Thursday, September 11, 2008
Concept: Dune, the movie.
For my birthday my parents got me Dune, and it was the first time I'd seen this film in about eight years. I watched this film constantly in 7th grade, and it became one of my favorites of all time. In 8th grade I picked up the book by Frank Herbert, and wasn't as impressed by the book as by the film. Many friends told me that the series went downhill from there, but I am still intrigued by the rumors that have reached me about what happened to Paul Atreides.
Now I realize that I am in the minority here in two ways: that Dune is a good movie and that the movie Dune is better than the book. I won't make the claims that I have about Dead Man's Chest... that this film is underrated because it is supremely crafted in an uncommon medium. But I think it may be underrated nonetheless because we have a bias toward, for example, good acting and plot coherence over lavish setpieces and effective imagery. These things are each neutral on their own... in the case of Dune the latter grant relief to the former. The script might be neither as tight nor as accessible as we would like, but for me, the spectacle of the blue-eyed Fremen, a sand-worm on the attack, or Baron Harkonnen indulging his blood fetish (not present in the book) is enough to make a very dense and difficult experience into something quite enjoyable.
Which brings me to another point. I also like the shorter cut of Dune more than the extended edition and this ties into why I like the film more than the book. In Herbert's novel, Paul Atreides sojourn into the bad trip that is melange gradually dominates more and more of the book, until he is completely overcome with a messianic grandeur so saturated as to seem inhuman. The extended film cut attempts to preserve this plot arc. The shorter cut (while hardly economical) jettisons much of this in favor of the political arc of the story. Which is marginally more human and certainly more accessible.
It might be fairly observed that this is a bit of an artistic cop-out. On the one hand, I don't think that an adaptation can exist independent of its source material; otherwise it wouldn't be an adaptation. That being said, the transposition of an object from one medium to another, and all of the attendant issues, makes it self-evident that these should be considered different works of art. For that reason, it is fair if the film emphasizes what the novel does not. One might say that political themes can be more thoroughly and deeply engaged in a three hour film than an abstract philosophical construct (if you want to pose Star Wars as a counterexample, I have an answer to that). One might argue, though I would disagree, that films being a popular medium (as opposed to books) have a greater obligation to ease and accessibility. However, I definitely believe that this film mitigated the story in a way that was beneficial. It took a novel that had struck me as coldly intellectual and through flesh-and-blood and abridgment brought the story some distance toward the opportunity to access through sense and emotion. Far from depleting its mystical ruminations, it has provided the audience with a point of entry to them.
Dune is a flawed film, but its atmosphere and viscerality continue to inspire me. It is, much like Ann Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho a work whose conspicuous flaws render equally conspicuous the risks it takes and its successful efforts to innovate and engage.
Labels: art, CONCEPT, esotericism, film, literature, science-fiction, syncretism
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Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Concept: The Visual Arts: A History, by Hugh Honour and John Fleming.
As part of my development of Urbantasm, I've been attempting a complete-as-possible review of the history of the West... generally speaking I'm up through the end of the Roman Republic, but since New York has such an unparalleled array of Art museums, I've actually gone ahead in the history of visual art, and I'm almost done with The Visual Arts: A History, by Hugh Honour and John Fleming.
It has unexpectedly become one of my favorite reads this year. So far as there is a sense of dramatic tension and suspense, there is no reason in my mind not to read nonfiction, and even a college survey, as a narrative exercise. Of course, I've been mostly reading to learn about art, but the sense of social and critical progression, the way the authors describe the undulation of schools, and the way one artist reacts and responds to another reads to me as a story.
A friend has pointed out to me that this particular textbook is treated by art historians with a certain amount of frustration. The response seems to be not one of contempt but resignation, and the problem is that Honour/Fleming is too short, that is, unequal to a fair and general explication of its subject. I was surprised by this, personally, because the book is the size of two Bibles. It's big enough and cumbersome enough that fellow subway riders would shoot me dirty looks and sidle away when I'd try to read while standing, holding the book open on one arm and turning the page with the other. It's almost 900 pages long, two inches thick, slightly oversize, has small print, and probably weighs enough to kill any small, furry animals it's dropped upon.
The brevity is made clear, though, as the complexity of the story becomes apparent. For example, four chapters spanning 140 pages attempt to cover the last 2000 years of non-Western art. While the book is able to explicate and discuss well-known and documented trends such as Chinese Landscape Paintings, these have to be treated very briefly. Moreover, the fact that there is any discussion at all requires many ommissions. There is no, for example, discussion of Korean art, or art from Southeast Asia beyond the 16th century. Meanwhile, the last 100 years of European and American art is compressed into 110 pages; in short, a heavily abbreviated sequence of the big guns (Picasso, Pollack, van der Rohe) marching across the pages in more-or-less single file.
