Stuck Inside of London with the Baltimore Blues Again, Part II

In which the author tries (and possibly fails) not to write something best used as a sleep aid or a dry-as-dust academic treatise, and reaches an organic and frightening conclusion.

(If you haven't read it, here is part 1)

1.

There’s an episode in The Wire’s last season called “The Dickensian Aspect,” which follows part of a much larger story arc involving The Baltimore Sun and its quest for juicy stories. I always “got” the title, in the sense that I knew that “Dickensian” was shorthand for wretched urban plight. But it wasn’t until I read Oliver Twist that I saw an added layer of meaning in the phrasing of the episode’s title.

To The Sun’s editor, “Dickensian” probably means “gritty” or some other euphemistic definition that glosses over the horrors from which he’s profiting by chronicling. But really, I think it gets at the heart of what both Nancy and Felicia Pearson feel about themselves. They’ve become, as my old friend Red puts it, “institutionalized.”

And just think about the ones who don’t get the casting director knocking on their door.

How easy it is for us to look at the people who populate these bleak corners of the United States, who occupy what epidemiologists call a “cyst” because it’s contained within a host environment, but is not made up of the same material, and say that if they only made better choices, they could rise beyond their circumstances. But even if that happens, and the circumstances themselves still exist, what have we won? We love putting the onus on the individual and playing up the role that hard work and personal responsibility play in our lives. But what Dickens knew, and what Simon knows, they showed us through their art: When we use class as a convenient way to ignore a voiceless population, we create a separate world, governed by a different set of rules, where words like “choice” and “fate” and “work” and “responsibility” and “education” don’t mean the same things or work the same ways.

2.

One of the most fascinating aspects of both Simon’s and Dickens’ work is how they view the outside forces that might conceivably come to the aid of those in need, but ultimately don’t. Both The Wire and Oliver Twist are filled with individuals who are burdened by good intentions (for the sake of spoilers, I won’t mention specifics), but, despite their efforts, have little success in changing the lives of the desperate characters around them.

My interest is piqued most specifically by the way that both men view the Church’s role (or the inevitable lack thereof) in aiding these individuals. In Oliver Twist, the Church and its people are largely absent. Oliver is confined to the workhouse as an orphan, and nothing good that happens to him is initiated in any direct way by the Church. In fact, the book’s first third is filled with ironic scenes in which Oliver’s Christian decency is constantly in suspicion (he is constantly described as having a rotten soul on account of his parentage). The characters who do provide Oliver some comfort are often described in terms of their virtues, but they’re virtues that anybody could have, irrespective of their motivations. If Dickens sees a poor orphan’s best shot out of London’s horrific underbelly taking place in a Churchless bubble, it can’t speak well of his view of the Christian community’s role in aiding the poor.

The same is even more true of David Simon. The one clear religious figure in The Wire is unquestionably good-hearted, but the Church itself just kind of sits in the background, a warm, toothless grandmother who isn’t ignorant of the cancerous drug game, but is admittedly powerless to do much about it.

Simon covered Baltimore for a long, long time. He has said repeatedly that his greatest aim as The Wire’s creator was to examine the major issues at hand in American cities, particularly the sort of former industrial hubs that have been increasingly hard-hit by rampant gang violence, crushing economic blows, and governments that seem more and more worried about plastering over the cracks than making hard decisions to address the most crippling problems of their communities (Detroit and Pittsburgh would likely fit the mold). If that was his aim, and he succeeded (which by the ways that prominent sociologists embraced the show’s depictions of the inner-city, it’s reasonable to say he did), then what does that say about the Church’s crushing lack of success in serving the “Other America?”

3.

The book of the Bible I’ve read more than in any other is James’ letter to the twelve tribes. The most powerful verse in this short book is, for my money, James 1:22 - “Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says.”

The edict here is pretty clear. James 1:27 delivers another - “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.”

I can’t read this verse since watching The Wire without thinking about Bubbles, Randy, Dukie, Michael, Bug, Namond, Brody, D’Angelo, and all the other nameless characters who are, at one point or another, outside the game, practically begging for someone to step in and show them grace.

Please understand that, for my part, sanctimony has no place in this rambling mess of thought. I have never done anything that could be construed as what I apparently am ashamed of the Church for not doing enough of, if that makes any sense (unlikely, I admit). Charles Dickens and David Simon collided (unbidden) in my mind while I read Oliver Twist and made me think about this stuff. I’m doing a lot of the thing you’re not supposed to do when you write about serious issues (heaps of complaining and hand-wringing; no solutions), and with each word I type I get a little more down on myself. I want the Church to step in and act for me, so that I don’t have to think about Simon’s and Dickens’ implicit criticisms as criticisms of me (which of course they are, because I am the Church).

So then I end up, strangely, in a very similar situation to Snoop and Nancy. They’re scared to leave the situations that have defined their entire lives. Miserable though they may be, they know their misery and are comforted by it, in a weird way. In the end, the most challenging part of their struggle to escape their circumstance is perhaps that they are terrified about the unknowns that await them on the other side of their escape.

I’m scared too. What would it be like if I did what Simon and Dickens see so little of, and became an arm of the Church’s reach into these ravaged communities? Uncomfortable and even dangerous, perhaps. Christ didn’t mind those (or in spite of minding them, acted anyway), but I find myself wishing He’d give me a pass if it came to that.

I’m doubtful.

Stuck Inside of London with the Baltimore Blues Again: Part I

By Josh Corman

Felicia "Snoop" Pearson

Follow me on Twitter @JoshACorman

1.

