Sweeney Todd vs. Into The Woods: Two Approaches To Film Adaptation

The Discerning Lyricist has moved! Look for us here to get the latest posts and essays!

I have been given to understand that I am somewhat outspoken in my love for the 2007 Tim Burton adaptation of Sweeney Todd. Whatever your complaints (and I've heard them before, I guarantee it), I would like us to set them aside for a moment and consider the movie as an adaptation alone.

Consider, for example, the controversial decision to entirely excise the chorus numbers. One might immediately presume this to be a measure taken against implausibility and staginess, but it actually serves a larger thematic purpose in the movie. The Tim Burton filmography is almost entirely about alienation, and Sweeney Todd is no exception. You can see this in the make-up work, where the gaunt and skull-like circles around the eyes are granted to those in Sweeney's sphere who have succumbed to madness. Toby, for instance, is not given the gaunt eyes until his very last scene - the one in which (SPOILER, I suppose) he cuts Sweeney's throat.

The decision to cut the chorus numbers extends this theme. The music and the related compulsion to sing is re-framed as a product - or perhaps an expression - of the madness inherent in the main characters. Where the Hal Prince interpretation emphasized the universality of inter-human predation and framed Sweeney's crimes as an extension of the callous disregard for life in an over-industrialized society, Burton pares back the story. He makes it less socially relevant, true, but at the same time more intimate and personally affecting.

For a film adaptation, this is - at least in my view - entirely the right choice. In a medium in which the camera can precisely focus on whatever specific element the director demands and capture micro-expressions that would be imperceptible on the stage, taking a sweeping story and making it tight and close is a choice that perfectly suits the medium into which the work is being transferred.

In short, Sweeney Todd serves as an excellent example of how to adapt a musical to film with a keen eye on the comparative advantages of each medium. By way of contrast, then, let us compare this approach to that used in the recent film adaptation of Into The Woods.

As I explained in my review at the time, I did not think the movie was particularly bad. The source material is just so good that you would really have to go far out of your way to make it unwatchable, after all. However, I also criticized the approach of the adaptation with a metaphor that I would like to elaborate on somewhat here.

The adaptation of Into The Woods is characterized not by any major additions, chronological fiddling, augmentations, or what have you, but instead by its omissions. Say a certain scene has to be cut for time. In that case, the subplot that the scene in question resolves must be cut in its entirety. If this cannot be done without destroying the main plot, then a more disposable subplot must be found. If you are going to cut the resolution of the Witch's arc, then you must also cut Rapunzel's death. If you are going to cut the Narrator and the Old Man for reasons of staginess, then you also have to cut "No More." You must cut precisely the right scenes in order to maintain the basic structural integrity of the piece as a whole.

In short, this adaptation treats the story like a Jenga tower. The trick is to pull out precisely the right blocks so that the whole edifice does not collapse.

Which, while I recognize that it's probably necessary in this case given just how complicated the plot of Into The Woods can get, I would assert is entirely the wrong way of going about it.

While I hope this does not require reiteration, I may as well repeat it here: the cinema and the stage are separate mediums with separate demands, and a good adaptation of one to the other requires heavy alteration of the source. If that alteration "ruins" the story, then maybe that work should not have been adapted in the first place, which is also a possibility that I think the entertainment industry doesn't consider nearly enough.

But in any case, whatever your reservations might be about Helena Bonham-Carter's singing, Sweeney Todd stands alongside the likes of Fosse's Cabaret as a shining example of how to do a stage-to-screen adaptation right by rebuilding rather than just reducing the source.

Pet Peeves: Don't Shelve Comics With Books

On occasion, I will visit a library (or even a bookstore, although there it is far less frequently a problem) where comics and are shelved amongst the novels, all listed by author. so let me just put out this slightly pleading message to any who organize their establishment's shelves in this way:

DON'T DO IT.

I love comics. I love what the medium can accomplish, and the effects made possible by the heightened reality that particular styles of artwork can evoke. But that is precisely the point: comics are a different medium from books, and even when there is overlap among the authors contributing to both (e.g. Greg Rucka, Brad Meltzer), they are authors working in two different formats and adapting their writing to each format as appropriate.

