the adaptor's quandary. and king arthur. lots of king arthur.

Ok, show of hands.  Who’s been super excited for a movie/ tv show/ whatever medium was being used to adapt something you loved, only to have your heart dashed on the rocks because the person in charge of transferring your passion into a new medium totally ruined it?  Like, everything good in the thing you loved was killed, fed to wolves, regurgitated, and then burned, only to be replaced by some weird statement on the political tensions between puffins and guacamole knights?

I remember the first time this happened to me.  2004.  Antoine Fuqua’s King Arthur comes to theaters near you.  A live-action movie about Arthur and his knights?  Intriguingly advertised as historically accurate?  I was so there, man.

Yup.  Talk about awesomeness.

I should explain why I was so there.  Man.

I literally grew up on the Arthurian legendarium.  The first stories I remember hearing where the adventures of Arthur and his knights, Merlin, and Morgan le Fey (in about a million different versions of her names and sometimes including her sisters); of Camelot, Excalibur the Round Table, the Sword in the Stone, and, well pretty much everything.  My mom read me those stories so many times, and when I was old enough to read on my own, I re-read everything we’d done together and then added dozens to the pile.

The stories about this beautiful, tragic, and lost Britain have shaped me in ways I doubt I fully understand.  I love history.  I think swords are basically the most amazing things, and I’d love to live in a castle (although I’d add modern amenities… once you’ve supped at the table of indoor plumbing, there’s no going back).  I tend to think a just monarchy is vastly superior to any other form of government.  I love fantasy, and while the Arthurian legends and romances aren’t fantasy, they’ve had an enormous impact on the genre.  Also, my grasp on reality is a bit tenuous, and that’s actually kind of true of most Arthurian stories… I’m sure there are other ways it’s impacted me, but you get the idea.  Big part of my life.

Hence, I was really, really excited for King Arthur.

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Aaaaaaaaand, as you probably guessed from that lead in, I was a little less than thrilled.  There were so many things wrong with it.  It seemed so bad, I wasn’t even angry.  I could only be disappointed. A King Arthur movie finally comes to theaters (I’d been waiting since about 2001, when The Fellowship of the Ring was released), and the don’t even have the decency to give Merlin more than a supporting role?  Madness.  I called my mom afterwards, despondent.

Seriously.  Arthur as Mr. UberRoman for most of the movie, Merlin his enemy for a while and barely better than a supporting character, Guinevere decidedly not a courtly lady, and the knights a bunch of indentured soldiers?  And that whole Pelagian subplot?  What gives, guys?

Ok.  I know, this looks a little different– the Arthurian legends aren’t a single piece being adapted, like Watchmen or The Great Gatsby, but are rather a large body of works that are, on the whole, fairly contradictory.  At the same time, the stories are almost always derived somewhat directly from the Sir Thomas Mallory take on Arthur, found in his work Le Morte d'Arthur– The Death of Arthur.  (Yes, it’s a grimly brilliant title.  Camelot doesn’t end so well.)

And you don’t encounter a gritty, post-Roman Britain for the bulk of those retellings.  A little in the beginning, which centers around Merlin more than Arthur, and then Arthur’s early victories over the Saxons, but by and large, the portrait painted is one of an established Medieval world, with courts and lords and noble ladies and courtly love and jousts.

Look at those knights, jousting away.  Joust on, guys.

There were not jousts in the fifth century.  Or the sixth.  And definitely no courtly love.

But it’s all part of the story!  It’s part of the beauty and otherworldliness that permeates the Arthurian legends.  We don’t really know what happened, but the point is that whatever Arthur truly was, his ‘reign’ represented a brief period of victory of the native Britons against the Saxon invaders.  After him, things got rough for a while.  The legends reflect that, but flesh it out into a powerful drama.

In essence, the details are all the various authors’ interpretations.  They read into the Arthurian framework elements that were important to them, then wrote those ideas onto paper.  Well, maybe not paper.  That might depend a bit on the era.  But nonetheless, they transcribed their versions of the Arthurian legend, and these accounts all became part of the way we now see the stories of King Arthur.  They’re all takes on the legend.  Most don't deviate too far from the now classic version of the story.

Back to the movie.

I was disappointed, as I said, at the time.  I now like the movie a lot, and re-watch it every few years.  There’s a lot of cool stuff going on.  The intense focus on Arthur as the last remnant of Roman authority in the process of going native is awesome.  The film’s efforts at reconciling the historical context of Arthur’s world with the characters that came to people Camelot is really cool.  Like, the knights as soldiers conscripted into military service?  Brilliant, and reasonably accurate with regards to Roman recruiting practices around that time.

Plus, there are some pretty epic lines.

