Future Classic Movies: Jane Eyre (2011)

Paula’s Cinema Club asked the excellent question, if Turner Classic Movies is still around in 30 years, what movies will they be showing, and who will be the host? Here’s my answer…

The year is 2042. The scene is the TCM set. The host is Drew Barrymore, actor, director, producer, and member of the one of the greatest acting families in American history…

Barrymore: Hello everyone, and welcome to another installment of The Essentials. Tonight we’ve got an amazing picture for you Jane Eyre – the 2011 version that is. And here to talked about it is this month’s guest host, bestselling author William Chandler. Welcome.

Chandler: Thank you for having me.

Barrymore: I’m sure some people are asking what’s a novelist doing guest-hosting TCM’s The Essentials?

Chandler: [Laughs] That’s a good question.

Barrymore: Your novels have been described as cinematic.

Chandler: Yes, that’s true. And I take that as a compliment. I love movies and the language of film almost as much as the I love the written word. When I was growing up, TCM was always on. I think that’s all my parents ever watched.

Barrymore: Not coincidentally, all your picks this month are film adaptations of classic novels.

Chandler: True.

Barrymore: It’s a cliche that the book is always better than the movie. So that begs the question, why is Jane Eyre an essential film?

Chandler: I admit it. I just love a good Gothic story.

Barrymore: And you are known for your Gothic novels.

Chandler: True, and the novel Jane Eyre has been influential on my writing. Charlotte Bronte took a genre that was pretty tired and worn out, some might say dead, and used its DNA to write  – what was at the time – a contemporary story. Which is what I try and do.

Barrymore: DNA? Bringing something back to life? Sounds like your pick for next week, Frankenstein.

Chandler: Indeed.

Barrymore. But you haven’t answered my other question. Why is Jane Eyre, and this particular version of Jane Eyre an Essential. Are you telling me it’s better than the book?

Chandler: [Laughs] Um, actually, this might be one of the rare examples where the film version is better than the book. And by that I mean a better, or more compellingly told story. Frankly, I think the 2011 version of Jane Eyre is a mini-film school.

Barrymore: That’s a bold statement.

Chandler: Let’s start with the sheer visual beauty of it. It’s one of those movies everyone should see on the big screen.

Barrymore: I totally agree, and I think it’s crazy that the cinematographer Adriano Goldman didn’t at least get an nomination for an Oscar.

Chandler: Absolutely. And it’s not just beautiful static shots. The film incorporates many different techniques: Subjective camera angles, wide shots, close ups. The camera use conveys alienation, imprisonment, a metaphorical sense of lurking danger, and perhaps most importantly, they all contribute to this dream-like quality – and that dream-like quality is present in many of the best Gothic novels.

Barrymore: Even the screenplay adds to the dream-like quality by chopping up the narrative of the novel. Most of the film literally takes place in Jane’s head.

Chandler: Yes, it’s a brilliant use of flashbacks. A brilliant tutorial if you will. And the whole dream motif is capped–

Barrymore: Wait! I know what you’re going to say, and there might be some watching tonight who’ve never seen the movie. We’ll let them discover that part for themselves. But you’re right it is amazing. Now let’s talk about the actors. I thought there was an amazing chemistry between Michael Fassbender and Mia Wasikowska.

Chandler: Absolutely. And going along with the film-school theme, the two really put on quite a clinic. What I mean is– It makes me think of this time when I was teaching English. I had this bright student, a gifted writer, who loved horror stories and movies. The bloodier the better. After the umpteenth zombie and dismembered body, I challenged him to write a horror story without one drop of blood. I wanted to show him that less is often more. This film is a beautiful example of this. The passion these characters have for each other is palpable, and one scene in particular I find highly charged.

Barrymore: The scene after Jane saves Rochester from the fire.

Chandler: Exactly. You don’t see a lot of skin, but the way Fassbender and Wasikowska look at each other, the way they hold each other’s hands, how they move closer together ever so slightly, it creates this beautiful and potent intimacy.

