On historical accuracy in movies (Wuthering Heights, The Odyssey) and the “anxious, professional monitoring in which the images onscreen must be checked and rechecked for their accordance with the original text and preexisting notions about it”.
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Well, I have seen Wuthering Heights and the biggest problem with it – the only problem with it – is that it's called Wuthering Heights. That title has caused people who for whom the book is important (the book is important to me) to have fits of the vapours because it's not the book.
I mean, Clueless was not Emma, and Forbidden Planet was not The Tempest, but fits of the vapours were not had.
And historical inaccuracy ... I mean, have you seen the Peter Greenaway films, or Bridgerton?
And finally, yes, may be it is based on Emerald Fennell's misreading of the book as a child, but, you know, Shakespeare misread history snd wrote some plays about that. They're quite good, I'm told.
Not forgiving Christopher Nolan though: he'd have to come round to my house & apologise for Tenet and Oppenheimer.
(I hope this doesn't qualify as a negative/aggressive comment: please nuke it if it does, & sorry if so.)
I hear this. Existing stories/histories/etc mean something to many of us, and when that thing is evoked and the details of those things are largely ignored, it feels like someone's just showing up for a free ride.
But it's hard to draw a line here because there's space for another person's interpretation, even if that interpretation is not particularly good or well informed.
To your point: the last big screen version of the Odyssey I saw was O Brother, Where Art Thou? and I still quote that movie about once a week.
One of the things that strikes me most here is comparing these two as equivalent criticisms.
Seeing the trailer for WH, I was struck that it seemed to focus on something that isn’t the themes and relationships and choices core to the book. It is (or seems) a pulpy teen’s reworking, focusing on rewriting the margins. This is interesting and weird and fruitful even if purists dislike it, and is something that is not Emily Bronte’s but an amalgamation — and I find the Clueless comparison above fascinating, btw. These changes change the story.
But the Odyessy as far as we’ve seen IS the story. The liberties taken are not with who Odysseus is, how he acts, or what he does … it’s with what color someone’s skin is or what a boat looks like. The whole discourse feels … pedantic? Small? Not that small doesn’t matter or doesn’t irk us. But it certainly seems coded for something that isn’t so much about the epic poem or what is says, but has this undercurrent hinting that it isn’t manly or “true” in some way that fails a righteousness test.
Is anyone else seeing/feeling this? I can’t put my finger on it quite
You’ve nailed this distinction, it’s been wafting around my mental peripheries for ages but I’ve never been able to put it to words.
I suspect it has to do with whatever it is that the person critiquing the adaptation is trying to protect. The people critiquing Wuthering Heights are trying to protect literary or aesthetic ideals, whereas the people critiquing the Odyssey are trying to protect ideals of manliness, as you pointed out, but also racial purity, national purity etc etc.
For the Odyssey haters, the text has just become a symbol of whatever pure state they want to project onto it. Any changes are thus comparable to, say, burning a flag or swearing in a place of worship… it’s desecration, for people whose entire self-images and worldviews depend on some narrative of desecration.
Or maybe I’m overthinking it.
I've frequently said: every, single, movie has ENORMOUS plot holes (Inception), GLARING inaccuracies (Gravity), and HILARIOUS production goofs (Stormtrooper bonking his head on a door). It's just a question of whether the movie is good enough that you don't care about them. The only sense in which inaccuracies bug me is when being accurate would have improved the finished product.
As a big fan of both Stephen King’s and Stanley Kubrick’s Shinings, I’m bound by coherence to be pro-adaptations that take liberties. I figure, if it’s a good work it’ll be a good work, liberties or not 🤷🏽♂️
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