movies and universality
rev. bob pigeon (sid-vicious@mindspring.com)
Fri, 31 Dec 1999 11:28:22 -0500
>They shouldn't make it into a movie that would ruin
>everything.
Catcher in the Rye has been cheapened all it could be cheapened already by
its being read universally. They even teach it in high schools. If they
made a movie it wouldn't really matter, I don't understand why people are so
deathly afraid of movies being made from books. I always enjoy seeing what
was done, and how well they did it. If it's bad I don't wish it had never
been made, I wish someone had made it better. How could a book lose its
meaning for someone because a bad movie was made from it? The only really
disappointing part of a bad movie being made from a book would be if it was
an obscure book or something, and they really butchered it, but people
considered it to be just like the book and figured the book was the same,
but that wouldn't apply to Catcher in the Rye because everyone and their
mother has read it already.
Catcher in the Rye is so easy for everyone to relate to sometimes that it
can really bother me. You get all these people wandering around talking
about how they hate phonies just like Holden Caulfield...it would be like if
all the kids at prep school that he hated grew up and read his book and said
they really identified with it. And then imagine his prep school was home
to most of America.
Wouldn't it be much better if J.D. Salinger was like John Fante? That only
strange people who read some Bukowski books happened to find him and then
read "Ask the Dust"? "Ask the Dust", though it shouldn't be, is much more
special to me because its' existence is so secretive. If I met someone at a
party and he told me he read a few Fante books, I'd feel an instant kinship.
Someone tells me they're a fan on Salinger and I automatically assume that
they're a pseudo-intellectual jerk. But that's probably just a character
flaw on my part.
Sincerely,
The Reverend Robert Pigeon