With the possible exception of Jean-Jacques Annaud's THE BEAR, a representation of ursine experience that is disturbed by only 657 words of human dialogue, THE PIANO is the least verbal of contemporary talkies. "The voice you hear is not my speaking voice but my mind's voice," announces Holly Hunter's Ada, and even that voiceover is muffled after the movie's prologue. For reasons that are never spelled out to appease those anxious to read explanations, the unwed Scottish mother who arrives on the desolate coast of New Zealand with her daughter and her piano has been mute since the age of six. Music is Ada's private language, one that she can share with no one, except eventually George Baines (Harvey Keitel), the unlettered neighbor who confounds keyboard lessons with adultery.
And yet, the logic of Jane Campion's erotic plot is undone by the written word. To satisfy the practical necessities of mundane communication, Ada goes about her daily paces fortified with a pencil and pad. Early in the film, while her new husband Stewart (Sam Neill) is off buying Maori land, Ada appeals to Baines to lead her back to the beach on which Stewart abandoned the piano. At first, she conveys her request by writing him a note, but the effort is futile. "I'm not able to read," says Baines, who must rely on her nine-year-old daughter and later his own instincts to interpret Ada's desires.
Much later, in the decisive action of the drama, Ada inscribes: "Dear George, You have my heart" on a piano key and instructs her daughter to deliver it to Baines. Instead, young Flora (Anna Paquin) hands the message over to Stewart, who is so irate over this evidence of his bride's perfidy that he chops off Ada's finger. It was an obvious blunder for Ada to have put her feelings into writing, a medium accessible to any reader. But it was a baffling gaffe for writer-director Campion to have inscribed this scene into the script. Ada obviously knows that George cannot read. Why, then, would she write him a note whose consequences could be so painful?
Cinema is the quintessential art of post-literate culture; THE AGE OF INNOCENCE is likely to attract more viewers than readers. Yet the medium remains stubbornly logocentric. Like Ada, filmmakers continue to favor letters long after they have lost their function. Like Robert De Niro's Jack Cady, who uses a copy of Henry Miller's SEXUS to beguile Juliette Lewis's Danny Bowden, Hollywood acknowledges the residual power of writing even as it attempts to burn its books behind it. "What about your books?" a guard asks Cady, who, in the opening scene of CAPE FEAR, walks out of prison without any baggage. "Already read 'em," replies Cady, abjuring literacy to enter the film.
Prophets who read the writing on the wall proclaim the demise of the book, but millions gaze at the writing on the screen. Movies begin in memos and end in reviews, and virtually every story is framed by printed credits. Titles in effect made silent films into illustrated texts, and foreign releases usually oblige the eyes to decode the alphabetical characters that flash beneath the faces of speaking characters. However, even Hollywood talkies frequently betray their deference to print. The title of Spalding Gray's filmed performance piece MONSTER IN A BOX refers to a mammoth autobiographical manuscript that Gray has been toiling on; for movies in general books are the silenced monsters whose ghostly traces haunt the silver screen. "I would rather take a fifty-mile hike than crawl through a book," declared Jack Warner, but he and many of the other vulgar moguls bought the rights to classy titles in order to camouflage their cultural insecurities. Though moviegoing is so popular that the Amblin production of THE BRIDGES OF MADISON COUNTY will likely outsell even that ubiquitous book, it is still generally regarded as one of life's guilty pleasures. The culture still feigns its first allegiance to print. Millions flock to see THE FLINTSTONES who think they should have read the book.
