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Got One on Your Wish List?
By James Parker
The megaplexes have been clanging with post-apocalyptic movies, so why has no one had a crack at “Riddley Walker”?
I think I was 12 when my dad gave me a copy of Russell Hoban’s “Riddley Walker,” and in my mind the scene has taken on a heavy, initiatory vibe: We stand, father and son, on the playing fields of my boarding school in Suffolk, England, in a cold and purple dusk, our nostrils quivering with the milky-metallic smell of processed sugar beets from the nearby British Sugar factory, and he hands me the book. . . . What a book! The blurbs alone were radically stirring, a unanimity of blown-away-ness, a massed aesthetic call to arms. “This is what literature is meant to be,” trumpeted Anthony Burgess. “Stunning, delicious,” harmonized John Leonard, “designed to prevent the modern reader from becoming stupid.”
I might have been 13, but I hope I was 12, because that would give me, in Riddley-speak, “a connexion” with the novel’s narrator. “On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen.” That’s the first line, and this is the language of Riddley Walker: futuristic-backward pig-iron English, blasted into poetic-phonetic lumps by the nuclear catastrophe that took place 2,000 years before. The people of “Inland” flounder through the mudscape, digging up dead machines, oppressed by a sense of lost knowledge and broken memory, looking for signs, rhymes, echoes, “tels.” They are about to reinvent gunpowder. The year of the book’s publication, 1980, was also the year that the English end-timers Discharge released their single “Realities of War”: One minute 10 seconds of Hobbesian hardcore punk that sounded as if it could have been bashed out by Riddley and a couple of his friends between digging shifts at Widders Dump.
The megaplexes have been brooding and clanging with post-apocalyptic movies for years now, so we must ask ourselves why no one has had a crack at “Riddley Walker.” Campfire smell, wet canvas, bows and arrows, heads on poles; a hero like a stoned and bardic Holden Caulfield; a fast-moving story that has Riddley “roading” all over rainy, smoky England in the company of a sacred mutant and a pack of wild dogs. What’s not to film? The language is a little startling on the page, sure, but no problem if you speak it aloud (although you might find yourself involuntarily doing a kind of destroyed Kentish accent). Perhaps it is the book’s intensely mystical atmosphere that has deterred the keen-eyed producer.
Riddley’s inner world is profound; it operates according to a kind of merciless spiritual physics, whereby everything is either in the process of being torn apart — like the atom, or Adam, or “the Littl Shynin Man the Addom” — or in the process of coming together. Nothing waits, and there is no rest, and there’s nothing you can do about it. “You know Riddley theres some thing in us it dont have no name,” says Lorna the soothsayer, the “tel woman.” “Its looking out thru our eye hoals.” Riddley’s religion, his bodge of myth-shards and desperate improvisations, is not a made-up theology like the god Frith in “Watership Down” — it’s an ontology, a top-to-bottom account of being itself.
Theology, ontology . . . Too wacko for Hollywood? So let me help. To adapt the novel into a screenplay with “oodles of rhythm and twang” (as one script is described in Martin Amis’s “Money”), I propose Louis Mellis and David Scinto, the team that wrote Jonathan Glazer’s gangster opera “Sexy Beast.” Masters of the vernacular, bloody-minded visionaries, with the necessary comical-terrible touch. For director, I would go with Edgar Wright, the metaphysical dimensions of whose “Shaun of the Dead” are still, I believe, to be fully appreciated. Wright does great action, and he’s extremely, elegiacally, almost insanely English — an important quality on this project. As for the soundtrack, well, that’s a no-brainer: Discharge, Discharge all the way.
James Parker is a contributing editor
◆ ◆ ◆
By Dana Stevens
The point is to dwell even more deeply in the imaginary space the book opens up, to love it in a different way.
Envisioning the movie version of a beloved book is at once an act of tenderness and of violence. Even as you recognize that the thought experiment is likely to end in failure, you find yourself mentally casting the main characters, finessing the details of costume and production design, maybe even framing the opening shot. No film that commits the crass act of existing could compare with the one that takes shape in your mind as you read, a project unbeholden to the demands of budget or box-office draw or, indeed, the laws of time and space. (Want to cast Cary Grant opposite Cate Blanchett in a screwball update of “Pride and Prejudice”? Have at it.)
Nor should the knowledge that great novels rarely make for great films — and that so-so potboilers often inspire brilliant ones — put a dent in the would-be adapter’s book-to-movie fantasies. The point of imagining the movie version of the book as you read isn’t to develop a filmable script (unless you’re in the unenviable position of actually trying to get the thing made). It’s to dwell even more deeply in the imaginary space the book opens up, to love it in a different way.
