Adaptations of books, for web series or any other form of visual art, cannot happen without making sure that the characters bleed, sweat and cry like the ink did on the book. The experience of watching a work of adaptation is either going to make us fall to sleep or can put a dagger inside us to revive the antiparticle. Every antiparticle of a subatomic particle has the same mass with an opposite charge and magnetic field.
Similarly, if the adaptations do not bring out the mixture of association and dissociation; similarity and dissimilarity; life of a new-born and necrosis of parts of what grew up in the book, then they will fade with time. Those which behave like antiparticles do justice to the hopes and expectations of the audience that reads and then religiously waits to savor the characters manifested in their physical forms. The passage of a story begins with words, agents, and publishers to then engage with a larger audience that wishes to cherish a narrative that has the physique of a screenplay in motion.
Society is binary by nature in which a section likes to have shows adapted from books while the other section decides to enjoy how filmmakers manifest the books. Writers manifest a human body by exploring the dents, moles and passion associated with it, as its figure twitches in love, shivers in cold, and explodes in rage.
The books resist the concept of the binary and they reach only a few people who believe that there are more numbers to define humankind.
In visual arts (films and web shows), the content cannot be blurred or appropriated. The layers of the screenplay are bred and subjected to evolution. This becomes equal to the process of writing since writers do not develop a dialogue for thinking and makers must give a definitive voice to the minds of the characters etched in the pages of a book. The story reaches the audience knowing that our binary thought is going to overpower it.
The blade for an adaptation is not impermanent. It gets to pierce through the flesh of the manifested work since the characters are vivid, the emotions have no curtains to cover them and music, as an associate, walks hand-in-hand with the project. What follows is my attempt to unearth this process as stories change hands from a book and form new beginnings in a script and finally with a performance.
Normal People
Women write better than men. It is not just a statement. It is basic science. Any being that can develop the skill to hold multiple elements in mind is better than those who fail to do it. After an era of male domination in literature, women are getting equal opportunities to get published with the stories that they weave.
In contemporary times, only a few storytellers exist who can write about relationships and its remnants and resolutions like Sally Rooney does. Her novel Normal People is about two lovers Connell and Marianne who are dysfunctional and complex in their own way. Their relationship gets stitched and then rips apart as per their own psychological modulation. We get to understand that it is not a sweet romance since reality keeps on kicking us hard with modesty and ease.
The writer knows how to unwrap tension and many of us as her readers have bitten our lips in pain and licked them to heal what Sally brings through her characters. The dynamics of their relationship is an organic oxymoron, but, at the same time, authentic since most of us are oxymorons. Connell and Marianne cannot keep themselves away from each other but the distance between them is their own creation. It makes the novel unconventional but relatable; romantic but depressing; well-clothed but irresistibly naked.
Its adaptation is a warm ode to the Irish writer’s mind. Lenny Abrahamson and Hettle MacDonald knew that they needed a male actor who does not have to play hard to bring the complex yet innocent mannerisms of Connell Waldron.
Paul Mescal cemented his skill amidst British filmmakers by playing the role of Stephen Dedalus, the wild but quiet character from James Joyce’s novel The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The duo did a perfect job by casting him as the shy but intelligent Connell. Daisy Edgar-Jones, on the other hand, brought a phenomenal storm by playing Emily Gresham in the adaptation of the science fiction novel, War of the Worlds. In the series, we get to see why her portrayal of Marianne adds cinnamon to the well-cooked curry of Sally.
In the last season of Game of Thrones, we witnessed a million heartbreaks since George R.R. Martin did not put his opinion on the screenplay. Normal People invades our skin mostly because Sally Rooney was allowed to explore the screenplay, written mostly by Alice Birch and Mark O’Rowe. People who read the story found a chance to bask in its warmth since an actor’s mannerism often exceeds the intellectual dimensions of a character who lives merely inside a book.
The book did not reach the hands of people who maintain distance from romantic novels due to an influx of writers who do injustice to love. The miniseries whispered in their ears and made them visit the book.
Normal People is a perfect demonstration of how a book can protrude its body, surrender itself to a different medium knowing that it is in good hands.
It took birth in a separate body and shaped itself around the characters like bodies wear something new with changing time to make sure the exploration begins by gnawing through the new beginnings.
Also Read: New Beginnings: The Everlasting Power of Resilience and Growth
Sharp Objects
Gillian Flynn is honest about the fact that women are capable of violence too. We find it in her novel Gone Girl that made people think differently about a woman’s mind and how breakdown and desire can make women penetrate the lives of men. Before this psychological thriller, Flynn explored the psyche of vicious women in her novel, Sharp Objects.
The essentiality of feminism cannot be denied or nullified. But like every other idea, this is capable of disservice too. The writer makes sure that readers get to see the unsavory side of women since we cannot blanket their flawed needs. Exploration of the darker sides of human beings is something we keep locked as our secret. Disturbing characters exist because they come out of our reality holding the hands of an awakened observer.
This novel is about a family with a psychologically disturbed mother and her two daughters, Amma and Camille Parker. What makes it unusual is the intent of Camille to investigate and hunt down a serial killer. The story heads towards the exterior dimensions of the family to then crawl towards the interior where the minds unravel deep secrets, talk about trauma and tempt the readers to dive in it.
