Contemptuous adaptation

Earlier this month I noted the “fraught” relationship between novels and their film adaptations as exemplified by Elmore Leonard’s struggles to get good movies made from his books—a story that eats up a considerable part of his new biography (which I hope to review in full soon). A lot of Leonard’s struggles were down to the usual Hollywood problems that bedevil novel adaptations: bad casting, indifferent directors, hack screenwriting, producers who don’t understand the material, and budget.

But what about film adaptations of novels that, while they may or may not have these problems, are made with contempt toward their source material? And what if the author, unlike Leonard in the 70s and 80s, is dead?

Agatha Christie biographer Laura Thompson recently addressed this in a multipart essay on what she thinks are the worst Christie film and TV adaptations. The competition is fierce. Between the flashy but pandering Kenneth Branagh Poirot movies and a string of wannabe prestige BBC adaptations, the last few decades have given us a slew of films that treat Christie’s stories as mere raw material to be chopped up and rearranged at will, the better to load down with fashionable social and political messaging. Read through Thompson’s posts to see just how bad some of these can get.

When Thompson reaches the penultimate of her ten worst, the 2016 adaptation The Witness for the Prosecution (which doesn’t even get Christie’s title right), she notes as a long aside:

What I dislike about these twenty-first century adaptations . . . is how much they seem to dislike the reason that they were commissioned in the first place: Agatha Christie.

They want, they need us to know that they despise her conservatism, her class, her structured restraint, her respectability, her reverence for the facade (almost everybody in these adaptations is openly frightful, which means that the tension between seeming and being is entirely lost: a deep distortion). There is a violent urge to expose, to denigrate, to remove human dignity. Everything looks greasy, grimy, filmy; food glistens repulsively; sex is slathered in deviancy; blood of dirty blackish-red drawls across the screen.

Most art today is politicized, and this is the politicizing of Agatha Christie. Her world is a privileged one, and for this she must be judged. Her characters belong, in the main, to about the only class of person who can be attacked with impunity, and there is no holding back. . . . The actual target of this mockery is Agatha, her Golden Age aspect, depicted as resoundingly hollow alongside the ‘reality’ of these adaptations. Of course she was not real, as such; but when it came to people she was never untrue, as these adaptations are.

This is sharp, not only as an account of what these adaptations get wrong and how, but of what they reveal about the filmmakers.

Sooner or later I’m going to get an essay on the recent spate of “retellings” of famous novels from the villain’s or a secondary character’s point of view. What these novels, especially those that seek to undermine the original, like Wicked or James, or those trying to force a currently correct opinion into an old story—usually feminism, for whatever reason—like Julia or Circe, have in common with film adaptations that approach their source material with open contempt is a fundamentally parasitical relationship with the original. Branagh’s Poirot, which is more insipid than insidious, or the ideological BBC adaptations Thompson more severely dissects, rely on Christie for prestige and name recognition and then abuse her work. The result is artistically diminished, “untrue” both to the source material and to good art. Their contempt has led them to make something contemptible.

But when this approach proves profitable, as it often does when the author has the kind of long-term popularity that Christie still does, the filmmakers do it again. And again. See also Bond, James and Tolkien, JRR.

I realized a few years ago that, for the first time in my life, I live in a period in which I dread the announcement that a book I love is being made into a film. This is why. If it is not treated as mere “content” for the system—the hungry volcano god of that earlier post on Leonard’s Hollywood struggles—it will be hammered into the correct ideological shape by hacks before being turned loose, diminished and untrue.

Thompson is the author of Agatha Christie: A Mysterious Life. You can read all three parts of her Christie film adaptation breakdown here (a top 11 best), here, and here. The modern slicing and dicing instinct hasn’t stopped a film adaptations of Christie’s work, of course; her books themselves have suffered as well, as I noted here two years ago.