For a not-so-regular moviegoer, I hear about a lot of movies -- many of my friends and acquaintances do in fact go to movies, and the people on LJ summarize them, and I wind up wondering whether I can cite Van Helsing to my classes as an example of contemporary ecumenical movements without actually seeing it. But I also get myself irritated without even the benefit of getting to eat unhealthy-yet-delicious movie-theater popcorn. You see, I had already decided that the prospect of Sean Bean in a leather miniskirt Bronze Age armor was not really enough to distract me from the well-publicized disadvantages of the movie Troy, such as the decision to write the Greek gods out of an ostensible retelling of the Iliad (plus or minus a few scenes from The Fall of Troy, The Aeneid, etc.). As we all know, the gods don't really play any major role in the Iliad. Nor am I the tiniest bit interested in religion. *cough* Still, I could sort of rationalize that decision -- cramming the dramatized Iliad into one movie-length sitting is a tough job, so something had to go.

That said, I have received the first reports from my LJ friendslist, and I am more shocked and horrified than I had expected to be. So they got rid of the gods -- except for Thetis, who is presumably a woman with a seashell fetish -- and they ditched subplots including Cassandra and Sarpedon, which make no sense without the gods and are somewhat tangential to the main action anyway. Fine. I was kind of looking forward to hearing creatively atheistic explanations for why Achilles returned Chryseis to her father ("My father is a priest of -- er, an accountant! He has brought the wrath of the Peloponnesian Revenue Service down upon your encampments!"), how Helen escaped with Paris, why Achilles was invulnerable, that sort of thing; alas, I was bitterly disappointed. It turns out that I was giving the filmmakers too much credit for wanting to adapt the actual Iliad: Chryseis does not appear (Agamemnon just grabs Briseis), and as far as I can make out, Helen decides to run off with Paris because he's dishy and does so by the clever expedient of stowing away on their ship under a cloak. Yippee.*

It also turns out that many elements of the original texts are neither avoided nor simplified but simply... changed, for no apparent reason. Reasonable change: when Menelaus and Paris fight, Paris is not carried away by a goddess but shielded by Hector. Fine. Then -- unreasonable change: Hector and Menelaus fight and Menelaus is killed. (So much for including the bitter-irony-of-war scene in the inevitable Odyssey movie. Is this supposed to be resonant or something?) Later on, in the final scenes of destruction, Paris finally shoots Achilles, Agamemnon kills Priam, and Briseis -- who, by the way, has borrowed Trojan royalty and (former) virgin priestesshood from Cassandra -- anyway, Briseis kills Agamemnon. If this is supposed to represent female characters with agency, I am So Not Impressed. (And I was so looking forward to Mycenae with Sharon Stone as Clytemnestra and Haley Joel Osment as Orestes!) Then Paris and Briseis take off together to go join Helen and Aeneas, all of whom skedaddle out of the city safely as far as I can tell. (One can only pray that the Aeneid movie -- which is pretty well inevitable at this point -- will have entirely different continuity.)

Now, I like referential and derivative fictions as much as (perhaps more than) the next woman, and the Trojan-War-plus-aftermath is easily in the top two all-time Most Fictionally Elaborated Stories of So-Called Western Civilization: there's not a lot that hasn't already been done with the story. I also appreciate the need to adapt a lengthy, originally oral, epic poem into something that can be told through a Major Motion Picture Event. But at a certain stage (it's a very fuzzy line) one stops "adapting" or "dramatizing" a story and starts retelling it as what media fandom calls an AU -- an alternate-universe version of the original. There's nothing necessarily wrong with that, either: an AU can make for a reasonably good fictional narrative when the alternative is one logical and thought-provoking step removed from the source narrative. Dio Chrysostom's Eleventh (or "Trojan") Discourse actually offers an Iliad AU of sorts, starting from the premise that the Trojans actually won the war but Homer had to rewrite it for purposes of Aegean propaganda. It is fascinating precisely because it assumes knowledge of the Iliad and plays on the many points of confusion in that narrative to offer a tongue-in-cheek revisionist history. Some source narratives even include their own AUs: for instance, the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "The Wish" is an AU working from the premise that Buffy never arrived in Sunnydale at the beginning of the series.

But when a piece of derivative fiction starts with a premise along the lines of "all the characters on Buffy are human EMTs in New York and vampires don't exist" -- or, less creatively, "in this story Angel dies in Season One and Buffy gets together with Xander because I always liked him better anyway" -- it is usually a lousy narrative on its own merits and always awful as fanfic, because it is almost never telling a story which can sustain any kind of relationship, nevermind fruitful tension, with the source narrative. This kind of fiction is basically a standalone narrative with the same character names and a couple of plot segments that might be from the original. Or from Shakespeare. Or from the Bible. Or even (mirabile dictu) from Greco-Roman mythology. There's no telling, really: "boy steals girl, gods and/or mischance kill off everyone except the narrator/moral voice, people die more or less heroically" is the plot of Romeo and Juliet, the five or so sequential stories/poems from which Shakespeare borrowed all but a few supporting characters in R&J;, nearly half of Ovid's Metamorphoses, and at least two episodes in the Book of Judges. Short of telling it as an allegory about subatomic particles, the producers of Troy aren't likely to come up with any completely new twist on Homer, but the pattern of seemingly pointless divergences from a widely-known and well-respected source narrative puzzle me. I mean, if you're going to change the story around to that extent, so that entirely different people survive and die with no obvious dramatic payoff in either direction, why not just call the hero "Bob" and the other guy "Joe" and have them engage in a climactic jello-wrestling match while wearing the aforementioned leather miniskirts?**

