Books into Movies: Final Examination, May 9 2002

Answer both questions. Please write on the right-hand side of the page only.

Question 1 (35%)

            During the semester we have discussed the various ways in which movies can (or should) remain “true” to the books upon which they are based. We have debated the case for and against “fidelity criticism.” In a wide-ranging essay in which you draw upon books read and films screened during “Books into Movies” (an essay based, when feasible, upon more examples than you may have discussed in your Journals), explore the pleasures and the trials of a course such as that which we have shared. Announce a thesis; examine it.

            Not everyone enjoyed such masterpieces as Blade Runner and Fellini’s Satyricon. (Be honest. I enjoy candor. Which are the real clunkers?) In your essay you may, therefore, discuss some books and movies which might better fit the format of the course. On the basis of your predecessors’ suggestions, I have already deleted some books and movies and have added Fight Club to the current semester’s syllabus. I look forward to reading your reasoned advocacy on behalf of other books and films that you have personally enjoyed (e.g. Clockwork Orange, Harry Potter and the [Philosopher’s] Stone). If you choose, in your essay, to propose a new book/movie (or books/movies) for future syllabi, you should indicate why they would both stimulate the interest of future students and fit the format of the course.

Question 2 (65%)

Please answer the questions in sequence. If you choose to move ahead to another answer, you should leave a space in your blue books to which you can return.

            In the ensuing extracts, I have chosen passages that have faced the complex transition from book to movie. Identify the novel from which these passages have come; show why they are important to its plot or imagery, to its language or characterization. You should then discuss how these passages have been realized cinematically (or have, occasionally, been rejected or altered). How do they filmically remain important (if at all)? What has been changed? What has been lost or gained in the transformation? Several passages may appear for the first time in the film version. If so, you should indicate what has been gained (or lost).

            Given constraints upon your time in the examination room, I know that some of your answers will be longer than others. But you should provide a brief identification of each passage even if you do not analyze it in detail. (If you can give a page reference, this will be helpful; but the provision of page references is not essential to your answers.) Several of the extracts I have chosen will reveal symbolic or metaphoric resonances; feel free to elaborate upon these. Have I allowed any typos to slip through? Tell me.

1. My mother used to tell a story about how I came into the kitchen one day while she was preparing an important dish. I was about four. I said, “Mommy, can I have a cookie?”, and she, for some reason misunderstood, or misheard me, and thought that I wanted a “hug”, so she gave me a “hug”, and I said “Thank you, Mommy. I didn’t want a cookie after all. You see? What is a sublimation of what? What signifies what?

2. There must have been, for as I glanced at him, his eyelids fell in that hawk-like hood which fear had stamped on my memory.

            I blew my whistle.

            In an instant the lights were out.

3. The murder mystery parties, rich people would come to the hotel for a big dinner party, and act out a sort of Agatha Christie story. Sometime between the Boudin of Gravlax and the Saddle of Venison, the lights would go out for a minute and someone would fake getting killed. It’s supposed to be a fun-let’s pretend sort of death.

4. “O.K., since you’ve got such a bad memory, gut him right here in front of us.” The cook donned his tunic, again, grabbed his butcher knife, and sliced the pig’s belly every which way with a quivering hand. The slits immediately gave way to the pressure from the inside and roasted sausages and giblets rushed out of the wounds!

5. “Okay. Maybe I ought to call them now before it starts to decay. Don’t dead bodies decay or something?” He felt elated.

6. I never knew the old Vienna before the war, with its Strauss music, its glamour and easy charm–Constantinople suited me better. I really got to know it in the classic period of the Black Market. We’d run anything, if people wanted it enough and had the money to pay. Of course, a situation like that does tend to amateurs but you know they can’t stay the course like a professional. Now the city is divided into four zones, each occupied by a power, the Americans, the British, the Russians, and the French. But the centre of the city–that’s international, policed by an International Patrol. One member for each of the four powers. What a hope they had, all strangers to the place and none of them could speak the same language, except for a smattering of German. Good fellows on the whole, even if Vienna doesn’t look any worse than a lot of other European cities, bombed about a bit . . . Oh wait, I was going to tell you about Holly Martins, an American–he came all the way to visit a friend of his. The name was Lime, Harry Lime. Now Martins was broke and Lime had offered him–I don’t know–some sort of a job. Anyway, there he was, poor chap, happy as a lark and without a cent.