Barrymore: Those two did so much with a glance or a raised eyebrow.

Chandler: I know. Fassbender’s one of my favorite actors. He can convey such passion in such a naturalistic way. Unlike say – ah I know this might cause an angry mob to form outside the studio – unlike say Lawrence Olivier’s acting which I find a little stiff, or affected.

Barrymore: You’re thinking of his Heathcliff in the 1939 version of Wuthering Heights?

Chandler: Um yes, but I guess I feel that way about his acting generally.

Barrymore: [Laughs] Well ok then. I think I hear the mob forming already. So let’s start the film. From 2011, directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga, with cinematography by Adriano Goldman, and staring Michael Fassbender and Mia Wasikowska…Jane Eyre.

Happy Birthday Will!

When I am lucky, I get to teach Shakespeare to high school students during the day to feed my stomach, and write stories with his ghost hovering over my shoulder at night to feed my soul. When I teach, I research the assigned texts far more deeply than I need to for high school freshmen. In the process of getting ready to teach Romeo & Juliet, I read that Shakespeare had written Paris’ lines in the then “old-fashioned” Petrarchan verse, and the lines spoken by Romeo and Juliet to each other using the meter and rhyme scheme of what we now call a Shakespearean Sonnet.

This is pretty esoteric stuff. The groundlings and many others at The Globe would not know the rules of Petrarchan verse, even if they sensed the difference in how Paris spoke to Juliet, and how Romeo talked with her. However, I’m sure the likes of Ben Johnson, Christopher Marlowe, or Thomas Dekker would have known what Shakespeare was up to, and probably nodded in admiration, or perhaps shook their heads in jealousy. And yet Romeo & Juliet is a crowd-pleaser 400 years later: In my darkened classroom, when – in Baz Luhrmann’s cinematic version – Romeo lifted the vial of poison to his lips, one of my students yelled out, “Don’t drink it! She’s alive!” But Romeo didn’t hear my student, and the classroom gasped as he drank it down and Juliet awakened. Now, I had slowly and carefully gone over the prologue with these same students. Some had even seen the movie before. On an intellectual level, my students knew what was coming, but Shakespeare swept them along in the story as the characters were swept along, and at that moment my students wanted to stop this impending tragedy from happening when the players themselves were completely oblivious to it. Romeo & Juliet was an old story even in Shakespeare’s day. But, the way he put the words words together and constructed his version made something new, something we still use as the basis for big-budget movies.

How can one not be awed by that power, that mastery of words? And to make it worse he was popular in his own lifetime and made lots of money. He was not a starving artist scorned and ignored by his contemporaries, dying alone and penniless, only to be discovered after his death. No, no. He was a genius, and was recognized and paid handsomely for it! As someone who would love to feed his stomach and not just his soul, with his writing, it would be easy to shake my fist and curse Shakespeare in a jealous rage. Or to be passive-aggressive and dismiss him as just another stuffy and irrelevant writer from the past. However, his success fills me with admiration. His career is the best argument that art and commerce can (should?) be intertwined. One can (should?) create stories that ask deeply human questions, and simultaneously keep the audience on the edge of their seats. One can (should?) play with language, writing heady, lyrical prose about base jealousy, unrestrained greed, and raging-teenage hormones. He proved these things possible by doing them – more than once.

Taking this (some would say idolatrous) view inspires me. While I doubt anyone will be reading my stories 400 years from now, my goal is always to write stories that are well written, if not lyrical, and at the same time cause the groundlings to cheer the hero and hiss at the villain. After all, if this standard was good enough for Shakespeare, it should be good enough for me.

Happy Birthday, Will.

