I first saw the Merchant Ivory film Maurice in 1987, the year of its initial release. Having moved back to New York City to start college (my parents had fled the city in the 1970s for the beckoning suburban allure of New Jersey), I was rediscovering the city. It rained all afternoon the day I ventured from Inwood (past Washington Heights, the last stop in Manhattan) to 59th Street, where the Paris Theater was showing the film. One of the lenses of my glasses had been threatening to free itself from the frame, and it did so as I walked the rain-soaked blocks from the train station to the theater. I bent down and retrieved the lens and put it back inside the frame, where it remained, however precariously.

This moment preceding my experience of seeing the film—buying the ticket, walking into the theater where adult and sophisticated (and… gay?) moviegoers milled about—always seems so inescapably allegorical. Redolent of my excitement and deep nervousness, my vulnerability but also ability to keep going—not to lose sight of my goal or my desire.

While out to myself, I was thoroughly closeted to family, friends, the outside world. Hence my excitement and trepidation at the thought of being in a theater full of actual gays, those exotic creatures I counted myself among yet felt unable to join. The closet leaves one perpetually hungry. Steadfast in my secrecy, I surreptitiously imbibed contraband knowledge. I read gay-centric periodicals like Village Voice, which typically included not only articles about downtown gay life and the looming threat of AIDS but also flesh-baring images of contemporary Adonises (Adonis was the name, indeed, of a gay porn theater in Times Square); reread books like James Baldwin’s 1956 novel Giovanni’s Room and YA gay classics that got me through adolescence such as I’ll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip (1969) by John Donovan; Sticks and Stones (1972) by Lynn Hall; and, less conventionally since they did not contain explicit gay themes, Lois Duncan books like Killing Mr. Griffin (1978) and They Never Came Home (1968). And I had seen Merchant Ivory’s film A Room with a View (1985) in the theater and its nude male bathing scene still lurked in my mind and made me know I had to see Maurice.

When I made my way to the Paris Theater to see Maurice, my triumph was a solitary one.

When I made my way to the Paris Theater to see Maurice, my triumph was a solitary one. I was alone. No one in my world knew I was gay unless they’d inferred it independently, or I had had a sexual experience with them. So, my aloneness found a complement in Maurice’s. Although externally dissimilar, Maurice suffered in ways I responded to intensely; his struggles felt like my own. I remember a palpable, almost tactile thrill when Maurice and the friend he loves, Clive Durham (Hugh Grant), awkwardly but intently and tenderly embrace. I shared Maurice’s wound when Clive holds him at bay and rejects him. The bliss Maurice ultimately finds with the gamekeeper Alec Scudder (Rupert Graves) also felt personal.

I mention this feeling of ardent identification in hopes of making a larger point: one need not actually see oneself onscreen to see oneself in the work. As the child of immigrant parents, someone of mixed race with a working-class background on both sides, and as an American for that matter, I did not see in Maurice someone who looked or acted in the least as I did. Yet I felt for him intensely and wanted nothing more than his happiness. Alec’s seduction of Maurice promised a kind of relief for me too, or so I hoped.

Thus although the rise of identity-politics work has quite rightly sought authentic representation and diversity, it’s also important to note that the power of art can speak deeply to us without necessarily resembling us. My mother is from Haiti, and my father is from Argentina, and I have rarely seen myself on page or screen. Nevertheless, I have greatly benefitted from works of art, from narratives that have captured and expressed, it has sometimes felt, things from my own life. So it was with Maurice; I was a solitary wanderer finding refuge.

As a scholar I work in two fields—19th-century American literature, and film studies—and feel kinship with artists like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James, Edith Wharton, and Alfred Hitchcock, and with film genres such as the woman’s film and film noir, the upstart visionaries of the New Hollywood and, later, the New Queer Cinema. The social psychiatrist Daryl J. Bem persuasively offered, in a 1996 paper, a theory of homosexual desire—really, of all sexual desire—as having this foundation: “the exotic becomes erotic.” This parallels my aesthetic appetites: I want to inhabit lives unlike my own.

Seeing Maurice now, I still feel deep kinship with it. It seems to me that the film can scarcely be bettered. James Ivory’s direction, the Richard Robbins score, the cinematography by Pierre Lhomme, the screenplay adaptation, and the acting are all glorious. Exquisitely adapted from Forster’s equally undersung and eloquent novel, Ivory’s film is a vision distinct from Forster’s, though there are obvious overlaps.

Almost 35 years later, I remain enthralled by Maurice, but am less dependent on it to speak for me. Indeed, I feel, to a certain extent, that I must speak for it. Maurice, like much of Merchant Ivory’s work, has not been treated fairly or generously by critics, including queer theorists who maintain that such works desexualize and distort homosexuality.

Ultimately, Maurice is as much about loneliness and isolation as it is about the closet and queer desire. As such, it has overlaps with works such as Hitchcock’s great Marnie (1964) and one of the least discussed great queer films, The Delta (1997), directed by Ira Sachs. Imagine if Alec Scudder were non-white and could not achieve romantic bliss with Maurice. The Delta gives us this story with harrowing results, emphasizing the themes of immigrant isolation and loss and the supremacy of white males in the gay imaginary. Ivory’s film, meanwhile, offers critiques of the stifling effects of class bias and the closet, as well as the representation of loneliness and isolation.

In the end, what makes Maurice a resonant text for the LGBTQ+ audience is not just its happy ending (albeit less happy than it may appear) but also the fact that its title character is able to jettison the class system and ties that have kept him a sexual and emotional prisoner. That he can feel for others and feel love for Alec gives us hope, in this time when it is most needed, that not only the systems that constrict us but also the people ensnared by these systems and seemingly doomed to perpetuate them are in fact capable of transformation.

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Excerpted from Maurice. Copyright © 2023 by David Greven. Used with permission of the publisher, McGill-Queen’s University Press. All rights reserved.

Dream Scenario, the new film from Kristoffer Borgli, sports a premise so clever and exciting that it seems almost impossible to live up to or make good on as a fully realized film. Sometimes ideas are like that—more engaging as questions or conceits than developed as drawn-out experiments or inquiries. This is probably because questions or conceits are limitless in their potential, kaleidoscopic teasers with permutations of interesting outcomes, while experiments or inquiries only happen one way.

Dream Scenario’s conceit is indeed excellent. The film is about an ordinary middle-aged man who starts mysteriously appearing in people’s dreams, all over the world. This is one of the most stimulating narrative prompts I’ve encountered a while, at least since I saw the wonderful trailer for Marc Forster and Zach Helm’s Stranger Than Fiction (2006) when I was fourteen. Unlike Stranger Than Fiction, which as a whole film and not a trailer I found fascinating but also a bit uncertain and a bit unfulfilled and a bit unsatisfying, I found Dream Scenario able to sidestep a hampering by its own scintillating prospects. It does eventually wobble as it builds a new story from its bracing gambit, but for the most part, it develops into a funny, interesting film with much to say about parasocial bonds and other illusions about possession of public figures.

The film stars Nicolas Cage (transformed by a fuzzy beard and bald head) as Paul Matthews, PhD, an evolutionary biologist and tenured professor at a small regional university. The film stresses that he is a very mediocre man. He hasn’t risen to any great heights in academia. As a father and husband, he’s fairly ineffectual. He suspects that a former colleague may have stolen his grad school research, but it’s been decades since and he hasn’t written his book on that work during all this time. It’s never directly stated, but it’s clear from little snide inflections and minute scowls in Cage’s performance that Paul lives his life feeling a little like a victim, wishing for notoriety and inclusion, and feeling resentful for his lack of it.

And then, people begin dreaming about him. No one knows why, but people all over the world begin reporting that they see him in the background of their dreams—watching the main events of the dreams play out, he is a curious but powerless and occasionally uninterested interloper. Paul becomes a celebrity, to the suspicious confusion of his wife Janet (Julianne Nicholson) and beguilement of his daughters Hannah (Jessica Clement) and Sophie (Lily Bird), and to his own delight.

Dream Scenario isn’t a fable about a man taken in and destroyed by fame; it’s more nuanced. Although Paul is tickled by his sudden notoriety, he hopes to use it to land a book deal for his own research. He signs with a management start-up (whose team consists of Michael Cera, Kate Berlant, and Dylan Gelula, all grotesque caricatures of media marketers), but they want him to appear in people’s dreams to advertise Sprite or other products, and Paul doesn’t want to sell out, just as much as he explains that he can’t control what he does in others’ dreams. His visage belongs to others, is seemingly controlled by their own brains and not his—a fact which begins to pose problems for him. And soon, his life becomes a waking nightmare.

For a while, the film evolves as a social satire rather than a sci-fi story about collective subconsciousness. It skirts past rails about cancel culture before settling in an inquiry about how the figures we encounter in life become characters in our own personal alternate realities, in a way that feels very relevant and useful in light of contemporary celebrity culture. It’s a longstanding fact of the social world that the more famous someone becomes, the more they belong to others and the less they belong to themselves, but Dream Scenario pushes an interrogation about this to extremes in a way that seems to resonate with, say, how our highly visual online culture leads to parasocial obsessions with celebrities like Taylor Swift. What does it mean when someone you don’t know becomes a dominant character in your life? What does it mean when you interpret someone else in certain ways, to the point where those interpretations begin to influence your opinions about the actual person?

