Beware accepted opinion, it can lead you to believe silly things. Or miss things that are worth catching. These thoughts came to me recently when I watched Walt Disney’s Alice in Wonderland, the 1954 adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, It’s actually a lot better than its reputation suggests.
I have written before about Lewis Carroll, and he is an author I continually revisit. Both as an author and as a person, he is fascinating. He cannot be pinned down, and any opinion about him or his work is subject to revision. The Alice books have been adapted frequently into film, television, plays, musicals and ballets. (Has there been an opera? I don’t know.) But they are a challenge to adapt. To be honest, I don’t think I have ever seen an entirely satisfactory adaptation. A lot of the magic is in the prose, which can be hard to preserve. And the books are very episodic with no real narrative drive, which presents the greatest challenge.
Some have shoehorned a heavy-handed metaphor onto the work such as Alice growing up with the jabberwocky representing all her fears (this was the basis of a 1980s mini-series and a more recent theatrical adaptation, which was more an adaptation of the mini-series than the book. I wondered if the adaptor had read the books, to be honest.) Tim Burton took the memorable characters and shoved them into a dull quest movie in the latest film. The best adaptation I saw on stage was Christopher Hampton’s ‘Alice’s Adventures underground’, which examined the relationship between Carroll and his supposed muse through the books, with the characters represented by actors wearing Victorian costume, no animals or masks in sight. It worked rather well. He may have stolen the idea in part from Jonathan Miller’s BBC version, which was proposed as a children’s show for Christmas but became more adult in flavour. Either of Dennis Potter’s takes on the books, one for TV and the other for the cinema are also worth seeing.
The book can appear to modern eyes as rather creepy and nightmarish. However, this may be our more limited imaginations. My grandmother thought it was a lovely fairytale. When I first read it, around age twelve, I didn’t care for it much. I reread both books when I was about twenty, and haven’t stopped reading them since. What I particularly love is how the books touch on fascinating and profound ideas then just as quickly move on. It’s why they are so re-readable.
One reason people find them creepy is the idea the Lewis Carroll was a repressed paedophile, an idea that also drives many adaptations. If he was a repressed paedophile, then three cheers for Victorian sexual repression! More recently argument has been made that Carroll preferred the company of young women in their early twenties. However, this meant they were having tea and worse, visiting the theatre, behavior that should have been leading to marriage. However, he had no such intention, but he did enjoy their company. Such activity could ruin the reputation of a girl at the time, and so Dodgson referred to them as his child friends, to give the impression they were much younger and so keep their reputations, and his own, intact. After he died, his family emphasised his actual, and genuine, child friendships as evidence of his innocence and purity, perpetuating the deception that his only relationships were with children. It was only in the second half of the Twentieth century that our collective dirty minds began to put the worse possible spin on that. However, argument rages on this point.
In any case, the Alice books were written to amuse children, and the Disney film does that very well. The books themselves are so immortal that like Shakespeare’s plays, no amount of bad adaptations can kill them. And this isn’t a bad adaptation. It’s funny, visually striking, and the characterisations and voice work are strong. Our picture of Alice in blue dress with white pinafore comes more from this movie than any other source. The Tulgey Wood is one of the more interesting sequences. I think it’s inspired by the chapter The Wood with No Names in Through the Looking Glass, and is full of animals that would not look out of place in a Muppet movie. I can give no higher praise. And I have to say that The Cheshire Cat in this movie leaves the Tim Burton/Stephen Fry Cat in its wake. This movie uses incidents I’ve never seen in other adaptations, such as The Wood of No Names and the mother bird screaming “Serpent!” at the over-tall Alice. And it nicely gets past the problem of losing the narrative voice in one scene by creating a talking doorknob on the door into the Garden. All in all, enjoyable.
And while I’m bending your ear, can we get past the idea that Lewis Carroll wrote on drugs? The evidence for it is so slim; actually to call it slim is to exaggerate the amount available, and to use the word ‘evidence’ is to compliment its quality. Yet how many times do I hear people talk about doing a ‘dark’ adaptation, ‘drugs and all that’? How sad that confronted with a unique imagination, the only explanation we can come up with is drugs and/or sex. When did we as a people become so dull?
Here’s a tip; if you want to write a dark version, tot up the number of jokes about death in the book. Actually the Victorians were much more comfortable about death than we are, which is why Carroll could joke about it with children, and no-one thought to comment on it. But that is another topic, for some other time. I could also discuss the common idea that Disney films are sanitised versions of fairytales and at the same time too dark and traumatic for children to watch. Oh I could go on and on – and often I do.
No comments:
Post a Comment