I would be better able to cope if I felt that this was a special form of insanity visited upon the producers of Troy (presumably by the Greek gods, who were looking forward to casting calls). It's not. I remain completely puzzled by many of the decisions made in the Lord of the Rings movies, as I have already explained at some length, but it was a miracle of textual fidelity compared to most adaptations. For instance, I am hearing squeals of delight from LJ Land over the upcoming Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban movie, but as a fan of that particular volume, I am unimpressed by some of the inexplicable line-swapping hinted at in the trailers. Then there was a Disney TV movie of Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time the other night, which I very sensibly did not watch because I loved that book as a child and I am not a masochist -- but I understand that IT was represented as a guy rather than a giant brain, which strikes me as completely failing to convey the book's rather central point about evil as depersonalized intelligence. I'm really starting to think that either I am crazy or the rest of the world is, because I am actually a specialist in the history, theory, and practice of doing wacky interpretative things to texts and yet I can find no room for most of these book-to-movie "adaptations." They are pointless at best and abominable at worst. And so now I am wondering why we apparently have media scandals about Janet Jackson's breast but not about Homer's literary castration, whether Homer's legendary blindness wouldn't be a perfectly reasonable reaction to the average movie adaptation, and why anyone goes to see movies.

Well, there are always the leather miniskirts.

* -- Hey, does anyone know how they explained Achilles' invulnerability? Or if it even made it into the story? I gather Paris shoots him in the heel, then shoots him a lot more times elsewhere. But most of my Troy plot-summary information is checked against Troy in Fifteen Minutes and not much else.
** -- That's probably a movie plot somewhere. Please don't tell me about it.

So I gave in to the inexorable forces of consumerism and got cable -- for the summer, at least. Even with the latest deal, it costs more than I'd prefer, but the end of Angel and the heap of broken images I keep seeing on network TV encouraged me to think that there had to be something (more) out there. I'd rather not be entirely out of touch with popular culture, you see -- I just reserve the right to define "popular culture" as "something other than reality shows, please." Unfortunately, I've mostly been using my brand-new cable to watch HGTV, which is not quite what I had in mind: unless I decide to become an interior decorator, it is not keeping me culturally au courant. For those of my readers who live under completely different channel regimes, HGTV expands to something like "Home and Garden Television," and it features lots of shows in which people with more money and/or resources than I manage to make perfectly serviceable homes look even better over the course of an hourlong show with commercials. I refer to these shows collectively as "homeowner porn." Occasionally I get good ideas from these shows; occasionally they suggest to me what I would never, ever want to do. But mostly their ideal universe entertains and frustrates me in equal parts.

In the normal course of events, I have accomplished a few little domestic things already since the spring semester ended, but they are little: keeping the garden alive and the lawn sorta kinda mowed, framing new pictures, finally reinstating the lightswitch at the bottom of the stairs, switching winter clothes upstairs after finishing most of the button-sewing I'd put off, getting a halfway decent lamp for the living room, that sort of thing. I want to wait on Major Homeowner Projects until I have finished at least one article, although my next Semi-Major Homeowner Project involves a power sander and so might be fun to do in my spare time. But when I watch the HGTV shows for long enough, it becomes difficult to live in my own house: I look at a perfectly livable corner and think, "needs paint, faux finish, new floor molding, better curtains, new armoire, and why do they never show the houses with the monster A/C intake vents on the floor?" (That's the corner with the TV, by the way.) Even knowing from my HGTV-watching that I could do a heck of a lot for $1000 if I had a complete decorating staff on call does not console me.

What I should be doing, of course, is working on that article, or possibly the book. But it's my first week more-or-less off, and my brain seems to be taking an enforced vacation. Instead of either working from home (or working on the home, for that matter), I continue to concentrate on inessentials with occasional pauses for Shavuot programming. I did try to read some of the books I brought back from Major Professional Conference #3, with an eye towards continuing revision on my own manuscript, but my attention wandered: what I really want is to relax with a glass of iced tea and a few good novels about a person or people who fix up an old house and live happily ever after. The problem is that there are not enough novels like this -- if anyone has recommendations, please do share them with me. (I like a good romance or mystery subplot, too, but if I find myself skimming through the sex scenes waiting for them to get back to stripping the moldings there's a problem.)

The other day I finally lost it: I was at the craft store getting an inexpensive frame for some office art, and I somehow wandered into the Random Craft Projects section, where I encountered a blast from the past. Now, I suspect this will only resonate with a certain segment of my readership, but when I was four or five I (and every other little girl I knew) made potholders for my family using loops of fabric, a square metal "loom" with spikes to hold the loops, and a metal hook. It seems that these items still come in starter kits for five or six bucks -- although the looms are now plastic and could stand to be larger, or possibly it's just that I'm larger and am taking dishes out of the oven All By Myself. But I needed something to do with my hands while I was watching HGTV anyway, right? Five teeny-weeny potholders later, I have reacquainted myself with most of the possible patterns on an 18x18 grid, made a mental list of my friends' kitchen colors, and sorted all the loops into color-coded plastic bags. (What the heck am I supposed to do with the orange ones, find a Clemson fan to send potholders to?) I keep stopping myself from starting to make or buy new loops. I think I need to learn how to crochet -- at least yarn is more easily customized.

Or possibly I should get back to, you know, writing. That being my job and all.