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Amid reports that Inherent Vice might make it to the silver screen, I find myself wondering if that’s really the best Pynchon book to film. Clearly, from a marketing perspective there’s an advantage to it being the most recent Pynchon, and from an actor/filmmaker perspective there’s an advantage to its linearity.
(And for more on this see The Quarterly Conversation’s review of Inherent Vice, plus Donald Brown’s essay discussing Pynchon’s three California novels and their resemblance to film.)
But need that be a boon? After all, a film shouldn’t be a simple 1:1 transfer of something that is read to something that is viewed; a good director/screenwriter has a responsibility to interpret and adapt, and anything less would be doing Pynchon a disservice. (For instance note the differences between the book of 2001 and Kubrick’s film of it.) From that perspective, Vice might not be the best way to go.
I have to disagree with Carolyn Kellogg at the Times, who says that Vineland “too boring for Hollywood.” Really? People acting insane to pick up welfare checks, alien abduction, DEA agents, “tubal abuse” . . . There’s a lot to work with here, and although a lot of Vineland will feel pretty dated at this point, it could work in an ’80s nostalgia sort of way. A good screenwriter could pick and choose the best and edit out everything else.
Then again, probably the obvious Pynchon book to film would be The Crying of Lot 49. It’s by far the shortest, most linear novel Pynchon wrote, and the story is tight and allegorical enough to be filmable as is.
But I think the book filmmakers should really be looking at isn’t any of the novels but rather Pynchon’s story collection Slow Learner. (See plot summaries of the stories here.) The five stories therein all circle around certain thematic preoccupations that Pynchon would follow for his whole career and that remain largely relevant. Each story would give itself to a good, strong 20-minute telling on the screen, and I could see a film thriving off the internal similarities and differences to each. Plus, Slow Learner wouldn’t carry the baggage of the most successful Pynchon books that tends to dog Hollywood adaptations–said adaptations work best when the text is a starting point that lets the film grow, rather than some overwhelming force that overdetermines what the movie should be. This certainly would be more art house film than blockbuster, but who are we kidding here . . . is a Pynchon film really going to end up being a blockbuster? And should it?
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More from Conversational Reading:
- Will Inherent Vice Be Filmable? With the possible exception of The Crying of Lot 49, Inherent Vice might just be Thomas Pynchon's first filmable novel. PW reports that the book...
- Pynchon at 13 Pynchon enters The New York Times best-selling fiction list at #13. This link also includes an artist’s extrapolation forward from a high school yearbook photo...
- New Pynchon Details–Inherent Vice Penguin has posted its Summer ’09 catalog online (PDF format), and it includes some details as to Pynchon’s new novel. The title will be Inherent...
- New Pynchon Impossible to know if this is legit or not, but Chris of Black is the new Blood says Thomas Pynchon has a book coming out...
- Rankin on Pynchon Ian Rankin in The Guardian with some remembrances of reading Pynchon. I spent the summer of 1981 cooped up in the library at the University...
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c’mon! how can you not mention V.? the only problem might be that it has too many scenes that would be cinematic thrills
Scott, what do you mean by the Kubrick aside? My understanding is that the film isn’t an adaptation of the book but that the two of them worked together on the basic premise and plot, but that the book was eventually written after the screenplay.
Perhaps Robert Altman’s Short Cuts could be a model.
P.T.: Yes, that was a little oblique wasn’t it? I think they were actually developed concurrently, with both coming out of Clarke’s earlier stories. But anyway, the point is that there are some notable differences between the film and book versions of 2001, just as I would hope a filmmaker would try to work Pynchon into something different from the book, and ultimately cinematic.
I think Emir Kusturica, judging from his film Underworld, could possibly translate the war-time insanity of Gravity’s Rainbow pretty well.
The Crying of Lot 49 would make a perfect cable TV miniseries. Each chapter turned into an hour-long episode. Give it a Dexter treatment and cast Elizabeth Banks as Oedipa Maas.
Because of the encyclopedic capaciousness of Pynchon’s works and their labyrinthine plots, cable TV might also work rather than cinema.
Not only do I think “Inherent Vice” is the only Pynchon novel that would make a good movie, I’m beginning to wonder if he didn’t intend it that way.
Ever since this story appeared yesterday, I’ve been thinking about the fact that, enjoyable as it was, “Inherent Vice” does kind of read like a rather slick, easily digestible story treatment. It’s as if he went through it and chopped out all those Pynchonian digressions, subplots and swerving stylistic slaloms, leaving only his paranoia and wacky humor. At the time, I thought he wanted an audience comprised of more than just critics, geeks, cultists, techies and the odd English major, that he wanted the regular guys, the people who just want a ripping good story — but he may, also, have been deliberately trying to tell a story that could conform to a two-hour running time.
Scott, I thought that’s what you were saying, but I was thrown by the complications of the example, and also spending time doubting how I understood the connection between that movie and book.
You’re right on though, about adaptation. I think people often forget that film adaptations are just that, adaptations, and then waste energy complaining about differences from the book. Then again, changing too much, straying too far, isn’t much better than sticking straight to the text. I often think of Blade Runner as a film adaptation that stuck to the sense of the book, but made itself a film. I mean, it never once mentions kipple, but is filled with that sense of kipplization that the book spends time explaining.
Inherent Vice? I’ve seen Altman’s long goodbye and Coen’ Big Lebowski before :D
Non linearity has been one of the most atractive forms of storytellings in mainstream movies and TV shows (Inception, Lost, The Prestige, Pulp Fiction and so on)…..