Strauss: Reimagine, don’t recycle, art

“Shrek the Musical,” “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” and “The Little Mermaid” all… “Shrek the Musical,” “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” and “The Little Mermaid” all hit Broadway recently, some with more success (and stunt doubles) than others. Regardless of their reception, they’re part of an ongoing trend: Books become movies, stage plays become miniseries, and so on. We constantly recycle our culture. Although we love to buy belts made from old bottle caps and water bottles that were once mounds of plastic, I’m a bit concerned with Americans’ love of recycled art. Some things are like Kleenex: not meant to be reused. I deem recycling art, in most cases, a sin.

My strong distaste for adaptations formed at a young age when I decided to watch the movie “The Face on the Milk Carton” after reading the Caroline B. Cooney book. The protagonist, I protested, had red hair! The cafeteria scene dialogue was different! I couldn’t take it! I turned the TV off and ranted to my mother, “How could someone do this to such a wonderful story!?” I was a dramatic child.

I generally agree with composer Igor Stravinsky: “Lesser artists borrow; great artists steal.” However, there’s a big difference between drawing inspiration from a text — in the way that Shakespeare’s “King Lear” informs the tragic hero of “Moby Dick” or the plot structure of “The Odyssey” informs “O Brother Where Art Thou?” — and transposing a piece of art into a different medium to create an uninspired new product bearing the same title.

Admittedly, certain works of high art, like “The Godfather” movie series, handle this transition well and retain the original text’s integrity. But with uninspired adaptations, like the film version of Audrey Niffenegger’s “The Time Traveler’s Wife,” the title is merely a marketing scheme, a pretext for erasing plot points and amping up the gooey romance. It’s maybe not so surprising, then, that when Niffenegger spoke two years ago at Carnegie Music Hall, she announced she hadn’t seen the movie version of her novel and didn’t plan on it.

The primary reason I — like Niffenegger, probably — detest such crossovers is the process they involve: People with creative control extract bits and pieces of the original work, give characters the same names, set the story in the same location and then exclaim, “Voila, we’ve created Charlie Chaplin’s ‘City Lights’ on ice!” This example is fictitious, but I don’t doubt its success potential.

The theatrical adaptation of the movie “Once,” which is currently running off-Broadway at the New York Theatre Workshop, might epitomize this problem if reviews are any indication. “Charm is fragile,” New York Times critic Ben Brantley writes. “What’s enchanting in one context … can seem soppy or strident in another.” In other words, many stories are best told — indeed, created to be told — in one specific art form. Brantley goes on to explain that the movie’s natural and understated performances, many of which were improvised, saved it from succumbing to the cutesy cliches that often plague rom-coms. Musicals are a different animal, however, and the “Once” adaptation seems to have turned the unique film into a live action cliche.

To cite a less contemporary example, Martin Scorsese can only recall one scene in “Rebecca,” Alfred Hitchcock’s adaptation of the Daphne du Maurier novel of the same name, where the film captures the eeriness of the book. The rest he deems, after roughly a dozen views, no longer interesting, largely because Hitchcock prioritized plot at the expense of other concerns.

There are several problems underlying this phenomenon. One is the creative control process in Hollywood and the increasing influence of Hollywood on Broadway. Another is an underappreciation for the nuances of words and images. The power of words on the page is different than that of spoken words, and the power of a beautifully crafted screen image, like the pottery scene in the movie “Ghost,” is very different from the same image evoked onstage — in the Broadway adaptation of “Ghost,” for example.

If artists want their work to survive an adaptation, they need to bear in mind the distinctions between mediums. Otherwise, the result will be second-rate — the artistic equivalent of a once-used tissue.

Contact Courtney at cas136@pitt.edu.