Which is Better the Movie or the Book?

I really liked O Brother, Where Art Thou? and most of my friends that had seen it shared the opinion. It was an enjoyable movie and the songs and action were fun and the characters were likable.

When watching O Brother, Where Art Thou?, I saw it as more enjoyable when I viewed it as a stand-alone film as opposed to an adaptation of The Odyssey. The appeal of hero stories to me is definitely the characters and I think that the characters in O Brother, Where Art Thou? are more likable when they aren’t compared to the Odyssean characters. I want to watch the movie because I care about the story because of Everett or Tommy or whoever, not because I'm interested in the retelling of a heroic narrative that I've heard so many times before. The Odyssey wasn’t particularly likable in my opinion because neither Odysseus nor Telemachus were especially likable characters. So when I think of Everett as a version of Odysseus, I care less about his story.

However, I think that if you don't watch the movie as an adaptation of The Odyssey, the plot takes a hit. The movie seems to just be a jumble of events that don't seem to really have any strong connection. However, when you look at them in the context of The Odyssey, you begin to see the parallels and the story seems to come together a bit more. When watching the movie, the sirens, the lotus eaters, the cyclops, etc, all seem so random until you see them as their Odyssean counterparts.

So if possible, I believe that this movie is best seen as a combination of a stand-alone film and as a film adaptation. However, I think this is hard to do. I think either way you watch it, either the plot or the characters take a hit.

Crying

Throughout the entirety of The Odyssey, Odysseus cries all the time. In today’s modern society, masculinity seems to be a very fragile thing. Male friends in a modern context are often called gay or feminizing terms if they are physically affectionate with their male friends or if they show weakness of any sort.

Emotions like sadness and fear are seen as feminine and unacceptable for men to experience or display, but in The Odyssey, these emotions are supposed to be humanizing. When Odysseus cries it’s meant to endear him to us readers and show that he really is sad and he really is affected by being kept away from his life and family for so long.

Another instance of Odysseus showing “unmasculine” emotion is when he fears for his life when faced with fighting the horde of suitors. As we discussed in class, this could be a tactic to show the audience that the suitors were a reasonable foe for Odysseus and their slaughter was something to be admired, but still, a male hero being afraid isn’t something we’re too used to in modern contexts. It could be argued that this fear only enhances his masculinity because it makes him brave, in that he was afraid but he conquered his enemies anyways. Also, is it a trial if there is no fear? If he is confident all the time, what kind of hero would he be? There wouldn’t be any triumph; it’d just be an “I told you so” kind of ending.

However, all of these “weak” emotions are balanced out by a stereotypically male penchant for affairs with women and a thirst for blood. But either way, perhaps the gender roles in ancient Greece were different than those we are familiar with today.

Coraline

I love hero stories and I always have. They make you feel hopeful. Heroes show human potential; they prove that survival is possible no matter how poor the circumstances and how high the stakes. They tell you that if you fight hard enough you can make it through, even if you lose things along the way. And regardless of whether or not I think this is a realistic lesson, it still has value in that while you read that story, you believe you can win.

My hero is and has been Coraline Jones from Neil Gaiman's Coraline for a while. Coraline is a girl who after moving into her new home, discovers her other mother on the opposite side of a wall. The other world seems to be a perfect version of her own world where her parents are attentive to her and she has everything that she could wish for. And her other mother gives Coraline the opportunity to stay in this perfect world if she allows for buttons to be sewn into her eyes. Horrified at this proposition, Coraline refuses until the other mother takes her parents and Coraline is forced to the lives of her parents, three other children, and herself.

