Peter CostelloWorld of Books
Darwin and his successors have been much interested in the way in which animals have evolved adaptations which aim to deceive. A type of insect for instance sitting on a bare tree will appear to his predators to be a set of twigs. These creatures are not what they seem to be, but are actually deceptive adaptations.
But such deceptive adaptations are commonplace in the modern entertainment media, whether film or TV.
This is not a new problem. When John Ford and Jack Cardiff made a film Young Cassidy (1965), based on the autobiographies of Sean O’Casey, the title role was played by that strapping bruiser Rod Taylor, a far cry in both character, appearance and physical build from the weedy, half-blind Sean. The posters proclaimed: “He’s a brawling, sprawling giant – on the make for fame and fortune, and then some.”
Then there is the case of Neil Jordan’s Michael Collins (1996). When it was released I asked an acquaintance of mine who was spending nearly every day in the National Library researching the later lives of the British agents in 1920s Dublin, what he thought of it. “Why,” he exclaimed, “there are six historical errors in the trailer alone.” This was to say nothing of the plot itself, with its rearrangements of history.
It is not so long since a Hollywood movie caused a scandal by telling the story of the recovery of the German Enigma coding machine, credited with enhancing Allied intelligence in WWII, enabling the eventual victory over the Germans. U-571 (2000) was admitted gung-ho rubbish, but young people ignorant about the real facts of the “almost forgotten Second World War” may have thought it some approximation of truth.
In making the film, Hollywood managed to exclude the British but then, as movie history has always shown, the US won the war without the British or the Soviets. We have all grown so used to this kind of lie. No-one seems to care about it anymore.
Closer to home
The same occurs closer to home. Dismay was felt by the admirers of Jane Austen by the scene in the BBC adaption of Pride and Prejudice in which the heartthrob Colin Firth emerged from swimming in a lake with a wet shirt. This was certainly odd. It was a scene far from the nature of Miss Austen’s fiction. No Georgian gentleman, if he swam, would have swum in his clothes, but in the nude.
The writer Andrew Davies also added a steamy sex scene to Northanger Abbey, with a seduction and a steamy bath scene, not from Austen. He is proud of his efforts to sex up the classics in this way.
In the recent series The Durrells the love affair of Sven and Mrs Durrell is a complete departure from the reality. Critics have called it a complete travesty of life and of literature. But those who loved Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals and his elder brother Lawrence’s Prospero’s Cell – a beautiful book in quite a different manner – were bitterly disappointed.
I could go on and speak about the even more egregious changes that are being made by the BBC, a supposed bastion of quality, to A Midsummer Night’s Dream and to a version of Arthur Ransom’s Swallows and Amazons.
Is there to be no respect for the writer’s authentic vision? These dramas make use of the name, and more importantly the literary reputation, of the writers to palm off on the public a second rate drama loaded with elements that appeal to the very largest of audiences. What distinguished the books, what made them enjoyable, or even life changing, is dissipated in favour of some ersatz playacting.
Perhaps if the scriptwriters had to depend on their own “authentic vision” they would not be as successful. Like the twig insect, they too are not the creatures they appear to be. It is all too much. In future I will refuse to watch any adaptation of favourite books. Instead I will have the great pleasure of rereading them. So in that very limited sense, such adaptations may prove of benefit to civilisation by hastening the end of TV drama.