Dream Scenario begins to lose its footing when it moves towards its third act, escalating into a different genre and abandoning its more philosophical questions for other ones that seem more immediate (especially given the looming threat of AI and the encroachment of various technological marketing assaults). Dream Scenario doesn’t spend enough time on these questions to pull off a multi-pronged critique, but it remains a fascinating and darkly funny film. Nicolas Cage, who has been enjoying a career renaissance as a character actor with films like Mandy, Pig, and even Renfield, is the film’s strongest propeller—his performance in Dream Scenario is a highlight even amongst this very strong recent run. He delivers a nuanced, very raw performance as the middling, over-his-head Paul. One scene, in which he attempts to behave like the more suave version of himself that someone else has dreamed, is one of the most cringey, hilarious interludes I’ve watched all year.

Dream Scenario is not the wild thought experiment that Borgli’s previous film, 2022’s Sick of Myself, is. That film, also a meditation on attention and audience, goes off the rails in a way that allows it to have a clearer thesis than Dream Scenario, which feels a little nebulous in terms of argument. Still, it is a very thoughtful and thought-provoking exercise, curious about what it means to be a captive audience, and also how your audience can hold you captive.

At the conclusion of Priscilla Beaulieu Presley’s 1985 memoir, Elvis and Me, she writes that Elvis “was, and remains, the greatest influence in my life.” Priscilla’s formative years with the King of Rock and Roll are what constitute much of her plainspoken yet captivating prose: meeting Elvis at a US Air Force base in Germany when she was only 14, wedding when she was 22, birthing their daughter Lisa Marie, and weathering their subsequent divorce after six years of marriage. It is almost impossible to understand or imagine the contours of Priscilla’s life outside of her relationship to Elvis, so prevalent was he in shaping every facet of her public persona, from her jet black beehive to her iconic liquid eyeliner to her lack of professional prospects, save keeping house in Graceland and being available at his beck and call. 

Director Sofia Coppola’s most recent feature film, Priscilla (2023), adapted from Beaulieu Presley’s aforementioned book, similarly showcases Elvis’s (Jacob Elordi) magnetizing pull for Priscilla (played by an assured and understated Cailee Spaeny). The film is a faithful adaptation, lifting dialogue directly from Presley’s memoir and following chronological events more or less exactly as she described them. When Priscilla Presley writes about her first conversations with Elvis, she notes, “It was a lot to expect an impressionable 14-year-old to understand, but I tried.” In the film, Priscilla’s dialogue during their first meeting is sparse, allowing the “impressionable” young girl to soak in her surroundings as the camera lingers on her inquisitive, steady gaze. 

Yet, Presley’s earnest aside—“but I tried”—underscores the extraordinary imbalance of power between the two, an imbalance that Coppola is not interested in engaging with at the expense of her highly stylized mise-en-scene. Coppola’s acute focus on clothes, makeup, hair, and period specific props distills both the potency of Elvis and Priscilla’s passion, as well as Elvis’s predisposition to violent outbursts and popping Dexedrine. After exiting the theater, I don’t meditate on Elvis’s drug addiction or the sexual politics of women in the 1960s, but I do long for a pink sweater set, a Polaroid camera, or a red Corvair. William Carlos Williams wrote, “no idea but in things.” Beautiful things are Coppola’s métier. The audience is ultimately left with a very pretty film that is as diaphanous and insubstantial as a chiffon scarf. 

Coppola’s oeuvre post-Lost in Translation (2003) recurrently poses the same problem for spectators: how to contend with these films that are exquisite to look at but decidedly devoid of emotional substance, political intervention, or formal innovation? When Priscilla dyes her hair at Elvis’s bequest, the makeover sequence could be something straight out of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) when Scottie remakes Judy in the image of Madeline. Does Coppola endorse Elvis’s control or oppose it? The montage’s percussive music and fetishizing close-ups seem, if not quite an endorsement, nonetheless take great pleasure in a woman being (re)made by a man’s imagination. While the close-ups on an eye, a foot, or a lock of hair may be a pastiche of the Classical Hollywood style, such style seduces the contemporary spectator with the visual pleasure of a woman’s subjugation.   

Coppola has architected an entire career out of the aestheticization of a waiting woman. In The Virgin Suicides (1999), the five Lisbon sisters wait for their lives to begin—or end—with Air’s ethereal electronic music accompanying each expression of animation or ennui; in Lost in Translation, Charlotte (played by an 18-year-old Scarlett Johansson) reclines in her Tokyo hotel room in various states of undress and repose like a modern-day La Grande Odalisque; in Marie Antoinette (2006), the titular character lounges in the bath eating bonbons and exclaiming over her satin shoes. 

Priscilla similarly exists in a state of suspension for much of Coppola’s film. After Elvis returns to the United States from military duty, there follows a montage of Priscilla heartbroken in bed, writing Elvis’s name on her school books, tacking cards to her bedroom wall, and paging through movie magazines where tabloid gossip about Elvis’s love life abounds. In each close-up, Priscilla’s manicure or coverlet or penmanship is impeccable. Philippe Le Sourd’s cinematography is a confection of soft lighting and dusky rose filters. A teenage girl’s boredom never looked so good. 

To be sure, when you’re a child, waiting is inevitable. You wait for your first kiss, your first trip, your first brush with danger, your first regret. “I often felt sorry for myself,” Beaulieu Presley writes of the time period in high school when she lived at Graceland, “and angry at Elvis for putting me in a situation in which I was forced to be alone for literally weeks at a time.” But for Coppola, Priscilla’s waiting constitutes most of the film—and the boredom she experiences becomes something we as the audience share. There is an acute desire for Priscilla to express something other than affability or agreement, for her to do anything at all. When Elvis initially sends for the now 16-year-old Priscilla to visit him in Memphis, another montage follows of Priscilla reclining on various pieces of furniture in the empty house. With her coiffed hair and kitten heels, Priscilla is poised as a mannequin in the love seat or the armchair. 

And yet, throughout the course of the almost two-hour runtime, Priscilla remains exactly that: beautiful to look at but offering no sense of what lies beneath. There are moments when the cool facade breaks, like when she snaps at Elvis that she’ll “return the fucking dress” after he chastises her for wearing prints rather than solid colors, or when she begs for sexual intimacy. But when Elvis retorts in response, “I see a mad woman before me,” the melodramatic statement becomes laughable. Priscilla is almost always mute. A madwoman is many things, but a staid personality she is not. 

Interiority is scarce in Sofia Coppola’s films. We know that Priscilla paints her toenails tomato red and that she wears two layers of fake eyelashes to give birth in the hospital, but we know little of her inner life, save a desire for sex, Elvis’s undivided attention, and fun. In interviews, Coppola has described this film as Priscilla’s perspective on the rock and roll icon, as well as her own highly publicized life. From Priscilla’s point of view I see her Aqua Net hairspray, her bottled Coca-Cola, the pearl handle of her custom gun. Missing is the first person candor of Elvis and Me, in which Beaulieu Presley admits to riding on her Honda Dream 350 when Elvis was in the studio “fleeing Bel Air, Beverly Hills, Hollywood, MGM, and all my worries.” In Priscilla she is not leaving but left, glamorous and alone, again and again and again. 

Last weekend, news broke that a long-awaited adaptation of Edith Wharton’s 1913 novel The Custom of the Country—which biographer Hermione Lee has called the writer’s greatest work—is no longer moving forward. The project was in the capable hands of Oscar-winning filmmaker Sofia Coppola who, since at least early 2020, had been working on a five-hour adaptation for the streaming platform Apple TV+. Fans and friends of the novel from all corners of the globe eagerly awaited the release of the miniseries.

Many of us have said for years that the novel’s audacious social-climbing heroine, Undine Spragg—a kind of Gilded Age Kardashian—has long been ready for her close-up. In two wonderfully tell-tale moments, Wharton’s narrator captures Undine’s je ne sais quoi: “If only everyone would do as she wished she would never be unreasonable” and “it was always hard to make her see why circumstances could not be bent to her wishes.” Those sentiments suggest Undine Spragg was born to be a reality TV star, influencer, or both. Undine was, after all, named for a water sprite who must marry a mortal to earn a soul. She changes husbands almost as frequently as Lady Mary swaps gowns on Downton Abbey, a show inspired, incidentally, by Julian Fellowes’s love for Wharton’s novel. Fellowes has even gone on record saying The Custom of the Country compelled him to sit down and write.

Since at least 2013, the centenary of Wharton’s novel, there has been an international conversation about Undine Spragg’s astonishing modernity. That summer, Laura Rattray and William Blazek hosted a symposium in the UK devoted to The Custom of the Country. (A few years earlier, Rattray edited an essay collection of contemporary responses to the book.) More recently, for its second virtual book club meeting, The New York Times T Magazine drew over 4,000 participants from around the world for a discussion of the novel led by Claire Messud. The chat stream suggested Generation Z loves Undine as much as Wharton’s contemporaries disliked her, and all participants were excitedly awaiting Coppola’s adaptation. Last year, Penguin Random House brought out a new edition of the novel with a foreword by Coppola, a version of which appeared here on Lit Hub. Concurrently, Brandon Taylor wrote a wonderful introduction to Simon and Schuster’s paperback edition, which he aptly calls “strikingly modern.”

When Undine Spragg burst onto the scene in 1913, reviewers were by turns fascinated and horrified.

Precisely because of its modernity, even before Coppola there has been a strong push to get Undine Spragg’s story to the screen. In October 2014 it was announced that Oscar-winning filmmaker Christopher Hampton (Dangerous Liaisons, Atonement) had written a script for an eight-episode Sony TV adaptation of the novel that was to star Scarlett Johannson. Michelle Pfeiffer has also been attached to an adaptation, according to an interview with Vanity Fair in 1993, the year of her award-worthy turn as Ellen Olenska in Scorsese’s adaptation of Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. Those projects have yet to materialize, and perhaps this has to do with the way some have responded to Wharton’s protagonist.