Adaptation is the tribute that cinema pays to print, and, though cinema has always cannibalized publishing, an extraordinary number of recent releases--among them, THE AGE OF INNOCENCE, CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER, THE CLIENT, DAMAGE, ETHAN FROME, FORREST GUMP, HEAVEN AND EARTH, HOUSEHOLD SAINTS, THE HOUSE OF SPIRITS, HOWARDS END, INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE, THE JOY LUCK CLUB, JURASSIC PARK, THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS, LIKE WATER FOR CHOCOLATE, LITTLE WOMEN, THE MUSIC OF CHANCE, ORLANDO,AT PLAY IN THE FIELDS OF THE LORD, THE REMAINS OF THE DAY, RISING SUN, A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT, THE ROAD TO WELLVILLE, SCHINDLER'S LIST, THE SECRET GARDEN, and SHORT CUTS--began as books. THE FIRM, LORENZO'S OIL, THE PELICAN BRIEF, and PHILADELPHIA each feature crucial scenes set in a library, where characters seize control of their plots by reading published texts. The prison library is an oasis from the desolation of incarceration for inmates in THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION. Access to the Beast's vast treasury of books is Belle's reward for nursing him back to health after an attack by wolves in Disney's 1991 BEAUTY AND THE BEAST.
Depicted as a bookworm, Belle is, like Emma Bovary, disappointed in quotidian existence after gorging herself on romantic fiction. "There must be more than this provincial life," pines Belle, whose favorite book describes Prince Charming. Gaston, the comely dunce who strives to win her love, is certainly not the man of Belle's print-shaped dreams. "It's not right for a woman to read," declares Gaston, whose misogyny and bibliophobia merit the violent death he meets at movie's end.
Beauty and the Beast is set, we are told, "Once upon a time in a faraway land," and its animated format further distances the story from a contemporary world in which reading has come to seem atavistic, and studio executives merely cook their books. In the quaint title PULP FICTION, Quentin Tarantino pays flippant tribute to an era when tawdry stories were printed on coarse, cheap paper not projected onto the silver screen. The Charles MacArthur-Ben Hecht play THE FRONT PAGE was made into a movie in 1931 and again in 1974, and in 1940 as HIS GIRL FRIDAY. However, its 1988 avatar, titled SWITCHING CHANNELS, transposes their sturdy story from the realm of tabloid print to the electronic global village in which only TV anchors ever read the news and television has supplanted newspapers as the principal source of information for most. In its hyperbolic freneticism, THE PAPER, directed by Ron Howard from a screenplay by David and Stephen Koepp, is a throwback to the old comedies of deadline competition. Michael Keaton's Henry Hackett, metro editor at the New York Sun, passes up an offer from the genteel NEW YORK SENTINEL, a wordy daily that, in its devotion to journalistic principle, resembles the NEW YORK TIMES, in vibrancy and urgency resembles Euclid's Elements. Instead, Hackett throws himself into the rush of tabloid coverage, where headlines count for more than sentences and photos for more than words and where veracity does not count for as much as speed and impact. During the single hectic day dramatized by The Paper, The Sun manages to triumph over its tabloid rivals, but it is only for twenty-four hours. The Sun's antiquated editor-in-chief, Bernie White (Robert Duvall), is dying of prostate cancer, and the paper itself remains on the verge of bankruptcy. THE PAPER, whose opening credits are accompanied by a voiceover of the news as broadcast by radio, augurs a world of paperless communications. TV monitors in the newsroom of The Sun keep the paper's employees ahead of what they read and write.
Similarly, Charles Shyer's I LOVE TROUBLE is a playful exercise in nostalgia, smart homage to both the old screwball comedies and to the newspaper movies that flourished then, when local dailies still vied and thrived. Nick Nolte's Peter Brackett, a famous Chicago Chronicle columnist who competes with Julia Roberts' Sabrina Peterson, a reporter for the rival Chicago Globe, has just published his first novel, a quaint object that seems passe in the post-Gutenberg galaxy evoked by I Love Trouble. "I'm dying to read your book, man," an old crony, Sam Smotherman (Saul Rubinek), assures Brackett. "When's it coming out on tape?"
