get out of the house with its lulling television sets, and films are inexorably juvenile. Maybe they always were, and I was too juvenile to notice. In the backward glance there is a dignity—a rather religious stateliness and intensity—to the Gary Cooper–Rita Hayworth–Fred Astaire black-and-white movies that seems oddly lost in videotape rerun. Those barking men, those vaudeville gags, those plainly fake backdrops—weren’t we pained by them the first time around? Still, there was not that jittery prurience, that messy something-for-everybody grabbiness which reaches out now from the curtainless screens of the shopping-mall complexes, where, as I write, Creepshow II is competing with Meatballs III.

  Even a very lame movie tends to crush a book. When I try to think of The Great Gatsby, I get Robert Redford in a white suit, handsomely sweating in a pre-air-conditioning room at the Plaza, and Mia Farrow in a floppy pastel hat, or Alan Ladd floating dead in an endless swimming pool, before I recover, via Fitzgerald’s delicate phrasing, Daisy’s little blue light or the hair in the gangster Wolfsheim’s nostrils. Ulysses, which one might have thought impervious to non-verbal invasion, is blighted for me by the pious film adaptation and its disconcertingly specific and youthful Bloom. Who can now read For Whom the Bell Tolls and not visualize its fellow-travelling hero as an avatar of Sergeant York, or its Spanish virgin as a Swedish beauty? Once I had a dream in which I was sitting high in the balcony of a vast movie theatre watching the film adaptation of Remembrance of Things Past; it consisted of, on a wide screen, Proust’s pale fastidious face, his eyelids closed as if in sleep. I prefer my version to the Harold Pinter script for Joseph Losey, which was written and published but never produced.

  Successful movies tend to take off from the book, rather than take it too seriously. One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, for example, or the impudent version, in which Faulkner had a hand, of To Have and Have Not. When the author gets too involved, and out of proprietary anxiety or love of the cinematic art strives to assert too much control, the result may be merely an unshot script and a batch of threatened lawsuits. What ever happened to the film adaptations of Fear of Flying and The Confessions of Nat Turner? On the other hand, it must be admitted that Jerzy Kosinski, with some help from Peter Sellers, did succeed in making Being There a better movie than it was a book. But, then, Kosinski, as he showed in Reds, is a natural film performer. He gets, over Norman Mailer in Ragtime and George Plimpton in Volunteers, the Eighties Authorial Cinemacting Prize.

  In a novel, the prose is the hero, the human thing; the author’s voice is our foremost point of contact and upholds one side of the shifting, teasing relationship we as readers are invited into. In a movie, the actors and actresses are what win us—these giant faces, all but impassive, like the faces of gods. As Wolcott Gibbs wrote some forty years ago, the movies are “an art form fundamentally based on the slow, relentless approach and final passionate collision of two enormous faces.” The mounting of these faces and their collision can be more or less elaborate, and more or less impressive, as directors, scriptwriters, cameramen, grips, costumers, and set designers labor at it, but a bad mounting will not altogether defeat the box-office magic of, say, Marilyn Monroe or Eddie Murphy, and no amount of skillful mounting will make Meryl Streep as winning as Diane Keaton. This visceral simplicity of the cinema embarrasses criticism: Gibbs, in his definitive if unabashedly class-conscious essay, “The Country of the Blind,” described his short-term stint as a film critic as attempting “to write … for the information of my friends about something that was plainly designed for the entertainment of their cooks.”

  Now and then, in watching a movie, we are troubled by awareness of something caught inside and trying to get out, trying to make more sense than the colliding faces that we see. On a recent evening while visiting New York, I walked up Fifth Avenue to view, at the convenient Paris Theatre, a French film called L’Année des méduses, starring Valérie Kaprisky. The frisky, risqué picture, located on the French Riviera, devoted itself almost exclusively to the photography of young women’s bare breasts and, when the plot needed thickening, their buttocks. But toward the end, the characters abruptly began to speak in lengthy speeches, and there was a sudden ugly splash of attempted resolution, and I realized that the movie had been based upon a book, and that the book was still in there, still fighting to impose a plot and a moral and even a twist of suave irony upon this pageant of Gallic bathing beauties, which we of the audience had been gazing at in blissful ignorance of any such darkly clever, print-inspired designs. It turns out that the director of the film was also the author of the book. He did not feel free; he felt he owed himself something. Seeing the movie made me, with an impulse of pity such as all tourists must learn to resist as they thread their way among the importunities of Fifth Avenue, want to read the book.

  A Nameless Rose

  THE NAME OF THE ROSE was an unlikely book to adapt for the cinema—intensely literary, bleak in mood and moral, and loaded with in-jokes only a semiotician who was also a medievalist could love. Yet the film’s makers, a mix of European names, have done
an honorable and at moments moving job of converting one thing—an obdurately textual text, abstruse and challenging—into another, a succession of filmed images ultimately conforming to a moviegoer’s conventional expectations.

  Movie and novel alike boldly ask us to conceive of the Middle Ages intellectually, as an arena of contesting ideas rather than the hackneyed site of tourney and Crusade, of flying pennants and glinting armor, of picturesque battles clouding the sky with arrows and colorfully gowned beauties exciting the clash of heraldry-laden combatants. The motion-picture version of The Name of the Rose, but for a recurrent splash of blood, is relentlessly dull in color, all gray and brown. The cast, but for a single besmudged and silent young female, is all male, and most of the men are ugly. The scene is a masterpiece of desolation, an abbey in the wintry remoteness of mountains in the North of Italy; the opening and closing shots panoramically establish something we tend to forget about the Middle Ages—how relatively empty their Europe was, a continent of populated islands connected by thin and perilous paths. Desolation without, desolation within: the stony walls and slanting courtyards of the abbey look cold, and as the actors speak their breath is white. Only the wandering Franciscan William of Baskerville and his accompanying novice, Adso, do not appear grotesque; the rest are robed, eye-rolling residents of a frosty hell claiming to be a path to heaven. Such a gloomy, almost sardonic bleakness lifts the film into the realm of intellectual enterprise.

  One of the pleasant surprises of the picture is how Sean Connery, the swashbuckling 007 of the James Bond soft-porn thrillers, carries off the difficult lead part, bodying forth our detective-hero’s necessary dignity and trustworthiness while conveying also the something troubled and flawed about him, a rational man in a century, the fourteenth, dominated by murderous superstition and a tortuous church-state rivalry. Eco’s fascinating and sometimes fatiguing explication of late-medieval theological debates—the wild heresies, the incipient rebellion against a totalitarian church, the precarious position of the Franciscan movement itself—is necessarily skimped, but not ignored. The shudder of a rotten world on the verge of upheaval is felt. The extravagant costuming of the Pope’s emissaries, when they erupt upon the bleak monastic scene, constitutes visual farce worthy of Brecht.