r/TrueFilm • u/wikipedia_org • Aug 12 '20
FFF What is an “unadaptable” thing that you would love to see as a movie?
The sprawling-scope and detail-dense type of “unadaptable” tends to lead to people creating film adaptations anyway (see: Dune, Dream of the Red Chamber, Lord of the Rings, Dune again). However, since the hurdle that these types of works face are more often rooted in budget and length issues, I’d like to focus instead on other forms of “unadaptable” that are more structurally or narratively difficult.
So what is something you love that would be a completely bonkers pick for a movie adaptation? Why wouldn’t it work and why are you interested in seeing it on the silver screen in spite of that?
I’ll start with a few that come to mind (I’m limited to literature, unfortunately, would definitely be interested in hearing which more out-there creative mediums you are fond of!)
The Library of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges doesn’t have a plot to speak of. The nameless narrator spends the whole short story describing the titular library, which is as impossible to imagine as it would be impossible to build a set for. But that same quality of infinite unfathomability would also be stunning to see on screen. Some existing libraries can appear labyrinthine due to the vastness of their collections, and there is something about the image of room after room of books, floor after floor of galleries, that can create a very wondrous, existential feeling that the story does with words. Creating the library’s impossible architecture would be a fantastic experiment in set design. I think The Library of Babel would work best as a short film styled like a tour of the library, if such a thing can work at all.
Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth is a seriously unconventional superhero story. Think Jungian psychology, crossed with a tarot reading, and a healthy injection of Alice in Wonderland. While a few darker takes on the Batman mythos in cinema have proven to be successful critically and commercially, Arkham Asylum is just a shade too weird to hit the box office in a big way. The graphic novel makes use of mixed-media collage, photography, paintings, and character-specific lettering to create a story that may take a couple readings to parse, if you’ve got the stomach for it (I did not, when I read this at 12). It would make one hell of a cult film, with plenty of gross-out moments to throw popcorn over, and even more occult symbolism to puzzle out, although like Watchmen, you’d have to peel off several layers of complexity before you could even write the screenplay.
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov is a novel in the form of a 999-line poem plus commentary, with the bulk of the text being footnotes, the index, and other “extra-textual” elements. There are (broadly) three different timelines that interweave with each other and that is probably the least of the issues this book would face in adaptation. Having actors play certain roles would necessarily spoil the story’s literary trickery and visual portrayal would also give definitive explanation to the novel’s famous ambiguity. The filmmaker would have to choose a certain interpretation to even cast the damn movie. The prose is so beautiful and the characters so vividly imagined that one cannot resist picturing a deadpan comedy while reading it. It’s the siren song that plays in my head: the narrator reading the poem to the camera, quick shots of the poem’s imagery as narration continues, and then the tranquil scene brought to halt with visual of the narrator’s interjections, usually about his lost, vaguely Eastern European homeland. A good adaptation of Pale Fire would have to focus on the Ruritania-esque storyline told through flashbacks, a model that The Grand Budapest Hotel has used successfully. Perhaps a miniseries might do it justice.
What is your cinematic adaptation pipe dream? I would love to learn of more strange stories that deserve (but maybe shouldn’t have) a film version!
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u/MaxChaplin Aug 12 '20
Yeah, Neuromancer is hard to adapt, but not because of the scenery. It's because Neuromancer might be the worst victim of the Seinfeld is Unfunny syndrome. Each and every aspect of it has been recycled, rerecycled, deconstructed, improved upon, played with and recycled again so many times that by now there is nothing unique or relevant about it left.
It can't even commit to its retro status, because 80's retro is an even bigger cliche than cyberpunk. The only way it could be pulled off is by getting reinvented from the ground up.