I'm not saying this by way of criticism. I suspect that more meaningful analyses of this textbook would scrutinize the disparities it posits between Western/Nonwestern art, and possibly the stability of boundaries it establishes between different schools and artists. I simply don't know the field well enough to have an opinion as to whether it succeeds or not on these levels. The two greatest impressions for me, however, as a layperson, are 1) the majesty and diversity of the physical artistic historical record, and 2) the immensity of history as a whole. It's just one more example of that double-edged sword: that the world is full of interesting things. In fact, there are so many interesting things that we'll die before we've ever experienced enough of them.
Then again, maybe just one is enough.
Labels: CONCEPT, literature, visual art
1 comments.
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
Concept: Harry Potter as Great Literature.
CONTAINS NO SPOILERS.
After finishing Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, I wasn't quite ready to separate myself from the subject yet, so I went to a number of websites reading reviews and the like. Among these I came upon the AV Club's blogged-as-read report by Genevieve Koski and Tasha Robinson. It was replete with comments like "These books aren't great literature, they're just kind of fun, and I'm more interested in the whole phenomenon than in deifying Rowling as a great writer," and "a lot of people, on this site and elsewhere, have complained that the Harry Potter books aren't great literature and don't deserve the kind of attention and devotion they've gotten."
This is a common criticism – certainly among my New York friends – and I think it is absurd. Instead of conceding that someone isn't a great writer and then cortorting our argument into all sorts of weird shapes to justify why we love it so much (because I can't believe that there's any reason for people to be fascinated by the Harry Potter phenomenon as opposed to, say, the Titanic or Pokemon phenomena), doesn't it make more sense to admit that we do find someone a great writer, and then examine our definition of "great writer"? We can either find our emotions or our assumptions in error, but either way I think the examination is more honest as a result.
The conclusion I've drawn is that such backhanded complements to Harry Potter are first and foremost a product of academia and the sort of literature it has sought to produce and endorse: that which we euphemistically call "literary fiction," and which is supposedly distinguished from genre writing by its lack of "conventions" and popular writing by its appeal to individual examination over universal sentiment. I don't buy these distinctions. "Literary fiction" is embodied by oh-so-reliable tropes of political ennui, childhood remeniscences, extramarital affairs that are prompted by assorted personal vacancies, and obsessions over prosodic minutae. These are all as present as the conventions of genre fiction, and their most convincing effect could be (almost) agreed upon as in accordance with an organizing principle, if not universal sentiment. Literary fiction isn't bad for that fact; it is simply conventional. It is literary by virtue of the fact that an academic community has named it so. It are not deprived of craft or novelty or relevance for this reason; it shares with popular and genre fiction the opportunity to extend relevance beyond a simple application of convention.
I'm not saying here either that I think that Rowling's work is flawless. Each book has had its flaws. Books One and Two lacked the complexity and intrigue of all that followed. Sometimes they've suffered from too much exposition, perhaps, and who can forget the angry (and annoying) ALL-CAPS HARRY from Book Five. But even great writers have peccadilloes. Samuel Beckett is essentially a one-trick pony; his trick is good enough that we forgive him. Vladimir Nabokov has many tricks up his sleeve, but only one plot, and if you've read Lolita and Pale Fire you've gotten the gyst of it. Getrude Stine is startling and magnetic with the power and beauty and majesty of her voice, but not in her off-putting theories on personality and nationality.
Rowling is a master storyteller. She makes an economic use of narrative inflection and description to establish setting and characters as both subtle and rawly imaginative, and immediately kicks into plots with myriad intersecting arcs. Like Dantè's terza rima the atoms of this device overlaps and stagger. This means that there is never a comfortable resolution until the end of the book, and maybe, ultimately, the series. It's as effective as good noir for page-turning, and given the manipulation of information from earlier books, the abundance of both red herrings and legitimate clues, it's authentically a masterful creation.
My problem with reviews such as the AV's is that they make automatic provisions for and distinctions between good writing and good storytelling. And yet: between these two modes of writing – if the social and political situation of the text is just as interesting, if the prosodic and thematic vocabulary is just is sophisticated, if the modes of creation and the distribution of the work are essentially identical – is there any objective basis on which to prefer "good literature" over "good storytelling"?
I don't think so, myself.
This week and next I will be writing three posts on this subject. In each I will choose an element, theme, or device that Rowling uses in the Hally Potter books generally and Deathly Hallows particularly. I will try to argue that these deployments are can be well-argued to be as nuanced and deliberate as those used by "master writers" of the last century. We have begun a process by which writing indigenous to the non-Western world – Ferdousi's Shahnamah for example, or the stories of Rabindranath Tagore – is being critically explored as equal in nuance and deliberation to our Western canon. We ought to examine our assumptions within the field of Western literature itself.
Labels: art, CONCEPT, Harry Potter, literature
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