***

For more blogs dedicated to William Shakespeare on his birthday visit: Happy Birthday Shakespeare

Writing That Pops: Raymond Chandler

Here’s another piece of beautiful writing from another one of my favorite writers, Raymond Chandler. As in my post on Neil Gaiman, I’ll give a plain, stripped-down rendering of the passage followed by the original. This one is from The Long Goodbye:

The white-haired man told the girl he had sold his convertible. He explained he needed the money to eat. He didn’t sound drunk. The girl moved away from him and grew distant. Then she became as cold as ice toward him.

And now the Chandler:

The white-haired lad said politely: “Awfully sorry, but I don’t have it any more. I was compelled to sell it.” From his voice and articulation you wouldn’t have known he had anything stronger than orange juice to drink.

“Sold it, darling? How do you mean?” She slid away from him along the seat but her voice slid away a lot farther than that.

“I mean I had to,” he said. “For eating money.”

“Oh, I see.” A slice of spumoni wouldn’t have melted on her now.

Wow. This is something. Chandler packs a lot into a few sentences. It tells us what is happening: A date just hit a speed bump. It reveals something about each character: He is drunk and broke, and she is a lot more interested in his convertible (and his money) than she is in him. Chandler does this using very few adjectives. But that doesn’t mean the writing is drab. Indeed, Chandler includes two very beautiful metaphors that are not hackneyed or well-worn. He takes the cliches “she became distant,” and “she was as cold as ice,” and makes them fresh. These metaphors make the passage lyrical without taking away from its hard-boiled, staccato rhythm. And that is why this bit of writing pops.

Do you have a favorite passage or line from Chandler (or a top five)? Do you have a favorite fresh metaphor or piece of figurative language from another author?

Inspiration: Sunken Cities

I’ve been working my way through Lovecraft’s The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath and came across a very nice bit of description:

The ship was about to pass over the weedy walls and broken columns of a sunken city too old for memory.

It made me think of all the sunken cities in literature and myth. In addition to the sunken city Randolf Carter sails over in Unknown Kadath, Lovecraft also created R’lyeh, an alien city submerged in the South Pacific, which is home of an ancient malevolent being. R’lyeh will someday rise to the surface and humanity will be doomed. Tolkien, inspired by the story of Atlantis, created the story of Numenor. The Numenorians were not satisfied with what they had; they wanted immortality too. The Valar punished them by drowning the island.

Recently, I stumbled across another sunken city story: The Legend of Ys. It is a part of Breton folklore, and tells the tale of a sinful city swallowed by the sea. The king’s daughter, Dahut, had engaged in orgies and murder. Lucifer appeared in the guise of a Red Knight and tricked Dahut into opening the dikes that held back the sea. Doesn’t make much sense to me. Wouldn’t Lucifer want the orgies and murder to continue? The legend we have today is probably a jumble of a pagan myth that was rewritten with an added Christian moral by some medieval monk. Since Ys is below sea level, Dahut may represents a chthonic goddess. I think the story needs a retelling to sort things out.

Indeed, while I haven’t read any of them, the legend has inspired stories by Robert W. Chambers, Poul Anderson, and Jack Vance. It even inspired Claude Debussy to write some music for piano (listen below).

If you were to rewrite the Legend of Ys (or a new sunken city story), why did Ys really fall? Perhaps Dahut was really a hero. Would you write it from the perspective of someone who witnessed the city’s fall, or would you write it from the perspective of someone finding the ruins years or ages after the fall?

Movies: John Carter

I saw John Carter yesterday, and in short, I really enjoyed the movie. The movie, based on Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars (1912), balances action and world building better than most sci-fi/fantasy movies. With its sweeping vistas of Mars, this is one of those movies that must be seen on the big screen. It will lose a lot if viewed on even a large TV.

