Unsettling Futures - Dune, Cowboy Bebop, and adaptation
Do we need adaptations at all?
Sound and Fury…
My favourite adaptation is five minutes of a play within a TV show.
Slings & Arrows was a brief Canadian comedy-drama about a Shakespeare festival. Every season focused on the production of a different play, with the second season tackling Macbeth. Geoffrey Tenant, the not-quite-mentally-stable artistic director (Paul Gross) was visited throughout season one by the ghost of his mentor, Oliver Welles (Stephen Ouimette) – but Oliver vanished after Hamlet concluded the previous season. Haunted or not, Geoffrey is more or less perpetually on the verge of a nervous breakdown, he's under tremendous pressure to pull off a second big production, he's wracked with doubt, but it seems safe to go see the local elementary school's production of Macbeth, right? It's just kids, doing the plot in language suitable for fourth graders!
But it's clearly getting to Geoffrey. He's getting a wyrd stare from an elderly patron of the festival two rows ahead of him, and his ghost-buddy decides to pop up on stage during the Banquo's ghost scene (visible only to Geoffrey, of course). The enthusiastic screams of the children playing murder victims (and it's Macbeth, there's a LOT of murder victims) are particularly bothering him. He starts to see real/stage blood when they're fake-stabbing one another with their cardboard daggers.
And then they get to Macbeth's brief soliloquy in Act 5. This is the original:
She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
This is the version in the children's play:
Now they tell me my wife is dead. I don't understand life. It just keeps going on and on with no purpose. I'm so sad.
Between the nihilistic language, stripped of its Elizabethan finery, and a little prompting from Oliver's ghost, Geoffrey loses it in a public outburst. As he is wont to do.
It's one of my favourite uses of adaptation, because both within the reality of Slings & Arrows and within the plot of the episode, it serves a useful purpose. On the one hand, it's about introducing Shakespeare to children who couldn't possibly absorb the 400-year-old language. On the other, it's about stripping bare the themes of the play, and digging into what bothers Geoffrey about it – the themes of evil, nihilism, the despair that he sees at its core, which he's been trying to avoid grappling with, holding them at arms length and pretending the play is a merely technical exercise.
In other news, I saw Denis Villeneuve's Dune last week, my first foray to a real, actual movie theatre since the Plague Years began. I loved it.
I also watched the first episode of Netflix's Cowboy Bebop adaptation, and my reaction was, well…
It just keeps going on and on with no purpose. I'm so sad.
We live in the age of adaptations, reboots, reimaginings, and sequels. In 2019, the out of the top 10 box office draws, not a single one was a wholly original property. There were two Disney live-action remakes, three Marvel movies and one DC adaptation/prequel, two Disney animated sequels, a Star Wars installment, and IT Part 2, a remake of an adaptation. In the top 20, there were only two original movies – Us and Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood.
So if this is the age of adaptations, what makes a good one?
As far as I can tell, what most people (including me) are looking for in an adaptation to screen and TV is some combination of 1) fidelity to the source material, 2) understanding of the core concept of the source material, and 3) actual quality. Opinion on which is more important may vary, not only from person to person, but from project to project.
Cowboy Bebop started drawing fire even before its first episode dropped because it was making baffling choices about fidelity, and people were wary that it didn't understand the source material at all. The first episode hasn't exactly convinced me to change my mind.
Why did the creators choose to do a cosplay-level copy of Spike's suit, so he looks like a human wearing a cartoon version of a suit instead of a realistic outfit? Why the exact recreation of the opening credits? Why make the shows around 45 minutes long instead of a zippy 25 minutes? Why replace the elliptical, quasi-philosophical dialogue of the original with awkward cop show clichés and sweary bickering? Why, on a show that clearly cost a lot to make, do so many things – Jet's cybernetic arm, the cramped sets, the many wigs and false moustaches – look so cheap?
You might think my last complaint is about the odious yellow/brown filter over everything but actually… why land the ship the opposite direction?
