Maybe we shouldn't call them "adaptations"
Jun. 4th, 2015 01:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
yendiSo I've been doing some thinking about Starship Troopers, thanks to Chester Himes.
See, I read Himes's classic hardboiled novel A Rage in Harlem last week, and it was superb. Some over-the-top stuff (his Harlem cops, Coffin Ed and Gravedigger Jones, at one point walk into the police station after a brawl has broken out between cops and hookers and fire their guns into the ceiling), but also some characters worthy of Westlake, and one of (if not the) first hardboiled books written by an African-American author and featuring an almost-entirely African-American cast of characters. I do highly recommend the book (whose sequel I'm planning on picking up soon), and note that Samuel Jackson reads the audio version.
But near the end, I realized that one of the characters seemed familiar, and a quick google suggested that yes, I'd seen the movie of the same name over twenty years ago. The movie is a lot of fun, but it is, at best, loosely inspired by the novel.
Starship Troopers, of course, is a great movie, and unquestionably better than Heinlein's dated novel by any reasonable standard. But it takes a huge amount of grief for being barely inspired by the original.
And I do get that. I mean, if the title is "Starship Troopers," you, as a consumer, have a not-unreasonable set of expectations based on the book.
We can say, of course that both ARiH and ST are "inspired by" their books, but that's a term that, if accurate, isn't complete. I mean, Total Recall is inspired by "We Can Remember it for you Wholesale." But there's a stronger connection than "inspired by" in both of these works; there are themes, characters, and plot points that do connect to the work, even if they go off in different directions.
We need a good word that splits the difference. "Inspirdaption" is a terrible choice here, and "adaptspiration" isn't much better, but since people love their portmanteaus, I figure they're starting points.
Of course, we could always just get collectively okay with some linguistic drift in filmmaking, but given how upset folks get at drift in general, I don't have high hopes there. In the meantime, I'm going to track down a copy of the movie version of ARiH to see how it holds up.
ETA: After reading someone complaining about the upcoming Scream TV series, I realize that TV adaptations of movies are also fair game (Hannibal and Friday the Thirteenth come to mind).
*Adhering faithfully to the novel is not a reasonable standard of quality.
See, I read Himes's classic hardboiled novel A Rage in Harlem last week, and it was superb. Some over-the-top stuff (his Harlem cops, Coffin Ed and Gravedigger Jones, at one point walk into the police station after a brawl has broken out between cops and hookers and fire their guns into the ceiling), but also some characters worthy of Westlake, and one of (if not the) first hardboiled books written by an African-American author and featuring an almost-entirely African-American cast of characters. I do highly recommend the book (whose sequel I'm planning on picking up soon), and note that Samuel Jackson reads the audio version.
But near the end, I realized that one of the characters seemed familiar, and a quick google suggested that yes, I'd seen the movie of the same name over twenty years ago. The movie is a lot of fun, but it is, at best, loosely inspired by the novel.
Starship Troopers, of course, is a great movie, and unquestionably better than Heinlein's dated novel by any reasonable standard. But it takes a huge amount of grief for being barely inspired by the original.
And I do get that. I mean, if the title is "Starship Troopers," you, as a consumer, have a not-unreasonable set of expectations based on the book.
We can say, of course that both ARiH and ST are "inspired by" their books, but that's a term that, if accurate, isn't complete. I mean, Total Recall is inspired by "We Can Remember it for you Wholesale." But there's a stronger connection than "inspired by" in both of these works; there are themes, characters, and plot points that do connect to the work, even if they go off in different directions.
We need a good word that splits the difference. "Inspirdaption" is a terrible choice here, and "adaptspiration" isn't much better, but since people love their portmanteaus, I figure they're starting points.
Of course, we could always just get collectively okay with some linguistic drift in filmmaking, but given how upset folks get at drift in general, I don't have high hopes there. In the meantime, I'm going to track down a copy of the movie version of ARiH to see how it holds up.
ETA: After reading someone complaining about the upcoming Scream TV series, I realize that TV adaptations of movies are also fair game (Hannibal and Friday the Thirteenth come to mind).
*Adhering faithfully to the novel is not a reasonable standard of quality.