Slaughterhouse 3 - Page 4

4: 1-3 and beyond

The old telephone game—how a sentence can change going through a chain of ears and mouth.  What is the nature of adaptation (a subject so exquisitely handled in the movie of the same name)? Are you adapting the plot and the characters, the emotional appeal, the source material’s sub-texts? And each medium brings a different set of tools, rules and expectations.

Even when a movie is remade—there are six film versions of Little Women—changes can be made, if only to better match the audience and available technologies, if not to add the director’s creative re-vision.

Probably we’ve all been disappointed by film adaptations of novels we loved. The only example I can think of a novel that to me worked better as a film was Cloud Atlas, with the film shuffling together the six stories well, instead of keeping them only halved as the book did. In judging any medium, subjectivity is unavoidable. The novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is narrated by Chief Bromden. The movie is focused majorly on Jack Nicholson’s character, McMurphy. I played Bromden in a college production—Cuckoo’s Nest was a play before it was a movie—and my prejudice against the movie’s choice of emphasis kept me from enjoying it fully.

One way of comparing the three Slaughterhouses is focus. The novel is focused on multiplicity. The horror of the war somewhat speaks for itself, but there’s so much more being commented on here, including the nature of story-telling. The graphic novel focusses strongly on the war, while including enough of the other aspects of Bily’s life for me to wonder how much he was permanently damaged by the war. The movie makes many parts a little louder and more hectic, but doesn’t give me a Billy I can focus on, though that probably wasn’t its intent.

One of the things I’d wondered about when I started this essay was the difference between creation and adaptation. Both of the adaptations display a strong range of artistic skills. As a creator, I know the exhilarating energy when the poem first comes out. There’s nothing like it. I also get great, but different, satisfaction when I put on my editor hat (though my creator brain is just beneath.)

Maybe I liked the movie least of these three because I saw little creativity expanding or altering the world of the novel. North, Monteys et. al. infused the graphic novel with a variety of creative bubbles, sometimes expanding Vonnegut’s energy, sometimes taking it a little appropriately afield. But it’s the novel that shines the brightest. To a large extent because it’s the original, but also because a novel is (usually) a single person’s vision and effort. I swear there’s something special in that singularity which few multi-person creations can match.