No Substance #161: A Brief Note on Originality
Fernanda Melchor’s excellent novel, Hurricane Season, has been turned into a movie.
I don’t know if I’ll watch it, personally. I loved Melchor’s book, it’s like a scream full of violence and anger. It’s my favourite of her work to date. The movie, however, doesn’t match how the book looks in my head. I’m half afraid that if I watch it, it’ll destroy what’s in my head, and I’ll have to decide if I want to do that or not.
I sometimes have this problem with movies I see before I read the book. I get film images stuck in my head, or actors and music, and can’t shake them out. I’m sure it’s a common experience. Usually I wait a while to let one become more settled than the other, or just accept that the two will be married. Sometimes it’s okay for the last to happen. I like Joe Connelly’s Bringing Out the Dead a fair bit and it is entwined with Scorsese’s adaptation in my head. In fairness, I like the film a fair bit so it’s okay, though I think the book’s ending is better and more faithful to the subject, if you’re curious. But increasingly, I mostly solve the problem by not watching the films that are based on things I like. It’s probably surprising, given how I go on about shit here, but it’s true. I guess it’s just not yet a hard and fast rule.
I often wish films were more and more original, though. This isn’t a complaint about Marvel films, or franchises or anything like that. I just like original things. And it’s nice when art is made without someone, somewhere, saying, ‘There’s already an inbuilt audience for this. If we can tap into them, it’s a safe investment.’ But of course, that’s about the obscene amounts of money that float around in certain parts of film, and the desire of those investors to make it as safe as possible for them than it is for art itself.
Speaking of money and art, here’s a somewhat hilarious article about Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capital company investing in AI, complaining that if they have to pay for all the work they steal, then this will make AI a bad investment because paying people for their original work is expensive. I mean, I can only imagine all sorts of chaos would ensue then, national security would be at risk, we’d all be victims of interstellar kidnapping, and so on and so forth.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to No Substance to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.