Week 6 The Hobbit, Joseph Campbell, and adaptation

I am disappointed I haven’t gotten a chance to reread The Hobbit yet. I haven’t read it since middle school. I mostly remember the scene with the trolls that try to cook Bilbo and the Dwarves for dinner, and Bilbo playing the riddle game with Golum in the cave. I think I remember both of these because of the application of Bilbo’s quick wit. Even when I rewatched the movies this summer I was anticipating the answers to the riddles and what story Bilbo concocted to delay the trolls until the sun came up.

I enjoyed the class discussion on Joseph Campbell because we studied him a couple years ago for cinematic storytelling. However, rather than it being taught as a starting point for our own idea, it and a couple other structuralist forms were taught as the only way to write a movie. Anything that didn’t follow the rules and hit certain plot points was wrong. I prefer the looser approach.

We also talked in class about straying from the text in adaptations. While I definitely understand purist who want the film to exactly match the book, I understand the reasons it often can’t be done. Length of the product and resources are the biggest considerations. Often the best adaptations result in miniseries. I think the BBC’s Pride and Prejudice with Colin Firth is quite good.

Another of the biggest challenges is adapting books that rely heavily on writing in first person. Twilight was very interesting for this. I’m not a huge fan. Read the series and watched the films only once, but they are an appropriate example. The books were really focused on her emotions moment by moment. The reader was open to the same emotional journey that Bella went on. It was especially effective in the second book when she was super depressed about Edward leaving. The movies couldn’t allow the audience to experience that in the same way. They had to convey it as an outside witness.

On the topic of adaptions and related to the first person narrator concept, I recently watched the Outlander series based on the books by Diana Gabaldon. I noticed they chose to have the main character, Claire, often narrate in voice over. I find that voice over narration needs to be used very carefully. The practice is often used by novice filmmakers who find it easier to tell the story in voice over rather than show it visually, which defeats the purpose of the medium. In this case I approve, because it doesn’t compete with the story it enriches it.

However, in the last or second to last episode Claire gets married to the very, very handsome Jamie Fraser. Unfortunately, the edit shows the wedding intercut through the characters discussion of it after the fact. I’m not a fan. Flashbacks and discontinuous story telling are okay if like voice over narration it really does something to enhance the story. They did cut away to it to indicate the passage of time in the present and show the characters gradually warming up to one another. So, they had good reason. It was a very motivated artistic choice. But with film and in this particular case, I’d rather be engaged in the present moment rather than jumping around.