"The Seeker"

Ever since “The Seeker” came out, I’ve been thinking a lot about books that get made into movies – specifically childhood favorites that are butchered during the transition from page to screen. I didn’t have high hopes for The Dark is Rising making a successful transfer, and when I re'ad reviews mentioning an army of snakes led by an albino cobra (!!!), I knew that this was one movie I’d skip.

My jaundiced views about film adaptations date to childhood. I wasn’t a big movie-goer, and I’m not sure when it occurred to me that books sometimes became movies. I’m quite sure that I didn’t see “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” (1971) on its first run because I saw it at the University Theater in Berkeley, a funky old theater that showed a different double feature every day. Also, I’m pretty sure that I first read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in 2nd grade, and I saw the movie after that. In any case, I remember it as one would remember some traumatizing event of one’s youth – it ranks up there with the death of my pet fish. From the first moment that Gene Wilder walked onto the screen as Willy Wonka, I sat in outrage. How, how, how could the filmmakers have gotten it all wrong? Willy Wonka didn’t look like that. The title was incorrect. And on and on. The final indignity was the great glass elevator, which wasn’t all clear, but instead looked like a gilded garlic clove.

This should have prepared me for the animated version of Charlotte’s Web in 1973. I badgered my mother to take me to it when it was first released, full of misguided expectations that I would see something that matched my inner visuals. This experience is not branded into my memory the same way as “Willy Wonka” is, but I do remember my mother grumbling about my ingratitude when I complained all the way home about the inferior adaptation.

Since then, I have avoided movies based on my favorites…Disney’s version of The Black Cauldron? Skipped it. “A Ring of Endless Light,” with Mischa Barton as Vicky Austin? No way.

And yet, I have found that I don’t have to dismiss all adaptations. When I saw the first Harry Potter movie, I was thrilled because it looked exactly the way I had imagined – the Great Hall with its long tables and floating candles most of all. I know that movie was criticized for its slavish following of the book, but for me, it was just what was needed; the subsequent movies have departed more from the sequels, but they retain the overall look and feel of the originals, and so I have enjoyed them as well. Have I mellowed as I get older? Or do I just have a different perspective because of my field, in which I regularly read interpretations of ancient texts? When it comes to ancient works, I understand that translations are acts of interpretation, and I may or may not agree with the translators’ priorities. In addition, I regularly teach that myth in antiquity was fluid and changed in retellings according to the requirements of genre and generation. So why not modern film adaptations?

With this new perspective, I’ve been able to watch some film versions of beloved childhood stories. The live-action “Charlotte’s Web” from 2006 retained the look of the Garth Williams illustrations in my well-thumbed volume, and I have to admit that I didn’t really notice changes from the text, although there surely were some. And to my delight, Tim Burton’s “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” (2005) finally exorcised the demons raised by the earlier version. Burton restored the original title, but in fact his rendering is even further from the original than the Gene Wilder one: his phantasmagoric version is interspersed with Willy Wonka’s troubled flashbacks, and the Oompa Loompas perform a whole series of genre song ‘n’ dance spectacles. But it works. It’s funny, irreverent, and I loved it. Oh, and the great glass elevator looks right.

But I’m still not going to go see “The Seeker.”