When Undine Spragg burst onto the scene in 1913, reviewers were by turns fascinated and horrified. While readers admired her gumption, she was called an “ideal monster,” “absolutely selfish,” “repulsive,” “the most repellant heroine,” and “a mere monster of vulgarity.” A year after Wharton’s 1937 death, the critic Edmund Wilson labeled Undine—wait for it—“the prototype in fiction of the ‘gold-digger,’ of the international cocktail bitch.”

Gold-digger. Bitch. That’s getting to the heart of the matter. Undine becomes a wife and accidental mother who lacks the mothering gene and is more interested in her modeling career than her toddler’s birthday—a detail that does not go over well with most readers. Undine’s response to the firearm suicide of her moneyed but money-less husband is informed by Wharton’s readings in Charles Darwin and survival of the fittest: “she could honestly say to herself that she had not wanted him to die—at least not to die like that….” Sofia Coppola cites as the reason executives at Apple TV+ withdrew support for her adaptation of a novel with an admittedly sociopathic heroine is because, as she told The Times, “the idea of an unlikable woman wasn’t their thing.” So here we are again with women and likability.

If an “unlikable woman” as the lead character is the reason the project was shut down, one has to ask: what about the heroines on Apple TV’s The Morning Show? Characters brought to life by Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon, Greta Lee, Karen Pittman, Julianna Margulies, and Holland Taylor reveal the sacrifices they’ve had to make to climb the ladders to professional success. Here’s the thing: we don’t watch them because we “like” them or want to be like them. We tune in because they are, like Wharton’s Undine, endlessly fascinating as they make compromises to climb the ranks to become equitably compensated stakeholders and voices. They say and do the unthinkable, and they survive.

She may not be “likable,” but there’s something terribly American about her.

If we are to believe that likability makes a character worth watching, then how do we explain our fascination with such morally bankrupt personages as Logan Roy, Kendall Roy, and, for heaven’s sake, all the Roys and their entourage on HBO’s superb TV series Succession? How do we account for the satisfaction one feels witnessing Don Draper literally and metaphorically forge his way to material success on AMC’s Mad Men? What of the blood on the hands of money-laundering Marty Byrde of Netfix’s Ozark, or chemistry teacher-turned-drug lord Walter White of AMC’s Breaking Bad? Many of us couldn’t take our eyes off them, and we feel the same about Undine Spragg’s ascent up the ladder to survival and world domination. What makes those anti-heroes different from Wharton’s anti-heroine (who, though uncouth and uncultured, is not a criminal)? The answer is obvious.

What a missed opportunity for Apple TV+. Edith Wharton’s writings across the genres—not just the consummate New York satires of the privileged but also her short fiction, poetry, plays, and nonfiction prose on art, architecture, design, gardens, and travel—have never before in my lifetime attracted as many admirers, and her appeal is just as global as it was at the height of her career, which is to say very. Sure, she was on fire in the film and TV revival that started in the 1990s (Ethan Frome, The Age of Innocence, The House of Mirth, The Buccaneers), but since then Wharton’s popularity has only reached further across disciplines and demographics. The diverse range of contemporary voices declaring Wharton a formative influence or favorite writer suggests the author’s resonance beyond the academy. That roster includes Roxane Gay, Colm Tόibin, Hernan Diaz, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Jennifer Egan, Brandon Taylor, Elif Batuman, Claire Messud, Vendela Vida, Mindy Kaling, and the creative minds behind Sex and the City, Gossip Girl, Downton Abbey, and The Gilded Age, which just launched its second season on Max.

At the end of Wharton’s 1913 novel, Miss Undine Spragg of Apex (that is, Miss U S of A), whose many marriages have enabled her to crudely ascend the staircase of the New York aristocracy, learns that, to her chagrin, her status as divorcée prohibits her from having it all:

…under all the dazzle a tiny black cloud remained. She had learned that there was something she could never get, something that neither beauty nor influence nor millions could ever buy for her. She could never be an Ambassador’s wife; and as she advanced to welcome her first guests she said to herself that is was the one part she was really made for.

She may not be “likable,” but there’s something terribly American about her, and we can’t take our eyes off this woman who—like Samantha Jones of Sex and the City—behaves, well, kind of like a man. Undine is, as one character puts it, “the monstrously perfect result of the system.” We made her, and when we did, we equipped her with tools to survive and a willingness to compromise—in ways that the perhaps more “likable” Lily Bart of The House of Mirth (1905) could or would not. Undine works the system that destroys Lily.

Undine Spragg, then, “was really made for” adaptation to the screen, and we are here for it. One has to ask: if Apple TV+ was willing to greenlight what will be the second television adaptation of Wharton’s The Buccaneers—a novel left unfinished at the author’s death, the adaptation of which premieres today—why abandon a masterpiece she wrote at the height of her powers when she was arguably the most famous American woman of letters? I suspect another network will grab this project, and quickly. Apple TV’s loss will be somebody’s gain. On the matter of who best to cast in the plum role of Undine Spragg? Florence Pugh, Julia Garner, Anya Taylor-Joy, and Margot Robbie come to mind. Then again, this could be a career-launching role for an actor who isn’t yet a household name. And those of us who teach, write about, and/or love Edith Wharton will, early and often, see, show, and emphatically promote an adaptation that powerful Hollywood stakeholders have been trying to actualize for at least 30 years, a story ideally suited to our present Gilded Age.

Chaplin’s optimism about The Great Dictator was confirmed by the critics. Variety said that “the picture has had much advance publicity, and the curiosity aroused in its connection no doubt is second only to that which was built up for Gone With the Wind.”

President Roosevelt was invited to the opening in New York on October 15, 1940, but couldn’t attend and sent FDR Jr. The opening night, Variety said, had some rocky moments, because the audience had been misled by “some of the very amusing still photographs.” The crowd, said the paper, was “cool to the Chaplin effort and hesitant to respond to its theme, except in the hilarious farcical scenes. The first audience reaction was that Chaplin should stick to his funny hat, cane and shoes and leave world politics to the politicians.”

But Variety ultimately realized that Chaplin had, against all odds, accomplished something remarkable: “The Great Dictator is one of those milestones by which films since their early, faltering days have been led to renewed inspiration and realization of hidden opportunities. In The Great Dictator, Chaplin has employed the full force of the screen’s expressive power to crystalize the timely and encouraging idea that the world is only half-crazy and that sanity has not completely fled from human experience.”

Chaplin’s silent features have a blithe momentum, with most sequences carefully building toward the climax. No matter the difficulties encountered in production, in the cutting room Chaplin was ruthless about narrative. He understood that flow was crucial, and the silent features mostly feel seamless.

Chaplin’s sound pictures are a different matter. Their rhythm is baggier, the running times are extended, the characters less firm. Mostly, this is because he saw sound as lending itself to political and social comment alternating with the expected amounts of comedy, which meant he had more to pack in. The Great Dictator is a particularly audacious mixture of satire, slapstick, tragedy, propaganda, and music hall jokes out of the Karno days:

“How’s the gas?” asks the pilot of a falling plane.

“Terrible, kept me awake all night,” replies Charlie.

The film also provided yet more evidence of Chaplin’s psychological grasp of character that coexisted with his protean acting skills. His Adenoid Hynkel is a comic X-ray of the authoritarian personality: endless vanity fueled by pathetic insecurity that can only be quelled by absolute obedience. As Hynkel, Chaplin captures both howling fury and an almost coquettish wheedling, all communicated through a soft English diction that indicated Chaplin had done a lot of work ridding himself of his working-class accent.

“He didn’t just scream and bawl,” said Alistair Cooke of Hitler’s speeches. “And he also had this slightly fancy toss of the hand, you know. He didn’t always give the full rigid salute. I remember Chaplin telling me about the dance that he was going to do with the globe…which did seem like a poetic extension of Hitler. But Hitler also made very delicate gestures with his hands. Chaplin had the most beautiful, very small hands, you know, like ivory knick-knacks. It’s the only film I know that gives this side of Hitler.”

Many critics have objected to the final speech, in which Chaplin steps out of character and addresses the audience as Charlie Chaplin—the twentieth century’s emblematic comic personality using his skills to delegitimize the century’s greatest threat to freedom, to art, to civilization: an apostle of compassion engaging in mortal combat with a promulgator of hate. Many people then and now consider the speech little more than sentimental utopianism, but Chaplin’s passion is overwhelming:

“Greed has poisoned men’s souls—has barricaded the world with hate—has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical; our cleverness hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost.”

True then, true today.

Variety reprinted the speech in full, and did an extensive interview with Chaplin in which he tried to deny that he was speaking as himself rather than his character. “There have been objections,” Chaplin said, “that the speech was not in keeping with the general practice of ‘good motion picture making.’ I don’t agree. Others have complained that it is out of character. I don’t agree on that either.

“It is not as unbelievable as they think to have the meek barber make such a speech. I could have finished it with a cliché, but that would have been still harder to believe. I could have had him triumphant, but that wouldn’t have been true to life. I could have had him kick the storm troopers out of his way and escape, then showed him with Paulette Goddard in the setting sun, approaching America, the land of freedom and hope. But if you want to get on the subject of credulity, then they’d have the immigration authorities to deal with before they got into America.

“It seems entirely conceivable to me that the little barber, pushed into the position he was, could have made the speech he did. It was all the pent-up emotion resulting from the persecution he and those he loved had been subjected to. He was in a stage where he was semi-hypnotized by the situation. He was no longer the barber, nor was he the dictator, nor was he me. He was a combination of all three.”

