by Slate. com
Measured against a best seller in its first flush, sales of any classic book are piddling, of course (unless the classic has just been made into a blockbuster movie, in which case all bets are off). But the overall sales picture resembles the proverbial tortoise-and-hare scenario: As the race goes on, the classics win out. This may seem intuitive; but what's surprising is that often the race doesn't have to go on long at all.
Until recently, this had been impossible to know—or at least quantify. Because classics, particularly those that are more than 100 years old, are usually in the public domain, no single publishing house monitors sales of Wilkie Collins' 19th-century thrillers, the way Simon & Schuster does for Jackie Collins' romances. But in 2001, Nielsen BookScan, a sister company of the TV-ratings firm, began electronically tracking book sales at cash registers (following in the footsteps of SoundScan, which had done same thing for music). Before then, sales data was manually reported by bookstores. But stores tallied up figures for only a short list of books expected to be big sellers; it was considered too taxing to compile and send off the numbers for every title sold.
A book's success is usually measured by its place on the best-seller list. But the best-seller list measures sales transacted over a highly limited period of time, usually a week, sometimes a year. What the Nielson BookScan shows is that short spurts of high sales volumes don't provide an accurate picture of the overall equation: Take Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace—which runs some 1,400 pages and is not a book you associate with light bedtime reading. Last year, it sold 33,000 copies, according to BookScan. The Cardinal of the Kremlin, another Russia-set novel, by spy-genre grandee Tom Clancy, and 1988's No. 1 best-selling book, just barely scraped ahead of War and Peace, with 35,000 copies sold. Its sales have been dropping, and it probably won't hit those figures next year, or ever again. In contrast, War and Peace will, by all evidence, continue at its steady pace—never rivaling the astronomical heights of the Clancy novel when it was first released, but never dipping low enough to go out of print, either.
It's not clear whether these new figures will have an effect on the business. In the music world, the introduction of comprehensive sales figures led to an increased promotion of Christian rock—until then, mainstream labels simply hadn't realized just how popular the genre was. The book industry has been slower to respond to the fount of data now available, in part because classics' popularity isn't self-evident. Those 110,000 copies of Pride and Prejudice, for example? To get that number, you have to look up BookScan's sales numbers on each edition of the book—the Penguin Classic, the Signet, the Bantam, the generic Barnes & Noble, etc.—and add them together. And that's no small task: There are more than 130 editions of Pride and Prejudice listed on Amazon.com.
Interestingly, even recent books that are considered literary don't compare to tried-and-true classics. At Politics & Prose, an independent bookstore in Washington, D.C., Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility sold 18 copies last year, while Snow Falling on Cedars, a literary novel that spent 87 weeks on the Publishers' Weekly best-seller list in 1995, sold only seven. So it's not just because bookstore owners want to edify us that they're as likely to stock Vanity Fair as Bonfire of the Vanities. "A best seller from 10 years ago, nobody wants to read—unless it's by someone like [Gabriel García] Márquez," said Donald Davis, a book-buyer for East Village Books in New York.
And that's why Penguin has seen fit to spend $500,000 promoting Sense and Sensibility, along with its 1,300 other Penguin Classics titles. It wants to corner the market. The paperback edition of The Nanny Diaries may be the rage right now, but authors Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus should look over their shoulders; another story about tending the children of the rich, a book by the name of Jane Eyre, is chugging along, slow and steady.
Drop the Gun
The Two Towers' wishful technophobia.
By James Surowiecki
Posted Wednesday, Jan. 8, 2003, at 10:50 AM PT
Without digital technology, there's no way a visually convincing film version of The Lord of the Rings—like the one we now have—could ever have been made. The irony is that J.R.R. Tolkien was a pure Luddite, a man deeply skeptical of modernity, horrified by "mass-production robot factories and the roar of self-obstructive mechanical traffic," and nostalgic for the English countryside before it had been scarred by the railroad and the car. The sight of the digitized figure of Gollum in The Two Towers would undoubtedly have appalled him.
