Image and Word

I haven’t cracked the spine nor perused so much as a paragraph of The Girl’s Guide to Kicking Your Career Into Gear: Valuable Lessons, True Stories, And Tips For Using What You’ve Got (A Brain!) To Make Your Worklife Work For You by Caitlin Friedman and Kimberly Yorio, yet I loathe it.

Setting aside the general offense of assuming that an entire gender needs directed, specialized advice to be successful, we shall start with the word “girl” in the title. The book purports to be about empowering women to take charge of their careers; “If you want to be both passionate about what you do and successful,” the book description tells us, “then you must take control of your professional destiny.” And yet, in just the second word of the title, the authors reduce their target audience to the state of children. And yet I myself have often found myself referring to my gender by the somewhat condescending, yet not egregious term, so thus far I can count myself but mildly offended.

The subtitle, however, is what truly kindled my rage. The phrase “a brain” is patronizing merely by its very existence. Its inclusion implies that other, less flattering attributes of the career-oriented woman would more naturally spring to mind. The addition of the exclamation point connotes astonishment, as if the authors expect the intended reader to find the idea of her own intelligence a bewildering prospect.

Though the title deigns to encourage women to acknowledge their own brains, the cover photo sends quite a different message. It depicts a woman, from the waist down, frolicking across the page wearing a short skirt and carrying a stylish handbag. Is it any wonder that we are to be shocked by our own capacity for reason, when even these career cheerleaders reduce us to fashionable clothes and shapely legs?

Women on a sincere search for career advice may be better served to consult The Daring Book for Girls, where they will receive sensible guidance on writing letters, negotiating a salary and public speaking, without any of the demeaning condescension.

I certainly can’t say that I liked the Masterpiece Theatre movie version of Jane Eyre better than it’s novelistic predecessor, one of my literary true loves, but nor can I say that it is inferior. It’s not a choice that I had to make. Unlike the recent film of The Golden Compass, this adaptation of the Charlotte Bronte classic demonstrates how a movie can, in fact, form a symbiotic relationship with the text from with is drawn, complementing and enhancing the original work.

Something about the character of Rochester, for example, always nagged at me when I read the book. He flirts with beautiful, haughty Blanche Ingram while teasing Jane about his supposedly pending nuptials, all the while knowing that it is his plain governess whom he truly prefers. This behavior has always struck me as verging on cruel. As embodied by Toby Stephens, however, the Rochester of the film is testing Jane rather than taunting her, trying to plumb the depths of her affections as he wrestles with the question of how to confront his own passion. He is torn between his desire for Jane and the knowledge that his previous marriage should make a union with her impossible.

The movie also revealed to me, far more clearly than repeated readings ever have, what is perhaps the essential reason for my love of the book; it is dark and it is weird. Unlike a more conventional romantic heroine, Jane is not beautiful and she is not vivacious, qualities that the film shows in Ruth Wilson’s wide, down-turned mouth and resolute jaw. (An aside: Would American producers allowed their protagonist to appear so genuinely plain? [Not that Ruth Wilson is inherently plain, but she is de-glammed here in a way an American production would not abide.]) Rochester is not dashing; quite the reverse, he is oppressed by his own past weakness and folly.

They find each other in a bleak landscape that the moviemakers show us as perpetually veiled in mist and cut with towering shadows. They are shot as small figures in the sprawling desolate rooms of Thornfield Hall. As their relationship progresses, no makeover transforms Jane into the radiant beauty that was hidden within her frumpiness and no emotional revelation softens the crusty heart of her master. They come together and find love on their own dark and tortured terms.

I usually find such a pronouncement snotty and affected, but here it goes: I liked the book better.

I am not a literary partisan. Reading a book and watching the movie it inspires are vastly different experiences. Films must often compress the scope of a novel to fit the format; characters will be amalgamated, cherished details lost. But the payoff is the visual impact of the big screen, the profound emotional reaction that can be evoked by immersing oneself in the moving images.

What both forms have in common, however, is story-telling. Philip Pullman’s novel The Golden Compass, excels in that regard. The book’s strength is that Pullman fashions a fully-realized world, but has the confidence to unfold it slowly for the reader. Details are trickled out slowly; half-revealed truths and untied ends are always nagging. You turn the page because you, like the young heroine Lyra, are just learning this universe and yearn to find out the next unknown thing.

The recently released film of the same name, however, dispenses with the mystery nearly immediately. During the opening credits, in fact, a voice-over explains several of the key precepts that in takes readers of the novel hundreds of pages to divine. Not just once, but three times, the dialogue explicitly identifies an alethiometer (a hand-held truth-telling device given to Lyra early in the story) as the golden compass of the title, an explanation that is neither useful nor necessary. This rush to revelation is a problem that plagues the entire film. Though the movie’s visuals create an astoundingly detailed, sumptuous world, each scene is so weighed down by exposition that the viewer has nary an opportunity to absorb these luxurious details.

The characters don’t do much more than the narrative to draw in the viewer. Daniel Craig, who recently brought movie-goers a vital, visceral James Bond, fails to duplicate the feat with the character of Lyra’s uncle, Lord Asriel. He feels somehow too small for the role; he is lost among the grandeur of the sweeping digital landscapes and the roars of the digital ice bears (the movie’s term for polar bears, which I rather like). Nicole Kidman was perfectly cast as the cold, cruel Mrs. Coulter, the villain of the piece, but she still fails to capture the character’s ability to utterly enthrall her victims–the hallmark of her persona in the novel.

Books and movies are different yes. But the film version of The Golden Compass could have benefited from Pullman’s ability to trust his audience to figure things out in their own time.