Unwatchable Films and Unfilmable Books: The Great Gatsby, Naked Lunch & Dune
I’ll start this with a bit of a story. Seems appropriate for an essay about books, right? Well, I’m doing it either way so bear with me.
Recently, I made a list of movies I had never seen that I had always heard were just terrible. Number one was Noah (2014), which almost made me quit this exercise, and number two was Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby (2013). Number three was Ishtar (1987), and I’ll be frank with you guys: I haven’t gotten to it yet. Those first two took a lot out of me. The reason I’m telling this story, instead of just getting into it, is to give some context as to my frame of mind going into Gatsby. I was expecting it to be terrible, and it did not disappoint, but I was struck by something I didn't see coming: Luhrmann was actually able to capture the “unfilmable” parts of the book. Where he dropped the ball was in the spectacle.
The party scenes in the The Great Gatsby are grating, annoying, and overly choreographed but, I mean, raise your hand if you’re surprised. It’s Baz we’re talking about here. According to the BBC’s resident film expert Mark Kermode, Luhrmann decided to take on the Gatsby Challenge when he was traveling on the Trans-Siberian railway after filming Moulin Rouge. He was drinking a glass of wine, listening to The Great Gatsby on audio book, and watching the scenery fly by. To quote Mr. Kermode, that’s exactly what it feels like.
What always gives people trouble when trying to adapt almost anything by F. Scott Fitzgerald is that so much of the meat of the stories happen inside people’s heads. They’re emotionally driven pieces of writing with characters battling their demons internally until they spill out in an extremely external way. To give credit where credit is due, Bazzie-boy genuinely got those parts right. The 1974 version of Gatsby with Robert Redford and Mia Farrow has a bit more soul (and less CGI) but doesn’t necessarily hit the right notes. Part of this is due to changing acting styles and attitudes, while the other part of it is due to the actors themselves.
Carey Mulligan as Daisy was an inspired choice. She has the ability to hold so much sadness in her eyes, so much tension in her face, that the viewer can see years of pain in the smallest glance. Mia Farrow did a fine job with the role, but kept Daisy a bit too vapid. For some, this may be their interpretation of the character from the novel. Never mind that when translating something through time and mediums, changes are going to be made. Giving Daisy more life and depth served Mulligan well in the part–every time she was onscreen, my eye was drawn to her to watch for the smallest motions, ticks, or winces. She reminded me of Robert Mitchum in the way she did so much with what might seem like so little.
Of course, we need to talk about Gatsby. Leonardo DiCaprio’s version of the character made me think of the ongoing discussion of Batmans and Bruce Wayne. Ya see, there have been actors who made great Bruce Waynes, like George Clooney, who were only mediocre Batmans. Likewise, there have been actors that were good Batmans, like Michael Keaton, who didn’t fit super smoothly into the Bruce Wayne role. (Author’s note: I adore Michael Keaton and have been sexually attracted to him since I was nine, up to this day. Part of my love for him comes from the fact that he always looks like he’s ten seconds away from becoming that guy from Pacific Heights. He’s got the best crazy eyes I have ever seen. But crazy eyes don’t really work on Bruce Wayne.) So why am I bringing this up and what the hell am I talking about? Great question. My point in all this is that DiCaprio nails the broken, desperate man who loves a woman because her voice is “full of money.” What he doesn’t do nearly as well is come across as the warm, helpful friend Nick Carraway (played with the milquetoast adequacy of Tobey Maguire) remembers so well. Even when DiCaprio’s smiling and extending a hand, there’s always a smarmy I-party-with-models-on-oil-baron’s-yachts vibe oozing out of him.
Overall, The Great Gatsby is maddening but I was impressed with the parts that worked. Luhrmann was able to do the hard part of bringing internal conflict to the surface without making it forced, but stumbled over the easy stuff like staging party scenes. Also, the use of CGI to create the mansions, lawns, and the green light was just awful. Here’s an idea: put a green light on a buoy, throw it in a bay, film it. I grew up on Long Island Sound and let me tell you that there are a hundred places that could work for that shot in heartbeat.
While Gatsby has yet to have a version that fully works, there is one truly unfilmable book that was made into a unique and interesting movie: William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch. There may be another book that is as unfilmable as that one but I’m hard pressed to come up with any. Naked Lunch is weird, has minimal action, and is more about the allegorical world of Interzone than it is about anything easily put to screen. The movie version, however, is a clever take on the work; one that interprets and digests the source material rather than stick religiously to it.
