Someone's Fargo Video Review

This is not by me, and I don't even entirely agree with it, but it's someone at least talking in the ballpark of blatant themes in the show, which is better than the interminable "oh hey did you see this Easter Egg referencing No Country for Old Man? It's the same brand of cigarette!"

Of course the flaw with Subjectivity vs Objectivity is a theme already explored in this work: the randomness of the universe belies neither truth. It's just pointless, cold, and uncaring, and we forge our subjectivity out of that. But you know, good for him at least having the discussion.

Adapting to the Eighties: Little Drummer Girl

Combining the themes of the last two posts, let's talk about a book that was adapted into a movie in the 80's, by John Le Carre. "Little Drummer Girl", starring Diane Keaton. The experience of watching this movie is positively bizarre.

So the book. As described elsewhere, the introduction is an excellent and romantic depiction of the class differences between Palestinians and Israelis. You can read it for free with the Amazon preview.

But really, it is Le Carre's most disturbing book. Sexual relations have always been a metaphor for the spy-business in his novels (usually adultery), and LDG is about Israeli black ups recruiting a young, radical actress to be a mole in Palestinian terrorist organizations. So he makes the metaphor seduction, and is extremely in your face about it. The mood of the book can only be described as "incredibly uncomfortable" as this actress is exploited and seduced by both sides, and her mental world collapses as she can not keep up the difference between reality and her illusions (a disintegration encouraged by her cynical spymasters, and the sheer surrealism of life under occupation for the Palestinians.) None of the sex would pass modern standards of consent, and it only gets worse from there.

It is terribly dark and disturbing. One might even say "sick." And from the introduction, it's quite clear this is what the author was going for. There's nothing light-hearted about any of Le Carre's novels, but especially this one. (It's still very good, so if you can stomach it, definitely read the book.)

Which makes this movie so very tonally different. Now, often when books with intense psychological depths are adapted, losing the main character's inner dialogue changes the presentation dramatically - we no longer have the anchor of their explanations for everything, only the appearance of their surface behavior, and so the story becomes much more archetypical. We have to do the interpretation for ourselves. ("Twilight" is an excellent example of this: Bella goes from someone we know is deep in thought about everything to... a rudely brusque and spacy persona.)

But as you see from the trailer and the star, this movie has the surface of... 1980's action film. It cinematically feels like... "Ghostbusters" and "Big Trouble in Little China." The alluring bell sounds about something being revealed, the bouncy music of a romantic or exciting night happening, or Diane Keaton proudly-but-naively demanding to know just what the hell is going on (until a big strong man comforts her.)

Watching the movie feels like someone demanded absolute fidelity to the plot of the book, and keeping certain key lines, and then looked away when the director changed everything about the tone and delivery. It's a wacky adventure story of a girl falling into a hidden magical world, with all the same visual and audio cues that we've gotten from fighting ghosts.

You want to yell "No, Diane K, stop getting flustered and then soothed by these men who know what's going on, you're supposed to actually be losing your mind at all this, never recovering."

Which is a pity, because the surrealism of what Charlie thinks is going on, contrasted with the "objective" point of view of what is being orchestrated by the intelligence unit, would make some fantastic cuts. Instead all attempts at that - such as the climax where she hands a bomb sent by the terrorists to the intended victim, surrounded by a disposal team in hazmat suits with guns, but has to go through the dialogue she would have had if she was faking being an innocent student returning the victim's briefcase - just read as funny and confused.

This all of course raises the question: are these 80's film techniques necessarily trivializing and comedic? Or have they just gained affective association, and we think they are action-y because that's what all the other movies who use them (and have survived) are like?

Eighties Adaptations

I guess we're talking a lot about filmed adaptations now, and that's good, since too often discussion of adaptations devolves into "Is it good or bad? Were they LOYAL to the original? Is actor X perfect as classic character Y?" instead of interesting questions like "Why does a visual medium benefit from this change? What is different about the themes now, than when the previous version was written three decades ago?"

So we've got "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" and "The Tick", both originally written work from 1986. Despite very different plots, they are fairly similar thematically: the main character is extremely weird, with unexplained supernatural phenomenon going on with them, and a complete unwillingness to follow conventional society. This character surreally interacts with the rest of society, who are stubborn in focusing on their normal concerns and methods of interaction, and generally willfully blind/dismissive to how much weird shit is going on around them. The title protagonist has a sidekick who acts as a bridge between them and the normal world.

There's a lot of differences, but these parallels aren't coincidentally. The fundamental theme of both is a sort of existentialist "how we let the psychological absurd into our lives."

(I can't believe there isn't more writing on the influences of French existentialism on the Tick. It seems really obvious, from the way "French" is their default variable for "foreign" and the way characters resemble French wrestling costumes, which have always been more about abstractions of our inner selves more than American professional wrestling, and just the way everything is both very erudite in its references (Die Fledermaus) and abstractly non-specific (The City).)

And fortunately, both of these have recently come out on internet streaming prestige TV series.

You can get both from Amazon, and they are pretty worth it.

And they are of course substantially different from the original - but precisely in the way you need to to capture the themes of the original. We're in a different time and a different medium than we were in 1986, and so you have to approach this differently to get to the same place.

What's most notable is... neither of these shows are about the title character. The protagonist and focal character is unmistakably that "somewhat boring sidekick figure" from the written work. In the Tick this is the perennial butt-of-jokes Arthur, and in Dirk Gently it's a completely new character (played by superstar Elijah Wood), due to fact that Gently has a new buddy in each of his novels. But we open with them and their boring life, see their personal struggles, their shock and resistance as this bizarre extrusion from the weird invades their lives, and eventually their embrace of absurd adventure.

We've gone from the main character being Don Quixote, to focusing on Pancho.

And it works really well. The quasi-normal sidekick is a much better stand-in for our modern audience than the mythic figure. We easily identify with Arthur and Elijah. And then the title character now works very well as largely an extension of the main character; both Gently and the Tick are hinted as as figments of the imagination.

(The Tick much more so: he disappears so conveniently that they lampshade it with a moment where Arthur has the revelation that he's imagining the Tick, only to be anti-climactically put down by someone else seeing him. But that doesn't really take away that the Tick has no identity outside Arthur: he doesn't remember anything before meeting Arthur, he's incapable of acting on his own much, and he literally says "I am the you that you always wanted to be." The entire series so far is about Arthur's battle with sanity as represented by the Tick and the emotional state the Terror.)

As always with my reviews, I'm not saying anything very insightful. (I should have a lot more to say about what the Tick and Dirk respectively say about the mental health of the person they are orbiting, for instance.) I'm just really struck no one else is saying this yet. The new Tick series is about Arthur mostly! The Dirk Gently series relegates him to a side character! Why is this so under discussed? Why can't we watch a film and say what we see in it?