Blood Jump #11: Book Was Better*
In which we visit the source material for three of the year's best movies.
I’m going to begin this issue of Blood Jump by shooting myself in the foot: I generally find grading movies against their source material to be an exhausting practice. The idea that the book is always better just isn’t true—Charlie Kaufman proved that, though not with the one you’re probably thinking of—and the notion that it’s somehow nobler to read a book than to watch a movie strikes me as pseudointellectual onanism. Especially if that book was written by Chuck Palahniuk. At the risk of sounding like a let people enjoy things guy, the most effective barometer for the right medium for your consumption is personal preference.
But adaptation is an art, and this was a banner year for it: from historical nonfiction (Oppenheimer, Killers of the Flower Moon) to middling NYT-bestseller fodder (Eileen, Foe) to YA (Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret.). As much as I roll mine eyes at anyone who beats their librarial chest with chants of the book was better, it’s a real joy to be able to return to a compelling story through the vantage of a different voice and medium, even if that return carries the potential to break your heart.
So today, we’re poring through the source material for three of the year’s best movies. Poor Things. The Zone of Interest. Elvis and Me. Let’s begin.
Please note: Blood Jump is typically a spoiler-free affair, but the nature of this issue has made them tough to avoid. Proceed with caution.
Husband of Frankenstein
Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things feels like a decidedly 2023 text. Emma Stone’s Bella Baxter, a gothic surgical fusion of the brains of a dead young woman and her unborn child, undergoes what a cynical read might interpret as a speed run through pre-Elon Twitter politics. She begins an insatiably horny, literal baby-brained woman, but quickly discovers wealth disparity, the patriarchy, xenophobic politics, and a handful of other Bernie-approved nemeses before finding her calling as a globe-trotting, socialist doctor. It is the stuff of nightmares for conservative fathers with daughters at Big-10 schools, a host of ideals so of the moment that the movie has inspired uncharacteristically reactionary takes from unlikely detractors. That Poor Things draws its material from a Scottish novel more than thirty years old is surprising, that the book is more explicit in its left-wing pedagogy even more so.
I’m not sure we’ve landed on solid footing for what to call art in the current age; I’ve seen metamodernism thrown around, which makes my throat itch. But postmodernism died somewhere between David Foster Wallace’s suicide and the birth of TikTok, and postmodern form might be the biggest signifier of the age of yore in Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things. The 1992 novel is framed as a series of book excerpts, letters, diary entries, drawings, and historical notes that both present and complicate what we see in Lanthimos’s adaptation. Its central narrative, what we see in the movie, lives in the drafts of Archibald McCandless, the patient cuckold who waits for Bella to return as his bride from her international fuckathon with lawyerly cad Duncan Wedderburn. It’s supplemented with letters and diary entries from Duncan and Bella, the former of whom loses his mind as the latter realizes her selfhood.
Emma Stone’s turn as Bella has dominated Poor Things’s press cycle, and for good reason. A lot is asked of her—over two-and-a-half hours, she must evolve from protoverbal toddler to hypersexed misanthrope to messianic physician, all in various degrees of Lars Von Trierian–compromise—and she nails it with aplomb, a pinnacle performance in an accomplished career. Without the shadow cast by Stone’s athleticism, though, the integrity of Bella Baxter’s character gets to shine. She is boisterous, obscene, and deeply funny; her rapid growth sees with it the flowering of an empathy that feels sweet but never saccharine. It’s tempting to consider Bella’s political awakening easy; Alasdair Gray was a renowned socialist and Scottish nationalist himself, and constructing a tabula rasa who happens upon your own views with snow-white eyes does not smack of challenge. But idealism’s biggest critic is the cynic, and Bella’s all-for-all banner cry is hard-won through her witness of injustice. She sees people go hungry on the beaches from her cruise ship, johns abuse sex workers in a brothel. Freed from the weariness of election cycles and centrist stagnation, why shouldn’t Bella’s fight be for the good of the people?
