Ha, interesting you mention Malick because I see him as the most natural fit to adapt certain aspects of McCarthy. Blood Meridian would be a good fit precisely because it's the least comedic of his works.
I think the difficult thing with McCarthy is that he's often several things at once. He's impressionistic and visionary but he's also slapsticky and humorous dialogue often drives scenes. So you would need a skilled comedic director with a great cinematographer. Which isn't a huge ask, but I think few directors with the clout to be given a McCarthy adaptation are skilled at all those things.
I think the Coens understand the humor to McCarthy very well and are great comedic writers and filmmakers, but I don't think they could give you the visionary visuals of something like Suttree or Outer Dark.
Paul Thomas Anderson might actually be a very good potential pick. There Will Be Blood has a strong dynamic feel to its comedy without ever relenting on the darkness of even funny scenes. And I think that may be the most distinct thing about McCarthy: he is hilarious and brutal and pitch black all at once.
So I'd agree with you and him that his books aren't unfilmable, but I'm not sure many--if any--current filmmakers are up for the task.
I’m not sure I understand why mccarthy is regarded as particularly “unfilmable” because he doesn’t make much use of interiority or complex syntax which are usually parts filmmakers have to break off novels to get them to fit into a cinematic form. monotony and repetition is already over-realized at times. I don’t mean “monotonous” and “repetitive” to suggest incompetence bc it’s of course a technical choice (but it’s not my cup of tea imo). But I mean that visual and sensory elements are out there, on the surface, and occur in a discrete way, and interiors are more or less configured by suggestion than exposition anyway, which seems to me to make his writing more “filmable” in fact than some. And if a willingness to film grotesque violence is the main hurdle in adapting blood meridian then the cinematic arts have pole vaulted over that obstacle long ago. I’d be curious to see the unaltered cut of All The Pretty Horses.
Yeah, I agree. I think his books, especially the post-Blood Meridian books, are so driven by dialogue that they are close enough to screenplays already. His early books are more difficult to film, I think, but I imagine a very good movie could be made out of Outer Dark on a very low budget.
I think his stature gets in the way. If you adapt a book that many consider the best of the last 50 years or whatever, the expectation is for this movie to equally be one of the best movies ever made. And that's just not a realistic expectation.
I think the Cowboy Bebop adaptation is somewhat instructive. There was no way it was ever going to be as acclaimed as the anime, since the anime is considered one of the best of all time. Because of this, fans of the anime wanted the adaptation to be equally good. And that's jsut impossible.
So I imagine many directors just shy away from his books because of the absurd expectation for the theoretical movie. Blood Meridian especially, since it's been crowned by some as THE Great American Novel, the film must also be THE Great American Film. And it never will be. It can't. Even if it was a legitimately great movie, it still would pale in comparison to the movie fans have been crafting in their head for forty years.
@“edward”#p122129 I think the Coens can be pretty strong on visuals when they feel like it! But maybe not in the kind of hyper-impressionistic reverie you’d want from adaptations of older McCarthy, which is what you’d get with someone like Malick.
@"yeso"#p122132 _Horses_ is the only work of his that’s actually been adapted which I haven’t read, so it was interesting going into the film blind. Even in its compromised state you can tell it’s sort of a median step in the McCarthy canon between _Blood Meridian_ and _No Country_, more plot and dialogue driven than his previous work without having reached the brutal stripped-down state of his 00s novels. That is to say, it seems like one of the _most_ filmable of all his books. (A bunch of details even reminded me of _Days of Heaven_, which McCarthy once named along with _Five Easy Pieces_ as one of his favorite films.) It’d be great for the original cut to get out there someday (apparently Billy Bob is holding onto it for reasons I couldn’t fully understand) but there are still some solid dialogue scenes in there that feel like basically faithful realizations of scenes that don’t need any galaxy brain creativity to work on the screen, e.g. Matt Damon being interrogated by a _slightly_ philosophical Mexican cop.
By coincidence I’m literally watching Five Easy Pieces right now. Jack’s in the bowling alley talking to the lady that looks exactly like morgan webb from X play
I just finished reading Cormac McCarthy‘s The Road. It flew by and hit hard. Really interesting how he doesn’t use quotation marks for dialogue. Wasn't ever a problem though.
