Free Odd Jobs by John Updike

all agree, little resemblance to my text—which exists, however, in hardcover and paperback editions and even in a large-print edition for the dimsighted. That is one of the charms of the authorial business—the text is always there, for the ideal reader to stumble upon, to enter, to reanimate. The text is almost infinitely patient, snugly gathering its dust on the shelf. Until the continental drift of language turns its English as obscure as Chaucer’s, the text remains readily recoverable and potentially as alive as on the day it was scribbled by one’s own hand. Not so film: its chemicals fester in the can, it grows brittle and brown, its Technicolor bleaches, it needs a projector and a screen, it is scratched and pocked and truncated by the wear and tear of its previous projections. So let’s not begrudge it its moment in the sun—the moment when, in the darkened theatre, the movie bursts upon us as if it
were
the sun.
    Let’s hear it for filmmakers. They bring their visions to market through a welter of props and egos, actors and bankers that a mere wordmonger would be overwhelmed by. Considering the vast number of fingers in the pot, and the amount of financial concern that haunts the sound stage, it’sa wonder any motion picture comes out halfway coherent. Lack of coherence—the inner coherence works of art should have, the ultimate simplicity of one voice speaking—is surely a failing especially of today’s films, in the absence of studio control and of the adult, bourgeois audience that filled the movie palaces in the palmy Depression days. Now only adolescents have strong and recurrent reason to get out of the house with its lulling television sets, and films are inexorably juvenile. Maybe they always were, and I was too juvenile to notice. In the backward glance there is a dignity—a rather religious stateliness and intensity—to the Gary Cooper–Rita Hayworth–Fred Astaire black-and-white movies that seems oddly lost in videotape rerun. Those barking men, those vaudeville gags, those plainly fake backdrops—weren’t we pained by them the first time around? Still, there was not that jittery prurience, that messy something-for-everybody grabbiness which reaches out now from the curtainless screens of the shopping-mall complexes, where, as I write,
Creepshow II
is competing with
Meatballs III
.
    Even a very lame movie tends to crush a book. When I try to think of
The Great Gatsby
, I get Robert Redford in a white suit, handsomely sweating in a pre-air-conditioning room at the Plaza, and Mia Farrow in a floppy pastel hat, or Alan Ladd floating dead in an endless swimming pool, before I recover, via Fitzgerald’s delicate phrasing, Daisy’s little blue light or the hair in the gangster Wolfsheim’s nostrils.
Ulysses
, which one might have thought impervious to non-verbal invasion, is blighted for me by the pious film adaptation and its disconcertingly specific and youthful Bloom. Who can now read
For Whom the Bell Tolls
and not visualize its fellow-travelling hero as an avatar of Sergeant York, or its Spanish virgin as a Swedish beauty? Once I had a dream in which I was sitting high in the balcony of a vast movie theatre watching the film adaptation of
Remembrance of Things Past;
it consisted of, on a wide screen, Proust’s pale fastidious face, his eyelids closed as if in sleep. I prefer my version to the Harold Pinter script for Joseph Losey, which was written and published but never produced.
    Successful movies tend to take off from the book, rather than take it too seriously.
One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest
, for example, or the impudent version, in which Faulkner had a hand, of
To Have and Have Not
. When the author gets too involved, and out of proprietary anxiety or love of the cinematic art strives to assert too much control, the result may be merely an unshot script and a batch of threatened lawsuits. What ever happened to the film adaptations of
Fear of Flying
and
The Confessionsof Nat