That’s why I’m going to go out on a limb and pitch Edith Wharton’s novel “The Custom of the Country” as a candidate for fantasy adaptation. A kind of companion-in-reverse to her earlier success, “The House of Mirth,” this mordantly comic 1913 novel traces not the downward mobility of a refined young woman, but the upward mobility of a coarse one: Undine Spragg, a social-climbing Midwestern beauty whose extravagantly ugly name befits her all-around awfulness. Having manipulated her enabling nouveau riche parents into relocating to New York, Undine rises high enough in social circles to snag a well born if not exactly wealthy man, then spends the rest of the book finagling to trade up to ever richer husbands, cheating and lying as the occasion requires. Not only does she neglect her young son, she uses him as collateral in a nasty blackmail scheme. Undine Spragg is one of literature’s most reprehensible and yet touching antiheroines, as morally vapid as she is socially adroit, unable to comprehend her continued dissatisfaction with a life built entirely on vanity, ambition and greed.
In the age of reality television and social-media fame, it’s easy to imagine a contemporarily relevant on-screen Undine, a Real Housewife of the Gilded Age. I could see her played by Amy Adams in resplendent period costume (insatiable lust for, and subsequent boredom with, expensive new clothes being one of Undine’s most salient traits) or by Busy Philipps in a pink tracksuit in a modern-day update set in Southern California. The project would require a director who could at once appreciate the tragic reach of the damage wrought by Undine’s monstrous selfishness and sympathize with her as an ambitious, appetitive woman whose era left her few options for advancement outside of aspirational marriage. Sofia Coppola might be able to pull it off, but as the sole executive producer of this project, I’m hiring Todd Haynes (or maybe a time-traveling Douglas Sirk).
There are scenes from the book I can’t stop picturing on film, like the late chapter in which Undine’s young son, Paul, left alone for the afternoon with a houseful of indifferent servants in his mother’s sumptuous Paris apartment, wanders disconsolately into a bedroom that both belongs to and resembles his perpetually absent mother: “all pale silks and velvets, artful mirrors and veiled lamps.” But it’s hard to envision an adequate cinematic rendering of the novel’s sly, sad, chilling ending, in which Undine, checking “the glitter of her hair” in the mirror as her now impeccably A-list party guests begin to arrive, feels a nagging twinge of resentment that because of her status as a divorcée, she will never become an ambassador’s wife. No clunky voice-over could convey that last page’s gossamer irony. But maybe — in my dream adaptation, anyway — the right actress could do it with just her eyes.
Dana Stevens is a film critic
By James Parker
The megaplexes have been clanging with post-apocalyptic movies, so why has no one had a crack at “Riddley Walker”?
I think I was 12 when my dad gave me a copy of Russell Hoban’s “Riddley Walker,” and in my mind the scene has taken on a heavy, initiatory vibe: We stand, father and son, on the playing fields of my boarding school in Suffolk, England, in a cold and purple dusk, our nostrils quivering with the milky-metallic smell of processed sugar beets from the nearby British Sugar factory, and he hands me the book. . . . What a book! The blurbs alone were radically stirring, a unanimity of blown-away-ness, a massed aesthetic call to arms. “This is what literature is meant to be,” trumpeted Anthony Burgess. “Stunning, delicious,” harmonized John Leonard, “designed to prevent the modern reader from becoming stupid.”
I might have been 13, but I hope I was 12, because that would give me, in Riddley-speak, “a connexion” with the novel’s narrator. “On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen.” That’s the first line, and this is the language of Riddley Walker: futuristic-backward pig-iron English, blasted into poetic-phonetic lumps by the nuclear catastrophe that took place 2,000 years before. The people of “Inland” flounder through the mudscape, digging up dead machines, oppressed by a sense of lost knowledge and broken memory, looking for signs, rhymes, echoes, “tels.” They are about to reinvent gunpowder. The year of the book’s publication, 1980, was also the year that the English end-timers Discharge released their single “Realities of War”: One minute 10 seconds of Hobbesian hardcore punk that sounded as if it could have been bashed out by Riddley and a couple of his friends between digging shifts at Widders Dump.
The megaplexes have been brooding and clanging with post-apocalyptic movies for years now, so we must ask ourselves why no one has had a crack at “Riddley Walker.” Campfire smell, wet canvas, bows and arrows, heads on poles; a hero like a stoned and bardic Holden Caulfield; a fast-moving story that has Riddley “roading” all over rainy, smoky England in the company of a sacred mutant and a pack of wild dogs. What’s not to film? The language is a little startling on the page, sure, but no problem if you speak it aloud (although you might find yourself involuntarily doing a kind of destroyed Kentish accent). Perhaps it is the book’s intensely mystical atmosphere that has deterred the keen-eyed producer.
