Saturday, December 12, 2009
MA (Epptab) (distance learning)
My studies for this degree continue and so continuing to ponder about synopses, first discussed on 10 December. I have now decided that one can categorise writings into two categories. Category 1, where the point is to teach someone about something, to persuade someone of the truth of some novel proposition or to persuade someone to do something. The someone might be singular or plural, male, female or other and the consumption of the writing is not an end in itself, rather a means to an end. One might call these action writings. Category 2, where the consumption is the end in itself. There might be some educational subtext but the main idea is to enjoy or otherwise appreciate the thing itself. One might call these fun writings. Most poetry and much fiction will fall into category 2, although few writers of posh fiction resist the temptation to preach (and thus drift towards category 1) altogether. The relevance of all this to synopses and headings being that one is much more likely to provide aids of this sort in writings of category 1. Category 1 is not apt to be fun so you have to work to get people to read it. The whole point of category 2 is that it is fun (of some sort anyway) and that aids are not necessary. People pay you to consume rather than the other way around.
Having done that one to death I now move onto the second course unit, on how to build a television drama out of fiction. We take as our text the Poirot story, repeated on ITV3 recently, called 'The Cornish Mystery'. See http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0676170/. For those who may have missed it, the story concerns the wife of a country dentist who was apparently arsenicked by her dentist husband who wants to get off with his nurse, but whom Poirot works out was actually arsenicked by a local shopkeeper who wants to get off with the money. Mr Amazon supplies the original text, published in the US and priced in dollars despite also appearing to have something to do with Penguin.
The first thing I learn is that the original story ran to just 17 pages. So the adaptation has turned 17 pages into an hour, whereas the adaptation of 300 rather bigger pages of Jane Austen might turn into six hours. So no surprise that the Poirot adaptation works by adding things to the original story while the Austen adaptation works by subtracting things. Assuming the function from number of pages to running time to be continuous, there must be a break even point where the adaptation contains no more and no less than what was in the original.
The second thing is that the original story is told in the first person by Captain Hastings. There is a landlady but there is no Miss Lemon, making the original set-up much more like that of Sherlock Holmes than that which appears on telly.
The third thing is that the villain is called Jacob in both versions. Which struck me when reading the story as a bit of mild anti-semitism, fairly rife at the time of writing, even in this country. But Mr G. offers no support for my theory that the name is more common among Jews than Gentiles. But it does tell me that my given name, James, is derived from the same Hebrew root as Jacob.
The fourth thing, is the scenes which have been added to the telly version. We have the business of Hastings and his regime, his diet and his exercises. Inspector Japp does not appear at all in the original story. The telly version makes much of train journeys and antique cars which appear but are not a big deal in the original story, being more or less contemporary with it. The telly version adds a midnight meeting of the dentist and his nurse, a visit by Poirot to the villain's shop, an attempted visit by Hastings to the dentist who turns out not to be the villain, a funeral, a reading of the will, and an exhumation. The doctor is made to be more of a prat on telly than he is on the page. And Poirot does not talk in a foreign accent on the page, does not include much Belgish and does not talk about the vox populi.
The fifth thing is a small number of few minor changes. Poirot does not meet the victim in the rain on the page but he does write out a full confession for the villain to sign. Last but not least, on the page Poirot honours his word to give the villain a 24 hours start. On telly this is presumably thought to be giving the villain too much leeway and is not to be tolerated on prime time telly which might possibly be watched by children in addition to the elderly. So Poirot is made to break his word. Maybe a serious point here in that 100 years ago a gentleman's word was his bond. Not to be broken. An episode (when he lies to save the situation, but the lie turns out to be true so he remains a gent. after all) in a Hornblower story depends on this. A famous play starring Al Pacino depends on the written version, that is to say where a gentleman's signature, rather than his word, was his bond. But are we better or worse off that this is no longer anything like as true as it was? Or have things not really changed at all? Have I just overdosed on the Daily Mail?
All in all, a decent if slight story adapted in an entirely fair way to the box. Quite clever how they can spin an hour out of so little material. An hour which I have watched at least twice without strain. Maybe some of the extra material has been purloined from other stories.
So now we have catalogued the differences between the adaptation and the original. The next task is to do the analysis. Why was the original expanded in the particular way that it was? To be continued after the parts that ordinary beers do not reach have been refreshed.
# posted by Jim @ 8:34 AM 