Chaplin’s own take on the reviewers who objected to the final speech was that they had “a perceived notion of what I was going to do, based on what they had seen in the past. They had a groove all planned for me and I didn’t fall into it. I felt I had to do something different, because times are different. There are grave things happening in the world and I wanted, in my way, to reflect them. I don’t pretend to be a propagandist, but I felt I must cry out against persecution….

“The world isn’t a pleasant place in all its aspects, and there’s no reason to make it appear that way in a picture. Furthermore, what critics forget is that I try to create enjoyment by creating emotions. I have never limited myself to the single emotion of laughter. I have attempted to stir up all sorts of emotions. The more varied the ones I create, the more enjoyable the picture.”

Geraldine Chaplin believed the final speech to be one of her father’s finest moments: “He steps up to the microphone, he’s a little barber and then he’s pretending to be the dictator. Then the camera comes in close and he starts speaking and the transformation—suddenly he’s no longer the Jewish barber, he’s no longer the dictator, he becomes Charles Chaplin speaking to the world. The way his face changes—I’ve watched that a million times. He becomes Charles Chaplin, without taking the makeup off, without anything; suddenly his face, it becomes older, you see the lines on it, and you see the man come out.”

The film opened in London in December 1940—the height of the Blitz. The critic C. A. Lejeune opined that the film was “uneven…harsh at some moments, sentimental at others, brilliant, even noble in many parts. The ghost of every trick that Chaplin has ever played is in the film somewhere. Watching it, your memory ranges back to The Pilgrim, The Kid, Shoulder Arms, even further to the plain, downright days of custard-pie and mallet.”

There were criticisms that Chaplin had singled out dictators of the right, while leaving out dictators of the left. “I’m not working in the political arena,” he said with a straight face. “I’m working in the human arena. Had I included Stalin, I would surely been getting into politics because there was no reason to include him from the standpoint I was taking. He may be a dictator, but he’s not persecuting helpless people because they are Jews, or Chinese, or Mohammedan, or because he doesn’t like the shape of their eyebrows.” (History has since proven that Stalin was, among other things, a vicious anti-Semite and homophobe. Chaplin was completely wrong.) Variety noted that Chaplin spoke with “a curious mixture of humbleness and the blazing conviction that he is right, his critics wrong, on all but one point—the picture’s length. He said he thinks he has culled from it every possible bit of footage without removing whole sequences. He’s anxious, he averred, to cut more if he can be shown how it can be done.”

In retrospect, it can be seen that The Great Dictator was the high-water mark of Chaplin’s political and social relevance. Everybody in Hollywood thought Chaplin was insane to make an antifascist film at a time of rampant isolationism. It was an opinion shared by Sydney, who believed the film was commercially dubious as well as politically dangerous. But Chaplin’s indifference about what other people thought tended to make his films better, while considerably complicating his life.

Released a year before Pearl Harbor, The Great Dictator portrayed Jews as an oppressed minority, served as a passionate clarion call for intervention, and, in Chaplin’s inspired burlesque of Hitler, was often uproariously funny in the bargain.

The Great Dictator ran for fifteen weeks in New York—a huge commercial achievement. Produced for $1.4 million, it returned rentals of $5 million to United Artists, producing a clear profit to Chaplin of about $3 million, despite the fact that most of Europe never saw the picture until after the war. The film nobody in Hollywood wanted proved to be a great hit.

As Arthur Schlesinger Jr. said, “Historically, it was one of the earliest movies to express any kind of repugnance against Hitler and Nazism, and it did so, it seems to me, with sublime artistry. It may be in some ways Chaplin’s most memorable movie, and the part of the film that was most widely criticized at the time—that is, the concluding speech, might have seemed mawkish at the time, but in the context of the nuclear age, I think it has great resonance and great power.”

Despite the cavils of critics in 1940 and since, The Great Dictator has retained its hold on audiences, and remains a popular picture, perhaps because its subject is perennially relevant—the authoritarian mindset is always with us. While there are certainly more perfect films, there are very few as courageous. Chaplin was never more confident of his physical virtuosity—the scene of Hynkel dancing with the globe is immediately followed by the Jewish barber shaving a client to Brahms’ Hungarian Rhapsody. First he shows you the dictator’s megalomania, then the barber’s unassuming expertise, both characters defined by movement set to music.

As for theoretical pro-Communist leanings, The Great Dictator didn’t receive a showing in Russia until March of 1989, when Raisa Gorbachev hosted a screening. By that time, Charlie Chaplin had been in his grave for twelve years.

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Excerpted from Charlie Chaplin vs. America: When Art, Sex, and Politics Collided by Scott Eyman. Copyright © 2023. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

In the 1950s, new technologies were the most conspicuous way that the film indus­try attempted to lure customers. But enlarging the size of the screen, magnifying the soundtrack, and hurling characters and objects into the audience were by no means the only strategies pursued by a business fac­ing financial peril. In the race for survival, new content was as necessary as new formats.

In the postwar decade there was a greater range of subject matter than there ever had been before, and the sheer range and diversity of offerings, from the upper crust to the bottom of the barrel, pinpointed the increas­ing fragmentation of the audience. Because the studios could no longer rely on multigenerational families of children, parents, and grandparents venturing out for a movie that could be enjoyed by all, they began to tailor their products for viewers of different ages and tastes, a strategy reflected in the era’s steep division between high and low offerings—between “art” cinema of varying kinds on the one hand and the explosion of exploitation fare on the other.

Let’s begin a survey of diversity 1950s style with upmarket fare, a look at the adaptations of literary classics. Paramount presented Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1956); Warner Bros. offered Melville’s Moby Dick (1956) and Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (1958); MGM produced Dos­toevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1958); 20th Century–Fox released Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1959). Sturdier than their reputations, these valiant upscale attractions are inevitably stunted because, in each, an essential ingredient is missing: the presiding presence of their authors.

Despite the novel’s immense length and its multitude of events and dra­matis personae, in some ways the adapters of War and Peace had the easiest job. Tolstoy is a comparatively unobtrusive narrator of a surefire story, in effect a Russian Gone with the Wind. While inevitably sacrificing much of Tolstoy’s political and psychological commentary, the film’s six credited screenwriters—Bridget Boland, Robert Westerby, King Vidor, Mario Camerini, Ennio De Concini, and Ivo Perilli—preserve the essence of Tolstoy’s plot while enrobing it with spectacle. King Vidor’s far-from-deep-enough “translation,” marred by the central miscasting of all-American Henry Fonda speaking in his own untouched midwestern twang as Pierre, Tolstoy’s indelibly Russian protagonist, has a visual majesty that may qual­ify it as the most elaborate reader’s guide in movie history. The central setting, the manorlike residence of the Rostovs—bursting with people and parties during peacetime, emptied and devastated once war descends—is made for movies, as are a resplendent ball, the cast-of-thousands depic­tion of the Battle of Borodino, the exodus from Moscow as French forces under Napoleon enter the city, the grueling retreat in the snow of the defeated Napoleon and his army. With its densely detailed long shots and deep-focus clarity, Jack Cardiff’s cinematography is the single finest use of Paramount’s short-lived wide-screen VistaVision format.

Shot entirely on sound stages at a tottering MGM (this was one of the last of the studio’s big made-entirely-in-house productions), The Broth­ers Karamazov is even less authentically Russian than Paramount’s War and Peace. Nonetheless, this made-in-Hollywood Karamazov cannot be discounted. The screenplay by Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein, and Richard Brooks, who also directed, reduces Dostoevsky’s dense religious and philosophical discourse into a tightly focused drama about the events leading up to a crime, the killing of the Karamazov patriarch, and the subsequent trial. The screenplay has momentum, and in the climax, the spiritual transformations of the principal characters attain surprising force. Also, Brooks’s film has an ace up its sleeve: the cinematography of Hollywood master John Alton, renowned for his lighting in many film noir thrillers as well as for the ballet sequence, ablaze with the colors of French impressionism, in An American in Paris. Alton bathes The Brothers Karamazov in vibrant shades of red, purple, dark green, and burnt orange, his feverish palette evoking a “dream” of Russian intensity. Alton’s colors turn the opening scenes of Russian dancing and music making, the moments leading up to the murder, the trial scene, and the finale of redemption and transcendence into a film noir en couleur. In 1958, Alton’s over-vivid hues were dismissed as cartoon-like, but over time the Dostoevskian intensity of his approach has been widely praised.

Although American filmmakers might be presumed to be more at ease with native classics than with Russian, home-grown masterworks like Moby Dick and The Old Man and the Sea proved equally untameable movie material. Man faces the sea in starkly allegorical battles in the Melville and Hemingway stories, and try as they do, the films cannot lift the ocean and its creatures to the metaphorical heights they attain in the novels. On film, the sea is the sea is the sea, a whale is a whale is a whale. The screenwriters—science-fiction master Ray Bradbury collaborated with John Huston (who also directed) on Moby Dick; Peter Viertel, who wrote The African Queen, adapted The Old Man and the Sea—were unable to approximate the novels’ symbolic charge. Stripped of most of Melville’s Christian and sexual over­tones and of its intimidating whiteness, Moby Dick is simply a mysteri­ous, horror-movie monster the audience waits to see. And when it finally makes its act 3 appearance, it looks like a dated special effect. Although Gregory Peck, who later apologized for his Captain Ahab, claiming he let down the film, is too stolid and self-contained to embody the inten­sity of Melville’s searcher, he gives what may well be his bravest perfor­mance, struggling beyond his depth in the churning waters of Melville’s allegory.