Naked Lunch (1991) is one of my favorite books and David Cronenberg is one of my favorite directors, so this was going to be something I either adored or was deeply disappointed by. Fortunately, it was the former. What Cronenberg did was mix the novel (which we know to be heavily influenced by the author’s life anyway) with bits and pieces of history and biography. The characters Hank (Nicholas Campbell) and Martin (Michael Zelniker) clearly represent Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, with whom Burroughs was quite close. An incident from real life, where Burroughs drunkenly killed his wife while trying to shoot a glass off her head, bookends the movie and is tied into the invented linear narrative.
While the book Naked Lunch wanders and explores, the movie finds a line to follow and does so effortlessly. William Lee (Peter Weller of Robocop fame) is an exterminator whose wife, Joan (Judy Davis), has been getting high on his bug powder in a way that looks very much like someone shooting heroin. He begins to get paranoid due to “bug powder exposure,” and convinces himself he’s actually some type of secret agent receiving orders through a strange alien/insect/typewriter hybrid called a Mugwump, a creature lifted directly from the novel. William kills Joan because he thought her to be an agent of the nightmarish Interzone, a world in which William is soon to descend.
The portion of the movie that takes place in Interzone sits a little closer to the novel, but Cronenberg still crafted a running story featuring a vibrant black market and Roy Scheider’s bizarrely captivating Dr. Benway being the man behind the curtain of it all. It takes what the book provided, which was a startling and fascinating setting, and worked a fairly simple storyline through it in the best way. Referring to anything about this movie as simple might seem off because it can be a hard one to grasp, but the plot is pretty much a straightforward mystery with smatterings of body horror and identity issues. Oh, and one great gender bending scene.
The final offering in the “unfilmable books” category is one that we’re actually expecting another version of soon. Dune by Frank Herbet is a long, detailed novel that can kind of be summed up as the story of an intergalactic drug cartel (or oil cartel if you’re into mixed metaphors) and the powers that be who are trying to control it. Yes, that is an extremely simplified version of it, but since internet readers have short attention spans, I’m not about to launch into all the different worlds, planets, power structures, sand worms, and space pirates covered by the novels of the Dune series. Although attempting to do so might illustrate why Dune has been so hard to bring to the screen.
David Lynch’s Dune (1984) is a bit of a mess, though one has to give credit to Lynch for giving it the old college try. It’s certainly not a lazy piece of filmmaking. In fact, I’d argue it’s the opposite: its really working hard to fit everything they could from a thousand page series into a two hour experience. The visuals in it are interesting enough, if a bit dated, and it’s clear that Lynch attempted what Cronenberg perfected: boiling a wide scope story down to a linear plot-line. Unfortunately, Dune falls apart pretty early on and suffers from throwing too much information at the viewer too quickly. Some of the costumes are downright laughable, like Sting’s ill-advised, Zardoz-esque warrior diaper, and poor Kyle Maclachlan (a favorite here at Back Row) gives a formidable performance as a character that starts as kind of a whiny brat and emerges into a sort of demigod. The only problem with it (and this is just a personal opinion), is that Maclachlan radiates a down-to-earth sweetness that doesn’t translate into either of those smoothly.
The 2000’s brought a mini series, Frank Herbert's Dune, from the SciFi Channel which I remember absolutely loving. Having watched it in the past few years, it’s a bit hard to get into at first when all the characters are being set up but really takes off once the “spice” plot gets started. I wonder if this could be part of the problem with Lynch’s version: he spends a lot of time of the set-up, making sure we all understand the world we’re entering, and by the time we get to the good stuff, we’re already over it.
For the record, I don’t really believe there’s such a thing as an unfilmable book. The whole idea of adapting a novel for the screen is that it is crafted for a new medium, so the material is not merely regurgitated. It’s shaped into something different–maybe changed a lot or hardly at all. Like anything else, it’s a crapshoot but to say something is unfilmable right off the bat is dismissive and, frankly, lacks imagination. As long as directors like Cronenberg and Lynch are willing to give it a shot, then we should be willing to let them try. Succeeding or failing is always the outcome anyway, no matter the material.