If you have known me for more than, say, half an hour, it’s likely that you’ve heard me vigorously extol the virtues of HBO’s The Wire. Watching the show was a strange experience for me for a number of reasons, chief among them that The Wire very well may mark the moment that television became the medium for telling long form stories. This is coming from a guy who defends the viability of the novel with rabid-wolf ferocity to anyone who’ll listen (and a fair few people who don’t particularly want to). Don’t get me wrong. I have no interest whatsoever in abandoning novels and consuming narratives solely through premium cable. But only the most sweeping, piercing novels can do what The Wire did in terms of establishing such an empathetic vision and developing complex arcs that so vigorously mine the human experience of so many seemingly disparate individuals. Think East of Eden or The Brothers Karamazov, but in contemporary Baltimore.

David Simon and Ed Burns, its co-creators, both had lived in the Charm City, The Wire’s almost-its-own-character setting, for more than thirty years, as a journalist and homicide detective, respectively. Their depictions of the violence, drug abuse, police brutality, and complex moral and ethical structures in East and West Baltimore scared the hell out me when I watched the show. Which, come to think of it, may have been the point. Perhaps The Wire functions most like one of those plays that churches occasionally put on, where they depict the misery of sinners as they depart life without accepting Christ and, painfully aware of their error, plunge into hell’s eternal fire. The biggest difference is that in the plays, people can make a choice to be saved. In Baltimore? I’m not so sure.

This may have been David Simon’s thinking when one of the show’s actors, a real-life product of the Baltimore drug game named Felicia “Snoop” Pearson, was arrested last year on charges of conspiracy to distribute heroin. This, after vanquishing her stash and quitting the game (as it is always called by those affected) a few years prior when she was discovered and cast as a mid-level enforcer in the Stanfield crew. Within hours of the arrest, Simon issued a statement:

Both our Constitution and our common law guarantee that we will be judged by our peers. But in truth, there are now two Americas, politically and economically distinct. I, for one, do not qualify as a peer to Felicia Pearson. The opportunities and experiences of her life do not correspond in any way with my own, and her America is different from my own. I am therefore ill-equipped to be her judge in this matter.

If you’ve seen The Wire, you know that this quote perfectly meshes with Simon’s Baltimore as it appears onscreen. In fact, Pearson’s arrest brought back several of the same gut-punch feelings that the show delivered often. I desperately wanted Snoop to have been wrongly arrested, for her to have finally separated herself from the game and the life that has claimed tens of thousands of mostly young, mostly black Baltimoreans. Because, see, Pearson falls into the one percent of the one percent who had (and still has, possibly) a way out of the predatory, cyclical destructiveness of poverty and drugs. Her fall would shake a (probably asinine) assumption I’ve always made about places like urban Baltimore: that if the people there could just be given a viable path out, if the allure of quick cash and status from the drug trade could be replaced with something, anything else, that those areas could be reclaimed. (Note: I am painfully aware that in using terms like cyclical, poverty, urban, viable, and reclaimed in such close proximity to each other, I’m playing into the worst part of the worst stereotype of the educated, non-urban white guy playing arm-chair quarterback to inner-city America's biggest problems. If it seems like I’m making prescriptions, I’m sorry. I aim only to portray my own woefully limited point of view.)

So, a funny thing happened. I heard about Snoop’s story and sought out Simon’s comments, pondered them, figured he knew better than I did, and went on my merry way (it speaks, I think, to my pathetic detachment from the plight of urban America—and hundreds of other places in need—that I could encounter this story and go “on my merry way,” but go I did). Then some months later, Rolling Stone ran a story about Snoop and her attempts to fully and finally extricate herself from Baltimore and all that that entails. I learned that she had been born to a crack addicted mother. I learned that she had previously spent time in prison for murder—starting when she was fifteen. Recruited by an East Baltimore drug crew, she had been on the street when a member of a rival crew (another young girl) rushed at her wielding a baseball bat. Snoop opened fire on the girl and killed her. After her time in prison, she vowed to go straight and even got a real job. She was promptly fired when her employer discovered her record, so she got another job. Once more, her crime surfaced, and she was fired. It took little time for the game to swallow Pearson once again. And until The Wire came along, nothing in her life was likely to offer any further opportunities for escape, barring some sort of myth-making, Horatio Alger-like effort of individual will (which may or may not actually even be possible), that would undoubtedly have been spun into a Lifetime movie.


2.

Oliver Twist—Charles Dickens’ second novel, published in 1837—is an unusual work of fiction. Typically, main characters are supposed to do something, rather than simply have things happen to them. Characters should dictate the action, the common wisdom goes, not serve as punching bags, tossed around by fate. Dickens, evidently, didn’t get the memo.

The book’s most famous scene (one so famous, in fact, that I would almost guarantee that you’ve absorbed it through cultural osmosis), where Oliver eats his gruel at the workhouse where he was born, and, demonstrating verve that nobody finds in the least charming, asks for a second serving, occurs on page eleven, leaving 335 more pages before we fully know the fate of the titular character. In those pages, Oliver is passed from the cruel workhouse to serve as an apprentice at the hands of a cruel coffin-maker (Dickens’ humor was bleak from the beginning, apparently), and from there into the arms of a cruel band of organized pickpockets led by a couple of especially vicious rogues who put him to work as a housebreaker. Every time it looks like little Oliver has a chance to escape these villains' clutches, he is ruthlessly jerked back into their grasp. It gets to a point where every time the kid walks outdoors, you brace for some terrible new fate to befall him (which, in Chuck's defense, isn’t quite as morally defeating and exhausting as it sounds).

