I have decided not to watch Denis Villeneuve’s upcoming film Dune.
 
It’s not because I don’t like Villeneuve’s work. Arrival is an amazing movie and one I use in the classroom as an example of masterful storytelling. Bladerunner 2049 was an incredible cinematic experience.
 
It’s also not because I am a literary traditionalist that eschews all cinematic adaptions. Arrival, for example, is an adaptation of  Ted Chiang’s short story “Story of Your Life”. Both expressions of the story are excellent.
 
I am also not arguing for a boycott of the film. I have no moral or ethical qualms with it. In fact, I love that Hollywood is giving attention to a serious science fiction masterpiece. Go watch it!
But.
 
If you are at all inclined to pick up a book, I beg you to read the book first.
I don’t make this request because I think that “the book is always better”. In fact, I cringe every time I find myself in another version of the “which was better” conversation. These discussions are the equivalent of the classic comparison of apples to oranges. They’re different.
 
While you may have a personal preference or strong opinions about the filmmaker’s or author’s story decisions, designating one or the other as “better” is a largely meaningless assertion. This is a bit like when my students or colleagues describe something as “interesting” — the intellectual version of an “um”. (Which is why I usually start my classes by making them watch this great little clip from Captain Fantastic.)

Let me back up a little and talk a bit about the process of adaptation.
 
Adaptation is always a practice of interpretation and translation, and every time someone tells a story, they are also engaged in the practice of interpretation and translation.
 
When the author sits down to write, they are taking an experience they had or an idea in their head or a historical account, and they are translating it into a particular new assemblage of words. No story springs into existence ex nihilo, out of nothing. There are always little (or big) things that come together to inform the story that finally gets told, whether or not the writer is fully conscious of their ideas’ inspirations or origins.
 
The process of filmmaking is similar, but here the storyteller must translate the story into a combined language of words, images and sound — with a time limit. Every story must take form within the possibilities and limitations of the particular medium chosen. Every telling is a retelling, an interpretation and translation, a decoding and an encoding anew using new materials.
 
As a result, I am hesitant to query whether a cinematic adaptation of a literary narrative is “true to the original or not”. Which original? How does one define “trueness” to this ongoing process of interpretation?
 
Instead I am more intrigued with thinking about adaptation as conversation. How does an adaptation respond to the text that inspired it? What choices does the storyteller make in order to weave their own narrative inspired by the previous? In this way, I can prefer the experience of reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?  but nevertheless thoroughly enjoy Ridley Scott’s cinematic interpretation and recognize that it is doing something quite different to the book. Scott didn’t try to repeat the book; he allowed himself to be inspired and then to tell a story best suited for his medium and his own creative inclinations.
 
Nevertheless, I want to also suggest that there is a one-way street embedded in the process of adaptation. This isn’t so much about the process of adaptation itself as it is about the particular media involved and their affordances.
 
The written word relies on the reader’s imagination as co-creator of the narrative. Even the most precise or poetic blocks of text need the reader to take those words as a sort of recipe that they use to bring the story to life in their minds. This is why reading a book can feel like such an intimate experience.
 
Audio narratives (such as podcasts, narrated books, or radio stories) have also been described as intimate (Ong, 2002). While they offer a bit more information through the use of soundtrack, voice actors, and sonic-scapes, they still allow the listener to visualise the story for themselves.
 
However, by their nature, cinematic and televised adaptations communicate stories through rich visuals. This narrative experience is often immersive and transformative for the audience member; some have even likened movies to dreamscapes. Audience members infuse these stories with their own emotions and personal experiences, so there is still a sense of co-creation between producer and spectator but this relationship is significantly different than the relationship between author and reader.
 
So this leads us back to Dune. In essence, the reason I will not see the film is this: Once I have seen Villeneuve’s interpretation of Dune, I can never un-see it.
 