In the old Romantic paradox, exuberance is opposed to print, and print loses. Wordsworth, in a book, advises his friend to quit his books, because "One impulse from a vernal wood/May teach you more of man,/Of moral evil and of good/Than all the sages can." The same lesson is offered more recently by WITH HONORS, directed by Alek Keshishian from a screenplay by William Mastrosimone. The movie establishes a dichotomy between zestful existence and the Harvard honors thesis that Joe Pesci's Simon teaches Brendan Fraser's Monty is better off burnt. In MISERY, James Caan, playing Paul Sheldon, a successful author not unlike Stephen King, who wrote the novel from which director Rob Reiner derived the film, is confined and tortured by rabid reader Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates). The 1990 release is a parable of scribocide, the assault on authorship that popular movies enact,even as they feign reverence for the authority of print. That all readers might be ogres is the implication of naming the cannibal genius of The Silence of the Lambs Hannibal Lecter. In Robert Redford's QUIZ SHOW, bookish Mark Van Doren (Paul Scofield), a man so purely literary that he does not even own a TV set, is utterly powerless against the new electronic media that devour his beloved son Charles (Ralph Fiennes), an intellectual prince who was born to read.
Dominic Sena's KALIFORNIA is a movie about the calamitous creation of a book, a study of mass murders that accumulates additional corpses during its own composition. When a publisher offers Brian Kessler (David Duchovny) a contract for a book on American serial killers, he and his photographer girlfriend Carrie Laughlin (Michelle Forbes) begin a cross-country trip to document the sites of infamous homicides. To help pay for gas in their old Lincoln Continental, they advertise for riders and end up in the company of Early Grayce (Brad Pitt), a psychopathic killer who outdoes the carnage of the miscreants Brian presumes to study. "How the hell you gonna write about something you know nothing about?" snarls Early, who proceeds to provide the mousy graduate student with graphic lessons in his chosen subject. More malignantly than ZORBA THE GREEk mocked his bashful, learned Boss as a "pencil-pusher," KALIFORNIA provides its viewers with a lesson in the fatuousness of mere book-larnin'. It demonstrates the inadequacy of print to convey the bloody horrors of a phenomenon we see graphically conveyed through film.
Nevertheless, the redemptive power of reading is celebrated in DEAD POETS SOCIETY, when Robin Williams' John Keating inspires his students with affection for Romantic literature. In quaint contrast to what adolescent males do for excitement in BILL AND TED'S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE or BOYZ N THE HOOD, Keating's boys assert their vitality by sneaking off at night for furtive encounters with Tennyson, Cowley, and Thoreau. But when one tender lector commits suicide, Keating is held responsible and dismissed from the Welton Academy. The era of good readings is ended. Though released in 1989, DEAD POETS SOCIETY is set in 1959, before Beavis, Butthead, Forrest Gump, and Bart Simpson displaced Stephen Dedalus, Jake Barnes, and Eugene Gant, when poets and their readers were not yet all dead. It was two years before Franois Truffaut shot Jules and Jim.
In its treatment of reading, as in much else, JULES AND JIM is a landmark work, and the land that it marks is the frontier between a culture of readers and a culture of viewers, between DEAD POETS SOCIETY and WAYNE'S WORLD, whose two main characters frame their lives through the lens of a video camera. Saturated with allusions to books, Jules and Jim is an elegy for the death of literature even as it revels in the expressive possibilities of cinema. Based on a novel by Henri-Pierre Roch, the film records the final moments of an age in which to be young and creative was to be a writer; its three principal characters, Jules (Oskar Werner), Jim (Henri Serre), and Catherine (Jeanne Moreau), are all authors. But Jules and Jim is the product of a later age in which Bohemia has been relocated to the Cinematheque, and the New Wave of artistic insurgency, young men like Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer, Chabrol, and Rivette, broke over film.