Neil Gaiman says in the foreword of the tenth anniversary edition of Coraline that he wrote it for his daughter. “Holly liked scary stories,with witches and brave little girls in them” according to Gaiman. I also like stories with witches and brave little girls. I like it so much when children beat adults with little or no help, when they defy the odds and beat the system despite being looked down upon and ignored. And Coraline is perfect because every child knows what it's like to be looked down upon and ignored. Through the entire book, no adult in Coraline’s life ever listens to her. Her parents are too focused on their work to pay attention to her and her neighbors simply don't listen. Even when she tries something as simple as correcting the pronunciation of her name and they don't listen at all. And because she's alone, she gets into a bad situation, but she gets out of it all on her own. She didn't need to rely on any adults to save herself. She could succeed on her own not because of them, but despite them, and that was something I really hung onto as a kid. That I could do it and I didn't need anyone else.

When Coraline is searching for an old well near her home, “It’s supposed to be so deep that if you fall in and look up, you’ll see a sky full of stars in the middle of the day,” the character Wybie says when she finds it. Coraline, as a self-proclaimed explorer, was fascinated by this idea and she wanted to see that sky full of stars. And unfortunately, she found that sky full of stars in the middle of the day in the other world. But one thing that I admire so much about Coraline is that this world was everything she wanted. Everything would've been easier for her had she just accepted the buttons in her eyes  and lived the "perfect" life. But Coraline listened to her intuition and she did what she felt was right, not what was easy.

“This is the story of Coraline, who was small for her age, and found herself in darkest danger. Before it was all over Coraline had seen what lay behind mirrors, and had a close call with a bad hand, and had come face to face with her other mother; she had rescued her true parents from a fate worse than death and triumphed against overwhelming odds. This is the story of Coraline, who lost her parents, and found them again, and (more or less) escaped (more or less) unscathed.” This is what Neil Gaiman prefaces his book with and this is a pretty good summary of why the story means so much to me. Coraline was small for her age. She wasn't the biggest or the strongest or the one that anyone would have expected to win, but she still did it. She faced all of those things and still managed to win. Against overwhelming odds, she won. And she more or less escaped more or less unscathed. Everything wasn't perfect when she returned, the story wasn't over, not everything was okay, but as the boy said to her at the end, "It's not all bad, miss. Thou art alive. Thou art still living." Coraline is important to me because she's just a kid. She's just a little girl who was small for her age who found herself in darkest danger. And while her journey sucked, she's alive, she's still living. And for me it's the brave little girls like Coraline who manage to stay alive that make it worth trying when things get hard.

Love is Pain

Sethe’s actions in Beloved are looked upon in horror by everyone who know what she did. To kill a child no more than two years old and to be proud of it was despicable in the eyes of others. However according to Sethe, her actions were justified and they were out of love.

“"For a baby she throws a powerful spell," said Denver. "No more powerful than the way I loved her," Sethe answered,” is said in the very beginning of the book. From the start, Sethe stands by the idea that the murder was an act of powerful love.

This idea is one that is difficult to understand for those who have not been in Sethe’s place. How can she proudly claim that such an act of violence is also an act of love? Love is a sacrifice but was Sethe’s sacrifice too extreme?

It is understandable for Sethe to want to protect her child from the evils of slavery and at the time, it was very hard to do. Even when they were in Ohio which was a free state, the fugitive slave laws allowed for them to be hunted down like animals. Sethe herself hoped that her own mother was not killed because she tried to run away without her so it would make sense that Sethe’s number one priority is to keep her children away from Sweet Home and wherever they may have been sent afterwards. Nothing could be more important to her than keeping her children safe from the white people. And arguably, when you're dead you're safe.

Denver is scared of her mother and claims her brothers left because they were too. And being hurt but told that it's out of love is a mark of many dangerous relationships. It isn't healthy to live in fear of someone who claims to love you. And worse, who claims to be willing to hurt you out of love.

What disgusts the townspeople so much about Sethe's crimes were that she was not humbled. There was no shame in the fact that she had hurt and killed her child. She was almost proud of it. And while there is something to be proud of in keeping her children away from the four horsemen and Sweet Home, murder is less laudable. But she loved her child enough to want them away from Sweet Home. Did she love them enough to take a chance that they could have a better life?
And even if it was out of love, how is it up to Sethe to decide for everyone whether it is better to die or be put into slavery? Does she really love her children if she gives them no chance at a future?

