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Digestive aids
Daniel Green wrote recently about the relationship that has developed between novels and screenplays:
If the novel is being marginalized, it is not because too many people are watching HBO; it’s because too many novelists are writing novels that are clearly meant to be made into movies. If fiction is being undervalued, by readers and critics alike, it’s not because shows like The Sopranos are better, or more accessible, than contemporary novels; it’s because fiction writers themselves implicitly concede that film and television are the narrative forms to which they ultimately aspire.
Here I would like to interject my suspicion that for many this is not an aspiration — conscious or otherwise — so much as it is their most familiar standard. It isn’t unlikely that, for many of these novelists, the structural traditions of film and television are more familiar and immediate than those of literature. It’s possible that they are not corrupted by a commercial motive, or driven by a desire for a wider audience, but merely limited by a narrative sensibility influenced most deeply by those arts to which they’ve had the most exposure. (For some time, a similar effect has no doubt traced its way less prevalently — but still detectably — in novels written in the mode of the stage.)
Later on, Green considers the example of the Tom Perotta novel Little Children and its Todd Field adaptation:
What I found was not just a mediocre work of fiction that managed to be transformed into a watchable film, but a mediocre novel that was mediocre precisely because it was obviously written in order to be so transformed.
I haven’t read or seen this work, so I don’t have any reason to suggest Perotta is a child of the screen or really just after “market penetration”. In any case, if what Green says about either film or book is true, it doesn’t strike me as terribly important.
But this started me thinking about other “digestive” effects on art. There are those that, like novels written for the screen, commit their effect indelibly to the original material, and there are those those that take place in the particular context in which a given thing is experienced. These would seem to range in intensity (depending on the person) from very slight to grave: the cover of a book might tint its reception almost undetectably, whereas the genre a given movie is understood to follow might radically alter its understanding. (Denis Dutton gives a characteristically cogent perspective on that effect of genre in his essay on intentionalism). Of course in most cases the cover of a book isn’t in the control of an author, whereas the genre it takes part in generally is. But there are cases where the effect is great and the control at a minimum: the extreme being the usage of songs on screen.
The authorship of commercial pop songs today is somewhat more complicated than that of books, but probably less than television shows. And the difference between the experience of a song and the experience of it within the context of watching its music video can often be very great: to me this is not a very damaging case, because when fine songs are paired with bad video, they’re only an annoyance, and, in a few cases, the video can make up for shortcomings of a song. Either way, most of the variables are apparent. In cinema, for some reason, things can be more closely confused: The Doors’ song “The End” provides a lot to Apocalypse Now, and Apocalypse Now provides a lot to “The End”. I’ve always thought the song pretty flimsy on its own, and the scene seems like it would be risible without the song — but together they have a correlative effect. (The usage of Wagner is more one-directional).
If I had never heard The Doors before I saw the movie, my experience of the song might be completely won over by its usage. (As it is, after seeing the film I found things to admire about the song that had previously eluded me.) I expect in many serious cinema-goers and people whose whole experience of popular music is mediated by music videos, the understanding and ultimate judgment of songs has a parasitic relationship to the quality of the corresponding visual component (and further, the aptness of the two). In certain circumstances, the combined effect results in large, and somewhat mysterious cultural shifts. ELO, once widely considered a hopelessly distant and ridiculous dinosaur of seventies rock, became suddenly respectable among Starbucks drinkers and casual indie-rock fans when “Mr. Blue Sky” appeared in a Volkswagen ad. Music that was previously only visually comprehensible by the ‘Simon’ shaped spaceships on its album sleeves and Jeff Lynne’s mushrooming hair, was rendered digestible by a sharply photographed short of whimsical, somewhat indie type fashionably groomed and tidily attired.
But probably the matter of its social acceptability isn’t quite as simple as such a description makes it sound — it isn’t merely a reawakening of interest or a contemporary contexualization that makes the song available for this new audience (if that were true, samples would widely rehabilitate interest in their sources — but they only do within small and highly musically developed enclaves). Rather, for those who came to understand a sense of the song through its usage in the commercial, there was the necessity of a visual-narrative cue. With an incomplete visual context, the song could not be fully understood — an intermediary operation was necessary, a sort of translation from the original language of pop music. If true, this would point to a not insubstantial population whose aesthetic literacy ends with film and television. For whom not only literature, but arts as apparently easy and accessible as pop music have become difficult, and can only be understood through the idiom of the screen.