Having it Both Ways
This is a familiar, er, story.
But in writing Sylvia, he was aiming to tell a story “that was not dependent on the audience being interested in Sylvia Plath.” So Sylvia is not actually about a writer. Mostly, it’s about a talented girl who dries up and goes mad as a housewife struggling in the shadow of a powerful and successful man.
Yes, such movies never are. They never are ‘actually about a writer.’ So what is the point of them? I never can understand it. To give people some kind of bogus feeling of cultural something-or-other? To give them the illusion that they’ve read the writer in question’s books, or at least might as well have now that they know something visual about her life? They don’t, of course, know a damn thing about what went on in her head, or about the way she transferred what went on in her head onto the page and what happened to that ‘what’ in the process and how good the translation is, or about what she read over the course of her life. No. Because that’s not what people go to the movies to see, obviously. They go to see fights and gun battles, or failing that at least some drama and emotional turmoil or a good lingering illness. They don’t go to see some bint reading in a chair and writing at a desk for hours and hours.
So what you do is, you eliminate everything to do with actual intellectual activity, and just show the entertaining stuff. Tom Eliot’s marital troubles, Lytton Strachey’s boyfriends, Byron’s sexual adventures of all sorts, Iris Murdoch fading away. And Sylvia Plath and her endlessly reviewed melodrama. Not because the audience gives the smallest tiniest damn about Eminent Victorians or Don Juan or The Waste Land, but because that way you get to have both an entertaining soap opera and a whiff of Kulcha. The whiff is totally unconvincing, indeed ridiculous, but never mind, it seems to do the trick, it puts bums on seats. But there’s something irritating about it all the same. If you want to see a soap opera see a soap opera, and if you want to read Virginia Woolf do that, but you look silly doing one while pretending to do the other.
Reminds me of an interview with Kate Winslet after she starred in the biopic of Iris Murdoch. I really have a feeling for Iris, she said. I think I have really got to know her. Asked if she had read any of Iris’s novels, she said, erm, no, none of them actually.
Exactly. I remember that comment. In fact, Jeremy found it so amusing that he added it to TPM’s Quotations…
‘Kulcha’. That’s absolutley brilliant!
I quite like those sorts of things. Should I be worried that you think I look silly because I like something that you don’t?
Should I be worried that you think I’m an elitist because I don’t like things that you do? Should you be worried that I think you have a notion that people shouldn’t have certain kinds of opinions because they amount to saying that other people’s opinions are wrong? Should I stop writing down my opinions here because you have different ones? Should I start making sure that my opinions are the same as everyone else’s on the planet before I entertain them?
Hehe. Touche, Ophelia.
Though you have me wrong. You are perfectly entitled to think that people who watch certain kinds of soaps are ridiculous, or to be irritated by other people going to see particular historical dramas. I think it slightly odd, for sure, but you have the right.
Did I imply that you shouldn’t have your opinion? I didn’t mean to, merely contrast my own with yours.
More seriously, I think it somewhat strange, given the goals of the site, that you equate an irritation with a segment of culture with the application of a straightforward description. As if the only way one could describe someone as elitist or religiously intolerant is in the same way that one hates soaps or films – from an entirely subjective viewpoint. Sure, these things are subjective to a degree, but they way you present it almost sounds like a postmodernist stance to my ears.
Thanks Barney! This is our Klassy Kollege of Useful Knowledge, I guess.
Armando, yes of course you implied that. You didn’t ‘merely’ contrast your opinion with mine, you wondered (ironically of course) if you should worry that I think you look silly. You turned a general observation into an occasion to be (dread word) ‘offended’.
You were also apparently so busy being offended that you didn’t read carefully; my N&C didn’t criticise soap operas, it criticised mutton dressed as lamb.
But I wasn’t even slightly offended. (To be perfectly honest, I may have overstated my love of this genre.) Its more that I think the way you put it was odd, and my comment was meant to highlight that. I *was* being ironic, but I did that in order to highlight the fact that, in my view, your main point was something closer to an ad hominem than an aesthetic criticism. Honest.
Having said that, even if I were offended, so what? Its not like one goes through life avoiding thinking things that may offend, or feeling censored every time one encounters an offended party.
Well sure it was odd, I often put things in odd ways. That’s what I do. Oddly enough, I tend to think that can be a good thing in writing (and even thinking).
And what I said is not an ad hominem, or close to one – that’s absurd, frankly.