not wasting words / book to film

This morning I woke before 4 after not enough sleep. This is as unusual as the fact that I remembered the dream/nightmare that woke me. I was in a large bookshop with a woman friend – who she was I don’t know; I found – second hand – a copy of a book of Vietnam photos that I was tempted by in Hanoi earlier this year. At one point it was $10 and another $40, in either case a bargain. While it cost $10 I handed over $50 to the woman behind the till – she was distracted talking to a colleague and gave me $20 change. A short hesitation, a word to my friend, then I pointed out that I’d been given the wrong change. The till woman insisted she had given me $40 with a fierce and unexpected determination. It quickly became embarrassing – she went too far past the point of losing face to now relent; useless to point out my friend had seen it all, or that she’d been distracted by her colleague. So I woke up angry , remembering a similar problem on a bus where I dropped money and the driver refused to return it to me on the basis I was unsure of the size of the note. Time to let it all go.

And so to the Diving Bell and the Butterfly. A slight book, to be sure: even while admitting that to write even so much is amazing given the means of production. More, as a writer he no doubt wasted* much – for some the task to squeeze just a few words onto the page, for others to painfully choose those worth keeping from a logorhythmic flow.

My reading coloured by the film: looking for the stories; yes, there’s the day on the beach with the children; yes, the trip to Lourdes – but I didn’t get the time sequence; that Isabelle pre-dated his wife. The speech therapist and the other one are not seen through quite the lecherous eyes given to Bauby by the filmmaker. Not so far. And not so far the wrenching scene where ‘the mother of his children’ is made to mediate a conversation with the lover who cant bear to visit, who may never call again. We’ll see.

The point of this to observe the craft of the screen writer; to imagine so much more actual life around the text. To build a personality from hints at best. The question: to what extent is it built up from interviews with the friends and family. This shouldn’t matter, the film’s the thing you’d think, but somehow this one must bear the weight of homage to the act of writing the book and in doing so seem to betray it to the extent of any deviation in inner truth.

Put this against my conversation with the producer of the film of a prize winning book in which the culmination of the book is the shooting of an animal: “but of course you can’t kill the *** in the film, we have to do something else.” And having not done so, how to render the bleakness of the ending which, if there is any redemption at all, it is no more than the brief fluttering of the translucent wing of a cicada, an insubstantial moment in the short life of a transitory being.

*On wasting effort: Julia Leigh in the SMH is quoted attributing the following idea to poet Elizabeth Bishop -

‘that artists and scientists are alike in that they are prepared to waste effort”  but so far as it matters Google suggests it might rather be Marianne Moore.

Insofar as modernism sought an aesthetics of clarity and precision, of stripped-down objectivity, the scientist made an attractive emblem. The “poet and the scientist,” Marianne Moore suggests, “work analogously”:

     Both are willing to waste effort. To be hard on himself is one of
the main strengths of each. Each is attentive to clues, each must
narrow the choice, must strive for precision.

Z Pickard 'Natural History and Epiphany: Elizabeth Bishop's Darwin letter' 
Twentieth Century Literature Fall 2004 Citing Moore, Marianne. Interview with Donald Hall.
Women Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews. Ed. George Plimpton.
New York: Modern Library, 1998. 3-31 at 30.