Then, kind of suddenly, things get static on Oliver’s end, and a couple of other characters take center stage: Rose Maylie, a compassionate young woman who vows to aid Oliver, and Nancy, girlfriend and criminal associate of Bill Sikes (the most vicious of the two aforementioned rogues). These two women play important roles in Oliver’s development, but for long stretches, Oliver doesn’t even factor into the narrative (aside from generally being the motivating element for others’ actions—he’s kind of a Maguffin in that way), and Dickens instead focuses on the plot to finally bring the novel’s villains to justice through a Rube Goldberg-like set of machinations (his passion for coincidence knows no bounds).

Two meetings between Rose and Nancy occur in the latter half of the novel, and it is these two scenes in which Dickens makes his most lasting critical statements about London’s underclass and the crippling effects of deep poverty and learned hopelessness (which is largely, it seems to me, what the book is really "about" in the English class sense). In this passage, Nancy speaks first.

Snoop wouldn't have asked so nicely.

“I am the infamous creature you have heard of, that lives among the thieves, and that never from the first moment I can recollect my eyes and senses opening on London streets have know any better life, or kinder words than they have given to me, so help me God! Do not mind shrinking openly from me, lady. I am younger than you would think, to look at me, but I am well used to it. The poorest women fall back, as I make my way along the crowded pavement.”

“What dreadful things are these!” said Rose, involuntarily falling from her strange companion.

“Thank Heaven upon your knees, dear lady,” cried the girl, “that you had friends to care for and keep you in your childhood, and that you were never in the midst of cold and hunger, and riot and drunkenness, and - and - something worse than all, as I have been from my cradle; I may use the word, for the alley and the gutter were mine, as they will be my deathbed.”

This exchange happens the first time Rose and Nancy meet, and in the midst of a larger conversation in which major plot points are advanced, so I’ll spare you most of the context. What you can take from this is how Nancy views herself. She isn’t fishing for compliments when she claims that people recoil from her in the streets, and she isn’t asking for a handout when she describes the miserable circumstances of her life. She’s simply offering Rose—who she sees as occupying an unreachable social plateau—an explanation of who she is, so that Rose will take the time to listen to what she has to say. A few pages later, they continue, Rose offering Nancy a chance at escape from her corrupt life.

“... do not turn a deaf ear to the entreaties of one of your own sex; the first - the first, I do believe, who ever appealed to you in the voice of pity and compassion. Do hear my words, and let me save you yet, for better things.”

“Lady,” cried Nancy, sinking on her knees, “dear, sweet, angel lady, you are the first that ever blessed me with such words as these, and if I had heard them years ago, they might have turned me from a life of sin and sorrow; but it is too late, it is too late!”

“It’s never too late,” said Rose, “for penitence and atonement.”

“It is,” cried the girl, writhing in agony of her mind...”

That agony, I think, is a very real thing, born out of the solipsistic view that often engulfs those born into extreme poverty and the sort of sinful mire that Dickens saw in the squalid hovels of 1830s London.

Or, say, that David Simon saw in millennial Baltimore. In both cases, it’s reasonable to suppose that one of the greatest contributing factors to the seemingly endless cycles of crime and despondency is that the people in those places don’t really and truly believe that another existence is even possible, let alone likely for them. In these passages, Nancy doesn’t come off as someone who is truly beyond hope, but since she sees herself that way, it doesn’t matter. Perception becomes reality, and the game claims another victim.

Part II (in which I attempt to avoid the frankly intimidating trap of sounding like I'm writing an abstract for a doctoral program application) arrives on Monday. 

By Josh Corman

Follow me on Twitter @JoshACorman

Wine from the Pop Machine: A Lesson in the Classics from a Whole Bunch of Prostitutes

It's a classic story: Boy meets girl. Boy pays girl to sleep with him. Girl dies in grotesque bout of tuberculosis. Ah, l'amour.

Previously on Wine from the Pop Machine, we learned the name and composer of Bugs Bunny's raucous piano solo in the critically acclaimed think-piece, Rhapsody Rabbit. Today we're going to jump from cartoon to film with the help of our new best friends, the afflicted and conflicted women of the night. Let's journey together back to 1990. Hair is big, bangs are bigger, bangles are plastic, Paula Abdul is not yet a punchline. Cinema is bright this year. We have Goodfellas, Edward Scissorhands, Home Alone, and the pick of the bunch, Pretty Woman. Dear Pretty Woman. Delightful Pretty Woman. You brought the wonder of downtown Hollywood to the big screen. I remember when I moved here to L.A. and sat in my first, magical traffic jam at Hollywood and Highland and smelled the smog and sweat and watched all the map vendors and flyer-givers and crack sellers working together in harmony and thought, "Ah, Pretty Woman, how full of shit you weren't."

Fellow time-traveler, you'll recall several memorable moments from the film, I am sure. There's the "Big mistake. Big. Huge," scene, the playful snap of the necklace box scene, and the "So good I almost peed my pants," gaff at the opera. You might also remember Edward's speech as the curtain goes up.

People's reactions to opera the first time they see it is very dramatic; they either love it or they hate it. If they love it, they will always love it. If they don't, they may learn to appreciate it, but it will never become part of their soul.

Our protagonist watches with undivided attention as the opera unfolds, and at its close she stands to applaud with tears in her eyes. Clearly, she is one of those opera newcomers who absorbs the medium into her soul (I assume in some kind of horcrux ritual). I always wondered what the story is that so engrosses her and inspires him, and ten years after I saw the movie for the first time, I got my answer.

The opera they attend, if you have been curious to know, is called La Traviata, and it was written by Giuseppe Verdi. The story goes a little something like this: Poor boy falls in love with a—shall we say—mistress of the courts. Mistress abandons life of immorality and opulence for poor boy's true love. Outsiders convince no-longer-mistress it would be wicked to stay with poor boy because of factors A, B, and C. Woman goes back to being mistress and tells poor boy she doesn't really love him (but she so does). The lovers overcome the obstacles and reinstate their love just in time for mistress to die of tuberculosis.