As either spectacle or metaphor, the big fish that we wait for in The Old Man and the Sea is no more convincing than the big white whale. But even if the fish had been rendered with the full resources of contem­porary CGI, seeing it would have been redundant, because Hemingway’s self-consciously literary novella about man’s eternal Sisyphean struggle for survival, written in his leanest and most “masculine” style, is meant to be read, or listened to, rather than visualized. Spencer Tracy, speaking in the novella’s third person, reads the old man’s story. He reads it well, with respect for the rhythm and the simplicity of Hemingway’s prose, and with­out making any attempt to become Hemingway’s Cuban fisherman. Peter Viertel’s screenplay treats Hemingway as holy writ—in 1958 the book was required reading in every high school English class in the country, whereas over time it has come to seem like another generation’s idea of a great book. Along with the solid if plodding direction of John Sturges, their efforts are superfluous—beside the point: a film of The Old Man and the Sea has no reason for being.

In their screenplay, Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank Jr. attempt to retrieve from Faulkner’s dense and structurally experimental The Sound and the Fury a realistic linear narrative. They replace the novelist’s technical tour de force, a collage of five narrators, with a conventional story of an aristocratic southern family in decline. And yet there are moments. From time to time, Martin Ritt’s direction conjures an atmosphere of southern torpor and humidity, Yul Brynner is surprisingly persuasive as the patriarch of a crumbling family, and Ethel Waters as the family servant Dilsey (one of the novel’s five narrators) fully evokes the strength of Faulkner’s great character.

In their continuing efforts to link literary prestige with hoped-for fi­nancial profit, studios released versions of other (more accessible) works by both Hemingway and Faulkner. The Breaking Point (1950), based on Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not; The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952), an expansion of a twenty-nine-page story; The Sun Also Rises (1957); and David O. Selznick’s remake of A Farewell to Arms (1957) are of varying quality, but in each case the source material was more movie-friendly than The Old Man and the Sea.

In addition to The Sound and the Fury, there were three other Faulkner adaptations: Intruder in the Dust (1949), The Tarnished Angels (1957), based on Pylon; and The Long Hot Summer (1958), based on the story “Barn Burning,” part of the novel The Hamlet. In his direction of The Tarnished Angels, a story of a war pilot who becomes a circuslike stunt flyer as a way of making money during the Depression, Douglas Sirk takes a force­ful approach. With his creative use of lighting, camera movement and placement, and his masterly wide-screen compositions, Sirk in effect be­comes Faulkner’s coauthor, translating a literary work into a kinetic, quick-moving movie, one of the director’s baroque melodramas about self-destruction.

“I thought it was pretty good—quite honest,” Faulkner commented about The Tarnished Angels. “But I have to admit I didn’t recognize any­thing I put into it—the book, not the script.” His favorite adaptation was Intruder in the Dust. “I’m not much of a moviegoer, but I did see that one. I thought it was a fine job. That Juano Hernandez is a fine actor—and man too.” Faulkner worked on the screenplays of about a dozen films, most often for Howard Hawks, but he had an indifferent track record. “I’ve never had much confidence in my capacity as a scenarist,” he admit­ted. “It ain’t my racket. I can’t see things. I can only hear.” Is Faulkner’s distinction between hearing and seeing a possible explanation for why great literature is seldom translated into great filmmaking? Nonetheless, the flawed attempts throughout the decade to adapt the work of literary masters are noteworthy.

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Excerpted from Hollywood and the Movies of the Fifties: The Collapse of the Studio System, the Thrill of Cinerama, and the Invasion of the Ultimate Body Snatcher—Television by Foster Hirsch. Copyright (c) 2023 Knopf. Used by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.

In 1975, four years after the release of The French Connection, William Friedkin revealed to a reporter the inspiration for the film’s celebrated car chase scene.

It was the cover of a comic book: a man runs terrified on elevated tracks, just a few steps ahead of a train. He is handsome and athletic. Save for a domino mask, he is dressed like a classic Hollywood detective, in a blue suit and loose tie; he bears no resemblance to Gene Hackman’s slovenly everyman “Popeye” Doyle. The cover was from The Spirit, a comic that ran as a seven-page newspaper insert throughout the 40s and early 50s. The series, created by Will Eisner, was admired for its black humor, innovative compositions, shocking violence, and its setting in a precisely realized urbanscape. “Look at the dramatic use of montage, of light and sound,” Friedkin told the reporter. “See the dynamic framing that Eisner employs, and the deep, vibrant colors.”

Friedkin may not have been telling the truth. The comic he showed the reporter was a reprint that had been published after the release of The French Connection. The stories were three decades old, but the covers were new. Still, it was good publicity for the project he was then planning, a feature-length pilot for an NBC series that would feature the Spirit, aka Denny Colt, a detective who has risen from the dead, lives in a cemetery, and fights crime with his wits, his fists, and a willingness to withstand pain that borders on masochism.

Eisner and Friedkin shared a sensibility, particularly an instinct for fatalism. In The French Connection, “Popeye” Doyle, whatever his talents as a detective, is undone by obsession. Friedkin’s other characters—the self-loathing gay men in The Boys in the Band, the mother who fights for her devil-mutilated daughter in The Exorcist—are entrapped, left to shout against themselves or God. In the mid-70s, following the success of The Godfather movies, Mario Puzo started writing the screenplay for Richard Donner’s Superman, which would be released in 1978. If Friedkin had made The Spirit, he would have created a different template for today’s most dominant genre.

At the time of that interview, Friedkin was developing the project with Pete Hamill, a crime writer and columnist. Hamill’s best work as a screenwriter was uncredited; he had provided the dialogue for John Frankenheimer’s sequel to The French Connection. In the film’s set piece, “Popeye” Doyle suffers a breakdown and rhapsodizes about a failed baseball career. In a primal, halting monologue, Hackman reveals the infantile rage of a man committed to a life of violence.

Hamill approached the Spirit with the same pathos. In a sketch, he maintains much of Eisner’s original vision, including the Spirit’s signature habit of tripping and falling down stairs when chasing criminals, and his melancholic sense of humor. He “often seems uncomfortable in his own body, as if its size forces him into physical action when he would rather just go to the beach,” Hamill writes. The superhero who wants to go to the beach is usually played for cheap laughs. Hamill understands the character as high tragicomedy.

Hamill wrote three disparate treatments for Friedkin, all of which were rejected. The first two anticipate the better superhero movies and cartoons of the last few decades. The third is among the many unproduced science-fiction epics—possibly brilliant, far more likely terrible—that make up the shadow history of cinema.

The First Treatment
There’s always the problem of realism. In theory, it’s impossible to go too far in a superhero story. The question is how much restraint you exercise to make sure the viewer believes the narrative. How vulnerable is your hero? How apocalyptic the threat? Do you really care if the science is accurate? Like many comics storytellers, Hamill solves the problem with metafiction.

Hamill knows when to be loyal and when to be disloyal. As in Eisner’s original comics, Denny Colt, an Irishman who speaks in Yiddish slang, has roots in the outer boroughs. But whereas the original comics depict the Spirit’s sidekick, Ebony White, as a minstrel with simian features, the treatment describes a street-smart and regular smart 12-year-old. In the comics, Eisner’s characters often break the fourth wall; they know they are heroes in a comics story. The treatment entertains a similar strategy, casting the two leads as Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Colt and Ebony study comics books, just as their predecessors study the tales of chivalry.

The villain is Richard Abrams, a sexually frustrated teenager who also treats comics as a guidebook, both to develop his mad scientist persona and to pursue his nefarious scheme (in his case to miniaturize the island of Manhattan). In a note, Hamill suggests a young Jules Feiffer, who had written several Spirit stories in his youth, as the villain’s physical model.

Feiffer could have been the model for Abrams’s character as well as his physique. Like Abrams, Feiffer was a comics obsessive. He had studied Eisner’s work for years before walking into his studio at the age of 17, looking for a job. He later became famous for a syndicated strip, in which he documented the travails of a generation of men and women for whom the sexual revolution came just a few years too late. His characters were as lovable as they were fundamentally broken. Accordingly, Hamill wants to make Abrams “as sympathetic as possible, to break the stereotype, and also to make the audience kind of root for him, wishing they could do the same thing…”

We have seen much of this since: the Don Quixote approach, the villain as nerd gone bad. It is a humane take on the genre. In Hamill’s first treatment of The Spirit, the hero tries to be better than he is, and the villain a grander version of himself, both hoping to realize an ideal of heroism and villainy in a civilization too dull to accept either.

The Second Treatment
The second treatment is neo noir, a meditative odyssey, as Denny Colt, having risen from the dead, investigates the mystery behind his own father’s death.

In this version, New York is nearing the end of history. A retired hitman “works as a custodian in an abandoned synagogue in Brownsville, a lone white man in a sea of blacks.” At the abandoned Lyceum, “a troupe of ancient actors perform each night in secret, only for themselves, with scratchy phonograph records playing the music of the past.” Colt visits a radical chic party, a Voodoo cult, a crooked nursing home run by an “evil rabbi” (a reference to the Bernard Bergman case, one of 1975’s sensational crime stories), and a high-class brothel. I want to see this movie, even if it is a little too comfortable with racist and anti-Semitic tropes.

The treatment gives Friedkin plenty of opportunity to indulge his talents. There’s a car chase across the Triboro Bridge into Flushing, and a fight with albino alligators in a sewer beneath the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But in his note to Friedkin, Hamill lays out a theme regarding the nature of identity. “As he plunges deeper into the mystery of the search, this man with a literal mask should be removing the mask of everyone he encounters.” He suggests La Dolce Vita as a model.