The orientation of the novel is not directed towards vampirizing women, rather towards tackling issues related to abuse and trauma. So, even when Gillian Flynn is giving birth to monsters, we do get to read the story of how they came into these pages. The emergence of dark elements does not get us into a limbo. In fact, it is in this very darkness that we get to see the light and feel where the source of freedom lies.
Sharp Objects
When it was announced that the director of Dallas Buyers’ Club Jean-Marc Vallee would come out with the adaptation of Sharp Objects, it ruffled a few feathers since the pair of David Fincher and Rosamund Pike had already succeeded in disturbing the calm minds of the industry. But hope sustained when Amy Adams, Patricia Clarkson and Eliza Scanlen were cast as Camille, Adora and Amma, respectively.
Adaptations have always favored crime thrillers irrespective of the medium of art. For instance, Othello is a crime thriller in many ways and two of its adaptations Omkara and Othoi (both the Bengali play and web series) rattled the visual art medium since crime is an electron and it metamorphoses into the God Particle when it knows that it is being watched.
The HBO adaptation of the novel broke the conditioned boundaries of society since Gillian once said that the story is a razor and if anyone has to experience it, s/he should have bodies written by scars.
The adaptation was not a new beginning in the genre of crime thrillers. But the world it built captured the darkness that we find in the novel. There is not a Pentagram in the story, but what the series unfolds is a demonic entity that devours the morality we associate with a matriarchal family.
The novel does not make us think about the demon. It is more about the acts of a disturbed mind. What Jean-Marc brings is new and the horror does not underplay. It makes us squirm, our fingers fold to form a fist and we see a knife tearing us to exhale out the fear of being in such a situation. The novel undresses us. The series violently strips.
Anatomy of a Scandal
Sarah Vaughan’s erotic novel Anatomy of a Scandal did not work for most readers in the West due to its commentary on class and how she takes the power politics of gender on a thrill ride. Yet the story stains us with the wrong decisions our hearts take when it comes to desire. We forget the power patriarchy generates in men and how sex happens to become a weapon to restrict a woman’s choices.
The book is also about how the characters, namely James, Olivia and Sophie examine their own desires and confinement without understanding the roles they play in society. The scandal is mostly about the reality check a woman needs when it comes to a man. For a man, the position of power makes him do heinous things without keeping in mind the damage they can cause. The meat of the characters is associated with how women compromise, and the other gender does not in any kind of relationship.
Men have historically used women to build kingdoms and to soothe their bodies. James, being a politician, does the same to keep himself relevant by maintaining a relationship with a blonde, long-legged women named Sophie just to keep her as a showpiece, an object that he possesses to show how perfect his charm is. So, Vaughan shows us how the act of infidelity reduces to the act of cheating when we hide our needs and desires from our partners. It makes the relationship fragile and only a woman who is conditioned to tolerate this direct act of misogyny goes on with men like James.
Kate Woodcroft is a perfectly written character that establishes how women with sexual trauma can lead a good battle against sexual predators. The commentary touches eroticism and then gets political to address how powerful men behave when they are confronted by women who tell them that the power they hold is the murderer.
The series unpacks the novel further by making us look at the suffering of an emotionally choked woman. It draws us towards her sentiments and the contradictions she has to go through without forcing us to take a look at the history of the situation. Sienna Miller’s calm but chaotic mannerism is something we do not get to see in actors who portray the turmoil of a vulnerable woman. Naomi Scott’s seductive portrayal of Olivia Lytton is sharp and vivid. Most men, even in the present time, would judge a woman like her for being bold and open about her desires.
To peel the book, one has to subsidize time and the mind. The series, however, nails the situation to our brain. People who still believe that abortion should be illegal would accuse Olivia and express sympathy for Sophie. The sympathy, however, applauds the wife for standing beside her misogynist husband. This particular miniseries magnifies the disturbance by toning down the eroticism. The new beginning over here is the way the maker addresses sexism and misogyny by playing the seduction within the subtexts.
It is not always necessary to confine a story within the pages of a book. Sometimes it has to explode in the eyes of a reader by watching the figures doing things we only imagine in our head while reading a book. One has to suit himself in a book and in other forms too, just to let art know that however it comes, change is not going to mess up its equinox.
I will sum up this article in a quote written by the American poet and existentialist philosopher Criss Jami, where he says: “A young outcast will often feel that there is something wrong with himself, but as he gets older, grows more confident in who he is, he will adapt, he will begin to feel that there is something wrong with everyone else.”
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Kabir Deb is an author/poet based in Karimganj, Assam. He works for the Punjab National Bank and has completed his Masters in Life Sciences from Assam University and is presently pursuing his MCW from Oxford University, London. He is the recipient of Social Journalism Award, 2017; Reuel International Award for Best Upcoming Poet, 2019; and Nissim International Award, 2021 for Execellence in Literature for his book 'Irrfan: His Life, Philosophy, and Shades'. He runs a mental health library named 'The Pandora's Box to A Society called Happiness' in Barak Valley. He reviews books, many of which have been published in magazines like Outlook, Usawa Literary Review, The Financial Express, Cafe Dissensus, Sahitya Akademi, etc. He currently also works as the Interview Editor of the Usawa Literary Review.