I certainly hope the synopsis sounds familiar. Moulin Rouge is one of its most recent incarnations, but the story was born even before Verdi grabbed it. It was first a novel by Dumas called La Dame Aux Camelias. The novel was quickly adapted as a play, then an opera, a ballet, a movie, and about twenty more movies. You know how little orphan Annie goes to the movies with Daddy Warbucks? Yeah, she's going to see Greta Garbo in Camille, the 1936 movie version of the story. I guess Daddy Warbucks wants Annie to get a complete and early education about all of her career options, since she definitely ain't getting her dirty orphan hands on his fortune.

Over time, the Dumas story transcended its literary origin and became rooted in our cultural consciousness. You can see its influence on any romance that sees one person putting the needs of the other individual over the desires of the relationship, even if it means giving up the relationship. Aragorn parts with Arwen because he knows she belongs in the Grey Havens. Edward tries to resist Bella because she doesn't belong in the vampire world (but maybe as a snack? Just an idea, Ms. Meyer). Those guys with unbuttoned shirts sing, "It's the hardest thing I'll ever have to do, to look you in the eyes and tell you I don't love you. It's the hardest thing I'll ever have to lie, to show no emotion when you start to cry." Nick Lachey, the glory of your selflessness dims only in comparison with your shining pectorals.

Verdi chose well when he snatched La Dame Aux Camelias' story for his opera. He chose a romantic conflict that every generation could adapt and appreciate. If you haven't seen La Traviata, I hope you get to do so soon. The arias are soaring, the story—as I've mentioned—is timeless, and you get the rare pleasure of rooting for the whore. Well, rare if you've never seen Camille or Moulin Rouge or Pretty Woman or Memoirs of a Geisha or Firefly or Taxi Driver or Trading Places or L.A. Confidential...

In Defense of Peter Jackson and Faramir: The Art of Adaptation

By Jonny Walls

Recent conversations with friends have gotten me thinking about the art of story adaptation, particularly for film.

A couple things I've come to learn over the years: One, I used to think the best way to adapt was to stick as closely as possible to the source material. This is often not true. Two, fans of the works in question are the worst film critics.

I understand that this is a self defeating argument since I claim that fans of original works are the worst critics and then turn around and criticize a film begotten by my most beloved work of literature, but hear me out.

Uber-fans are like crazy parents at a little league game. "If that coach doesn't see my child exactly the way I (completely erroneously) see him (based on a pure but nevertheless blinding love) and start him at pitcher every game, then he's an idiot!"

Maybe your kid just isn't a pitcher. Maybe he's a shortstop. Maybe he's a catcher. Maybe, just maybe...he sucks at baseball.

But if we can put aside our fanboy-ism we can all learn to appreciate some good films for what they are, or, as the case may warrant, recognize the films that just got it wrong.

Here is my thesis in a nutshell: The art of adaptation requires a walk on a very tight rope indeed. The adapter must not be afraid to break from his source material. It's for its own good! Literature is a different medium, and certain things that work in that arena simply will not fly in film. (More on that in a minute.) Conversely, and most importantly, the spirit of the original work must be maintained. This can be accomplished even while changing and compressing a story, and it can be failed miserably even when following an original work closely.

Make no mistake, I'm not here to cast a wide net of defense over all adaptations with the erroneous claim that to adapt is to gain unquestioned dominion over a work. Not so. The original work must be respected and treated with care, or it can become a pale imitation of the original work (Prince Caspian) or cease to be an adaptation at all and be rendered a devious imposter at a hotel luncheon with someone else's nametag while said tag's rightful owner is bound and gagged in his hotel room on the sixth floor (Fever Pitch and Resident Evil.)

While the subject of films that went awry is a fun and (sometimes) worthy topic, I will instead focus on one that got it right.

Lord of the Rings is a great example to consider because it isn't perfect, but despite its flaws, it still falls into the pinnacle category, in my opinion. I could go on for an age about the myriad specific ways these films succeeded or fell short, but taken as a whole I say they were a success. I will focus on one of the big ones in the hope of a reasonably brief discussion.

Faramir is representative of the greater issue at play here and is thus a perfect example. Oh, how the fanboys wailed and howled (myself included) about film-version Faramir's prick-ish decision to drag Frodo away to Osgiliath and derail him from his quest. As much as I always loved the films, I derived much pleasure from bashing the discrepancies between page and screen that Jackson and crew were "too thick to understand," wondering, "does he think he knows better than Tolkien? If only they had let me write the script."

Yeah, right.

Put bluntly: Jackson, Walsh and Boyens knew what they were doing in 2002, and I didn't. Had Faramir emulated his ink and paper counterpart and turned Frodo loose immediately upon learning of his treacherous and noble quest to destroy the ring, we wouldn't have a movie.

And that would be a slight problem, because you need a movie to have a movie.

If Faramir hadn't presented some sort of conflict for Frodo and Sam, they would have literally spent the entire second film walking. And walking. And walking. Remember how they spend the first half of that film just...walking...as it is? Remember how tedious it is? It's already the weakest of the three films, and much of that is because it sticks to the formula of the book as much as it does.

This is a necessary evil because, as I said, much of the original work must be retained to serve the greater work, even if it may be at the expense of portions of the film. Those dull moments in Two Towers serve the greater work as they lend Middle Earth a sense of grand scale and drive home the oppressive nature of Sam and Frodo's quest. They serve as juxtaposition for the the beautiful Shire and Rivendell that our heroes toil to save. But Jackson and crew stretched that band as far is it would go. Any more and it would have snapped.

