News of the World – Imagination, Literature and Film

 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. 

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