This is Cerdic, in all his grainy quality.  He's the requisite bad dude in King Arthur, a Saxon warlord bent on the conquest of Britain, and he is a seriously violent and scary man.  Scarier than the Grinch pre-mountaintop conversion.
So, Arthur goes up to him and says:

'… it would be good for you to mark my face, Saxon, for the next time you see it, it will be the last thing you see on this earth.'

Just before the huge battle.  It was quite the statement.

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Ironically, the very things I at first disliked came to be the things I loved about the movie... yes, it differs tremendously with the stories I grew up on, but still represents a creatively strong take on Arthur.  The film isn’t even more or less correct, to my thinking, than the courtly Romance version of Camelot.  Both are based on supposition and creatively reading into a simple and historically vague time period in Britain’s history a fully imagined story.

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The transition, though, kind of begs the question: what changed?  The movie’s the same.  The things I like about it are even the things I used to find loathsome.

I mean, you could watch the director’s cut if you want.  That’d be a bit different.  But the basic idea remains.  So, nothing about the movie is different now.  Rather, it’s my perception of the film.

Nothing brilliant there– our views on things change all the time.  It’s the nature of the change that matters.  A long time ago, I viewed King Arthur as a child whose own interpretation of the Arthurian legends was so different from the director’s that I couldn’t get my mind around it.  By the time the movie came out, I had six years or so of memory detailing my view on King Arthur.  The film was jarring, because it didn’t line up with that view at all.  At my age, I couldn’t reconcile the two visions.

A director’s adaptation– although now I’ll widen the scope to include any artist using a new medium to tell an old story– is, in essence, their critical take, their ‘reading’ of the story, put onto screen or brushed in paint or fanfictioned.  The artist delves into their source material and absorbs it into their creative subconscious.  It dwells there, but it can’t remain purely itself, by virtue of having been taken into a human being, specifically an artistic human being.  All of us are dominated by our own perceptions, and an artist takes this a step further by actively trying to express these perceptions through miniature creations.

Actually, it’s not unfair to say that no art is truly original.  Our creative minds are a portmanteau of influences.  At the same time, we, as humans and artists, are incredibly original, or at least have enormous potential to be incredibly original, if we let ourselves be ourselves.

(I felt a little wise there.  But only a little.)

Yoda, being all wise and stuff.  Not as wise as me, but, you know.  Pretty wise.

So, the originality in art– and I use art in the broad sense to mean the output of the creative mind– comes from the person themself, but the art itself is also wonderful swirl of other art, subliminally coming forth through the unique expression of the new creator.

Thus, adaptations become a problem, because a pure adaptation can’t truly exist.  Just as no human is identical to another human, just as no pathos has a mirror image, no artist can create the same art as another artist.  We’re all different, and thus a ‘faithful’ adaptation is a difficult concept.  What is a faithful adaptation?  We all ‘read’ into works different things.  Of course, there are underlying concepts and ideas that most of us will pick up on.  Anyone who reads Cormac McCarthy’s The Road will pick up on the core theme of love, expressed between the father and the son.  If you read Revelation, the final book of the Bible, you’d be hard pressed not to find the theme of judgment.  There are certain elements that everyone’s going to see, and those will make it into most adaptations.

King Arthur, since I spent so much time rambling on about it.  Fellowship of knights, attempting to define their kingdom.  That’s a pretty central element to most Arthurian legends.  But the intense focus on fighting the foreign Saxons, that’s pretty different.  Most Arthurian re-tellings (not a word I like to use, but my continuous variations on ‘takes on the Arthurian legend’ are getting a little stale…) don’t focus much on that aspect of the story, but to the film, it’s paramount.

That’s really only aesthetic detail, though.  A little deeper– the film focuses more on beginnings and a new world, being created by Arthur and his ragtag knights.  Fuqua’s reading of the Arthurian legends finds the promise of hope represented in Arthur’s Camelot and dramatizes the sacrifices and heroism structuring themselves into the kingdom.  The grittiness, and the choice to portray Arthur in a violent post-Roman Britain, rather than in an idealized medieval world, is almost required by Fuqua’s interpretation.

My reading of Camelot, though, doesn’t really focus on the hope of the beginning.  Mallory’s title, translated, The Death of Arthur, is very close to how the Arthurian legends have always presented themselves to me.  Camelot’s beautiful tragedy and the family drama (there’s the really important bit) that plays out through Arthur’s conception and the eventual ruin of his kingdom are the parts that resonate most inside me.  For me– and not necessarily anyone else, although in this case my feelings aren’t uncommon– this is the most important part of the Arthurian legends.  But that doesn’t make my reading the only valid way to view the legends.  Different minds, and many different artists, have latched on to different portions.

A rendering of Arthur killing his son, Mordred.  Things go very badly towards the end. (On the plus side, the versions I like best don't actually end in Arthur's death, but rather the beginning of his long sleep in Avalon.)