In short, putting comics and novels on the same shelves just because both are printed on bound stacks of paper is like shelving CDs and DVDs together because they both come on discs.

On Anime, Walled Gardens, and Maximizers

I have been thinking about why there are some people who only seem to watch - to take a random example - anime as their primary form of intake for dramatic fiction. Because even if it were a genre (which it isn't, even though I can see why people would think it is given that it does have its own occasionally quite bizarre set of idiosyncrasies), then I would still have trouble understanding that tendency because having an intense passion for a particular genre has never seemed very...eh, healthy to me. It just seemed artificially restrictive, a manacle you have forged for yourself.

But in giving it more consideration I did sort of come to understand the impulse, which I connect with what we might call the minimizer's impulse. The basic concept is that we can broadly split up human decision making tendencies into two extremes with everyone at different points on the spectrum between them. Maximizers really cannot make a decision until they have seen every choice and analyzed all the opportunity costs involved, whereas minimizers are perfectly happy with an artificially restricted set of choices because it makes the decision making process feasible and sometimes even easy. If you are a minimizer, you have cut down your range of possible decisions on the possibly quite correct and yet frequently unconscious assumption that even if there is a better choice available somewhere far off among the countless possible choices you have neglected, chances are it will not have been sufficiently better than what you ended up with to compensate you for the time you would have sunk into trying to divine which of several choices might have been the best one. That said, I tend to fall into the maximizer's category, not because I think it is necessarily more logical, but rather because my personality does not admit any other possibility.

A similar impulse applies to my view of art, which is why I am never going to stick to one medium or one genre, and consistently try to absorb and process them all, find out what makes them all tick, and then try to use those principles in my own work.

I also tend to reject - in Warren Ellis' terminology - walled gardens. Ellis used the term to describe the chat rooms in the early days of the internet that people tended to stick to even after the internet opened up, largely because it was easier and more comfortable for them. And that isn't necessarily a judgment, it just means that there is what we might call a minimizing tendency there, an impulse when faced with a mountain of choices to artificially restrict your choices to a manageable range.

In the case of anime, there are a lot of internal genres so you can get the illusion of having the full range of choices while staying within that walled garden. While, again, I can't say that I entirely approve of this, I acknowledge that it is not entirely my place. What I will say is that devotion to particular genres or artistic mediums leads inexorably to apologism for those categories, which is really not good for the state of those forms.

What do I mean by that, broadly? Well, let us take the example of horror, particularly American horror. When something comes along like All The Boys Love Mandy Lane, everyone goes crazy because it tweaks the formula just a little bit, but in reality it doesn't move anywhere outside of its comfort zone. It is only fresh to someone who has stayed inside the walled garden of American horror cinema for so long that they begin to mistake the slightest bit of storytelling spice for groundbreaking innovation, and it is only really by stepping outside that walled garden that you acquire the necessary perspective to see that.

It is maybe a little too easy to use a sick man as a straw man, and American Horror has indeed been the sick man of the cinema landscape for so long, so let me instead pick something a little closer to home - musical theatre.

I do know people who are, and I hate to say this, almost pathologically obsessed with the musical theatre, and those are the people who are most likely to say that, for example, Legally Blonde The Musical is great, which it really isn't. Oh, it's perfectly entertaining, but it is only really good within the walled garden that is the modern musical theatre, and it is only by going outside and looking at the other forms of storytelling that the story might have been better-suited to that you begin to see how lacking that particular work really is. So my own favorite genres are hardly immune to this Apologist's Syndrome, as I have just now decided to call it.

And to be fair, I see a lot of these walled gardens breaking down a bit, especially in fields like music, and I really do credit the iPod with this. A lot of kids of my generation now listen to a little bit of everything. Sure, we might have our preferred genres and artists, but you are going to be much more likely to find a country fan with some rap on their iPods or a rap fan with some Johnny Cash on their iPods than you would have been to find roughly equivalent music fans with roughly equivalent anomalies in their record collections in earlier years.

