I have directed a few movies in my career. They were made on zero budget and were released only for one viewer – me! In my post about books and reading, I mentioned that whenever you read a novel, you are directing a movie in your head. This is what I was talking about.
Different novels make different types of movies. Take for instance, The Idiot by Dostoyevsky. Dostoyevsky always shows you the worst tendencies of human beings : the hidden urges, the eccentric and compulsive behaviours, the self-destructive habits – what Jep Gambardella, in the movie The Great Beauty describes as “lo sqaullore disgraziato e l’uomo miserabile” – the wretched squalor and the miserable humanity. Everyone in Dostoyevsky’s novels is a little crazy, as we all are in our own unique ways. And some characters cross the limit of craziness that is allowed and become completely crazy.
In the climax of The Idiot, there is Rogozhin who has murdered the woman he loves, Nastasya. Nastasya did not love him back but had agreed to marry him. And then there is our hero Prince Myshkin. It is said that while writing The Idiot, Dostoyevsky decided to create a character who had a 100 % pure heart. He was all good without a shred of evil or malice in him. Through the Prince, Dostoyevsky shows that in a world where politeness and courtesy are taken as a sign of weakness, having a pure heart is impractical. In the end, the Prince loses his mind and is admitted to a mental asylum.
When you read such an intense novel, the movie plays automatically inside your head. The quality of the movie depends on the effectiveness of the prose. When you finish, just a few images remain. Images that you can put on the poster of the movie. My poster shows this. In a dark room, Nastasya lies on a bed. She is dead from a wound to her heart from Rogozhin’s knife. She is covered with a sheet but her foot can be seen, white as marble. Scattered all around, bits and pieces of silk white dress and some diamonds from broken jewelry. Rogozhin is babbling incoherently, shouting, laughing a sure sign that he is losing his mind. Prince is in a shock, his legs are not moving and he is trying to make conversation. He will lose his mind later.
The problem with Dostoyevsky is that if you read him continuously, very soon you may become crazy yourself. Yes, he shows a very dark side of life but that’s not the whole picture. No author or philosophy can completely describe the complexity of human experience. No one has a monopoly on wisdom. As soon as you commit to one author, you immediately restrict your world view.
That is why I choose a completely opposite genre after The Idiot. Nothing To Lose by Lee Child. This was my first Jack Reacher novel. But I had already seen the movies. And when the character is played by none other than Tom Cruise, that’s the image you will always have in your head. Tom Cruise has this amazing ability to mix acting and charisma that enables him to completely own the character. So be it Top Gun or Mission Impossible, you cannot imagine any other actor playing that role.
Jack Reacher has very strong traits of Sherlock Holmes in his character. Just as almost any mafia movie or TV series has some connection with The Godfather, many spy or police characters have Sherlockian tendencies. Reacher is very observant, he deduces many things from footprints and tire marks. He is also very calculating, literally so. The lengths and breadths and heights, the strengths of materials, the distances and so on. Before a hand-to-hand combat, he mentally calculates the mass and height of his opponent to determine how easy or difficult the fight is going to be. Then he decides how to tackle the opponent so that he would only be wounded but would not die. Reacher is a decorated ex-military and the training shows. The only thing he owns is a toothbrush and set of clothes that he is wearing. When the time comes for a wash, he discards one set and buys a new one.
One remarkable thing about this novel is it does not go back and forth between two or more scenarios. There is just one story that’s happening around Jack Reacher and you follow it from start to finish. Nothing To Lose was like a breath of fresh air after the heavy melancholy of The Idiot.
I also read The Martian. And here too, I had seen the movie before. But guess what? Unlike Jack Reacher, no Matt Damon in my head while reading it. Why did this happen? All credit goes to the author Andy Weir. Andy does not describe what the protagonist Mark Watney looks like, his skin colour or his height – the general characteristics most novelists use while introducing a character. This completely changes the movie inside your head. The Martian is all about science – physics (lots of it), chemistry, botany and engineering. The processes are described in such detail that this could may well be a survival guide on Mars. The Martian is true science fiction in that it deals with future science and nothing else, unlike many others that just use the future as a background to tell that same stories. Call these speculative fiction or whatever else you want, they are not science fiction.
The sheer joy that I experienced while reading The Martian made me realize I need to read more sci-fi. So new rule. Read one sci-fi book after every book from any other genre.