The adapter is faced, really, with an impossible task.  Fans of the original work will expect the adaptation to be ‘faithful,’ but what do they mean by faithful?  If they themselves are possessed of any originality, what they think constitutes faithful won’t truly match anyone else’s, and it likewise won’t really be the original creator’s meaning, either.  The closest anyone can come is basically recognizing the central tenets of a work, but beyond that?

Trying to be attentive to the original creator’s ideas is important, certainly.  But it’s only possible to a point, because we all read as ourselves.  Fuqua sees the hopeful beginning of Camelot; I see the sorrowful end.  The difference with our interpretations and the original is perhaps even more marked in this instance, as there is some historical basis in the Arthurian legend– but it’s vague enough that we really have no idea what truly happened.  We may never know how close either of our readings of the legends are to what actually happened.  Similarly, we, as outsiders, can’t truly claim to have access to the creator’s mind.  The mind of another person, especially when that person is consumed in some kind of sub-creation, is even more foreign than sixth century Britain.

There are rare instances when an artist tries to explain their own work, but even then, it’s only a transfer of what they truly mean, an attempt to explain an explanation.

An adaptor’s work, then, represents their reading of the source material.  The new work is a critical interpretation of the original, and this is one of the primary reasons we often respond negatively (at least at first) to an adapted version of a work we love.  The way we see the work is our way, and in a way, the work is ours.  Our reading of the work operates independently of any other person’s.  It might be influenced by those views– it’s safe to say that many fans of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings have had their views intensely shaped by Peter Jackson’s ‘reading,’ exemplified in his films– but it is still uniquely our own.

Thus, our reaction depends a lot on how closely the adapter’s reading aligns with ours.  If it all matches up pretty well, or (somewhat more rarely) if we like the director's reading better than the original work, fabulous, chuckles and smiles, you don’t regret the money spent.  If their reading is radically different… well, you can still end up liking it, but it takes work.  And sometimes time.  It’s a complicated interplay between the original artist, their work, the adaptor, and the fan. (Fan being used loosely here to indicate another person who experienced the original and is now in the process of experiencing the adaptation.)

Of course, this isn’t the only factor.  The sheer change in medium radically alters the way a story is told, and that in and of itself makes for some substantial differences.  Comic books, for instance.   Their film adaptations are often among the most controversial of adaptations.  The director’s reading vs. your reading remains, but the difference in length is also central– a high selling comic series is a publisher’s dream, and can run for years unabated.  Movies, if you want them to be good, can’t keep going along those lines.  Just an example.  I do believe the whole adaptation-as-a-form-of-reading remains central in most instances, but there are definitely other factors.

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Also!  This is an aside, but I think it’s important.  Of course, I think all of my asides are important, and I have the hardest time organizing my thoughts these days…

Bill is confused by my thoughts.  It's ok, Bill.  I am too.

The idea that the book is always better than the movie is ridiculous.  Ok, yes, proportionately there are more instances of an original work being better than the film version.  Often, the adaptor’s reading ends up being shallow and focuses mostly on what will sell, rather than actually viewing the source material with creative integrity.  I get that.

But there are instances where the adaptor’s reading is actually stronger than the original creator’s work– my favorite film, Howl’s Moving Castle, is based on a novel by Diana Wynne Jones.  It’s a good book.  But the movie… it’s profound.  To some extent this is subjective, and it’s not really a point I care to argue (both versions are beautiful and don’t deserve to be debated into the ground), but I believe Hayao Miyazaki’s interpretation, played out on screen, is actually a more powerful piece of art than the original novel.

A still from Howl's Moving Castle.  All of the beauty.

You can feel free to disagree with me about Howl’s Moving Castle.  Please do, if the book resounds in you more than the film.  But you get the idea.  Movies can be better than their original inspiration.  Some adaptors' reading is actually stronger than the original.

So, the next time someone tries to tell you otherwise, call upon Cthulhu to punish them for their transgression.

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Closing thoughts!  Thanks for reading.  I suspect this one’s probably not terribly entertaining– life has been rather stressful for a bit, and I’m concerned that my writing is a little lackluster as a result– but I hope you enjoyed it nonetheless.  As you can probably tell I’m very into discussing and trying to understand more intimately the creative process, and the relationship between the artist and those who embrace the art.  The interplay is all part of the same creative process, and I think it’s important for artists to delve into it ourselves, being that we’re all lovers of art in addition to being creators.

Also, props to James Franco!  He wrote an excellent article (check it out here: http://www.vice.com/read/james-francos-impressions-of-gatsby) that first got my thoughts rolling in this direction.  I’ve always liked him as an actor, but every once in a while I stumble upon something he’s written and am impressed by what a smart guy he is as well.

Is a James Franco.  He's probably James Franco-ing in this picture.

Take care, everyone!