>!So grateful that the book doesn't try to explain the cause of the apocalypse...!<
Last year I read the first part of Stephen King's _The Stand_, and _The Road_ is like the anti-_Stand_. Similar trappings but Stephen King as an author cannot help himself or show any sort of restraint whereas based on this one book, McCarthy shows a lot of it, for the better.
Read Stella Maris and liked it a whole lot. While The Passenger felt like a miss to me, leaning into most of McCarthy‘s worst habits and then making those fill the entire novel, Stella Maris feels like where he’s been heading since finishing Blood Meridian.
The gradual stripping down of his novels until they're nothing but dialogue. And while I imagine this one will be more polarizing because an all dialogue novel is a big ask for many readers, I think it's a tremendous achievement while remaining wholly McCarthy. A novel of life and death spread over a few conversations between a minor character in The Passenger and her psychiatrist.
Reread Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card for the first time in twenty years. Card may be a huge shithead, but this book was lifechanging to me when I was eleven and I didn't know anything about Card until many years later, long after I'd read and reread this novel a handful of times and grafted it to my life. It's not as good as I once believed it to be, but what books are, and the social conservativism was more apparent, but it's still a very beautiful novel. The first one to ever make me cry.
Though if you're looking for something similar without all the Mormon baggage, check out Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow.
@“Brett”#p122929 I read this post hours ago, but the King-McCarthy comparison keeps rolling around in my head, because they are both writers I enjoy and admire a great deal, though of course for very different reasons.
I have read nearly every god dang book that King has written, and would count The Stand as one of the better ones, despite it being King To The Max, in all the best ways, which are also all the worst ways.
Having read all of the early McCarthy novels in the first part of this year, one thing that struck me was: I wonder how much King lifted directly from McCarthy, if anything at all. It's a bit of "guy who has only seen Boss Baby watches his second movie" of me, but I noticed some stylistic tendencies and turns of phrase that King _may_ have borrowed from McCarthy. But those may have just been stylistic tendencies that were more prevalent in those decades.
King is open about the authors he loves best, and which ones he's stolen from over the years, but I've never heard him mention McCarthy. I would be surprised if McCarthy has ever spared Stephen King a thought. I wonder how much mutual disdain they had for one another.
Also I wish every McCarthy book had a King analog, the way The Stand and The Road so thematically fit one another. You could probably make a labored connection to some King output for each McCarthy book, but then, why would you.
Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo is too gorgeous to fully reckon with after only one reading. Especially one as spread-out as mine was. I only really grokked what he was doing partway through, and my knowledge of Latin American history is too limited to grasp what all he's getting at, but the imagery and the lucidity were haunting/comedic in that way that Latin American authors - and maybe Eastern European authors, sometimes? - seem to specialize in. The copy I read had some typos, which was a bummer. Makes me question how good the translation was, and makes me wish I could read it in Spanish.
#真相をお話しします (#I will speak the truth - my translation) by Yuki Shinichiro is a collection of five short stories that feel _eerily_ accurate in their depiction of what it feels like to be alive right now in Japan. Black mirror vibes, but less emphasis on sci-fi, and more emphasis on how fucked up the situation we're living in right now actually is, from a social human perspective. Oh, and mix in a nice amount of pulpy genre stuff and humour. It's already been turned into a manga, and has been picked up for translation in several languages. I hope this finds a big audience as it's already done in Japan.
I'm also two thirds of the way through Lonesome Dove again, and that book is just among the all-time greats. Effortlessly masterful storytelling. Epic in length without feeling bloated. I will read it a couple more times before I die, I hope.
@“yeso”#p123012 Thanks! That’s three separate things for me to now be intrigued about, in one very short post. I intend to check out all threes Your economy of words is impressive.
I‘ve been recommended Jim Thompson since I was seventeen and I don’t think I've ever read one of his novels, but the Dimestore Dostoevsky has always had a strong appeal to me.
@“whatsarobot”#p123014 lol sorry I should have taken the time to elaborate more. Bc you like mccarth, I think you’ll probably enjoy the direct style bleeding into phantasmagoric effect that Rulfo has in The Burning Plain (since you’re already buying what he’s selling). Same for Jim Thompson, in his case mid century US crime novels. The Killer Inside Me, Savage Night, The Getaway (very different from the Peckinpah film), and Pop. 1280 are good ones