Hamill may not have known that Federico Fellini had considered making a superhero movie himself—his was to have been an adaptation of the strip Mandrake the Magician starring Marcello Mastroianni. Either way, the treatment imagines the kind of superhero movie Fellini might have directed. This version of The Spirit is a carnival of grotesques, which the hero journeys through, at times as a detached, self-assured observer, at others a reluctant participant in a decadent society.

The Third Treatment
In Hamill’s third treatment, Denny Colt is not a detective, but an environmental engineer, who awakes from a cryogenic chamber into a post-capitalist dystopia. He takes up the identity of the Spirit, which he constructs out of historical records of crime and policing. This is the least bizarre aspect of the narrative.

Corporate powers took over the government sometime in the 70s and made environmentalism illegal. Now the mass of humanity lives within artificial cities made of giant red orbs—called “Urbs”—within which the past Earth—everything from Chinese restaurants to Arab bazaars—has been reconstructed in an antiseptic, machine-governed environment. Sex androids satisfy the carnal needs of humanity. Jousting tournaments with giant vehicles satisfy their entertainment needs. The exterior world is threatened by a giant fog of pollution and fetid sludge. The general area is known as Central City—the name Eisner gave the Spirit’s home in the original comics—but the Urbs occupy the ruins of old New York, and it is cut off from the rest of the world. An underground resistance made up of antediluvian religious zealots occupies catacombs beneath the surface.

This is the kind of cultural artifact that belongs in the category “What occasioned this?” There is nothing in the treatment that speaks to Hamill’s style or interests. It has nothing in common with Eisner’s original series, not even the subpar science-fiction stories of its final years. Friedkin knew how to build terror in claustrophobic environments, so who knows what he could have done inside these “Urbs.” But the horrors Hamill describes lack the wit and the internal logic of The Exorcist. Friedkin did not practice the cinema of excess in which every inch of the screen is filled with detail, far more than the average viewer can absorb or study. This is all a long way of saying the treatment has nothing to do with Friedkin as well, and I have no idea what Hamill was thinking.

The Spirit, who wore a suit instead of tights and who tripped over his toes, was an anti-superhero, loved by readers who knew the genre was capable of literary merit, the same readers who would devour Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns in the 80s. But there are only so many genre conventions you can break before you lose everything you liked about it in the first place.

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Hamill gave up on trying to please Friedkin, and over the next two years the director would enlist three other prominent writers for the project: Jules Feiffer, Harlan Ellison, and Eisner himself. Like Hamill’s third treatment, Feiffer’s is a bizarre mix of bad anti-capitalist satire and 70s dystopia, with a touch of Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle. (“I must have been going through some kind of crisis at the time,” he wrote me when I sent him his version.) Ellison’s revives Ebony White’s minstrel persona. Eisner’s updates the better aspects of his original comic, but the treatment lacks passion. Friedkin moved on.

In the early 80s, Brad Bird, then a recent graduate of the California Institute of the Arts, attempted to make an animated feature film based on The Spirit, and he produced a three-minute pencil test. The piece utilizes the strategies of live-action film, looking back to the Superman cartoon series of the 40s, and anticipating Batman: The Animated Series and Bird’s own masterpiece, The Incredibles. It’s impressive work, but animated features were not popular at the time, and he failed to obtain financing.

There would be two live-action adaptations, the first a two-dollar-budget television pilot for ABC, starring Sam J. Jones, who had played Flash Gordon in a fun as high heaven glitzy adaptation a few years before. This version is heterosexual camp—a love interest admires the Spirit’s shoulders even as she compares him to Charles Manson—and maybe it could have worked, but unfortunately, no one is intelligent enough to sell a word of dialogue. It aired once, during rerun season, buried on a Saturday night in July 1987.

In 2008, Frank Miller, Eisner’s friend and arguably his protégé, directed a theatrical adaptation, shot entirely on green screen. Gabriel Macht plays Denny Colt as a dumb jock. Samuel L. Jackson plays the arch-villain. He wears a samurai suit, and later on a Nazi uniform, and he kills kittens, and it’s all more hateful and joyless and stupid and cruel than it sounds.

“One might argue that the consistent inability to translate The Spirit to live action is testimony either to Eisner’s talents or to the intrinsic way The Spirit depended on the media form it was depicted in originally,” Paul Levitz, the author of a book about Eisner, wrote me. He suggests a version of the film, made in the 40s, starring an Arsenic and Old Lace Cary Grant, might have been successful.

In 2019, Martin Scorsese penned a New York Times op-ed, in which he described what he searched for in cinema as a young man and what the superhero blockbusters of our current era lacked. The great films of the 40s and 50s, he wrote, were “about characters—the complexity of people and their contradictory and sometimes paradoxical natures, the way they can hurt one another and love one another and suddenly come face to face with themselves.”

That was the Spirit in Eisner’s comics, and in Hamill’s second, Fellini-esque treatment, which, ideally, would have starred Roy Scheider. For Hamill, the Spirit’s immortality is a curse. His desires for justice, order, love, and human connection are confused. His city is already fallen and it can never be saved, only managed. Superhero fans will point to any number of films that depict similar heroes and similar worlds, and they’re not all bad. (I like, but do not love, Logan.) But Hamill’s take on The Spirit would have been sadder and better. Friedkin was the rare showman who knew as much about human suffering as he did about spectacle, and you would have believed the Spirit’s pain as much as you did his powers.

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Special thanks to Caroline Jorgenson, of the Margaret Herrick Library at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, who obtained scans of Pete Hamill’s treatments for The Spirit. Denis Kitchen provided copies of Will Eisner, Harlan Ellison, and Jules Feiffer’s treatments, as well as Eisner’s notes to Feiffer.

“What one sees with one’s own eyes is mixed up with the question of what someone else sees.”
—Darian Leader, Stealing the Mona Lisa: What Art Stops Us From Seeing

Published in 1993, “E Unibus Pluram,” David Foster Wallace’s essay about the now pretty much bygone age of cable TV, reads today as a kind of critique avant la lettre of the culture that’s since been spawned by the digital streaming services—services that allow us to take charge of what gets channelled into our homes such that we need hear only what we want to hear and see only what we want to see. At the time, the particular target of Wallace’s essay was his own breed, American writers of fiction, whose art he thought at risk of TV’s malign influence. As the ultimate window on to American normality, he warned, or what “Americans want to regard as normal,” TV looks like a godsend “for a human subspecies that loves to watch people but hates to be watched itself.” Yet the risk for these professional oglers is that they could lose sight of reality thanks to the ease and comfort of its televisual substitution—a risk, he added, that was by no means theirs alone. If it’s true that the average American watches TV for six hours a day then the screen must be a dark mirror of the democratic ideal itself. Wallace didn’t, by this, intend to lambast arthouse TV such as Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage. Although the lower-brow TV he had in mind did in some ways resemble that sophisticated modernist bend towards formal self-consciousness. The TV you gleefully derided along with your like-minded friends had not only metabolized your own critiques of it, it was already speaking to you in the register of your own mockery. TV was practically begging you to hate-watch it in fact; and it was doing so long before social media’s algorithms had figured out that it’s the pleasure of hating that gets you hailed, homogenized and hooked. Bergman, after all, isn’t the only one to have considered the small screen an ideal match for marriage. Amongst the family-centered sitcoms Wallace mentions are such specimens as the Cosby Show or Married…with Children. Marriage and TV, in other words, may have enjoyed such a binding and lasting relationship because it’s those two hitched together that can provide us with the most compelling picture of normality. As such, they can also help to hitch together a TV-watching populace that knows exactly what to say and how to say it in the “cynical, irreverent, ironic” tone that Wallace deems the method, mood and meaning of the screen age. Or the TV screen age at any rate.

That said, binding the populace with a vision of normality was much easier to do back in our analogue days when we were all forced to watch what was on at the time it was scheduled, whereas living as we do now, in the solipsistic and siloed future Wallace’s essay predicted, we can all decide for ourselves what’s on. Where couples used to fight, in their most eloquent of marital disputes, over the remote control, peace has since prevailed over home entertainment as every household member can reach for earphones and laptops and turn on whatever it is that turns them on. Not, though, at my address. Here we do still continue to vie for the remote control, our quarrels notwithstanding, because we still feel the need of shared televisual experience as pretty much the only zone of interaction we have each day that doesn’t feel like a management meeting. This TV time, we tell our children whenever they get out of bed to interrupt us, is special, sacred, adult time. Once we’ve watched over them, we get to watch the next episode of our box set. We do this so religiously, in fact, that if either of us was to jump ahead and watch that next episode alone, it would reasonably be declared, within the terms of our current contract, an act of infidelity. So is this what middle age looks like, or looks like for us? We look forward to looking forward together and there are few things we look forward to quite as much. Spoken aloud, that doesn’t sound great. Have we then consigned our own romance to the past, or delegated all further romancing to the actors we watch on television? Not necessarily, I tell myself. Wasting time after all, pace Cavell, is what lovers do in the belief that no time spent together could really be wasted. And there’s no time wasted like TV time. Physical intimacy aside, could any time spent together be more intimate? Yes, that’s what I tell myself. But we do, it’s true, my husband probably more than me, have reservations about our TV addiction. And I sometimes wonder what we might really be looking for when we’re looking forward to the box. Observing that one starts looking for things only once one thinks they’re lost, the psychoanalyst Darian Leader has suggested this might tell us something about looking per se. Are we always looking for what we’ve lost? And if so, when we’re distracted by our laptop or phone or TV could that suggest that we’ve even lost a sense of what we’ve lost, or what it is we imagine we’re looking for? What are we seeking when we’re staring at our screens? Is it something different when we watch our screens alone as opposed to together?

