I’ve just seen The Dark Knight, so have compiled my thoughts for this blog. This is more of a critique than a review, so if you haven’t seen the film yet, you might like to wait until you have before reading the entirety of this article. As far as the typical ‘review’ part of this post goes, suffice to say I largely agree with a very good review I heard on Radio 5Live last week, from Mark Kermode, which you can listen to here. The remainder of this post is, as I’ve said, more a critique than a review, so it might contain information you’d rather not read before seeing the film (though I’ve endeavoured not to include any obvious ’spoilers’). You’ve been warned, so click ‘more’ and read on at your own peril.

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Gav left a comment on the previous post, but I thought it warranted a full enough reply to become a new post in it’s own right, so if you haven’t read the previous blog, and the associated comment from Gav, you may wish to do so first. Right, here goes…

Do you think that all adaptation is doomed to failure?

No, I don’t think they’re all doomed to failure, but I do think that one of the characteristics of true greatness is that it’s something which could only have been done by a particular person at a particular time. Dickens, Orwell, Tolkien and so on produced great works that really couldn’t have been produced by anyone else at any other time. In that way, greatness isn’t just the product of its author, but of its circumstance too (and that’s why even the most talented have to be lucky to achieve greatness, or be recognised for it).

I also think it’s a defining characteristic of greatness that it explores and uses its medium every bit as well as it explores and uses its content – being not only a great story, for example, but also a great novel; ditto for a great song needing great composition, arrangement, playing, etc, or a great film needing cinematography every bit as great as any profound truth revealed in the words of the script or the portrayals of the actors.

Both of these factors, to my mind, militate against the chances of an adaptation being particularly good. As regards the first point, an adaptation is usually (though not always) out of time and circumstance with the original work, hence it’s unlikely to be able to recapture whatever it was that meant only that person could do that thing at that time; and as regards the second point, adapting means recreating a work in a new medium which, given the connectedness of work and medium, I think is difficult, if not impossible, to do with the same degree of success.

There is a reverse to this, of course - there are many adaptations which are vastly superior to the original, because the original chose its medium poorly and the basic idea is actually better executed in a different way. This can be true of remakes, as well (which I consider to be part of this whole discussion, as a form of adaptation). So it’s not that I think all adaptations are doomed to failure; I think that the quality of the original counts inversely against their chances, it’s adaptations of the best, most popular and most well-known stories that are therefore most likely to fail - sadly it’s just that kind of adaptation which is tried most frequently. I also think that attempting such a thing is slightly pointless, since there’s a better alternative, as I’ll explain in the next part of the question…

By that I mean something that perhaps goes the whole hog of reinventing a character into a different setting - would Sherlock Holmes (as depicted in the stories) as a character translated to a different (i.e. non-Victorian London) setting always offend? What if Holmes stayed the same character but was transposed to a modern setting, facing mysteries of a contemporary nature and armed with modern technology?

I think this is where inspiration becomes a better bet than adaptation. Inspiration is a factor in everything we do, so we needn’t on the one hand be afraid to admit to it, or on the other feel so beholden to our inspirations that we have to emblazen their names and faces the bastard offspring we create. Sherlock Holmes can be - and doubtless has been - successfully translated to a different setting, facing mysteries of a contemporary nature and armed with modern technology, but it’s under a different name completely, with no reason to pretend he’s Sherlock Holmes anymore. I’d actually say the television series House is an example of this. House is clearly inspired by Sherlock Holmes, but it’s not an adaptation of it. Wouldn’t it just be completely tedious if it was actually called Sherlock Holmes, M.D., and leave everyone wondering, ‘er, why have they made him a doctor?’. More of this in the next part of the question…

Is not the problem with some reinventions that they don’t reinvent at all, but sort of smudge stuff around a bit, losing the essential essence of the originals but not adding anything?

Yes. The basic problem with adaptations is that if they lose the essence of the original (i.e., the thing that made it interesting and made someone want to adapt it in the first place) then it begs the question, why adapt it at all? If it keeps the essence, but changes everything else, then I think it’s really a case of working better as inspiration rather than adaptation. Adaptation brings constraints which inspiration doesn’t, and I think ultimately it’s those constraints which flaw most adaptations. Adaptation is about details while inspiration is about basics. When you adapt something, you retain details - sure lots of things change, but details nonetheless remain, even if it’s only a name or a crucial plot point or whatever - and yet on the other hand, in an adaptation, details are precisely the things you’re forced to change, so adaptations sort of slit their own throats in that regard. The details you keep in order to prove it’s an adaptation really only serve to highlight the compromises and misjudged changes made elsewhere. Better to wholeheartedly abandon the detail, I think, identify the basics, and use them as inspiration (and once you do that, of course, you can still use all the details you want, as long as you’re not relying on them to the point of ripping off - House, though not Holmes, has a drug addiction and lives at 221b).