Support for Suicide

In White Boy Shuffle by Paul Beatty, many people read the ending of the book as a bleak sign that Gunnar and the rest of the black community have given up and there's no hope for the future. They see suicide as the easy way out and look down upon Gunnar for not fighting racism and going down swinging.

This view is definitely understandable and as much as I disagree, I have trouble finding the words to contradict this view of suicide that's the norm in western culture. But as we talked about in class, a missed free throw isn’t hurting the player, it's hurting the crowd. And a dead baby born into slavery doesn't hurt the mother, it hurts the slaver. When people say “Oh he had so much to live for, so did that baby born a slave. Each had so much to offer the white man and so little to live for within themselves.

There will always be other boys who can play basketball and poets too. If Gunnar hadn't played with Scoby that one day would he still have something to live for? Would he be worth anything at all? If Psycho Loco, the gangbanging killer, had decided to die, is that important? Did he have something to live for? When the officers were acquitted on all charges for the Rodney King beating Gunnar says he feels worthless. That being a black person in America meant your life meant nothing. And I think that's what Beatty is trying to get across. He's a black boy who’s life without his standout skills is essentially meaningless to us and American does not love him enough to stop him.

Gunnar says to Psycho Loco that he just wants to win for once. But to him, winning isn't making the last free throw, it’s throwing the game.

Laughter or Love

Richard Wright’s critique of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God is centered around the fact that Hurston’s characters and method of telling a story could be a continuation of minstrelsy. I understand that Wright sees the comedic dialogue between townspeople as something playing on stereotypes of southern black people just to entertain a white audience. Similarly, the concept of the happy field worker, which is seen in Hurston’s depiction of life in the Everglades, is a trope found often throughout the history of minstrel shows. For Wright to see her work through this lense makes sense, especially because as a protest writer, Wright was very concerned with his audience and their perception of his characters. However, I don’t think that this criticism is applicable to Their Eyes Were Watching God.


Hurston isn’t an author who is attempting to cater to a white audience in this novel. As a woman who grew up in the town she features in her novel and who studied the vernacular and oral traditions of people she writes about. Her story mimics the type of oral folktales that I myself grew up with. The type of comedic interactions in between people are very reminiscent of interactions between Brer Possum and Brer Rabbit, Little Eight John and his mother and many other people in stories that have been passed down. The comedy seems to me to be a tool to connect with what may be familiar to a lot of black readers and it seems that this is a work of familiarity and love rather than one of mocking.

Everything Black is Pun Intended

For a poetry reading some weeks ago someone read the poem “Black Privilege” by Crystal Valentine. This poem examines some of the things black people have been forced to do over time and calling it “black privilege” as a mockery of non-black people who claim such thing exists.

In the poem she says “Black privilege is being so unique that not even God will look like you.” She says not even God will look like you. Not that he just happens to not look like you, but that he won’t. It shows that to be black is so undesirable that not even God, who is said to have created people in his image, would be willing to look like you. And while this is a perfectly legitimate thing for a black woman to say who has spent all of her life being told that black isn’t beautiful, that black isn’t right. For her to express frustration in the fact that people say over and over again that white is holy and black isn’t is totally reasonable and justified. But what does it mean for a person who isn’t black to read this poem and talk about these things to a room full of a majority non-black people?

What does it mean when the author of the poem writes “And it’s tirin’, you know? For everything about my skin to be a metaphor, for everything Black to be pun intended, to be death intended,” and then we sit for the rest of the fifteen minutes trying to make metaphors from her blackness and trying to find death in her words?

What does it mean for her to say “Black privilege is having to have the same sense of humor as Jesus. Remember how he smiled on the cross? The same way Malcolm X laughed at his bullet,” as we go on and find humor in Invisible Man  and find jokes in the poems we read?

How is it fair for us to take her experience and her suffering and pick it apart to search for enough symbolism to satisfy us? How is it fair to call someone a pale poet if we aren’t satisfied?