Frank Herbert’s book invites readers into a complex and strange world that requires one’s imagination to work hard to envision landscapes, characters, and scenarios that bear minimal semblance to our own world. The strangeness becomes a foundation for the philosophical ideas that he introduces–the ideas that transformed the book from simply a great story to a literary masterpiece. Books like these leave a visceral imprint on the body and mind. I vividly remember my experience of first setting foot on the planet of Arrakis. In a similar fashion, I remember spotting Strider mysteriously obscured in the shadowed interior of The Prancing Pony. That moment was two decades ago, and yet I can easily bring to mind my first reading of Lord of the Rings as if it were last week.
 
I have strong, fond memories of reading a number of books, but for books that involve extensive world-building, particularly in fantastic or science-fictional contexts, I think the experience of co-creation is especially intimate and unique. I treasure my first encounter with Middle-earth, but once I watched Peter Jackson’s trilogy, something changed. My Strider now found himself in battle with Viggo Mortensen over who got to occupy the visual icon of Aragorn in my mind. Now if anyone was to replace my image of Strider, I’m happy it happened to be Viggo (less happy about Elijah’s usurpation of Frodo). Nevertheless, my imagination suffered a tremendous loss.
 
Of course, I can’t get away from the film’s PR campaigns, so I do have new images of Dune’s occupants floating in my mind. But my objective is to minimize their power as much as I can. Thus, I choose to not watch the film.
 
For you, I am excited that you will get to experience Villeneuve & his production crew’s imaginations brought to life. That is a gift. But I encourage you to consider letting your imagination have first dibs on Arrakis. Accept Frank Herbert’s invitation to co-create this world with him. Maybe even read a few of the sequels. Then by all means, turn to Villeneuve and take a peek at how he interprets and has translated Dune onto the screen.

This post’s featured image is by Francesco Ungaro on Unsplash

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks grading end-of-term essays, while simultaneously scrambling to pull together syllabi and reading lists for my two new courses.* Over the Christmas break, however, I forced myself to slow down for a bit and read a few full books related to my research.

I recently acquired a gorgeous vintage accent chair that also happens to be incredibly comfortable. In the morning, I turn it to face the windows, prop my heels on the window ledge and settle down to read with a strong cup of tea. I am both relaxed and alert. I savor each page while out of the corner of my eye I watch the blackbirds play in the trees along my street.  When I reach the end of a book, I feel a kinship to the author–the sort of intimacy that comes from the experience of just listening to somebody speak while not interrupting.

In reality, most of the time when scholars (and our students) read books like these, we are hunched over our computer or notebook. The book has been forcibly spread out flat with the necessary pages weighted down with elbows or our perennially full coffee mugs. I even have a nifty device to manage my texts on my behalf.

We read books and academic articles extractively, quickly skimming pages looking for sections or quotes that will support our own arguments. We teach our students to “read the abstract” and if the text looks “useful” then “read the introduction and conclusion but probably skip everything in between”.

Essentially, we mine these texts for data. Rather than listening and allowing the author to fully explain themselves, we interrupt and interject with our own ideas.

We do this because we find ourselves in an impossible situation where, in order to prove that we are “good scholars” (and maintain our jobs), we have to maintain a steady output of research. Most of our workweek is taken up with teaching responsibilities, so research has to be squeezed into whatever extra time remains. There’s just no time to put up your feet and take a leisurely stroll through another scholar’s hard work. (I paid dearly for those mornings with many extremely long and exhausting days of work the following weeks.)

My bookstand for subduing unruly research texts.

One of the ironies of this situation is that this expectation of constant research output translates into an exponential amount of research being released into the world. In accordance with a modern industrial logic, this should be reason to celebrate. Look at all the knowledge production!

But when we turn the university into a “knowledge” factory, the product isn’t actually knowledge. I’m not sure what it is, to be honest. By this, I’m not suggesting that our books and articles are devoid of valuable insights into the world (otherwise I’d be undermining my own work), but I’m reminded of what Marx refers to as the fetishization of commodities. What he meant by this concept is that, in the industrial process our commodities (things) become abstracted and disconnected from the hands that produce them. These individuals who make the products are even abstracted and disconnected from each other–replaceable figures on an assembly line. The meaning of a product is instead derived from its participation in the socio-economic act of exchange.

