Рик Муди - The Creature Lurches From the Lagoon

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I liked going down to the set when they were making the movie of my book. I also liked leaving the set. Mostly I went while they filmed on location in New Canaan, Connecticut, because it was easy to get there. They filmed, the first day, in the park where I had once played intramural soccer. Soccer was the one sport I was good at back then, and I couldn’t help but feel that the triumph of my career as a soccer player would stand the film in good stead. Yet there were all these people around, big union guys driving trucks, trailers everywhere, a guy whose job it was to stand around looking like Kevin Kline until the real Kevin Kline was through with makeup, etc. It took two or three hours, this one setup, and by the end of it I was bored as hell. When I had imagined the story, in 1989 or 1990, somewhere back there, it was about isolation in New Canaan, about the ways that the WASPs of the Northeast could sit surrounded by people, nonetheless besieged by loneliness. Now here was this gigantic production, with Teamsters, arc lamps, hair and makeup people. Would it be possible for all these people to produce this silence, this conversational fear, this embarrassment and discomfort of Northeastern WASPs on a crowded and disordered set; would it be possible for them to create the illusion of things they didn’t have around them and perhaps had never experienced? This gets to the uncanny feeling of adaptation, and by this I mean the uncanny in the way Sigmund Freud used the word: familiarity and discomfort in equal measure. Unheimlich. My experience was made all the more unheimlich in that the crews were actually in my hometown, one of my hometowns, anyway, and had requested permission to film at my old junior high school, right across the street from the park. This request was apparently denied when the town of New Canaan got a look at the script and, thereafter, at the book (they’d ignored my novel when it was first published). My own town refused to allow filming at my junior high! They said the book didn’t reflect New Canaan’s spirit! What could be a better example of das unheimlich ?At least for this sojourner in the unearthly realm of adaptation. Eventually you begin to forget your childhood and remember only the photos yellowing in albums in the closet and you adhere to these photos as though they were themselves the memories. But even if the movie of your novel is not filmed in your hometown, das unheimlich still obtains, because of the collision of your imagination with the collectivity of the film crew, the director, the producers, the studio suits, the director of photography, the editor, etc. As when I saw the final cut: on a gray day in January of 1997. Ang and James invited me to one of those plush, underpopulated screening rooms in midtown with seats so comfortable that they ruin the local theater by comparison. There were six people in attendance, Ang Lee, James Schamus, myself, my father, my partner, Amy, and a foreign-distribution person I didn’t meet. Ang sat right behind me throughout, so that on top of other ironies I worried that I might sneeze or shift uncomfortably in a way that would make a mockery of the seriousness of his work. I remember beginning to sob at some point toward the end of Ang Lee’s Ice Storm, partly out of relief ( because the movie was so good I wouldn’t have to simulate pleasantries afterward ), partly because it was genuinely sad, but also because the story before me was so removed from my own imagining that it was no longer necessary to think of it as my own. I had successfully given away my book, and this was a bittersweet thing. The movie, that is, is the fraternal twin of your novel. Same family, but with only coincidental resemblances. The night they screened The Ice Storm at the New Canaan Playhouse das unheimlich became actual and environmental: there was a winter storm. The trees and power lines and sidewalks and roads of my hometown were coated in ice.

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The film world has too much riding on its investments to be less than beautiful. Not since my adolescence had I felt like the ugliest, most awkward person in a room, but I sure felt that way during the year or so they were making the movie of my book. For example, when I went to rehearsals, and met the principal actors in the film, Kevin Kline, Joan Allen, Tobey Maguire, and Christina Ricci. I was really scared, of course. I had never met a movie star before, not even once, hadn’t even seen one up close. Nonetheless, James Schamus, the producer and screenwriter, asked me to come to a rehearsal and have lunch with the actors who were supposed to play the Hood family in The Ice Storm. I think the idea was that Tobey Maguire, who was saddled with the burden of the Rick Moody part in the film, should see what an awkward and eccentric guy I was, in preparation for his performance. What I took away from that luncheon (besides the incredible brightness and intensity of the actors, particularly Joan Allen and Kevin Kline) was how beautiful everyone in the movie was. Of course, this had nothing to do with the book. The characters in the book looked like real people. They had bad skin, multiple canker sores, glasses. They were puffy, they didn’t exercise enough. These actors, on the other hand, were beautiful. They were so beautiful that you couldn’t think of anything to say in their company, except You are incredibly beautiful! Sometimes I was irritated by all this beauty, since it didn’t seem to have anything to do with my vision of how people lived. And at the party after the opening of the film Sigourney Weaver came up to me to thank me for writing the book and held my hand for a moment, and I was completely seduced and charmed and grateful that the actress Sigourney Weaver had read my book and was holding my hand for a moment. Still, at the same time, I couldn’t help but feel that the culture of movies (leaving aside Sigourney and the kindness of her gesture) was trying to tell me something: We make beauty, and we are going to give you access to our beauty, and we hope that you will go back out there and say nice things about us. I would like to oblige, really. But is this beauty true ?

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If there’s a word that best summarizes my feeling about my own adaptation and those of some of my acquaintances, that word is ambivalence. Do I think that the film world and everything it touches is venal, cutthroat, cruel, thoughtless, careless, heartless, boorish, dim-witted, and sinister? Pretty much, I do. Do I think that book publishing, and therefore the endeavor of writing, can be just as bad? Yes, I do. Do I regret having signed the option agreement in my own case? No, I do not. Would I advise others to do so? Under the right circumstances, yes. Do I think that most people who sign option agreements have pleasant experiences? No, I think most of them suffer. Is suffering noble and good? Yes, in some cases. How do I reconcile all of these divergent and in some cases diametrically opposed opinions? I reconcile them by saying that these lines I have written here are written, and when what is written closes in on a true record of human behavior, it frequently finds that the behavior of humans, however well-meaning, is ambivalent, paradoxical, contradictory, morally ambiguous. Human consciousness evades tidy depictions. Human consciousness lists where it will; one day it’s at the movies, next day it’s taken up with chess, or baseball, or the best way to win money at the casinos, or how to beat the IRS. One day human consciousness wants to love all the children with HIV, the next day it wants to blow up thousand-year-old religious idols in the desert. To be human is to be, by turns, sacred and profane, magnificent and contemptible, light and dark, mirthful and humorless, and human consciousness can’t be contained in most of the vessels that would house it. Heroes and villains are one and the same, they have the same shape, they are indistinguishable, they ride the same color horses, and men in black are no more likely to kill than are men in lavender; great orators smack their kids; our leaders are failed family men and women. That doesn’t make them bad. All is ambivalence, all is complicated and strange, and try getting that into a movie. Go ahead and try.