7. “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I’ve watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tanhauser gate. All those . . . moments will be lost . . . in time. Like . . . tears in rain. Time . . . to die.”

8. “In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed–they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce . . . ? The cuckoo clock.”

9. “Not quite. I feel that you and I and Henry are only fragments of that woman’s mind. She knows everything. She is everything. She is the house, and the tree that leans over it. People have their own deaths as well as their own lives, and even if there is nothing beyond death we shall differ in our nothingness. I cannot believe that knowledge such as hers will perish with knowledge such as mine. She knew about realities. She knew when people were in love, though she was not in the room. I don’t doubt that she knew when Henry deceived her.”

10. —Do we want the girls? Jimmy asked.

           They did.

             —They could give us a rest, said Derek.—They could sing a few slowies. For the oul’ ones.

           That’s the lot though, righ’, said Jimmy.—No fuckin’ politics this time either.------But yeh know, Joey said when he left tha’ he didn’t think soul was righ’ for Ireland. This stuff is–though. You’ve got to remember tha’ half the country is fuckin’ farmers. This is the type o’ stuff they all listen to.------Only they all listen to it at the wrong speed.

11. Mr Turnbull himself opened to me–sober and something more than sober. He was primly dressed in an ancient but well-tended suit of black; he had been shaved not later than the night before; he wore a linen collar; and in his left hand he carried a pocket Bible. At first he did not recognise me.

12. I mean a fellow comes to the beach to sit out in the fucking sun, am I wrong? . . . I mean we’re talking about recreational fucking space, huh? . . . What the fuck am I talking about?

          Are you feeling alright?

13. I happened into an art gallery with an amazing collection of paintings. I actually saw some originals by Zeuxis, unscathed by all the years, and sketches by Protogenes that so rivalled that the truth of nature herself that I trembled to touch them. I got to Apelles–the piece [the Greeks] call ‘The Goddess on One Knee’–and my admiration began to verge on worship.

14. Leonard listened to it with reverence. He felt that he was being done good to, and that if he kept on with Ruskin, and the Queen’s Hall concerts, and some pictures by Watts, he would one day push his head out of the gray waters and see the universe. He believed in sudden conversion, a belief which may be right; but which is peculiarly attractive to a half-baked mind. It is the basis of much popular religion; in the domain of business it dominates the Stock Exchange, and becomes that “bit of luck” by which all successes and failures are explained.

15. I bury myself in a Reader’s Digest.

16. I watched him striding off on his overgrown legs after the girl. He caught her up and they walked side by side. I don’t think he said a word to her; it was like the end of a story.

17. The next night Jimmy brought Declan Cuffe (by now he was Deco) home from work with him. Deco had a big fry cooked by Jimmy, five slices of bread, two cups of tea, and he fell in love with Sharon, Jimmy’s sister, when she came in from work.

18. Worker bees can leave

             Even drones can fly away

            The queen is their slave.

19. The eyes of a parrot chained to a perch stared beadily back at him.

20. WHOOSH, the whole room is up in flames.

21. Nothing is static. Everything is falling apart.

22. Things were going very well.

            There were mistakes, rows, a certain amount of absenteeism but things were going well.

23. A stick, very bright, descended. It hurt him, not where it descended, but in the heart. Books fell over him in a shower. Nothing had sense.

24. –he heard the kipple coming, the final disorder of all forms, the absence which would win out.

23. Panic and emptiness! Panic and emptiness! The goblins were right.

24. “I have no fear of turning your stomach: it will obey you if you promise to compensate it with many fine things for a single disgusting hour.”

25. “Can I speak to you?” he said. “May I come in for a minute?” He was steadying his voice with an effort, and his hand was pawing my arm.

26. However, just for the heck of it, he wiggled his bent Sidney’s out of his coat pocket, thumbed to ostrich comma male-female, old-young, sick-well, mint-used, and inspected the prices.

27. You, uh, you have to work (you work right?) You have to go to work tomorrow?

28. —It’s good.---Some great lookin’ judies.

29. I sat quite still and hopeless while the beat grew louder. Then I saw an aeroplane coming up from the east.

30. “Because everything up to now is a story,” Tyler says, “and everything after now is a story.”

31. DOO DOO DOO DOO DOO--

32. And I pull the trigger.

33. TOAD (Bufonidae), all varieties . . . . . . . . E.

34. Alas! Poor us! We all add up to squat . . .