Alasdair Gray’s writing is idiosyncratic, brash, and perverse, which is to say, a natural fit for Yorgos Lanthimos. The director’s adaptation is faithful in spirit and content, if not updated toward a more contemporary style. But it omits a pivotal (and definitively PoMo) postscript: Gray’s novel ends with a letter from Bella, years after McCandless’s death, that refutes the text as her late husband’s failed fiction. It is a move ostensibly made to shake the Frankensteinian nature of her birth from the altruism of her later career; it “positively stinks of all that was morbid in that most morbid of centuries,” she writes of the novel. But her letter also speaks to the death of idealism that we face as we age, the turn so many of us make toward conservatism once cynicism pollutes our values. Alasdair Gray did not publish his first novel until he was 46; perhaps Bella’s refute of her own history reflected his disappointment with his own peers, or maybe it is simply a playful complication of a gorgeous, hilarious work. But whether Bella’s life is the fiction of her dying husband or a true gothic coming of age, it is marvelous to watch her work as if she lived in the early days of a better world.
Crisis Zone
I’m not sure whether Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, which strays deliberately from the Martin Amis novel of the same name, was intended as a provocation. I wrote in an earlier issue that Glazer playfully (if darkly) described his film as “a Nazi-house Big Brother.” Zone takes a detached naturalist’s approach to the life of an SS commandant and his family in a house on the border of Auschwitz; Glazer positions cameras throughout the home as silent observers to the Höss family’s routines and meals and arguments while gunshots fire and the sky fills with ash outside. That degree of objectivity can read as shortsighted around such morally weighted material, and Zone’s eventual bend toward retribution is subdued enough to frustrate viewers already skeptical of its methodology (though considered enough to reward those with the patience to stick with it). But if Glazer’s film walks precariously in its exercise in quotidian Nazidom, Amis’s original text puts its hand on the stove.
The 2014 novel is shaped by accounts from Angelus Thomsen, a Nazi officer, Paul Doll, a commandant, and Szmul Zacharias, a Polish prisoner forced to operate a gas chamber. They trade narrations in cycles of three, a nauseous waltz of varied implication as romances, hope, and Germany’s power rise and crumble. Szmul and Doll take comfortable places in opposing moral poles. Doll practices an acrylic, broad-stroked evil, a Daffy Duck of a Nazi prone to pratfalls and kitsch, and Szmul’s only discernible sin his is reluctance to die. But Thomsen ushers in Zone’s greatest challenges. He doesn’t win any points with his reluctance to join the Nazi party (the blood on his hands is indifferent), nor does he offer any sense of altruism that doesn’t suit his immediate needs (getting laid, avoiding bureaucratic doldrums). But he is a dynamic and thoroughly rendered human to a degree that steal’s one sympathies without consent. We watch Thomsen as he sacrifices ideals, internalizes failures, falls in love. It is uncomfortable to share a room with a Nazi in the film, it is sickening to be moved by a Nazi’s poetry in the book.
Amis, who died in May this year, was a skillful writer and knew better than to structure his novel around flimsy “what would you do in those times?” hypotheticals. Daydreaming about your response to atrocities committed before your lifetime is an easy way to excuse yourself from the problems of the world in which you live, a neoliberal morality layup without consequence or application. In a world in which genocide is still practiced—worse, vehemently excused and defended—on a global scale, it is more valuable to trace the boundaries of your empathy for the aggressors, to watch its capacity to bleed into their politics.
In an uncommon move for similar adaptations, Jonathan Glazer centers his film closer to history than Amis’s text. Both feature loose constructions of Rudolf Höss, the longest serving SS commandant at Auschwitz and an instrumental player in the use of a lethal pesticide in Nazi gas chambers. Where the author constructs a stand-in by way of Doll’s fourth stooge, Glazer’s naturalism demands a more direct tether to that which happened, and he returns to Höss as his lead. Amis’s remove buys a bit of authorial freedom, but it’s a choice that ultimately dilutes some of the venom of Zone’s satire. Rendering a real-life monster as a cartoon character can undercut his legacy, but ramping up the antics of a fictional composite threatens excess. Still, The Zone of Interest is an effective and uncomfortable novel, provocative not in its predilection to shock but in its insistence of a holistic definition of humanity.