JULES AND JIM is rich not only in general nostalgia for the way things were before the nationalistic frenzy of World War I and then World War II. But allusions to Shakespeare, Cervantes, Baudelaire, and other European authors evoke a vanished literary culture, the cosmopolitan cafe Arcadia inhabited by Jules, Jim, Catherine and other lively poets, playwrights, novelists, journalists, and translators from a variety of nationalities. A bookish gesture, Jim's urgent return to Catherine of her copy of Goethe's Elective Affinities, provides the pretext for the first consummation of their love. But the last reunion of Jules, Jim, and Catherine occurs in a movie theater, where, just moments before we witness the cremation of Jim and Catherine themselves, the three view a newsreel in which Nazis gleefully immolate books. Book-burning was to be the central image and atrocity of FAHRENHEIT 451, which Truffaut, whose own initiation into the movie business came through print, as a professional critic, adapted from a Ray Bradbury book in 1966. JULES AND JIM, an epistolary film that advances its story largely through the letters exchanged among Jules, Jim, and Catherine, is a cinematic epitaph for an age in which epitaphs were still written and read.
According to Anthony Hopkins' C. S. Lewis: "We read to know we're not alone." SHADOWLANDS begins in 1952 and ends, with the death of Joy Gresham, in 1960, before the release of JULES AND JIM. Richard Attenborough's drama about the romance of Lewis and Gresham is rooted in a world of reading. It is her admiration for his books that induces the American poet Gresham (Debra Winger) to begin corresponding with Lewis, and an exchange of letters encourages her to visit him in Oxford. Much of the appeal of SHADOWLANDS is in the unlikeliness of the story for cinematic treatment. The ancient donnish campus town that Lewis lives in offers no evidence of any movie marquee or even a television antenna. In depicting the gentle love between two middle-aged authors who died thirty years ago, SHADOWLANDS evokes an era in which reading was spiritual discipline and a superior form of human intercourse. As portrayed by Hopkins, Lewis is a lonely soul redeemed by the boisterous intrusion of the woman who would become the love of his life. But, despite his dictum that we read--and presumably need--to know we're not alone, reading is a solitary activity. Though it links us to others, the act of reading also isolates us. By contrast, moviegoing is a social activity, much as filmmaking--unlike writing--is a collaborative endeavor. In a crowded society where privacy and solitude are suspect, viewing displaces reading. For many, SHADOWLANDS the movie speaks volumes about Lewis and Gresham.
The most affecting testimony by contemporary film to the enchantments of the written word occurs in Bruce Beresford's 1991 BLACK ROBE. Father Laforgue (Lothaire Bluteau), a French priest who journeys to the frigid wilds of colonial Quebec, brings along a few books as well as pen and paper. Early in the story, an Algonquin chief is puzzled to find the Jesuit missionary scratching squiggles on a sheet of parchment. Laforgue tries to explain what writing is, but the natives are letterless. So he demonstrates. Laforgue asks the chief, Chomina (August Schellenberg), to tell him a secret. The Jesuit writes Chomina's secret down, and then walks the sheet over to Daniel (Aden Young), another Frenchman. To the awe of Chomina, Daniel is able to repeat his secret. What magic is it that enables private information to be conveyed from man to man without either moving his lips? The scene is a parable of writing's crucial role in the transmission of ideas, in the creation of communities of thinkers regardless of the spatial or temporal proximity of their members, but it is set in 1634, when that magic had not yet lost its potency.
While not as numerous as drug dealers, dinosaurs, or lawyers, print professionals are common figures in recent film. They most commonly reject their craft. An executive at a major New York publishing house, Glenn Close's Alex Forrest neglects her job once she becomes consumed with avenging rejection by Michael Douglas's Dan Gallagher in FATAL ATTRACTION. Similarly, Sharon Stone's Carly Norris, whose neighbor teaches "Psychology of the Lens" at NYU and whose landlord is an electronic voyeur, begins SLIVER as a book editor; however, by the end of the film she has become absorbed in peering at video monitors that covertly record activities in every apartment of the narrow high rise into which she has moved. In BRIGHT LIGHTS BIG CITY, Michael J. Fox's self-destructive Jamie Conway bungles his work as a magazine editor, and, acknowledging that what destroyed his marriage to a fashion model is that: "She wanted to live a magazine ad, and I wanted to live a literary cliche," abandons literature if not cliches. In the movie's final line, Jamie tells himself: "You'll have to learn everything all over again." The editors and writers with whom Woody Allen populates ANOTHER WOMAN, HUSBANDS AND WIVES, INTERIORS, MANHATTAN, MANHATTAN MURDER MYSTERY, and SEPTEMBER are feckless and neurotic, misfits in an electronic culture where publishing is a quaint anachronism. "Chapter One," announces the tremulous voice that opens Manhattan, as though we were reading a book, but Allen's book editor Larry Lipton solves his Manhattan murder mystery by going to a movie theater. "I'll never say that art doesn't imitate life again," promises Larry at story's end, but the art that mocks the plot he finds himself in is Lady From Shanghai, not a work of printed literature.