A bridge piece is extremely difficult to adapt because movies need clear cut beginnings, middles and ends, with tangible conflicts. Where novels can get away with things like meandering through the waste for hundreds of pages by using little techniques like omnipresence (the ability to see inside any character's mind at any time, allowing us to explore the character's emotional growth, anguish, joy, etc. from the inside) films must be external. Conflicts must be apparent in the things happening on the outside. On screen. Thus, The Two Towers needed prick-version Faramir.

"But wait!" cry the fanboys, "Shelob's lair could, nay, should have been the main conflict for Two Towers. That's how it was in the books, and that would totally work for all that external stuff. What's more visual and cinematic than a giant-ass spider?"

You're right and you're wrong. That could have worked for Two Towers.

Shelob's Lair and Shelob herself were quite cinematic and gave us one of the best scenes in all three films. The problem is if you move Shelob out of the third film and into the second (where she was in the books), you're left with no active conflict for Frodo and Sam in the third film. Yes, there is plenty of conflict happening around them, and there is a great menacing threat floating over the whole world, but if there isn't direct conflict in Frodo and Sam's path, on screen, the entire third film would have consisted of them wandering around in Mordor, making their painstaking way to Mount Doom (which is how it is in the book). It would have been unspeakably dull right up until the very end. Remember, we wouldn't be seeing all of the character development and conflict through personal anguish going on in their minds and revealed through Tolkien's well crafted dialogue. In film, we must see it happen, must see them overcome their trials, or it doesn't translate. It wouldn't have hooked us otherwise.

The third option would have been for Jackson and crew to invent a host of new conflicts to spice up act two (like they did with the Aragorn storyline), and it would have pissed people off even more than the Warg battle did. Ironically, changing Faramir's character helped them keep things as close to the original work as possible.

One more word and then we'll wrap it up. And this is important. The Faramir change does not alter that all important spirit of the books. Much of the spirit of Faramir in the books is borne of his success where Boromir, his brother, failed. The physically "weaker" brother is stronger where it counts. The film still delivers this theme in full, but it's deftly altered to fit the film format. If Faramir had been strong and pure from the get go, without the benefit of Tolkien's omnipresence directly telling us all that neat, deep character stuff for which the author has unlimited access and liberty to divulge, we would have been left with an "important character" who shows up on screen, does absolutely nothing, and then disappears.  And we would be left to assume that he's important because...why? Because they told us so? They told us he's related to Boromir, so we need to take their word for it and believe he's important?

Wrong. It does not work on screen.

As it is (in the film), we get to see Faramir reach that character arc, that point of strength that eluded his brother before him. We get to watch it take place and witness the transformation, and in the end, we get the same theme of strength over weakness, the defeat of temptation. The spirit remains the same, and it tidies up the act two issues for both the second and third films in the process.

The LOTR movies aren't perfect as films or as adaptations, but they get the spirit right. Despite a few missteps, like pretty much every extra in The Return of the King, which were cut from the theatrical for good reason (hindsight is 20/20, after all), Jackson and crew did a great job bringing Middle Earth to the screen. Similar arguments could be made in defense of the excision of Tom Bombadil and The Scourging of the Shire, but we've all got places to be, so I'll spare you.

Have you been too tough on some adaptations of your favorite works? Have you blindly stood by some that were faithful to a fault? What are some adaptations you think worked? Which ones fell flat for you? Maybe it's time to go back and give some of these a second look. And for goodness sake, give Faramir a break.

By Jonny Walls

Real Life Series: Don't Drink it 'Til it's Black Edition, Excerpt Two

Here you are, folks: a hot buttered serving of the (hopefully) forthcoming memoir from me and Jonny Walls. As with Jonny's excerpt, this picks up right in the middle of a much, much longer tale (and is not a continuation of his previously posted section). This section, narrated by yours truly, finds our weary heroes ascending Goatfell, a mountain on the coast of a Scottish isle.

Follow me on Twitter @JoshACorman (if you're a literary agent, may I say that you're quite intelligent and good-looking and have impeccable taste in shoes)

By Josh Corman

It isn't long before we notice the steady stream of people walking in the opposite direction. Almost every one of them is replete with elaborate hiking gear: walking sticks, heavy coats, sunglasses, and hiking boots.

"I suddenly feel very under-prepared." I say, "These people look like they're returning from the summit of Everest.

"It can’t be that bad. We'll follow the trail as far as we can. Let's get out of these trees and see what it looks like."

I keep quiet and stay a few paces behind Jonny, taking the occasional slug from my water bottle. Soon we emerge from the lowest part of the trail and the landscape opens up completely. A good distance beyond the edge of the trees, I stop and step off of the trail toward a small stream.

"Too tired to go on, eh?"

"Just refilling my water bottle."

"What? Just in the stream there? You're just going to drink water form some stream?" Jonny, it's safe to say, has an issue with germs. He would say he has a healthy respect for them, and it's true. But at times it goes beyond that. Once, after fixing tea at his house, I tapped the handle of a tea strainer on the sink to knock off excess water after washing it, and after I put the strainer on the dish rack, he picked it up and washed it off again before putting it in the drawer. I love to give him a hard time about it, even though I'm the one who will probably die of some infection because I don't wash my hands before every meal.

I dip my bottle into the flow and withdraw it, filled  to the top with cold, glistening water. For good measure, I hold the bottle up to the light and admire its clarity. (Spare me the lecture, science-folk. I know bacteria are microscopic, but it’s as clear as could be, not even a speck of refuse.)