The best part of the movie, however, was the characters. John Carter is one of the rare movies in which the heroes are more interesting than the villains (this is a topic that deserves its own post). The title character is a haunted veteran of the Civil War who goes West seeking gold, and who has little use for other people or their causes. He fought for a cause, and in doing so, he lost everything. As the movie opens, it is clear he does not want to make that mistake again. Dejah Thoris, the Princess of the book’s title, is a scholar and warrior who flees her besieged city to escape a political marriage with an enemy ruler. Very quickly their paths cross, and it is their crossed purposes – his desire to get back to his gold in the Arizona Hills, and hers to find a way to save her city – that provides most the conflict and drama of the story.

As for the film’s villains, they could be best described as personifications of greed, violence, and entropy. In a way, they are the perfect 21st-Century villains. They are shadowy, faceless parasites, slowly sucking the life out of Mars, not unlike the evils Earth faces today: Climate change, terrorism, and the financial meltdown (with its arcane credit-default swaps and “securitization” of sub-prime mortgages). John Carter smartly, I think, leaves the villains as forces of nature (like the shark in Jaws), and focuses on the heroes, and how they face challenges that are bigger than any one person. This is a refreshing change from the revenge-motivated, I-can-kill-everything hero and the all-too-interesting villain so often found in recent action movies.

See John Carter in the theater. It is well worth the time and money.

* * *

The studio released several trailers and clips for the movie. Below is my favorite. It was the first trailer released, and, ironically, I think it captures the film best. Especially nice is the use of Peter Gabriel’s cover of “My Body is a Cage.” If you are unfamiliar with the story, I won’t say any more – I don’t want to spoil anything. Just, watch (or watch again) this trailer after you’ve seen the movie. I think you’ll see what I mean.

Literary Archeology

Penguin Classic Ed.

I love to practice “literary archeology.” That is, I love to dig down to find out who inspired and influenced the writers I like. For example, one of my favorite writers is H. P. Lovecraft. A friend of mine introduced me to Lovecraft’s storis when I was a teenager and I’ve been hooked ever since (I’ll save the full story of my introduction to Lovecraft for a separate post). As I got older, I started to explore the authors that Lovecraft grew up reading and those that influenced him: Edgar A. Poe, Lord Dunsany, Arthur Machen, and Algernon Blackwood. By doing this, I’ve discovered some wonderful stories, and, in the case of Poe, I’ve read an author with fresh eyes.

Recently, I’ve started reading Edgar Rice Burroughs’ planetary romance A Princess of Mars (which incidentally was the last book I bought from Borders). I read that it was a model for Lovecraft’s The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, as well as countless other science fiction/fantasy stories, so I put it on my “to read” list.

I’ve only read the first couple chapters, but from what I’ve read, it seems that Princess was also very influential on the work of Robert E. Howard, in particular his Conan stories. Both have a “barbarian” warrior coming into contact with an ancient and dying civilization, which itself is built on the ruins of an even more ancient civilization. It’s wonderful to find these “hidden” gems.

Have you read the works that have influenced your favorite author? Did you like them? Did reading them add to your appreciation of your favorite writer?

Writing that Pops: Neil Gaiman

The more I think about it, the more I think that what separates a good writer from a great writer is how they put together a sentence. That is, it’s not the story, but how they tell it. Many have argued that there are only so many story structures or patterns. Robert Heinlein wrote that there were three: 1) boy-meets-girl, 2) The Little Tailor (that is, the man who succeeds against great odds, or its converse, the great man brought low), and 3) the-man-who-learns-better. The blog Murderati has a different list – and a nice discussion on the structures of stories here. If there are only a limited number of story structures, then how the story is told is what makes each version of the story unique.

With this in mind, I’m going to do something new. I’m going to pick out a specific passage by one of my favorite writers and talk about why it’s an exceptional piece of writing. For me, these passages are inspirational. Hopefully they will be for you as well…

To begin, if humanity is still around 100 years from now, the general consensus will be that Neil Gaiman was one of the greatest writers of the late 2oth/early 21st century, regardless of genre. The passage of time will let prejudices against comic book writers and genre fiction* fade, and Gaiman’s beautiful prose will remain.

