News of the World, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Book, Movie
Paulette Jiles’ book News of the World was recommended by a friend, and a number of others echoed that it was a good book. When my copy arrived, it had “Soon to be a Major Motion Picture” emblazoned on the front. I promptly forgot that, read the book, and idly thought about angles that would be worth writing about, but also didn’t feel deeply compelled by it – stirred, but not driven. Then, last night, I was blindsided by an ad for the film. It was in the middle of Jeopardy and the Reluctant Son, with whom I was watching it (and against whom I was competing) noted that it looked like a violent film. Well it did, but I assured him that the book was not essentially violent. But the trailer was doing an additional, particular kind of violence to my reading of the book.
The trailer for the film led to a collapsing of the images
that I had created as I read the book.
These images were still fresh and vivid enough that they could be destroyed – and they
were. The book is told in the third
person, but from the perspective of its hero, Captain Kidd. He is a veteran of three wars, and he is
described as having, “a clean shaven face with runic angles, his hair was
perfectly white, and he was still six feet tall.” It is 1870, he is living in Texas, and makes
his living moving from town to town and reading, you guessed it, the news of
the day. He puts up signs advertising
his readings, rents a hall, collects newspapers from around the world, selects items that will entertain and
reads from them to a packed house by lantern light for about an hour. He is partly informing, but mostly
entertaining by bringing news of far-off and imagination saturated spaces that
the audience is not familiar with. This
is more in the tradition of bed time stories than the evening news – in fact,
he becomes angry when people complain that he is not including more local and politically
divisive material – and he tells the audience in no uncertain terms that they
are to listen and not to interrupt – which they do, with pleasure.
I’m not sure what kind of picture has begun to emerge in
your mind of the captain after the last paragraph. I had a lot more to go on, but I thought he
was lean, to the point of being gaunt.
He had, after all, survived the war of 1812 and the Civil War. The Civil War soldiers were nearly
starving. He is living on the frontier –
in the Hill Country of Texas – and he travels through what was then called
Indian Territory and is now called Oklahoma.
Civilization barely existed. One
of the haunting themes of this book is that government is sparse and
patchy. The confederates who governed
Texas have been dismissed. The Captain
has to assert order in the towns when he is reading because there is neither
order based on external authority – on law – nor on internal authority – the people
are focused on survival and this creates a rawness in most of them (the
exceptions in the book are women who are probably poorer than the men, but certainly more
generous).
Once, after a cross country bicycle tour with a friend of
mine in college, he and I got together to review the pictures from the
trip. A few months had passed (this was
in the ancient days when pictures were made in cameras with film that needed to
be developed). I had very vivid memories
of that trip – made all the more vivid because they were not just visual
images, but they were multimedia events – the images were accompanied by
memories of the feeling of my palms against the handlebars, my pelvic bones
against the seat, and the smell of the area we were riding through, heightened by
having given up smoking to make the trip.
There were sounds that rounded out the memories – and the memories of that trip were
among the most vivid of my life – until the pictures arrived. I could feel them melting and recrystallizing
around the “objective” images that came out of the camera. The narrative experience of the trip was being reduced to a travelogue and I was powerless to prevent it.
Now, many years later, the more visceral memories have
returned. Not with the same vividness
they once had. The memories of the
photographs, ironically, are more faded – patchy. I can remember just one or two. As I was reading this book, I was thinking
that the author, when she wrote it, may have had its being made into a movie in
mind. It is written in such a way that
the visual is given prominence, despite it being a very internally focused book
– a book that explores such things as loneliness, loss, and grief, and also how
culture creates us a creatures – but that even below that there is a primal
self – one that cries out for attachment – both early in development – when there
aren’t words for it – and much later, when we have a beautifully descriptive
language available and therefore can explain much of that away – even though it
keeps knocking away at us as we ride across the country, as the captain does in
this book - and looks and sees the land around him - which is beautifully, vividly - and visually described by the author.
A friend of mine, an English literature professor, a person
who was one of the best readers of fiction that I have known, confessed that
the written word did not conjure up for her a single visual image. I still do not know how she managed to keep a
story in her mind – or more accurately, to follow the story as it
unfolded. And, for what it is worth, she was terribly jealous of those who were able to experience images from reading. I do not read a novel so much
as let the words prompt my visual imagination so that I, like the listeners of
the captain, am swept away to a place that I create – as I created the High
Plains and the Hill Country of Texas as the captain rode through it. Oh, there are parts of this territory that I
have traversed, but not in a wagon, not on a bicycle, but in a car, zipping
past the bluebells of spring and enjoying, with airless comfort, the visual
pleasure of fields and hills – but never testing myself against them in ways
that this text allows me to feel, to appreciate not just what they look like,
but what it feels to gallop towards a swollen stream in the hope that the
momentum will carry us towards the other side when the horse's hooves lose
contact with the streambed and we are floating or to feel what it means to scale
a hill – a word that makes it sound so tame – but when the horses are straining
and the wagon threatens to pitch backward you realize it is not just a bump, not just a hill, but
a fortress.
And yet the words matter.
The narrative that holds the images together is important. When listening to a patient’s dream, I write
down what they say, as best I can, word for word. What I remember months and years later are
visual images – and, when they come to me, it is in reference to what the
patient and I are now talking about at this moment.
And those images are important – but they important in part because the
words that are used to describe the dreams has allowed us to communicate about
what the dream means to the patient. My
image of the dream, conjured up as I write down what is said, is my production –
not the production of the dreamer. Could
she or he see my image, they might not recognize it as their dream. So the common starting place for us to
understand are the words they have spoken.
Though they may be pale representations of the visual experience of the
dream, they allow us to know, together, what the dream means (at least in
certain respects – the dream will always contain private aspects that we are
never going to be able to share).
And when we discuss a book, it is the words that we can
agree are our common text, as it were.
This is where we take off in our particular way to experience this work –
whether we “see” it or simply know it as a story. A film, on the other hand, starts with the
image as the shared text. It is the
image, and secondarily the sound – the dialogue and/or narration that we
share. But, in so far as it is the
image, in the film it is the non-verbal that we have in common. And this image creates something concrete in
our minds – something that is not pliable – the way that images in dreams and
the images that emerge when we read are.
So, spoiler alert, when I saw that Tom Hanks will play the
captain, my image of the captain, but the images of the whole book were
threatened. Tom Hanks is a fine actor,
but he is a round person – not gaunt.
Yes, he is eager to be loved, but he wears that eagerness on his sleeve –
he does not hide it under layers of protection the way the captain does. Tom Hanks does not, in my mind at least, have
the gravitas – the grit (True Grit was an association as I read to this book) that the
captain has. And the entire enterprise
is threatened.
The film is not out yet, and it may prove to be a lovely experience, but I fear it will not be the vehicle the book is. We will not get to know the flintiness of the captain in quite the same way. We will see that he is an upstanding man in a world that is chaotic and filled with people who are uncivilized. We will see smatterings of civilization, but we will not see those through the eyes of the child he “rescues”, a white girl who was adopted by the Kiowa and who became thoroughly Kiowa in the few years she lived with them so that she finds “civilization”, which we experience as approximate at best, as a dangerous and oppressive force that we, because of having seen the Dallas Cowboys play football, know will obliterate this wild world that can only be scaled by force of will and turn it into something that is non-threatening to those who have no appreciation for their own essential wildness.
To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here. For a subject based index, link here.
No comments:
Post a Comment