"There isn't anything above us on the mountain, no runoff from anything but snow and rain. If I was drinking from a fetid, stagnant pool of brown water, I'd worry, but I'm thirsty." As I lift the bottle to my lips, Jonny recoils, as if I'm about to pour a vial of hemlock down my throat. I gulp down nearly half the bottle and stoop to refill it. "It's delicious. Best water I've ever had, literally." I’m laying it on a little thick, but the water is cold and quenching. When I extend the bottle to Jonny, he declines.

The traffic heading back down the mountain remains heavy for another twenty minutes. It makes me a little nervous to see all of these people (several of whom shoot us puzzled looks as they pass), who so clearly know what they're doing, getting out of Dodge while we amateurs march on. But march on we do. We reach a point where the incline becomes even steeper and the ground is dotted with rocks the size of medicine balls and larger. The previous days' travel catches up with me all at once, and I grab a seat on one of the rocks while Jonny strays from the path, attracted by a small waterfall about a hundred yards to our left. The weather has changed and a thick mist clings to the mountaintop and hides the sun. I'm reminded of Emyn Muil from The Lord of the Rings and find it easy to see how Tolkien used Britain's landscapes to paint Middle-Earth in true colors. The wind gusts and howls and long brown grasses sway in rhythmic union and even though I'm tired and cold, I know that I've never seen anything quite like this. When Jonny returns, he wears a smile, and I'm glad he's here to force me along.

The trail soon peters out almost entirely and my exhaustion tells me that this would be a fine place to stop, turn around, and proceed to the sustenance of a hearty meal and the warmth of Brodick House.

A friend is supposed to support you, but he is also supposed to do what's best for you, not only what is pleasant. Jonny notices the similarities to Tolkien's world as well, and he keeps the conversation in that line, presumably to take my mind off of just how tired I really am. I see right through it but don't have the energy to protest. "Come on," Jonny says. "Let's get up there to that ridge just under the peak. We won't be able to get any higher than that, but that ridge looks out over everything. We can at least say we made it that far."

I stumble on, but soon we’re stopping every hundred yards or so because of me.

"Corman, pretend there are Orcs on your trail. Just a little farther." Jonny, it turns out, makes quite the Samwise Gamgee. I stand, and instead of traipsing past a few dozen more rocks and sitting again to catch my breath, I am possessed by the utterly foolish notion that if I sprint as fast and hard as I can over the brittle, uneven terrain, I'll make it to our stopping point in one go and then we can simply turn around and fall back to the base of the damned mountain. So I run. I hurtle rocks and cut like a running back into open spaces and up, farther and farther, until the ridge is right in front of me. The ridge itself ends in a cliff face that plunges seventy-five degrees towards the sea below and runs parallel with the coast that extends from the beach across from Mike and Nan's house all the way around the island. From our point on the ridge, the peak of Goatfell rises sharply to our left, blocking out any view of the far side of the island. I nearly collapse onto a rock at a spot perhaps six hundred feet from the summit.

Moments later Jonny is beside me, though I don't really remember him getting there, and I momentarily wonder if I blacked out. The mist is heavy as rain, and my puny cotton zip-up hoodie is rapidly absorbing moisture. My hair is soaked, my shoes are soaked, my jeans are clinging to my legs, and like a child I wipe my running nose on my sleeve. When I finally look up and out over the water, the seeming incongruity of the view is alarming. To the right, the entirety of Arran Isle is laid out before us. Sheep graze in their pastures. Hills and farmland beyond the coast roll and merge with dense forest. Taxis and tiny cars cruise the narrow road just off the beach and inward away from the water. The shadows and mist that have engulfed us do not touch what lies below. Sunlight covers everything we can see, and in the distance we can even glimpse the mainland, kept at bay by the sea.

"This is unbelievable," I manage.

"Look at the difference," Jonny muses. "Behind us it looks like Mordor's doorstep, but out here it's perfect."

I stand and walk nearer to the edge, surveying the world in front of me as though it wouldn't be there if I closed my eyes and opened them again. "You know what," I say. "This is simultaneously the worst and the coolest thing I've ever done."

Jonny laughs at me, but it's the truth. I could have stayed down at the bottom of the mountain and drunk tea, and it would have been fine. I could have stopped half-way up the mountain, seen the peak, and gone back without feeling like I had missed all that much. It would have felt fine, but that's it. It would not have actually been fine, because I would have short-changed myself, all because climbing a mountain is hard.

Damn straight it's hard. But if it weren't as hard, then the view wouldn't be half as sweet. And honestly, the only thing that ends up making any difference is how sweet the view is.

By Josh Corman

Real Life Series: Don't Drink It 'Til It's Black Edition

Excerpt From a Book by Josh Corman and Jonny Walls. This Section by Jonny Walls

A few important words about this post. The following is an excerpt from Don't Drink It 'Til It's Black, the (in development) true memoir of Josh Corman's and my 2007 trip to Britain. The memoir is co-written by the two of us. Roughly half is written by me, in my first person voice, the other half by Josh, in his voice.

Unlike past Real Life Series entries, what you are about to read is not, in any way, a fully formed short story with a clear beginning, middle, and end. This is an excerpt lifted straight out of the middle of a larger story. Also, it should be noted that, as of the time of this writing, we are still on the second draft of the memoir, and further polishing and improving may occur to all sections presented here.

This section of the story finds Corman and me on a bus, racing up the coast of Scotland. We've just gotten off a ferry which brought us over from Ireland. The ferry was late arriving, causing all passengers to miss a train that had been waiting for us. So, the company that owns the ferry has called in an emergency bus to take us all up the coast to a different train station where we can hopefully catch trains to our various destinations before they stop making runs for the night.

Look for another random DDITIB excerpt from Corman on Friday. Enjoy.  