Seriously? Why? The creators should have an answer. Do they?
When you're making an adaptation, you can do one of two things – you can do a recreation, a translation as faithful as possible to the original text.
Or you can use the original as a jumping off point.
Just consider the various Dunes. The TV miniseries and Denis Villeneuve's versions both tried to be faithful recreations, within the limitations of their budgets and mediums. Lynch's version more or less attempted to be a faithful adaptation, but failed because it was crammed into too short a time span.
Jodorowsky's Dune, while never made, would have been a much looser adaptation, more of a jumping-off. (God, I wish we'd got to see it. It would have been glorious, or it would have been a glorious train wreck, but it wouldn't have been boring.)
Jodorowsky's approach isn't wrong. Starship Troopers faithfully took the plot and characters of Heinlein's novel and gleefully twisted the tone 180 degrees in the name of satire. Blade Runner is not exactly Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, but it touches on themes Dick wrote about repeatedly while creating its own dense world. Villeneuve's Arrival rebuilt Ted Chiang's The Story of Your Life, with some significant alterations, but it very much works on its own merits.
It's well outside of science fiction, but I recently watched the movie version of The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt's 800-plus page novel. The movie is pretty faithful to the book – which is a terrible mistake. It's just a checklist of plot points. A looser adaptation would have done the source material better service.
The question with all adaptations is, why?
Start with this assumption: nothing has to be adapted.
Would the world have gone on spinning without a movie adaptation of Lord of the Rings, without three adaptations (so far) of Dune?
Yeah. Of course. The books would have kept on being themselves, complete and available, always ready to welcome more readers. The same with Sandman and The Avengers and The Goldfinch and IT and Hyperion and The Expanse and A Song of Ice and Fire and on and on…
But people want them. They want more of their favourite thing, they want to see it realized, in some form. And of course we keep getting them because studios like a sure thing and blah blah blah name recognition valuable IP please kill me.
There are a lot of ways to make an adaptation, but I keep coming back to the idea that you either have to love the original, or you have something you want to say that is best served by using that story. In either case, you first have to understand what made the original work, what made people love it in the first place.
With Dune, you can tell Villeneuve loved the novel, and, so far, that he understood many of its themes.
With Cowboy Bebop… I don't know. Almost certainly the live action creative team loved it. But I don't know if they understood it, and I strongly suspect they didn't have anything new they wanted to say with it. (If you would like to suggest that I keep watching until it "gets good," I am sorry but I'm going to disappoint you.)
Last week, Vice posted a piece titled Netflix's Cowboy Bebop Isn't Supposed to be Good, a limp defense of the live action version. I disagree with basically every part of it.
I'm not angry that the adaptation fails to be true to the original, I'm not even that angry that it's bad. I'm angry because it was pointless. Because it added very little to the world. It's just… there. It fails to justify it's existence in any way, to the point that most of the people defending it are saying "Well, it's just some dumb fun, yeah?"
Which just means that all the money and talent that went into the adaptation could have gone to something original. A pastiche, even – a story of interplanetary bounty hunters, perpetually broke, torn between the easy score and their own consciences. "Of course, Cowboy Bebop was a big inspiration," the creators could have said. But it would have given them room to breathe, and to maybe make something with its own identity.
Maybe something someone would even love so much, they might want to adapt it someday.
Obligatory Self Promotion Corner
Hey, I sold a short story! Yay me!
Payday Weather will be appearing in a future edition of the Escape Pod science fiction podcast! It'll be my fourth sale to one of the Escape Artists publications, after The Remora, The Names of the Sky, and After Midnight at the ZapStop.
Payday Weather is about folks scraping together a few bucks by working for a firefighting service for the wealthy. (Uber, but for risking your life fighting urban interface fires!) No idea when it will be out yet! Next year, I assume!
Also, speaking of adaptations, my 2016 story Patience Lake is being adapted into an audio drama podcast, Broken Road. You can subscribe on your favourite pod-thingy.