Tolkien's hatred of technology was central to his conception of Middle Earth. The good hobbits are classic old English villagers, content to cultivate small plots of land and smoke their pipes, while the noble men are horse people and farmers. The evil wizard Saruman, by contrast, is a kind of demented Henry Ford, with a "mind of metal and wheels," while Tolkien writes of the orcs—who are born fully-grown from a monster-making assembly line of Saruman's design—that "wheels and engines and explosions always delighted them."
Most of the time, Tolkien's technophobia is harmless enough, manifesting itself as a kind of quaintly radical environmentalism, as in the scene in The Two Towers where the giant Ents (treelike creatures who care for the forests) destroy Saruman's "factory." But elsewhere its effects are more dubious, particularly when it comes to Tolkien's depiction of war. The climax of The Two Towers is the battle of Helm's Deep, where a small force of men and elves are besieged by an army of orcs who outnumber them 10 to 1. And what the film's version of that battle makes clear is that Tolkien's reflexive distrust of technology led him to a profound misrepresentation—and misunderstanding—of the roots of Western military success.
Now, to accept this argument you'll have to accept that, in some vague sense, the men and hobbits of Middle Earth are stand-ins for the English (and, more generally, Westerners), while the orcs represent the enemies of freedom and light. This has become a hot debate topic of late, with some critics decrying what they see as Tolkien's racism and pro-war propaganda and others insisting that the orcs are just orcs. Without stepping too deeply into this, and recognizing that Tolkien disclaimed any allegorical purpose for his books, it seems to me impossible to watch The Two Towers and not be reminded of those battles in British history—Crécy, Agincourt, Inkerman, Rorke's Drift, or for that matter the Battle of Britain—where small contingents of brave Englishmen successfully repelled wave after wave of enemy troops.
There is, though, a profound difference between Helm's Deep and all those real-life battles. At Helm's Deep the men and elves get by purely on quickness of wit and strength of arm, while the orcs deploy all manner of newfangled technology—explosives, catapults, siege ladders. The victory of men is a victory of the heart over the machine. In the real world, though, technological superiority—and in particular the ability to turn it to pragmatic military ends—has historically been the engine of British, and Western, military dominance. The longbow at Crécy and Agincourt, the Enfield rifle and massed artillery at Inkerman, the Martini-Henry rifle at Rorke's Drift, and radar during the Battle of Britain ensured victory for outnumbered armies. And this paradigm remains in place today, as evidenced by the Gulf War and the battle of Mogadishu. Of course, Western armies have also benefited from excellent training and discipline. But the machine played a central role in every real Helm's Deep in Western history.
On a deeper level, the machine has also been the engine of the West's economic vitality. And in that sense, it's Tolkien's Luddism that defines The Lord of the Rings as not allegorical but escapist, since it's an attempt to imagine England without the very things that made England possible. It may be comforting to think that bravery and a good heart are enough to repel the Dark Lord. But having guns that fire 4,000 rounds a minute makes a difference, too.
Alien Autopsy
What makes Ridley Scott's horror film so unnerving?
By Michael Agger
Posted Thursday, Oct. 30, 2003, at 4:14 PM PT
In Pauline Kael's essay "Why Are Movies So Bad? Or, the Numbers," which she published in 1980 after a
brief, unhappy stint as a producer in Hollywood, she lamented that moviegoers had become "jaded" and wanted "images that move along in an undemanding way, so they can sit and react at the simplest motor level." She singled out Ridley Scott's new picture Alien as an example, writing that the audience "thought it was terrific, because at least they'd felt something: they'd been brutalized." Most of us don't go to the movies to be brutalized, but Kael's comment gets at the mysterious appeal of horror films: Why do we subject ourselves to them? Alien was the fourth-highest-grossing picture of 1979. Its release opened a perennial fault line in the moviegoing public: those who sought out its lacerating horrors and those who preferred The Black Stallion.
