Today, I’d like to talk about adaptations, specifically about adaptations of very difficult source material. I can’t be the only one who’s heard certain books described as “unadaptable”, whether due to their content, their stylistic experimentalism, or their scope, so I;m going to be looking at two of my favourite cinematic adaptations - one of a play, Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, and the other of Michel Faber’s novel Under the Skin.
Titus is Julie Taymor's adaptation of Titus Andronicus, which is probably Shakespeare's least liked and most misunderstood play. TS Eliot called it "the worst play ever written", and when I studied it in university we had to take seriously the idea that it was supposed to be a parody. It's the violence, I think, that turns most people off – Shakespeare's plays are full of violence, of course, but it's never so intense as it is in Titus Andronicus. The protagonist's daughter is raped, and the rapists cut off her hands and cut out her tongue so she can't tell anyone what happened; Andronicus then kills the two rapists and feeds them to their mother, whose other son he's already had killed as a sacrifice. It's a fucked-up play. But it's also a bloody good one, no pun intended. As anyone who's ever seen her version of The Tempest knows, Julie Taymor is the director when it comes to putting Shakespeare on screen, and on top of her directing you've got a cast including Jessica Lange, Anthony Hopkins and Alan Cummings (who I normally can't stand but he's actually really good in this, probably because his character is supposed to be irritating).
Titus Andronicus, essentially, is a victim of history – that's the play, not the character. If someone made a film today that had basically the same storyline as Titus Andronicus, it'd be seen as what is is – a really, really brutal film about revenge. But because Shakespeare wrote it five hundred years ago, you've had snobby fuckers like Eliot (I'm sorry, he was one of the greatest poets who ever lived, but he was a snob) who hated it because they wanted their Shakespeare to be highbrow and very genteel and academic – the kind of plays you could take your mother to see. So when they saw a play full of rape and mutilation and cannibalism, they reacted out of shock, because that wasn't what they were expecting to see.
Anthony Hopkins plays Titus Andronicus, a Roman general who captures Tamara, the queen of the Goths, along with her family. He sacrifices one of her sons, as apparently was traditional then, and as you can imagine Tamara, played by Jessica Lange, is not too pleased about that. She and her sons plot their revenge, and after they have enacted their plans Titus takes his revenge on them for their revenge. It’s a very revenge-y play.
Adapting Shakespeare for the screen is never an easy task, and those who succeed often do so by taking the least imaginative approach possible. The plays were written in the sixteenth century, so many directors set their films in the sixteenth century. They have characters dressed in period-appropriate costumes, stick rigidly to the script, and basically stage everything as though it were a contemporary play set in the past. There’s nothing wrong with that approach, of course, and plenty of excellent films have been made that way, but the problem is that in trying to remain faithful to the letter of Shakespeare’s writing, directors are unfaithful to the spirit of Shakespeare as a playwright.
Shakespeare wasn’t a “literary writer”, writing to please the minds of upper-class intellectuals; his plays weren’t written to provide the material for your PhD thesis. He was a popular playwright, working to entertain the masses at a time when the idea of an English canon was unheard of. In Elizabethan England, the classics were the works of the classical dramatists, and were studied in Latin or Greek; works in English were considered of a lower stature by nature of being written in the language of the great unwashed, and even among English writers, Shakespeare was looked down upon. He was a young punk, the upstart crow who filled even his tragedies with knob gags so that the people in the stalls would be kept entertained.
Moreover, the idea of “realistic” staging is a relatively recent invention. Shakespeare’s plays would have been performed on a wooden platform, with pretty basic props and sound effects, and playwrights didn’t bother trying to make the audience feel like they were somewhere other than where they were. They knew they weren’t in Ancient Rome or the realm of the fairies or wherever the play was set - they were in a theatre, watching a play, and you weren’t going to convince them otherwise. Hence, staging and costumes were largely decided on the basis of what looked right for the atmosphere of the play, rather than what a Roman general would have worn. Drawings from the time when Shakespeare’s plays were performed show costumes that ignore any notion of historical realism - centurions onstage next to Elizabethan nobleman,and so on.
Julie Taymor’s Titus stages the play as Shakespeare probably would, were he alive today. She gives us a world that feels the way the last days of Rome probably felt to those who lived through them. Wild, out of control, alternately decadent and savage; a world that mixes fascist dystopia with Mad Max costumes, ancient conflicts with pieces of modern technology. It is a beautiful, frightening world, fit for the characters that inhabit it.
For entirely different reasons, Michel Faber’s 2000 novel Under the Skin was considered by some to be unadaptable, and there’s certainly a lot in there that would translate poorly to the screen. The novel follows Isserly, an alien who lures men back to her isolated farmhouse so that they can be, in essence, factory farmed. She drugs them and takes them to an underground complex where they are pumped full of hormones and fodder until they weigh half a ton, at which point they’re butchered and the meat sent back to Isserly’s home planet.
Johnathon Glaser’s film Under the Skin, however, is very different. The basic premise stays the same - a woman who is really an alien lures men back to an isolated cottage and kills them - but Glaser throws away everything else about the novel. In Faber’s book, everything is very physical, very real; Isserly is gangly and awkward because she is an alien of very different anatomy who has been surgically altered to look like a human. The bodies of the aliens and of their human livestock are described in detail, and it feels as though Faber is really trying to build a believable world. We see the society of the world that Isserly comes from, and it feels like it could actually exist.
In the film, Glaser gives us virtually nothing. The Isserly character - played by Scarlett Johansson in a career best performance - is not even named. Far from looking like a surgically-mutilated alien, she looks like, well, Scarlett Johansson. The process that the men go through upon arriving at the farmhouse is far more abstract and unexplained - a black goo envelops them, and then...something happens. It’s never quite clear what, or why, but we get some gorgeous abstract sequences that I presume are depictions of the men being processed. Glaser explains nothing, and the film - by the nature of the medium, but also because of the decisions made by Glaser and co-writer Walter Campbell - does not let us into Isserly’s head the way that the book does, so we don't even get much character development to distract us from the worldbuilding we aren’t getting. Glaser shows us what’s happening, and lets the audience interpret it for themselves - production of emotion obtained by resistance to emotion.
From all this, you;d expect the film adaptation of Under the Skin to be a failure. After all, it ignores everything that works about the novel, right? But you’d be wrong. What Glaser does is he strips away everything he can, but leaves the heart of the novel untouched. At its core, Under the Skin is a story about loneliness. Isserly is isolated from both her own kind and the humans that she preys on, and that kind of isolation is a truly frightening prospect for anyone. We all - humans and ridiculously hot aliens alike - need some kind of contact with someone, we need to be understood, to have our existence confirmed by the acknowledgement of another person. By removing any hunt of where Isserly came from, or what she’s here to do, Glaser and Campbell make her even more alone, and emphasise her alienness - which in turn emphasises how unconnected she is to the humans she interacts with. That loneliness is the source of the horror, in both the book and the film.
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