To illustrate Gaiman’s talent, I will first rewrite one of my favorite passages from Neverwhere. I’ll strip it down to its essential content and  summarize what Gaiman wrote in the plainest way I can. Then I’ll show the original passage…

When it rains it pours. Or, everything always seems to happen at once.

And now Gaiman:

Richard had noticed that events were cowards: they didn’t occur singly, but instead they would run in packs and leap out at him all at once.

This is just brilliant. First, it uses a very nice personification. Who hasn’t felt that “events” are sentient — that they get together at the corner bar and decide how they can really mess up your life in one fell swoop? I know I have.

Second is its style. I find that Gaiman’s stories, even the most modern, have a fairy-tale feel. Not simply because of the supernatural or fantastical elements they contain, but also because they give a sense that the reader is sitting by a fire, with a time-worn elder telling the tale. The sentence is a perfect example. Gaiman sets out a truism, and then proceeds in the following pages to provide a superlative example of that truism. Now, one could edit out the sentence and the following pages would make perfect sense. The plot would still be sound and the characters would still be themselves, but it would take out that “something” that makes the story special. Gaiman has a unique voice; it would be hard to mistake one of his stories for some other author’s. And that is why his writing pops.

*In my not so humble opinion, literary fiction is a genre, just like mystery, romance, or science fiction; it has its own rules and conventions that must be followed. I won’t mention any names, but seriously how many times in literary fiction do we meet middle-aged white men who have lost their passion for their wives, feel their jobs are soul-crushing, and that They. Must. Do. Something…Someday, I’ll have to write a full post on this topic.

Some Thoughts on Editing

After I created my “about” page for this new website, I decided to add my most polished stories. As I did so, I stopped and reread parts of them. Generally, I still love them as much as I did when I first posted them. However, some rough patches jumped out at me. I’ll have to go back over them again to smooth them out.

This, I think brings home the greatest challenge in editing: Namely, being patient enough to set aside a story which you think is done and very clean. And then, after not looking at it for several weeks or months, to come back to it with fresh eyes. It may seem counter-intuitive to let a story collect dust as it were before sharing it. Moreover, simply handing it over to an editor is not the answer for me. Before I have someone edit one of my stories, I want it to be as perfect as I can make it. This is not mere pride. I find the story as I write it. If I give someone something that is not fully cooked, so to speak, the editor will give me their critique, and in the jumble of the partially-form story and the critique, I will lose (and actually have lost) the story.

So, the moral is, let your stories collect a little dust, and then come back to them. They will thank you for it.

Two Short Stories and Part of a Novel

I’m settling into my new website, and three of the first things I’ve unpacked are some of my most polished stories. All three of these are urban fantasy, and take place in The Narrows, a version of Detroit were the folktales told by the first French settlers in North America are very real. I love this setting and will be adding to it in the future. Hope you enjoy.

Below are the stories listed in the order I wrote them. Click on the title to go directly to the story.

Georgianna and the Dragon – Prologue

Reflections

Angelique and the Loup-Garou

Welcome and a Question

Hello everyone. I’ve decided to move my blog/website to WordPress. I was very happy with the platform I’ve been using. It had a “wysiwyg” interface that was totally awesome. Indeed, I liked it better than any of the blogging platforms I’ve tried. However, WordPress does two very important things that my current site cannot. Namely, visitors cannot subscribe by email to the site, nor can they subscribe to comments/be alerted when a new comment has been made. Now, I was able to add a widget that allowed people to sign up for email updates, but I would have to sign into another website to administer this system; not the ideal situation. However, not being able to subscribe to comments was what really decided the issue for me. I want to use my blog to have conversations. I simply need that function.

Anyway, on to the QUESTION. What should I do about the posts on my old blog (I’m going to bring my stories over, I’m just thinking about the regular posts)? Should I try to move them over? Or should I just have a link to my old site? Let me know what you think in the comments below. Thanks for your input!