Now, Alien has returned to theaters with a director's cut, once again daring audiences to come and see it. The original trailer offered one of the great taunts in movie history—"In space no one can hear you scream"—and few earthbound horror fans could resist the provocation. But the open secret about Alien, then and now, is that if you discard its notorious scene of indigestion, the movie contains few bloody appendages. It will, however, scare you to pieces.
The late-'70s pitch meeting is all too easy to imagine: "Star Wars meets Jaws!" Yet Alien does something neither of those movies does: For the first 45 minutes, nothing happens, just like some European art-house films. It's all buildup, all prologue. Scott shows the crew waking up from hypersleep and exchanging pithy banter. He feeds you details about how a commercial towing starship operates. Although Scott admits to being influenced by the technophilia of Stanley Kubrick, this is not the antiseptic future of 2001: Everyone is smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee—it's just another day at the office. Scott is laying down a foundation of reality; he's showing us that the shadows are empty, for now. The scariest movie in history is actually a bit shy. The subtle, romantic score by Jerry Goldsmith is what keeps the tension at a simmer.
The cast is your standard motley crew: the black guy (Yaphet Kotto), the black guy's white sidekick (Harry Dean Stanton), the science stiff (Ian Holm), the European (John Hurt), the babe (Sigourney Weaver), the other babe (Veronica Cartwright), and the handsome captain (Tom Skerritt). But Scott sets up a great decoy. Audiences were expecting Skerritt to survive the voyage since he was the star with top billing, but it's Weaver, young and smooth-faced, who faces down the alien and lives to make the sequels. Critics have called Weaver's character, Ripley, an influential and trailblazing female action hero, but outside of perhaps Linda Hamilton in the Terminator series, the trail seems to have faded. My guess is that Scott had simpler motives: He wanted to fool the audience and then exploit the sexual frisson of the movie's final scene, when he has Weaver dodging the alien in her underwear.
The dissenting view on Alien has always been that it's just a haunted-house movie in outer space, and Scott couldn't resist a few manipulative "boo" moments. (A ginger cat jumps out of nowhere; the alien's hand reaches from the wall to grab Ripley.) But the staying power of Alien lies in the way it dredges up primal fears. Scott's long shots emphasize the vastness of space, the sense of being marooned in a hostile environment. The spaceship interiors were designed for maximum claustrophobia. And the alien itself, created by the Swiss surrealist H.R. Giger, is not completely foreign. It's a corruption of nature—an intelligent insect—both comprehensible and terrifyingly unknown. Then there's the way many scenes play like a sophomore biology-lab experiment gone awry: Ian Holm poking at the glistening organs of the alien body or Skerritt cutting one of its fingerlike appendages with a laser saw, releasing a spring of acid blood. And the queasiness is intensified by the old-fashioned, analog look of the effects: The alien that leaps onto John Hurt's space helmet, for example, is a mass of sheep's intestines, steam-cleaned to be white.
The scene in which the alien chews its way out of Hurt's stomach remains the pièce de résistance. When the movie was first released, there was speculation that Scott had cut in some subliminal images of graphic sex to heighten the shock effect. It's one of the handful of movie moments that once seen can never be unseen, as much as you'd like to erase it from memory. We may not be brutalized by it in the same way that audiences were in 1979, but it's not a tantalizing image or a grotesque glimpse into some dark side of human nature. It's a pure pop moment: leading nowhere and full of sensation. It's something for celebrities to talk about on VH1. You saw it, and you felt something.
Thankfully, Scott has resisted the urge to refurbish the movie with a digital airbrush. (I'm still smarting from what happened to poor E.T.) The soundtrack has been enhanced, and the new scenes are ones Alien fans have already seen on DVD and laserdisc, the most famous being the "cocoon" sequence where Weaver discovers Skerritt trapped by the alien but still partially alive. This director's cut, like a lot of these efforts, acts as a promotional campaign for a soon-to-be-released DVD. So what? The movie is on the big screen again. After all these years, Alien is still our bad dream about the future.
Swan Song
What might School of Rock tell us about the state of rock 'n' roll?
