David Cronenberg’s “The Fly”

This is another example of a film that went in a different direction than the source text.  In the book it starts out with a guy’s sister-in-law has called him and confessed to murdering his brother. In the film,  the character is single and at a science convention, where he meets and later has sex with a journalist, who at first he doesn’t want to tell his story, but later changes his mind and decides that he wants her to shoot a video diary, documenting his triumphs and tragedies.  I’m not sure how he was able to obtain two monkeys, as he just happened to have them. The book then goes into the sister-in-law’s letter, explaining the events leading up to and including the murder, and how a fly had slipped into the transmitter when he went through it.  When he came out of the receiver, he had a fly head, and arm.  In order for him to communicate with his wife, he would type out messages and slip them under the door. Once the wife found out what had happened, she pleaded with him to go through just one more time, which he eventually did, and when he came out of the receiver, his head was now part cat and part fly.  This was the first time his wife had seen him, as he had kept himself covered until this point.  She screamed bloody murder, and then they both knew that he had to destroyed, and all evidence erased.  So, she crushed his head and his fly arm in the steam hammer.  In the film, the fly slipped into the transmitter with him, but in this version the fly’s DNA mixed with the human DNA, and he slowly turned into a fly, and his human parts begin to fall off which he keeps in a little make shift museum.   But of course the journalist he had sex with in the beginning had to be pregnant, possibly with “BrundleFlys” inside of her body, and she didn’t want any part of that.  The movie then moved to her trying to get an abortion, but Brundle won’t have that, and he puts a stop to it, by kidnapping her.  But, at the end of the film, Brundle begs her to shoot and end him.

 

 

Tod Browning’s “Freaks”

This story took a completely different approach from the way the book “Spurs” went.  The film had a female dwarf by the name of Frieda as Hans’ fiance.  In the book, the character was single, but he had a trusty companion in the form of his dog St. Eustache.  The dog is key to the source text, in that after he becomes wealthy, marries the woman he’s been in love with, but ignored him until he gained such wealth and leaves the circus.  As it turns out, she is only after his money, which the dog helps to protect his owner from her attempts to get rid of him. Since the film didn’t include the dog, none of this  could happen. So, what they did was they Had the money hungry gold digger and him just stay in the circus, and not even mentioning the mansion or servants or anything normal rich people would expect to have.  Not to mention in the movie, the “freaks” turn her into a chicken.  In the book, she meets up with the man she planned to runaway with after the dwarf was out of the picture at a motel, after escaping in the middle of the night.  However, the dwarf and his dog track her down and kill the man she had planned on running away with.  Then she puts the dwarf around her neck just as she had done on their wedding day and with spurs on his boots, and his dog at her heels, began to walk back home. 

Elia Kazan’s “A Face in the Crowd”

The differences between the text(Your Arkansas Traveler) and this film are quite staggering.  The way Marcia and Lonesome meet in the book, is that Lonesome comes to the radio station where Marcia works in Fox, Wyoming.  In the film, Marcia is doing her radio show on the road from the jail, which is where we meet Lonesome Larry Rhodes, sleeping with his cigar box guitar case as a pillow.  Instead of going to Chicago like they do in the book, they go to Memphis.  The storyline in the film has Marcia kissing Lonesome once, whereas in the book they never kissed.  The movie uses the hypertext to when talking about how they ended up in New York.  But the book tells how Marcia gets fed up and says she is going on vacation to Cuba, where she meets someone.  This wasn’t as clear in the film, Marcia is shown storming off demanding to be made a partner, but nothing was said about a vacation.  The film spent a lot more time on the baton competition than the book did. The end of the book tied everything thing up, yet the film just left everything open as Marcia gets in a cab which drives away while Lonesome screams out his window, “Don’t leave me Marcia!”

Julian Schnabel’s “Diving Bell and the Butterfly”

The film was shot mostly as if from the only working eye of Jean-Do, and when his eye began to water, the lens went out of focus.  The film changed Jean-Do’s personality and it turned him into a bit of a smartalec, which made the character more relatable in 2007 when this movie was released. The character still receives pity from the audience, even after this change. The body of Jean-Do in the wheelchair was shot at such an angle that it was difficult to tell if that was a real actor, or if it was just life size doll.  My question about if that was a real actor was answered when he got out of his seat and kissed the wife of Napoleon the third.  The male gaze is very prominent in this film, as is to be expected, after all he is still a guy even if he can’t walk, talk or move.  The supporting cast helped move the story along when it started to get a little slow, and they gave Jean-Do someone to look at or to argue with, even though it was a one sided argument, which made for some funny moments. When Jean is moved to the ICU, when he comes down with pneumonia, and the lady who is writing what Jean blinks to her is writing the chapter on the accident, the tension seems higher than is was even a few minutes before.

John Huston’s “The Night of the Iguana”

The film strays pretty far from the book and the hypotext in that all scenes involving masturbation, Nazi’s, lesbians basically anything that might cause extra controversy besides the idea of a preacher raping a sixteen year old girl was cut out of the film.  Their were a few scenes where I felt the film makers just kind of skipped part of the hypotext, where it would have helped make the movie make more sense if they had included more imagery,  The scene where Charlotte gets the distributor cap back and then the camera cuts to Shannon running down to another room and then several ladies come running out of that room screaming.  I assume that he either masturbated or exposed himself in some way.  In another scene, when Charlotte is dancing with the house boys from the motel, then Hank comes up swinging and missing, then the next time we see Hank and Charlotte they seem to be together, and Judith Fellows doesn’t seem to have any problem with the two of them dating.   The movie does follow the hypotext as provided by the play in the end as Hannah tells Shannon to cut the Iguana loose and to set him free, which Shannon does.  The hypotext is the same near the end when Maxine asks Hannah and Shannon to take over the motel, and only Shannon accepts the offer.