Just to give you some background, I am generally convinced that anyone who claims that the internet has either saved or ruined the world is talking out of their arses. The internet has not changed anything. Email has replaced snail mail, texting has replaced telegrams, twitter has replaced muttering to yourself after you've finished eating or whatever; it really has not changed all that much, it has just moved everything into another arena.

That said, I think in this case there is an argument to be made for this movement from the physical to the virtual having enhanced the cultural landscape. To be sure, that is partly to do with accessibility and cost, but I think it has far more to do with communication. So, instead of getting a local music community or publication which will tend to exclusively review the things that are popular around where you are, on the internet you can access reviews of any record from any genre you care to mention. You are not limited in your cultural outlook by the region you happen to be born in.

The obvious downside to that is that there is now a lot more competition for your attention, and again we run into the maximizer's problem, in that suddenly we have everything available to us, so how do we choose anything? The answer, as we have seen, is usually that we restrict our attention to the inside of that walled garden.

The flip-side of this positive movement, therefore, is the extent to which the internet has enabled the survival of niches that might not otherwise have survived. Trading card games used to have a rather short shelf life, and a lot of games had the misfortune to die before the internet really kicked off, but the major three - Pokemon, Yugioh, and Magic The Gathering - experienced a resurgence, and I personally attribute that to the rise of the internet. Even as local game shops died or stopped hosting tournaments, the online community supplanted the local communitya and thus saved these particular communal pastimes from extinction.

These entities that the internet saved are very niche, so niche, in fact, that in what I might tentatively call the real world - which is in itself artificially restricted by geography - these niches would not have survived. Instead, they are flourishing and peacefully coexisting, and the online community is responsible for that.

Incidentally, this tendency towards the maintenance of niches online is not necessarily a bad thing either, at least in comparison to the analog world. The analog world is restrictive too, and all the internet has really done is to replace restrictions of geography with restrictions of personal preference. They are still restrictions, and restrictions are generally bad, but I think it is at least a baby step in the right direction.

So, in a sense, the internet can promote walled gardens, but the walled garden concept is not an inherently pernicious thing. It is really just a method of cutting the otherwise overwhelming myriad of cultural choices down to a much more manageable set from which to make your own personal selections.

Again, I would assert that this is not entirely healthy, but I at least understand the psychological necessity for it. So while I would feel comfortable nudging them into areas they might not have contemplated exploring previously - for example, I might present a serial musical humbugger with a curated selection of musicals for them to sample, because I think they might enjoy them and would be gratified if they did - I am not at all comfortable with condemning the walled gardens. It may not be my thing, I may tend to think it is very unhealthy for the individual consumer and the broader intellectual landscape alike, but I definitely understand how necessary it is for a great number of people, and understand that to reach out to those people, we should gently nudge and shift the borders of the walled garden rather than unilaterally decide to tear those walls down.

A Few Thoughts On the Advantages of Novels

I was just recently thinking about the differences between books and films, and brought one of my older thoughts a little bit further. I have long held that novels are best suited to stories that deal with the tension between narrator and narrative. By extension, first-person narration is often the best and certainly the easiest way to explore that tension, but that led me to take it a step further than that. I have noticed in my work that I tend to write for ensemble casts whenever I write for visual media, whereas my novelistic attempts tend to gravitate towards a single character, but only recently have I realized why.

I am becoming increasingly convinced that ensembles are just a better setup for visual media that do not have the opportunity to explore the internal lives thereof. I am also becoming convinced that this is because a good ensemble consists of a range of characters representing the different aspects of what would ordinarily be a real person. We contain multitudes, every one of us. We are different people in different company, that much is obvious, but we are also different people in the same company with only a change in situation required. You talk to your wife differently over dinner than while thrashing out your tax returns. And such behavior is not considered dishonesty, I daresay it is even expected. Using a casual, jovial tone with the tax returns or a pragmatic, businesslike tone over dinner would both be considered very odd indeed.

My point is that we are lots of different people, and really only with internal narration of the sort that novels allow us to indulge in can we explore those inner multitudes. Depending on how they are used, comics and stageplays can also convey this to some extent by creating associations between images through juxtaposition.