Excerpt from Don't Drink It 'Til It's Black

In a matter of minutes we’re lumbering our way up the coast via a precariously high and thin road. More fields of devastating green stretch out to our right, illuminated in patches by the waning sunlight bursting through an occasional hole in the clouds. On the left the coast swings in and out of sight, terribly striking, and a good 150 feet down the cliffs we so speedily traverse.

I’m beginning to feel a Richie-like fear when another phenomenon commands my attention. I realize all at once that we’re embroiled in a classic, childhood, school bus situation. Corman and I, along with a number of other mild mannered or elderly groups, are huddled in the first few rows of the bus. We’re the Good Kids. The back, however, is under the reign of the Bad Kids. The difference now is that they aren’t throwing raisins out the window or rolling apples up the aisle or even puncturing holes in the upholstery seats. They’re piss drunk. All of them. Evidently the boat ride over from Ireland was more of a party cruise for this bunch than the pragmatic mode of transportation it was for the rest of us. Soon, the general revelry is spilling out of their private party in the back and being directed at the front of the bus.

“Hey, driver! We need some more booze back here!”

“Ruddy’ right Charlie! Driver, there was booze on that boat! Why aint’ you got any for us, eh?”

They seem good-natured enough for all of their loud mouthed carousing, but I strongly hope they don’t find any reason to yell at the guy up front in the Notre Dame hoodie. Slightly amused and more than a tad uncomfortable, I force myself to continue enjoying the splendid passing scenery.

Moments later someone hurriedly brushes my arm. I glance up to see Charlie or some other sloppy drunk from the back making his way to the driver carrying what looks like a chili sack lunch without the bowl.

“Driver, my friend gone ‘n hurled in this bag. Where should I put it?”

To my amazement, the driver, who has held a respectable level of stoicism up to this point, straight up stonewalls the drunk. Glances are exchanged among us good kids, all wondering the same thing. How will this play out?

"Driver, didn't you hear me? I've got this vomit here, and the lads all have to piss."

The driver keeps his eyes on the road and doesn't say a word as if this is all business as usual. Hell, maybe this is business as usual. Maybe, like the cheeseburger joint owner in Dublin, this is just another Sunday afternoon in the Scottish bus driving world. Maybe there’s a training program for these guys. I can hear the instructor in my mind, straight out of Full Metal Jacket: “You WILL encounter drunk men on the job. LOTS of them. You must ignore them. You will make them think they don’t exist. Hell, they DON’T exist! That is the ONLY way to deal with a drunk Scotsman!”

His speech is followed by a rigorous training course where inexperienced, soft willed drivers are subjected to the worst drunken taunts imaginable while operating a bus-driving simulator. Only the strongest survive the full course, and none go without at least one lapse into tears. This man before me was clearly the best in class.

The drunk turns unsurely back to his seat, barf bag in hand. Our heroic driver’s eyes flit to the left for only the scantest of split seconds, and I know that I’ve witnessed a master at work. A true genius. This man is unflappable. We are on a course to make up lost time, to get a bus full of eager tourists to a train in the small town of Ayr to make up for his company’s late boat. This is the hour he has been training for. He drives for us, the good kids. He drives for honor. And nothing can derail that. Ignoring a chorus of cries from the back, he drives on.

Ten minutes later the bus is on the side of the road and a line of fifteen shit-faced Scotsmen pee into the bushes. The sight is amusing, but I’m forced to shelf the hope that I’m in the care of one of the last true heroes on the bus-driving circuit. Yes, every man has his price, or his limit, as it were, and fifteen drunken Scotsmen begging for a roadside pee-break proved more than our fallen hero could withstand. My shameless optimism has let me down this time. We roll on a few minutes later, and I go north a wiser man.

Excerpt From a Book by Josh Corman and Jonny Walls. This Section by Jonny Walls

Death of the Cool: A Defense of Cameron Crowe

One of these things is not like the others.

Follow me on Twitter @JoshACorman

By Josh Corman 

I once tried to write about Cameron Crowe.

What I Wish Had Happened: I poured myself a drink, brought a stack of records to the desk, threw on side one of Bruce Springsteen’s Darkness on the Edge of Town, cracked my knuckles, and typed without stopping (except to flip the record or raise my glass, of course) on my Smith-Corona Galaxie XII typewriter until I had produced nearly 2,000 flawless words about a man in whom I am very much interested, the venerable Mr. Cameron Crowe. 

You see, if I were writing about Cameron Crowe, I would have to get myself into a Cameron Crowe state of mind (or so the logic went). 

What Really Happened: I curled up in my bed, secluded (the better to concentrate, I told myself), intent on writing about Cameron Crowe. No drink, no vinyl, no typewriter. There may have been 2,000 words somewhere along the line, but most of them are deleted. Three or four different false starts later, I finally scrapped the piece and rescued something from my “works in progress” folder and shaped it up for a residence on this site. 

What’s Happening Now: More than a month later, I sit at my desk, having at it one more time. Drink: yes. Records: no (iTunes will have to do). Typewriter: Never even owned one. Cameron Crowe: Finally, yes. 

“The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with somebody when you are uncool.”

Go ahead, read it again.

One more time. Seriously.

If you’ve got guts, read it aloud.

I’ll give you a minute.

...

Let me just tell you that there are some things I wish that I’d written. As far as single sentences go, that one is at the top of my list. The profound sense of envy I feel about not having written that line is compounded by my even more profound envy I have towards the person who actually did write it. You guessed it: Cameron Crowe.

The bastard.