By Alex Abramovich
Posted Thursday, Oct. 16, 2003, at 1:51 PM PT
How much can rock 'n' roll movies tell us about the state of rock itself? Take the 1979 Ramones' classic, Rock 'n' Roll High School, and compare it to the current Jack Black juggernaut, School of Rock. A quarter-century ago the Ramones told us the Man "tried to stop their music, but the kids got wrecked and rocked the school!" Today, Black goes out of his way to explain that rock isn't about "scoring chicks" or "getting wasted," and the theme song culminates in a cry of "get me to school on time!" Well, as Joey Ramone quipped 25 years ago, "things sure have changed since we got kicked out of high school."
Traditionally, confluences of rock and film stock tended to fall into one of two categories: In twentysomething films like High Fidelity, the heroes held rock to be so real, and so very vital, that life itself seemed pale in comparison. Such films told us, time and again, that aesthetic judgments, rather than actions, defined our characters. In teen epics like Footloose, rock 'n' roll was elevated to the status of an emerging and embattled value system. The kids in these films felt about music the way that early Christians felt about Christ. Town elders stood in for Roman centurions, and the music served double-duty as cri de coeur and secret language. Bob Dylan summed both forms up nearly 40 years ago: "The word is not international phenomenon," he said. "The word is parental nightmare."
But School of Rock was written with a new breed of adults in mind—and their driving fear isn't that the youth of tomorrow will fall prey to what Frank Sinatra once described as "the martial marching music of every side-burned delinquent." It's that the kids might never get their rocks off in the first place. When Black first meets his school kids, who are young enough to be Dylan's grandkids, Led Zeppelin takes a backseat to Latin, and rock 'n' roll is as sexy and redemptive, in their eyes, as a square dance at a retirement home. Which might explain why Stephen Holden's New York Times review mentioned in passing that hip-hop has usurped rock's place in the public imagination; if he's right, it makes sense that the substitute teacher played by Jack Black should have to introduce his charges to the pleasures of rocking out rather than the other way around. It also makes sense that, like the subtext in your favorite Saturday morning cartoon, School of Rock's music serves mainly to keep the grown-ups engaged.
In this, as in other things, the film succeeds brilliantly. Director Richard Linklater dates his artistic awakening to a 1984 Dead Kennedys show. His first, DIY film, Slacker, did as much as any other to define the contemporary indie aesthetic. And, for all its references to Zeppelin, Sabbath, and AC/DC, his latest has impeccable indie credentials: The cast was coached by Jim O'Rourke, the avant-rocker who produced Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and now plays with Sonic Youth. The title track was co-written with New York garage-rockers the Mooney Suzuki. Craig Wedren, who used to sing with the Washington, D.C., art-punk band Shudder To Think, ghostwrote the faux-Creed anthem you hear in the film's Battle of the Bands sequ
ence. And if Jack Black's character leans heavily toward metal and riff-rock, the film itself makes less-obvious choices—songs by bands like the Velvet Underground and Jonathan Richman's Modern Lovers keep seeping through cracks in the dialogue.
Given such a pedigree, it's odd that School of Rock should invert High Fidelity's highbrow aesthetic entirely and—aside from a quick, cursory dis of Christina Aguilera, Puff Daddy, and MTV—strive to avoid value judgments altogether. Still that's what Linklater's team seems to be doing through much of the film. Consider the sequences in which Black's kids rock out to Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song" and the Ramones' "My Brain Is Hanging Upside Down (Bonzo Goes to Bitburg)." Setting Zeppelin's Wagnerian pretensions against a punk song about Ronald Reagan's trip to a certain German cemetery might, in fact, be the point, but the Ramones themselves would have objected—for them, Jimmy Page's taste wasn't much of an improvement over Reagan's. ("We decided to start our own group because we were bored with everything we heard," Joey Ramone explained once. "Everything was tenth-generation Led Zeppelin … overproduced, or just junk. We missed music like it used to be.") Here, and elsewhere, School of Rock's implication isn't so much that such musical turf battles have sorted themselves out with time—it's that they've simply ceased to matter.