Tracing the ways we look at each other back to childhood and the looks first exchanged at home, Leader notes that Freud’s early work on scopophilia (the pleasure in looking) is linked to a sexual curiosity aroused by the veiling of parts of the body. Viewed thus, looking becomes part of an effort to reveal what’s been hidden in order to complete the object—so it’s infused as well with an incipient form of distorted memory or nostalgia since its veiling is what also allows the looker to imagine the object had once been satisfyingly whole. In an earlier chapter I associated this veiling of the body, or of sex, with the wedding veil, and with the claim that marriage and clothing appeared at the moment when something—call it paradise—feels lost. I suggested that via this “civilizing” move, the effort to socialize the sexual simultaneously sexualizes the social. Once veiled, that is, interest gets displaced on to the veil itself, whose mystery is now rendered both physical and metaphysical. For which reason, says Leader, we needn’t take the sex organs in this story too literally. After the veil has been added to sex, sex seems to stand for something else—something “that eludes visualization.” But what is it that, when we’re looking, we can’t seem to see? One answer, says Leader, is that we can’t see our own act of seeing. Which is true, I’m finding, even intellectually. Few things are more slippery than endeavoring to look at looking. You really feel yourself going around the houses as every look sends you off looking somewhere else. Although it’s true in the mirror too, of course, that we can’t focus both our eyes on both our eyes, “we can only imagine the way someone else is looking at us”—as if someone else possessed the power to complete us.

If it’s “someone else looking at us” who we fantasize has such power, then this someone else must also, presumably, possess the power to dismantle us by the same means. Face to face may well be a portal to the ethical relation, as in Levinas’s philosophy, but it can equally awaken the anxiety that a more hostile or even aggressive confrontation could be taking shape. Albeit how we feel about being looked at is also likely to have its own specific history; a history that probably relates to the looks we exchanged with the caregiver who first watched over us. While being watched might be viewed by some as an essentially benevolent, beholding act, therefore, it might, by the same token, also recall in us a sense of our underlying powerlessness and utter dependency. There are those for whom it is only ever persecutory to feel oneself the object of another’s gaze.

Leader makes a subtle distinction between the act of looking (e.g. at art) and the act of watching (e.g. TV). Specifically, he notes that when we’re watching rather than looking, we often correlate our watching with compulsive snacking. We might watch a movie in the cinema while stuffing our mouths with popcorn, for instance. And this, he intimates, could be a sign of what, when we’re watching rather than looking, we’re unconsciously looking for, e.g. a psychical return to the fantasy of the bountiful breast; to that time when we were being fed and looked at simultaneously in what seemed to promise a continuous source of care, pleasure and gratification. To want to watch rather than look thus takes us back to that moment when we had her exactly where we wanted her; or when we perceived in the other’s gaze the look that looked after us.

Such a memory, however, were we really to have it, would likely, for Freud, be considered a “screen memory,” as in the kind of memory we invoke to calm ourselves about who we are and what our histories contain in order to block the experiences we cannot bear to recall, and which we cannot visualize either. With screen memories, Freud explained, “the essential elements of an experience are represented in memory by the inessential elements of the same experience.” So if it’s infantile pleasures and gratifications we’re seeking when we’re watching our TV screens—during our “adult” time—then what we may simultaneously be seeking to evade with our watching could be that which gets more readily aroused by our looking. For it’s with looking that we can better sense how the object of our gaze has her own appetites, demands and desires; as if she’s not merely looking after us, but also looking at us. As such, it’s looking that we may wish to avoid, since “nothing prepares us for when the object looks back.” If we turn out to be the sort of incurable oglers who prefer to observe others unobserved, therefore, that may be because we’ve been driven by our desire to regain mastery over what first disturbed or dispossessed us in our earliest experiences of looking.

As a bid for mastery, however, ogling is a pretty limiting one. This is what Wallace intuited when he warned that watching people on TV as a way of resolving anxieties about being watched is liable to damage both artists and the art they’re capable of producing. For you view a screen, on this reading, precisely in order to be screened from view—and lest negative consequences ensue should your gaze be caught in flagrante. It’s not for nothing, for instance, that the most widely recycled internet meme, which gets enlisted to comment on just about anything that hooks the passing attention of a fickle world, is the one where a guy walking along a high street with his girlfriend has just turned his head, his face all wide-eyed and wowed, at the sight of another woman’s ass. Meanwhile, his girlfriend is left tugging on his sleeve, reminding him whose ass he’s supposed to be thinking about. Clearly she’s offended. And not only, one assumes, because he forgets her the moment another woman catches his eye, but equally because he doesn’t even bother to pretend otherwise—he doesn’t keep up the public performance of two people looking forward in the same direction. Spotting that other woman’s backside, it’s as if he’s decided he can’t not see that. Seeing him spot the other woman, it’s as if she’s discovered she can’t unsee that. But while what he saw will likely vanish from his mind just as quickly as it flashed into view, what she saw might never leave her. Such is the impact, very often, of glimpsing even a flicker of amorous betrayal. Although the irony, of course, is that a meme inviting us to identify, internet Puritans that we are, with the outraged girlfriend, reveals, by our use of it, who it is we perhaps really are—her faithless and easily distracted lover.

The critical question, however, is what that meme couple will do now that the different directions of their gaze have been witnessed. Are they off to make good on that other woman’s ass by seeing it as, for instance, the opportunity for an open- minded and exploratory conversation about what they each want from or feel frustrated about in their own relationship? Or by going home and, say, watching porn together. Though if even TV is becoming an increasingly solitary affair, then porn, I’d guess, is still mostly what people, in or out of couples, watch alone. Might that be what adult entertainment even implies? That the adult is someone looking to escape from the shared world of relationships and responsibilities—the world in which they feel, no less than children feel, that their every move is watched—so as to enter the zone of their special, sacred me-time.

Writing in the New York Times in the post #metoo heat of public and private arguments about sex, gender, power and abuse, the film critic Wesley Morris reflected on the watching habits of the on-demand populace. He was struck, he said, by “the two cultural planets these people seemed to be coming from…romantic comedy and porn.” Yet despite plenty of research into the warping effects of misogynistic pornography on the development of young boys and girls, there’s been little interest in exploring the impact of the romcom as “an entire genre about people coming together, as opposed to one that prefers your coming alone.” As a jumping-off point into adulthood, therefore, didn’t that suggest a more socially binding erotics of entertainment? Albeit the romcom’s real value could easily be missed by those tempted to treat the genre derisively as merely chick flicks, thus failing to acknowledge how romantic comedies have historically encouraged diverse audiences to watch them together, “everybody absorbing images of what it looked like to engage with each other.”

Not that watching things together always means engaging with each other. In lockdown, as Zadie Smith put it in a passage quoted before, married men, confronted with the infinite reality of wives they can no longer even exchange mentally “for a strange girl walking down the street,” are accosted by the awful nearness of having to see each other’s faces exclusively. “The only relief,” she continues, “is two faces facing forward, towards the screen.” Imagine lockdown, in other words, but without Netflix. Problem is, in my household, my husband has very strong views about Netflix. For all we may be a couple of TV addicts, I’m the real addict, which has led to some occasional strife between us. As a filmmaker, my husband has very strong views in general about what we watch, and where we watch it, and when, and how. His views are so strong on these matters that he even once wrote an opinion piece about them for the Guardian. “If you’re anything like me,” it began, “what shared emotional life you might still have is mostly achieved by mainlining shows on a streaming service with your loved one perched on the sofa nearby. When I say loved one, I mean co-watcher.” Since that loved one/co-watcher is me, I can vouch for the fact that he’s not knocking the streaming platforms—because it’s true that we depend on them, much as all internetted beings depend on such shows to, in his words, “dramatize the bits of our relationships we’re too exhausted to undergo the drama of ourselves.” But when he then comes out against bingeing such series the way cinemagoers binge popcorn, I can vouch for that too. For my husband—and this has been a point of contention between us—wants us not only to watch things together, he also wants us to look at things together. And he wants this, he sometimes tells me, for the sake of our marriage. Although to save our marriage by such a method, he acknowledges, we must also risk it. Contrasting episodic TV, whose pleasure is “precisely because it confirms our sense of ourselves,” to the languishing art of cinema, aka “the part of enjoyment that’s closer to pain,” as a general indicator, he explains, the latter “is more likely to lead to you and your partner sleeping in separate rooms.” Which, naturally, I can also vouch for.

Although I’m generally conscious of the splitting of our collective vision during the screening itself, normally we only row once it’s over. This is seldom an issue when we’re making our way through a box set. Then I don’t bother much to look at my spouse because I don’t doubt what he ’s thinking. It’s when we watch art films that I’m less sure. I notice myself stealing glances in his direction. Why do those glances feel stolen? Why does the dignified practice of watching art cinema draw my attention to what’s furtive, transgressive, even guilty in the art of looking? Is it because, as Leader intimates, there ’s “a dimension of theft always present in art?” The object accorded the status of “artwork” appears as if it’s been highjacked from common sense reality and resituated—”the key is that it finds itself in a new place”—such that we not only see the object differently, but recognize too how its removal from where we normally picture it could precipitate the tumbling of all the norms by which we live.

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Excerpted from On Marriage by Devorah Baum, to be published October 24, 2023 by Yale University Press. Copyright © 2023. All rights reserved.