Riddley’s inner world is profound; it operates according to a kind of merciless spiritual physics, whereby everything is either in the process of being torn apart — like the atom, or Adam, or “the Littl Shynin Man the Addom” — or in the process of coming together. Nothing waits, and there is no rest, and there’s nothing you can do about it. “You know Riddley theres some thing in us it dont have no name,” says Lorna the soothsayer, the “tel woman.” “Its looking out thru our eye hoals.” Riddley’s religion, his bodge of myth-shards and desperate improvisations, is not a made-up theology like the god Frith in “Watership Down” — it’s an ontology, a top-to-bottom account of being itself.
Theology, ontology . . . Too wacko for Hollywood? So let me help. To adapt the novel into a screenplay with “oodles of rhythm and twang” (as one script is described in Martin Amis’s “Money”), I propose Louis Mellis and David Scinto, the team that wrote Jonathan Glazer’s gangster opera “Sexy Beast.” Masters of the vernacular, bloody-minded visionaries, with the necessary comical-terrible touch. For director, I would go with Edgar Wright, the metaphysical dimensions of whose “Shaun of the Dead” are still, I believe, to be fully appreciated. Wright does great action, and he’s extremely, elegiacally, almost insanely English — an important quality on this project. As for the soundtrack, well, that’s a no-brainer: Discharge, Discharge all the way.
James Parker is a contributing editor
◆ ◆ ◆
By Dana Stevens
The point is to dwell even more deeply in the imaginary space the book opens up, to love it in a different way.
Envisioning the movie version of a beloved book is at once an act of tenderness and of violence. Even as you recognize that the thought experiment is likely to end in failure, you find yourself mentally casting the main characters, finessing the details of costume and production design, maybe even framing the opening shot. No film that commits the crass act of existing could compare with the one that takes shape in your mind as you read, a project unbeholden to the demands of budget or box-office draw or, indeed, the laws of time and space. (Want to cast Cary Grant opposite Cate Blanchett in a screwball update of “Pride and Prejudice”? Have at it.)
Nor should the knowledge that great novels rarely make for great films — and that so-so potboilers often inspire brilliant ones — put a dent in the would-be adapter’s book-to-movie fantasies. The point of imagining the movie version of the book as you read isn’t to develop a filmable script (unless you’re in the unenviable position of actually trying to get the thing made). It’s to dwell even more deeply in the imaginary space the book opens up, to love it in a different way.
That’s why I’m going to go out on a limb and pitch Edith Wharton’s novel “The Custom of the Country” as a candidate for fantasy adaptation. A kind of companion-in-reverse to her earlier success, “The House of Mirth,” this mordantly comic 1913 novel traces not the downward mobility of a refined young woman, but the upward mobility of a coarse one: Undine Spragg, a social-climbing Midwestern beauty whose extravagantly ugly name befits her all-around awfulness. Having manipulated her enabling nouveau riche parents into relocating to New York, Undine rises high enough in social circles to snag a well born if not exactly wealthy man, then spends the rest of the book finagling to trade up to ever richer husbands, cheating and lying as the occasion requires. Not only does she neglect her young son, she uses him as collateral in a nasty blackmail scheme. Undine Spragg is one of literature’s most reprehensible and yet touching antiheroines, as morally vapid as she is socially adroit, unable to comprehend her continued dissatisfaction with a life built entirely on vanity, ambition and greed.
In the age of reality television and social-media fame, it’s easy to imagine a contemporarily relevant on-screen Undine, a Real Housewife of the Gilded Age. I could see her played by Amy Adams in resplendent period costume (insatiable lust for, and subsequent boredom with, expensive new clothes being one of Undine’s most salient traits) or by Busy Philipps in a pink tracksuit in a modern-day update set in Southern California. The project would require a director who could at once appreciate the tragic reach of the damage wrought by Undine’s monstrous selfishness and sympathize with her as an ambitious, appetitive woman whose era left her few options for advancement outside of aspirational marriage. Sofia Coppola might be able to pull it off, but as the sole executive producer of this project, I’m hiring Todd Haynes (or maybe a time-traveling Douglas Sirk).
There are scenes from the book I can’t stop picturing on film, like the late chapter in which Undine’s young son, Paul, left alone for the afternoon with a houseful of indifferent servants in his mother’s sumptuous Paris apartment, wanders disconsolately into a bedroom that both belongs to and resembles his perpetually absent mother: “all pale silks and velvets, artful mirrors and veiled lamps.” But it’s hard to envision an adequate cinematic rendering of the novel’s sly, sad, chilling ending, in which Undine, checking “the glitter of her hair” in the mirror as her now impeccably A-list party guests begin to arrive, feels a nagging twinge of resentment that because of her status as a divorcée, she will never become an ambassador’s wife. No clunky voice-over could convey that last page’s gossamer irony. But maybe — in my dream adaptation, anyway — the right actress could do it with just her eyes.
Dana Stevens is a film critic