So, in short - my opinion: adaptation’s alright for the evolution of species, it’s a bit wank for films ‘n’ that.

Right, that’s it.

Matt

…blog more often!

Here’s one:

Thanks to Mark Gibbons for pointing me to this news item:

Robert Downey Jr ‘to play Holmes’

Anyone whose reaction to this news is ‘oh, wow, that’s going to be great!’ might prefer to stop reading now. Actually, no, what am I saying? It’s exactly those people who should continue reading…

Apparently the Ritchie version is going be ‘less stuffy’ than previous versions, which no doubt means Sherlock Holmes will be an irritating cockney twat. Why on Earth you would even try to make Sherlock Holmes less stuffy is beyond me; the character just ceases to be Sherlock Holmes if you do that. The whole point is that he’s completely relentless, single-minded and consumed by the need to solve the mystery. The success that brings him as a detective is mirrored by his loneliness and isolation (yes, there’s Watson, but in the original stories, Watson is only a temporary lodger, who marries and moves out before too long, leaving Holmes as something of a recluse who Watson does his best to drop in on from time to time). Is this new Holmes going to be a playboy with a string of super-model girlfriends to his name, as well? Bollocks.

I suppose the argument for making him less stuffy is that the modern audience can’t empathise with him, but that’s nonsense – whether or not an audience can empathise with any character is down to the skill of the depiction.

There’s just enough humanness in Holmes to show that he is capable of feeling the loneliness that his obsession brings him - there’s a moment in one of the stories where he thinks Watson has been shot and he explodes with rage; there’s the sort of weird mixed, emotion he displays at Irene Adler, the woman who manages to actually deceive and outwit him; and there’s one or two victims for whom Holmes shows moments of genuine sympathy or fondness - but that’s it; it’s just enough to show that he’s human, and that he obviously is capable of feeling something, which hints at the possibility of loneliness without making him an unfortunate character. If you fiddle with that - either by taking away his feelings completely, or, as Ritchie seems likely to do, making him more human - then he just ends up tediously perfect where he’s supposed to be a flawed genius. He’s a cocaine addict for crying out loud - are they going to glamourise that and make it part of his bad-boy cool?

Why people insist on meddling with characters like this, I don’t know. There’s always the trite argument about ‘doing something new’, but that’s plainly just bollocks - it’s not new, it’s just inferior to the original, and completely misses the point. Do something new by all means, but doing a shit version of Sherlock Holmes certainly doesn’t qualify - they’ve been doing that for years.

The same is true of a great many well-known, archetypal characters – Tarzan, for instance – something about these characters, perhaps the lack of ownership an adapting director or writer feels over the character, seems to fill them with the desire to tinker to no good end.

It astonishes me how awful, by and large, any attempts to film characters like these have been. They’re not hard stories to adapt - in the case of Sherlock Holmes, they’re recounted in exactly the manner mysteries are depicted on screen, and they’re heavy on dialogue; you could virtually film them off the page, but for reasons I can’t understand, successive writers, directors and producers insist on making life hard for themselves by trying to fix what wasn’t broken in the first place.

There are some reasonably good adaptations of Sherlock Holmes of course, but even those are often spoilt by completely needless (and frankly nonsensical) tinkering, like placing them in a contemporary period or relocating them to the USA while leaving Holmes as an Englishman. Basil Rathbone always seemed to me to have a good version of the character, for instance, but the stories are somewhat wayward and oddly chosen, to say the least - Nazis in a lot of them, I see to recall.

The thing that makes me laugh is that, what with this tendency to tinker with characters like Sherlock Holmes, those involved would actually stand more chance of seeming like they were doing something ‘new’ if they just did it straight up. It’s sort of gone full circle in that regard. If you did a straight adaptation of one of the original Sherlock Holmes stories, complete with all the details and nuances that have dropped out of the less subtle archetype we’ve got now, then people would probably be astonished. I bet a lot of them would have a hard time believing half that stuff was in the stories in the first place.

So, to give this some broader relevance, I’ll sum up by saying if you’re aim is to do something new, don’t confuse it with the aim of trying to restore an old favourite to prominence. Both are laudable aims, but not to be combined. Restoring the fame of a once-loved character is a question of reminding people what was there to love in the first place, not replacing it with something you’ve decided they’ve come to love instead in the meantime. Whatever it was that made the character popular or worthy of attention in the first place will, by simple fact of its long absence, seem new in itself; nothing else is needed.

Incidentally, I’m led to believe that the three most filmed characters are, in order, Holmes, Dracula and Tarzan. Oddly, they all seem to suffer from the same curse in adaptation - perhaps that’s why studios continue to adapt them so frequently. All of them are characters which, given how ubiquitous they are, you’d think there would have been a definitive, comprehensive treatment of years ago, but there really just hasn’t been. Guy Ritchie won’t be the one to manage it for Sherlock Holmes; I would wager much on that.

Matt

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