The line, delivered by Philip Seymour Hoffman’s note-perfect Lester Bangs, comes from Crowe’s magnum opus, Almost Famous, which loosely recreates Crowe’s teenage years when he scored a job writing for Rolling Stone and toured the country with The Allman Brothers’ Band, Led Zeppelin, Neil Young, and The Who. OK, so envy doesn’t adequately describe the feeling. I actually feel wronged by Cameron Crowe, like he’s cheated me out of experiences that I might have, nay, should have gloriously lived out if I had been a fifteen-year-old prodigy in Southern California in 1973. I should hate the guy, right? I should find his films insufferable or pretentious. The schadenfreude potential is enormous, folks.

But I actually kind of love him.

And it isn’t that Crowe is a particularly great director. He’s good, certainly. He’s got a (usually) deft ear for clever dialogue (Lloyd Dobler’s career speech in Say Anything; most of Jerry Maguire and Almost Famous), he’s crafted his share of memorable moments (Say Anything’s so-iconic-as-to-have-suffered-the-unjust-fate-of-becoming-overrated “boombox scene,” the “You had me at hello” and “Show me the money!” scenes from Jerry Maguire, the “Tiny Dancer” scene from Almost Famous) and characters (Dobler; Maguire, nearly everyone in Almost Famous), and he’s got a bold streak to boot (Vanilla Sky).

Despite this respectable accumulation of artistic achievement, Crowe routinely falls short of greatness. His movies are almost always too long, the plots are frequently circuitous to the point of distraction (even his masterpiece is guilty, though I’m charmed rather than annoyed by it in that case), and he’s drawn stilted performances from his lead actors on more than one occasion (Renee Zellweger in Maguire, Orlando Bloom in Elizabethtown). Even his oft-praised encyclopedic knowledge of—and deep-seated love for—pop music has grown into as much of a crutch as a weapon.

So he’s what, a middle-aged director with a huge stack of vinyls who charts at the high end of average and who only puts out slightly more than two films a decade?

Well, no. Not quite. That is, he may be those things, but he also possesses at least one other salient quality that keeps me from dismissing the guy as a one and two-halves hit wonder as some of the “serious” film-going world has. The best illustration of this particular quality is Crowe’s much-maligned (as in, the professional and amateur film critics of the world got together and voted to enact a social mandate threatening a public flogging to anyone who expressed genuine appreciation for this film; see M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village) 2005 pet project, Elizabethtown.

The movie tells the story of a prodigal son’s journey (warning!) to retrieve his father’s body (repeat: warning!). On the way, he meets a quirky flight attendant (WARNING!) who opens his eyes (For the love of God, somebody do SOMETHING!) to the spirit of adventure and empathy (CRASH!), and leads him via mix-tape on a cross-country journey of self-discovery. (That sound you hear is the orchestra still playing as the icy water slowly fills the ruptured hull of the Titanic.) Elizabethtown is, by any measure, an act of self-indulgent directorial gluttony. I should hate this movie, just like most people do.

But I actually kind of love it.

That quality of Crowe’s I mentioned earlier can best be described as a painfully earnest desire to get to the root of what makes us afraid of the world around us, and it positively drips from Elizabethtown. Orlando Bloom’s character (Drew Baylor) is emotionally able to go on his film-ending road trip only after suffering a spectacular, career-ending failure, being harassed by his family into realizing that he barely knew his father, and having all of his sophisticated affectations exposed by a series of people who challenge the one thing he clings to most fiercely: his coolness. There, I suspect, lies some of the explanation for the vitriol surrounding Elizabethtown. We see movies where a loss of cool is necessary for a character’s self-realization as trite and cheesy. As the parent of a two-year-old, I can vouch for the stunning number of children’s movies in which this same general character arc is present.

If the connection seems flippant, I’m sorry. It isn’t meant to be. We associate the themes Crowe so often explores as childish and unworthy of serious adult consideration, especially when they’re explored as un-ironically as Crowe does in his films. I say films because when I think about it, every film of his that I’ve seen (all but Singles and the newly released We Bought a Zoo) features a character who is stripped of his cool on his way to the tale’s climax. In Say Anything, it’s Dianne (Ione Skye’s character) whose Class President sheen is stripped away as she fumbles her way through normal social experiences and her relationship with her father crumbles. Jerry Maguire falls from grace and is rescued from professional and relational hell only after making a fool of himself on a grand scale and realizing that he isn’t too good for his wife. Both Penny and Russell in Almost Famous are nearly reduced to rubble before their epiphanies arrive. Even in Vanilla Sky, a film he didn't write, David Aames is brought low from his days as an invincible playboy by a relationship he plays a little too coolly.

Why does any of this matter? How does it make Cameron Crowe anything more than a mediocre director who’s a total sap on top of everything else? It matters because I hold a special place in my heart for people who really, violently mean what they say, even when what they say is on the hokey side. It’s the same reason I love Bob Dylan and Neil Young despite the considerable gap between their artistic ambition and the quality of their voices. They mean what they sing so intensely that their depth of feeling overcomes flaws that seem more and more inconsequential the more you listen to their music.

If Dylan and Neil were cool, they would never have opened their mouths. If Lloyd Dobler were cool he would have never blasted “In Your Eyes” from that boom box to a girl who’d broken his heart. If Jerry McGuire were cool, he never would have saved his marriage. Russell Hammond wouldn’t have given William that final interview. Drew Baylor never would’ve truly appreciated his father. These people can't be saved as long as they're cool. Cameron Crowe believes fundamentally that coolness is a false currency, a shield that we use to protect ourselves from the most frightening, vital aspects of the world around us, and he can’t help but show us how fervently he believes it, over and over again. You know why? 

Because Cameron Crowe is uncool.

By Josh Corman

Follow me on Twitter @JoshACorman