In the case of research, the “creator” or author is not obscured in the process, but I draw this comparison because I find that our work is often abstracted from the conversation that actually created it. As a scholar, I am not the creator of knowledge. Rather, it is my job to participate in an ongoing conversation among fellow knowledge seekers in our collective pursuit of understanding our world better. And it is my job to teach young people how to enter into this conversation. This is what Jack Halberstam, in their introduction to Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s The Undercommons, suggests we should call study rather than knowledge production.

When we perceive knowledge as conversation rather than commodity or product, it changes how we engage it. In conversation, we speak but we also listen. In fact, the best conversationalists are usually also the best listeners.

So what if instead of just teaching my students how to speak, i.e. write a research paper, I also taught them how to listen? What might an end-of-term project look like in this scenario?

What if the academy rewarded me for research input, in addition to output? What if I was encouraged and supported in efforts to slow down and actually listen to my colleagues? What if I was funded to attend conferences even when I wasn’t presenting a paper? What if this was expected? What if the academic community gently discouraged “too much output” as indicative of “too much talking”, just as I ask my more chatty students to step back and allow their peers to speak?

It would require a massive shift in how the university currently thinks of its purpose in society, but that much we already knew was dearly needed.

*At the University of Groningen we run on a 4 block, 2 semester system in which each block is 7 weeks of teaching and 3 weeks of exams/resits. Our second block of the first semester finished early January after the Christmas break. We just finished Week 2 of block 3 of semester 2 (2a).

Featured image from Photo by Nothing Ahead from Pexels.

I am worried about the cultural memory that will be lost after this pandemic season comes to a close.

All the painful and long-overdue self-reflection and self-scrutiny we’ve done; all the observations about the limitations of technology after days filled with Zoom calls; all the visceral recognitions about how inter-connected our lives are, and how much we really need each other.

How long before we go back to our hyper-individualistic lives? How long before we become content to have a palatable Democrat back in the White House, meaning we no longer need to personally attend protests and fight for Black lives, indigenous sovereignty, refugees, and our abused planet?

Are we going to go back to waiting for someone else to step into a messianic role on our behalf? Are we going to keep reveling in movies that perpetuate this comfortable myth that change happens because of one or two remarkable and brave individuals who dare to make a difference? Are we really going to go back to our lives sustaining the hope that, even after the virus has demonstrated to us how interwoven our lives are, that nevertheless somehow my personal choices don’t matter on a ‘grand’ scale?

I really want to believe that we humans have learned a lasting lesson from the past months, but history tells me it could go either way.

And I’m afraid. I’m afraid that, just as people grew tired of being careful and precipitated a deadly second wave, so we will grow tired of fighting for what is right and just. Especially as the problems our planet is facing seem to keep compounding.

I’m afraid that we will forget that we are resilient. I am afraid we will forget all of our creativity from the days when we had nowhere to go. I’m afraid we will forget those quiet hours spent staring at a tabletop trying to rearrange monochromatic puzzle pieces into a sky.

I’m afraid that we are tired of being afraid. Tired of longing for more. And that for many of us, our lives are comfortable enough that we can closet ourselves in our white middle class insularity and ignore the daily havoc being wreaked upon the less fortunate that comprise most of Earth. That we can ignore the planetary fate that we will bequeath our children and our children’s children.

For many of us, the only way to make it through the pandemic was to switch into survival mode. But we can’t stay in survival mode. Nor should we try to reclaim some sense of normalcy. When this is all finally over, we need a brief season to rest but as we rest, we must remember, and we must find ways to materialise what we learned from the pandemic so that we carry it with us collectively into the coming days, months, and years. We need to preserve these cultural memories so that we pass them down to future generations.

Once we have regained some strength, we must help each other up and build upon this new foundation of cultural memory towards a new sustainable and compassionate way of living. Here is where I should say something about loving each other and fighting together for justice, but humanity seems far from that. For now, all I ask, all I hope for, is that we focus on not forgetting and live daily in light of what we have learned.

Because there are no heroes, there are only movements.

Cover image by Mick De Paola on Unsplash

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...