This conversation took place at the 2nd annual Refocus Film Festival, a four-day celebration of the art of adaptation hosted by Iowa City’s nonprofit cinema, FilmScene.

Jane Keranen: Kristen, this was one that’s been on my mind for some time, since I first read the story. We were talking a little bit last night about how it came out when I was a freshman in college, and for freshmen girls in college, there was kind of a feral obsession to the story. I was curious about the genesis of the narrative, what you were trying to achieve, what feeling you were trying to convey, and whether you think the audience that received the story was the one you were writing to. Could you have even foreseen the alchemy of circumstances that led to this feral, cultish obsession with the story?

Kristen Roupenian: I will start with the easiest question first. No, I could not have foreseen anything about the reception of that story or the way it made its way into the world. Thank you. I think “a feral cultist obsession” is the best description. Now it’s all I ever want—I never want to write anything that isn’t received that way.

I was 35, I think, when I wrote the story. So I was older; I was not myself in college. But I was thinking a lot about what it was like for me to be 19, the way Margot is in the story. In my experience, as you age, you suddenly start looking back at your younger self as if you were a different person and you see like, oh, I was young. When I was 19, I thought I was just an adult. I was as old as I had ever been. I didn’t think I was going to get any older. I was like, I’m done. I’m cooked. And then when I got to be 35, suddenly all of these experiences I had had started coming back to me and looked much different. I was the age of Robert when I wrote the story. It took me to get to that age before I realized how young I was at that time, if that makes sense.

I wouldn’t say I wrote it with any particular outcome in mind, or even what I was trying to say. I always think, I said what I said, I don’t know what it was trying to say, but it all came out like that. But I do feel like that feeling of dread and ugh—that feeling was the thing I was trying to bottle, and I feel really grateful—and also sorry—that I managed to make a lot of other people feel that way. I feel very connected to the audience that responded with that kind of visceral intensity because that is where I wrote the story from.

Jane Keranen: Susanna, obviously you’ve cultivated here this beautiful, rich, layered cinematic landscape, and I was curious how you approached turning the short story into the film. Because so much of the short story is interiority, and we don’t necessarily see anything besides what’s going on in Margot’s head. You do implement that here through a lot of really excellent editing. And I was curious, what was it about the story that struck you as cinematic? What was the genesis of your realizing that this could be a film?

Susanna Fogel: I should start by saying that I didn’t write the adaptation, so I have to credit Michelle Ashford with that piece of it. Obviously I read the story when it came out, I loved it, I engaged in all of the debates that other people were having around it. And just living in Los Angeles, I assumed someone would try to make it into a film. You just never assume that’s going to go well, ironically. Sometimes it does, as the movies at this festival show.

But this one, I wasn’t sure, because short of Kristen adapting it, I couldn’t think of a person who would be able to capture what was so incendiary about it and universal about it. I could picture somebody making it feel very small, and maybe just taking [Kristen’s] best language and putting it into a really invasive voiceover. I wasn’t sure how they were going to do it in a way that didn’t keep it feeling really small and internal, and that the reach the story had wouldn’t have that as a movie. Because if it was a small internal story about a woman, then men wouldn’t see it. The fact that the story was in The New Yorker I think thrust it in front of people who would maybe have dismissed the content in another medium, but because it was there, they had to reckon with it. And knowing how movies are, and how hard it is to get people to see movies about the female experience, or how niche those movies are considered, I just didn’t know how it would be able to have the breadth. I wasn’t sure the way forward really. I knew someone would try, but I wasn’t sure how.

But when I read Michelle’s script, she had taken the psychology and externalized it. Her idea was, I’m going to immerse the audience in this subjective experience that Margot’s having. They’re going to have invasive thoughts about getting strangled, they’re going to have to feel the fear that Margot feels, and those little cortisol fight or flight moments in Margot’s life that Kristen described so well are going to be felt by the audience. Michelle had that idea to make the audience, along with Margot, constantly wonder what genre of movie they’re in.

Which then, talking to Kristen more in these Q&As, I realized was consistent with what [she] also wanted to do. Or that feeling that being a young woman entails, which is like, what genre is my life? It’s a lot of them. I can be really scared one minute and actually fearing for my life, and then the next minute I can be being funny and sarcastic and flip. Michelle really wanted to create a multi-genre movie that is confusing and disjointed in how much it’s doing because that’s what the life of this young woman was. So that was the way we tried to approach it.

Jane Keranen: I am really fascinated by what you mentioned about how people wouldn’t necessarily be interested in seeing a movie that was just about a young woman’s experience. I do notice that something that is in the movie that isn’t necessarily in the story is a lot of Robert’s complexities, a lot of his interiority. He is a frightening man, but he is also more than that. He has his own complexities. I was curious about how you approached adding these complexities to both of the characters, making them both multidimensional. I know you mentioned in your Sundance Q&A how you wanted to explore grayer areas in who a character is and the situations in which they’re placed.

Susanna Fogel: We talk about this a lot because in a short story, you are taking Margot’s and Kristen’s word for it. The observations she’s making that are leading you to picture something are fully in the control of the narrator. But when it comes to creating a visual, people are going to have to deal with a person they’re looking at. Everyone’s looking at the same person. And so that actor has to have a specific performance that’s going to make people think one way or another about him and his motivations. So just reckoning with a physical actor who’s standing there asking, why did I say that? Why did I do that? You have to construct dimension because you have to at least answer the question for him, to be able to inhabit the role.

And then in doing so, you end up talking about the interior life of this character, and psychoanalyzing dimensions of a character that maybe you didn’t want to have to delve that deeply into their psyche. And then you have to figure out, for that actor, what’s the context that led him to be this way. Without excusing the behavior, where did it come from, and how is he a product of his world? Even though he’s also complicit, too. All those conversations come up when there’s a man standing there saying, I have to justify being here and doing this. Even if they’re willing to be unlikable, which Nick [Braun] obviously was.

Jane Keranen: The last thing I was most curious about were the other embellishments in the adaptation that were not in the story. The dog, for example, in addition to Robert’s dimension. The well-meaning best friend who’s also Margot’s extreme opposite in a lot of ways. And of course, the ending.

Kristen, I’m not sure how much you were involved in the adaptation or if you had any say in what was changed in the story. And then, Susanna, I’m curious about what you wanted to achieve in the film and how you approach the adaptation process.

Kristen Roupenian: So the way the process worked was when they decided that they were going to make a film, basically the producers said, We’re going to do this. We’ll come back to you in a bit. And they went out and they hired Michelle Ashford, the screenwriter. She wrote a screenplay. I read it. And so, I was kept in the loop, but I wasn’t really a part of it. And I think that was necessary. I felt like I needed to take a step back. I didn’t have any kind of distance on the story at that point. It had been such a huge part of my life, at that point for more than a year. So, I had a lot of distance as the main parts were coming together.

And then when Susanna came on, I feel like that’s when I started seeing the texture, and we had a lot of text conversations and discussions about motivation. But it always felt like I was getting to watch something grow. I never really felt like I was adapting my story because I couldn’t have done it. It was a story in my head; I didn’t know how it would be a film. So, I got to watch that and see it evolve.

“I think any adaptation of any kind of interest is one that kind of says to the source material, We appreciate you, we respect you, now goodbye.”

And to me, still, I think the best way to read the story and watch the movie is to understand them as two very separate things. It’s funny you mention the dog. In the story, we don’t know if Robert has cats or not. That’s one of the things that Margot doesn’t get to know. In the movie, he has cats. And so you could watch the movie and be like, Oh, I read the story and now I know Robert has cats. But no, that’s not true. That’s not canon. You don’t know in the story if he has cats. The movie gets to make a lot of different choices—and has to, to be full and rich. I think that’s cool. I think any adaptation of any kind of interest is one that kind of says to the source material, We appreciate you, we respect you, now goodbye. We’re going to go do our other thing. That was my relationship to it. And I feel lucky that I got to be a part of it, and it came out so cool.

Susanna Fogel: By the time I came on to the project, Michelle had constructed a script that included that third act, so I understood what she was going for, and then it was a matter of working within that to make sure it felt like it was still going to hit the moments of resonance of Kristen’s story, and how it was doing that. So, in order to expand it into a movie that felt like a multi-genre thing, and like it was servicing the conventions of thriller films and all of that, it went from very personal story to big movie with devices that were inspired by the themes, but very allegorical and big, big, big. Fusing the two was what my job was. It was to kind of back into the relatability of the story and put that into what had become a bigger exoskeleton. That was a big part of it.

And the other thing we wanted to do is, in between Kristen’s story coming out and the movie getting made, there were a lot of movies that joined the canon of MeToo and post-MeToo. There were movies about revenge stories, about women and reckonings, and it felt like we had a lot of those movies. This wasn’t going to be one of the first movies of that type if that’s what we chose to do with it. But what it felt like we wanted more of was to question the gray areas, especially around things like consent, because the simplifying of that concept, or the extremeness with which it’s shown or was shown, oversimplifies a very complicated issue. I think this movie had an opportunity to show how much more complicated and messy those questions can be. We wanted to see situations that are a little more like life in that way, where it’s messy and complicated, and ideas of culpability and agency are really complicated, too.

Join Lit Hub at Film Forum on November 10th at 7 p.m., where we’ll be co-presenting a screening of the new film Orlando, My Political Biography, an incisive contemporization of Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel from philosopher and trans activist Paul B. Preciado. Get up to two discounted $13 tickets (regular $17) to all showings by entering promo code LITHUB at checkout. 

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