Film and Fiction as Partners in an Author's Literary Development (Guest Blogger Jesse Bullington)

After addressing matters relating to history and historical fiction all week I would like to wrap things up today and tomorrow with a couple of posts that relate to other aspects of my writing. Being a writer, I talk a lot about other writers, especially those who have influenced my own writing. I’m surely not the only young buck to discover the potential of postmodernism through Italo Calvino, nor will I be the last to plot a map of my literary development from childhood fairy tales to Angela Carter. At present, though, I would like to indulge myself with an aside about another principle form of storytelling prevalent in the modern age, indeed, the only other medium of tale transference to rival the written word for most formative influence on my own storytelling. I’m talking about movies, dude.

Full disclosure: the path through the wild wood from fairy books to Angela Carter involved a shadowy figure named Neil Jordan taking me on a shortcut with his film The Company of Wolves. Like any self-respecting ten year old I was obsessed with werewolves but even consuming everything lycanthrope-related I could get my hands on I had never seen anything like Jordan’s movie, which illuminated the link between fairy tales and horror as brightly as moonlight on snow. A recent re-watch with a friend resulted in her howling with laughter at the film’s less than subtle symbolism—a flower filling with blood? Why, whatever could you be driving at, Angela?—but as a boy the film entranced me, and as adult I still rather adore it.

Full disclosure: I came to Italo Calvino through Umberto Eco, and I came to Umberto Eco through the film adaptation of The Name of the Rose. Without getting into the relative merits of casting Sean Connery as a Franciscan friar making Sherlock Holmes references centuries before Baker Street was even cobblestoned, what I’m getting at is that in addition to being their own reward and often their own story, movies introduced me to many of my favorite authors by way of cinematic adaptations that are often lampooned by fans of the original texts. A bad adaptation is just that, but even the worst of them have the potential to turn on new readers.

Full disclosure: when I was growing up my parents had a policy that if I wanted to watch an R-rated film I had to read, in its entirety, the book it was based on, and if said film was not an adaptation than too bad for me. I imagine this rule might have been amended if I picked up a copy of Tropic of Cancer in order to justify watching the star of the giant worm epic Tremors get raunchy in Henry and June, but this rule was the reason why I read Dracula as a ten year old, which I credit with getting me interested at a young age in the Gothic novel via the Victorian Gothic of Bram Stoker. Not that I didn’t try to find a loophole after reading the first few daunting pages—desperately wanting to see Francis Ford Coppola’s adaptation, featuring, as it did, both the titular vampire that certain children seem born with an innate knowledge of and the star of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, I found an abridged copy of the novel at a Scholastic book fair. My father rightly called shenanigans but offered to help me out with the genuine article, and so we read the whole thing together, which proved to be both more rewarding and far less awkward than watching the super-sexy Coppola version with my parents after the fact.

This is not to say that the only movies that impacted and influenced me were adaptations of books, I’m simply pointing out the more overt examples of film and literature intersecting in my development as a writer. I learned how to be a storyteller from hearing well-told stories, and while books were obviously crucial movies were often as not just as important, regardless of whether or not they had anything to do with a preexisting written tale. As a kid who loved films and books in equal measures I tend to conceptualize my stories in a very visual fashion, and I would not write what I do, or even how I do, without Hammer horror films, or a childhood exposure to the work of Vincent Price, Terry Gilliam, and Tim Burton, or the especially memorable film Bad Taste, made by Peter Jackson long before anyone though to give the mad Kiwi a crack at adapting The Lord of the Rings, or a thousand other films, actors, directors, screenwriters, producers, composers and costume and set designers. Films introduced me to a lot of my favorite authors but they are also fundamentally their own stories, and as such deserve just as much respect and credit as their literary cousins.

That said, I wouldn't inflict the film adaptation of Alan Moore's tremendous The Leage of Extraordinary Gentlemen on anyone or anything with a pulse. Unless, you know, that was their thing. Pain, I mean.