Literary Arrogance

[digg=http://digg.com/movies/Literary_Arrogance]Evening Finger Lickers! While lounging in the bath this afternoon, yes it was a very lazy day, I was reading the Times Book supplement and came across an article by David Baddiel about the Academy Awards. Regular Finger Lickers will know my feelings about the Oscars and so I don’t want to dwell on the subject in too much depth, however, I felt that this article deserved a mention.

I have no real feelings about Baddiel either way, I have never read one of his books and have never been a particular fan of his stand-up shows. However, I began the article with neither positive nor negative feelings towards the man. He begins his analysis of the proceedings discussing the swing in recent years from “good book, bad movie” to “good book, good movie.” He then continues to explain how significant it is that the three extremely sucessful films at this year’s Oscars Atonement, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and No Country for Old Men are extremely faithful reproductions of the original text. Going as far as suggesting that Cormac McCarthy’s book was so cinematic in nature that he alludes to McCarthy doing the Coens (love them Coens mmmhmm) job for them. His parting shot is to suggest these filmic adaptations provide a “literary experience” rather than a “cinematic experience” and here’s the passage that really annoyed me:

This is what I mean by a literary experience: you feel challenged, subverted, disturbed and a bit alienated by the movie. You don’t cry, or punch the air, or shout “you go, girlfriend” or think “cool” in response to a really big explosion. Thus it’s more like reading a post-modern novel than going to the cinema. And thus it has won a lot of awards.

What complete and utter literary arrogance, yes this film undoubtedly owes a good deal of its success to Cormac McCarthy’s original text. That I am not disputing. However, the utter arrogance, to suggest that the experience he describes is made up of facets only found in post-modern fiction. Indie film has been pushing the boundaries of mainstream cinema for decades by challenging, subverting, disturbing, and alienating its audience through alternative forms of storytelling. This mainstream success by a film with indie hallmarks is not solely due to its literary roots. It owes a great dept of gratitude to a huge number of indie films that have paved the way and acclimatised the mainstream audience to a different form of cinematic experience. The suggestion that this film owes its Oscar success to its ability to provide a literary experience is absurd, not only because it demonstrates dreadfully narrow thinking, but also because it highlights the author’s utter lack of knowledge about cinema.

K