In WOLF, directed by Mike Nichols from a screenplay by Jim Harrison and Wesley Strick, Jack Nicholson's Will Randall is editor-in-chief of MacLeish House, a venerable New York publisher that is a bastion of urbanity in a bestial urban world that is a bloody war of all against all. Print culture is losing that war, and MacLeish has just been acquired by a multimedia conglomerate for which book publishing is just another profit center. The boss's daughter calls Randall "the last civilized man," an odd way to describe a guy who turns lupine every night when the sun goes down. The boss himself, icy tycoon Raymond Alden (Christopher Plummer), fires Randall after telling the veteran bookman that he has only two flaws--taste and individuality. Randall demonstrates his taste by insulting Judith Krantz. And he maintains individuality by continuing to line-edit his own authors' manuscripts. When Alden and his corporate lawyer meet with Randall, it is in a room lined with bookshelves, but the shelves are filled with videocassettes. Randall lashes out at the crassness of post-literate contemporary culture, but he is powerless to save MacLeish before his bizarre metamorphosis into a wolf, which, among other things, makes him a better reader, even without glasses. WOLF fantasizes the revenge of Gutenberg on video culture and of personal art on cartel capitalism. But it does so in a movie, produced by giant Columbia Pictures, and by means of lycanthropy, a tactic unavailable to most book people.
The most servile adaptation from print to cinema would be a film whose opening frames offered nothing more or less than page one of a book. After allowing viewers sufficient time to scan the text, the camera would then focus on page two, followed by pages three, four, five, and on, until we have read every word in the volume. Such a film would, of course, make a mockery of both viewing and reading, since, instead of moving pictures, it would be projecting a tome in much enlarged type, and, instead of a personal literary experience, it would oblige us to participate in a collective, public scan. It would be a clever scam not unlike some multi-media stunts that manage to secure grants. However, the most cunning examination on film of the delights and limits of reading is Michel Deville's LA LECTRICE (The Reader), which Orion marketed in the United States as "a seductive comedy for people who like to read in bed." The description might seem more applicable to bound bawdiness like THE GINGER MAN or PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT.
In contrast to Martin Ritt's STANLEY AND IRIS, in which Jane Fonda's Iris King befriends the illiterate Stanley Cox (Robert De Niro) and helps him acquire the skills necessary to decipher a telegram announcing his father's death, LA LECTRICE is a film about and for sophisticated readers, singular viewers familiar with the writings of Tolstoy, Marx, Sade, and Baudelaire. The film is constructed around a story-within-a-story, but both of its frames portray a character who reads a book to someone else. In the outer story, Constance (Miou-Miou) lies in bed beside her lover and reads him a novel titled La Lectrice. Within that novel, a woman named Marie (also played by Miou-Miou) becomes a professional freelance reader and recites the texts of books to a succession of disparate clients. At one point, Marie even reads from Marguerite Duras' THE LOVER, a novel that was actually being transformed into a film, by Jean-Jacques Annaud, at the moment that LA LECTRICE was insisting on the work's identity as something to read. Marie's own story concludes with the words: "It is almost certain I will now be out of a job." Uttered in a modern medium eager to absorb and transcend print, the prophecy is a cry of despair for the remnant of writers and readers.
(this article is forthcoming in The Centennial Review)