Rik Mudi - The Creature Lurches From the Lagoon

Just got back from another conference where I talked about what its like to have your book adapted into a film. A weekend in Miami was promised. Sunburn and some pool time sounded pretty good.

I shouldnt be dismissive and ungenerous about questions on the subject of my book The Ice Storm and its adaptation, because the movie brought me a large audience that had no prior knowledge of my work. It paid for the down payment on my house. I got to meet interesting and gifted people. I got to witness the machinery of cinema up close. Yet I feel ungenerous just the same. When I hear them coming, these questions about adaptation, I feel my heart sink. I start to get bored almost immediately. Why? Why do I feel ungenerous and dismissive about the facts of my adaptation? Well, because Im a writer, first of all, and I therefore make things out of words, and I think the multifary of earthly creation is best refracted in words. Sometimes I think words are so beautiful so flexible so strange so lovely that they make me want to weep, for their mystery and import, for their proximity to eternal mysteries. Words are the oldest information storage and retrieval system ever devised. Words are probably older than the cave paintings in France, words have been here tens of thousands of years longer than film, moving pictures, video, and digital video, and words will likely be here after those media too. When the electromagnetic pulse comes in the wake of the nuclear blast? Those computers and digital video cameras and videotape recorders that are not melted outright will be plastic and metal husks used to prop open doors. Not so with the utterances of tongues. Words will remain, and the highly complicated and idiosyncratic accounts assembled from them will provide us with the dark news about the blast. The written word will remain, scribbled on collapsed highway overpasses, as a testament to love and rage, as evidence of the wanderers in the ruin.

Movies, on the other hand, are useless without parking lots, movies are useless without projectors, movies are useless without the crowds urgently required to make good on the large investments in movies. Were there but a single mating pair of Homo sapiens sapiens left on this planet, there would be stories composed and recounted, presented from one to the other, while two people would be barely enough to get a movie pitch off the ground, much less the thing itself (someone would have to be director and foley artist, gaffer, best boy, makeup person, stunt man, etc.).

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The interest in relations between writers of books and the filmmakers is cultural. What does the culture want? What does that famished maw of culture desire? It wants to dine. The African elephant, I learned recently, requires four hundred fifty pounds of forage and fifty gallons of water every day, but the colossus of culture is far larger than the largest ever herd of these pachyderms. The vanished buffalo of the plains wouldnt get close to its massiveness. Often we are it, the repast,we are the thing that culture needs. The people you meet on the street are the thing that the media finds appetizing, because it likes to observe conflicts between these people, between you and me, especially without having to get involved as in Jerry Springer, Survivor, et al. A little conflict can provide a lot of nutrition, it can drive a narrative, and the bigger and more lasting the conflict, the better it works. So theres the presumption of a personal conflict between myself and the makers of the film of my novel, as between all novelists and filmmakers, There must be some conflict there, there always is. A political difficulty. Somebody has to get slain in the helter-skelter of this combat. Which is top? The movie or the book? Though this is like asking about the translation of a certain poem. Which is the better English version of the Odyssey of Homer? Chapmans? Or that one that recently came out of the University of California? Neither of these translations is Homer, because there is no exact equivalent, Homer in English is not Homer, since his poem was written in ancient Greece, and Chapmans was written in eighteenth-century England, while that recent translation was written in the United States of America, which didnt exist at the time that the Greek epic poet was composing his lines. No exact translation. At the moment of a translation or adaptation is a loss, a falling away from the spirit of the original, a depletion. A photograph is not a thing, even a word is not a thing, but a cinematic adaptation of a word (a sequence of moving pictures) is by its nature farther from the world of the actual and is thus artificial, like the prose paraphrasis of a poem, a falling away, a capitulation to the ingenuine. Reporters and people who come to readings, they are keen to exploit this difference, this space of discrepancy and depletion, because it hints at a conflict. So what did you think of the movie?

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Since Im a failed musician, music is always pretty close to me when Im working, and each of my books has had certain songs or records that were central to its composition. While I was writing The Ice Storm, I listened only to music that was released in 1973. I had piles of cassettes from the period, some progressive-rock monstrosities, some stuff from California, and a whole bunch of those Rhino Records samplers that specialize in songs like Delta Dawn and Billy Dont Be a Hero. Ive thrown out a lot of these things since 1992, when I finished the book, so I cant tell you exactly what was on them, but I did make a tape of 73 favorites for Tobey Maguire, an actor in the film, which, its my impression, he didnt like very much. The point here is that music is always implicit in novels, in mine anyhow, is always just outside the margin of the work. I had a friend who included a flexi-disc with his first novel, and there was a point when I thought about having my brothers band record songs mentioned in my own book so that I might shrink-wrap these songs onto the novel when it was published. But this actual music would subvert the immanence of music in novel writing, the incredible power of music described in words, the music suggested by words, the very music of prose. Film, meanwhile, because its synergistic, brings the music out of the wings and into the production. This is an awesome responsibility, and it was one of the areas where I was most worried about Ang Lees film of The Ice Storm. Not because I had any doubts about Angs ear but more because what music was occasioned by the composition of my book was so close to my heart. Turned out that the studio financing Ang Lees film, since it had budgeted The Ice Storm modestly, didnt leave much money around for buying well-known songs, and, anyway, Ang and producer James Schamus wanted to have an actual score, not one of those film soundtracks that merely traffics in the nostalgic radio music of an earlier time. Thats how we ended up with some recherch song choices as incidental musicDirty Love by Frank Zappa, The Coconut Song by Harry Nilsson, etc. Meanwhile, what was interesting about the score (by the Canadian composer Mychael Danna) was that it sounded really Eastern to me. It had a lot of gamelan in it. Mostly, this score was used to accompany montages, landscapes, barren trees of New Canaan, and while it had nothing particularly to do with the era, it was eerily appropriate. Indeed, though the film of The Ice Storm now summons in me few feelings at all (Ive seen it too many times), the soundtrack to the film, with that mournful score, can bring up in me waves of regret about the past.

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