Queen for a Day
Of all Priscilla’s needle drops—and this being a Sofia Coppola movie, there are many—the most poignant might be Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You.” It plays in the film’s final moments, as a newly divorced Priscilla Presley drives out of Graceland’s music gates one last time. The song is successful both in its text and subtext: “I Will Always Love You” is one of the great American songs and speaks so precisely to the sadness and longing that remain after a relationship ends. But its inclusion in Priscilla is pointed. Dolly Parton denied Elvis the rights to record her song when he demanded too great a share of the publishing rights, and Priscilla is too critical of The King’s legacy for Elvis’s estate to have granted permission to use his music. The resulting choice is poetic, if not barbed—a move that a read of Elvis and Me suggests Priscilla may not have made herself.
Priscilla is the most faithful adaptation of the three in this issue, with only a few small deviations from its source material. Its biggest remove from Priscilla Presley’s book may be objectivity. “I hoped to give a better perception of what [Elvis] was as a man,” she writes in the epilogue. “Other books have painted a picture rather less than flattering, harboring on weaknesses, eccentricities, violent temper tantrums … I wanted to write about love and precious, wonderful moments and ones filled with grief and disappointments.” Elvis and Me is not a revisionist text, and Priscilla doesn’t deign to hide the pain she endured throughout their relationship. But her prose is smooth and suffuse with the same sad reverence as in Parton’s ballad, and it’s easy to forget just how young she was when she met Elvis (14 to Presley’s 24).
The greatest strength of Coppola’s movie is her ability to capture what it looks like when a kid is in over their head. Cailee Spaeny plays Priscilla over the course of her 13-year relationship with Elvis, and her performance is a feat of body language. Rooms grow twice her size when she’s nervous, she fidgets and shudders under Elvis’s looming shoulders, she takes the shape of whatever vessel he wishes her to fill. That the relationship began on predatory grounds (regardless of Elvis’s strange and puritan chastity) is never dismissed in Priscilla’s memoir, but the affection that she still carried for her late husband shines brightly enough in her writing to wash out some of the darkness—where the film underlines their marriage’s lurid nature with deft attention to physicality. Elvis and Me is under no obligation to function as a damning tell-all, though, and it performs well as a tender and surreal document of diving from a civilian life into the world’s most high-profile relationship.
Priscilla’s father was a pilot in the US Navy, and she met Elvis during his own bid with the military while they were both stationed in Germany. She is as nervous and overwhelmed and starstruck at their first encounter as anyone might have been, clinging to the wallpaper at a party he threw and plumbing her throat for the right words when he speaks to her. Priscilla is careful to note how otherworldly it felt to watch Elvis ask her parents to take her on a date, to listen to him work out songs in a living room, to learn his pet name for his grandmother (Dodger, if you’re curious). That inherent and immense awe melts a few layers as their relationship matures and Elvis’s eccentricities stray into abuse; Elvis fed a young Priscilla his own diet of uppers and downers, he was physically, mentally, and spiritually controlling, he was unfaithful and often violent. But even by the time of the book’s writing, Priscilla never seems to lose the sense of bewildering unlikelihood of the shape her life took, and a deep love threads through all its odd shapes.
Sample Draws
Is there anyone who has earned their ubiquity like Hayao Miyazaki? The Boy and the Heron is as beautiful as you’d expect it to be. Perhaps overstuffed at the expense of its poignancy, but my god, what a gift for a child wrestling with something as tremendous and cumbersome as watching a parent be replaced. My friend Eggy described the titular heron as “built different … dude is a problem.” I can’t think of a better way to put it.
I watched Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront for the first time last week. A good movie, sure, but veeeeeery interesting that Kazan’s first move after the HUAC trials was to include an act of righteous snitching in the third act of his new film. I compared this to I Love You, Daddy to a friend, which was met with confusion.
This is the penultimate issue of Blood Jump for the year. We remain a small but mighty publication, and it really does mean a lot to me that you continue to read. Excited to keep things going in 2024.
Thank you for reading Blood Jump. If you enjoyed this issue, please encourage a friend to subscribe. I will see you again soon for the last issue of the year.