Piling on The Seeker

Salon asked some children’s writers about movie adaptations, and a couple had interesting things to say about an uninteresting film, The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising. I read that piece just a couple of hours after watching the movie for the first time (I had a bunch of envelopes to stuff, all right?). M. T. Anderson is right on the mark about it:

The original novel, published in the ’70s, established a lot of the common tropes of kids’ fantasy novels – for example, the odd penchant of Forces of Light in general for engaging underage teens to save the world. (Really? Is that a wise choice? Are those the only resumes they receive?)

The qualities of the original that make it a classic of the genre also make it a tough thing to adapt into a movie. It’s richly atmospheric and moody, even dreamy, evoking a Celtic Christmas that is ancient and half-pagan – but the confrontations between Light and Dark are subtle. The action is almost ritualistic.

For the movie, they threw the whole Celtic thing out the window and focused on action. By sapping the story of everything that made it particular (its mood and its focus on a seductive blend of British mythologies) they left behind only the elements that have been imitated so many times in the 30 years since the book’s publication that they’ve become cliché. So the filmmakers managed to create something that fans of the book hated – because it gutted the original material – while at the same time boring the hell out of everyone who didn’t know the book, because all that was left was insipidly generic.

Charitably, Anderson says, “Some of the bustling family scenes, scripted by the talented John Hodge (‘Trainspotting’) have verve.” Family was also a major theme in Susan Cooper’s novel as well, starting from the first line, but used in a completely different way. Though one Stanton brother is exasperated by the number of siblings (which the movie doesn’t try to replicate fully), for Will his family is safe and sturdy. In contrast, the movie family is full of nasty teasing, sexual rivalry, and hidden shame.

I was struck by how desperate the moviemakers were to establish that The Seeker was set in the present, not the (gasp!) 1970s. Our first sight of Will is him putting in earbuds. Shortly afterward comes a shot of a line of teens all flicking open their cell phones. (Remember when phones flicked open?) Will’s brothers have a huge screen for their videogames, an older brother Skypes in from Hawaii for Christmas, and Will researches the ancient battle of light and dark through Google.

That technology theme fades away, however, and cell phones and computers aren’t allowed to affect the plot any more than in the Harry Potter stories. The conflict plays out in a series of very familiar special-effects shots. Giant snakes! Water bursting through archways! Glass breaking! Smoke billowing!

Diane Duane concurred on how much was lost:

…probably the adaptation I’ve seen that stands out as most completely screwed-up would be “The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising.” The basic concept was eviscerated and left staggering around like a zombie-ized shell of itself, and all the good character business was either dumbed down, ripped out or rendered meaningless. It infuriated me, because that book was the anchor of one of the great mid-’70s YA fantasy series, a nuanced piece of work.

I know mood is hard to translate from page to screen. But The Dark Is Rising offers one of the finest lines in children’s literature—“Tonight will be bad, and tomorrow will be beyond all imagining”—and The Seeker managed to screw up even that.

I have no compunction about spoiling what’s supposed to be one of the movie’s big reveals: that Will’s twin brother was kidnapped in infancy, and—despite his growing up in a family with two guilt-stricken parents and five older brothers who love to torment him—no one ever told him. This allows for a sight of the lead actor in an awful wig alongside his regular self in trick shots at the end of the film. Hell, I’ll even give away the ending! The brother returns to the family after fourteen years of captivity in a snow globe as if nothing has happened.

The Fantasies of Asperger Fiction

Among Oz readers and in other fantasy fandoms, I've met readers who acknowledge having some of the traits of Asperger syndrome, or even formal diagnoses of it. Indeed, I suspect that some fantasy literature might even hold special appeal to people with those conditions.

To begin with, fantasy literature involves figuring out how an unusual world or hidden aspect of this world works, often as an outsider. Many series end in societies that welcome people of diverse types, as in the Emerald City under Princess Ozma. Both qualities might appeal to smart readers who've found that they think differently from most of the people around them.

Another possible attraction of fantasy series is their sprawling level of detail: books, characters, locales, fictional histories, and adaptations into other media--all for a highly detail-oriented person to enjoy mastering. If those universes weren't so sprawling, they might be less appealing.

As much as fantasy novels can appeal to people with Asperger syndrome, I haven't been pleased with how the ones I've read actually portray the condition. We don't fully understand Asperger's, and fantasy lets authors explore such mysteries by connecting them to otherworldly forces and dimensions. Unfortunately, that approach risks obscuring the fact that autism/Asperger's is a way of being human in this world.

Diane Duane's A Wizard Alone brings on a new "young wizard" named Darryl McAllister, who's been diagnosed as autistic. Kit, one of the protagonists from So You Want to Be a Wizard, sets out to help him.

However, Darryl's autism is atypical: he suddenly developed the condition at age eight. And the resolution of his story is (***SPOILER***) even more atypical. Magical events allow Darryl simply to "ditch" his autism and recover fully, to the surprise of his parents and teachers. Plus, he gets to stay magical.

Thor Wignutt in Summerland has no formal diagnosis, but I immediately thought of "Aspie" kids when I read Michael Chabon's description of the character. Thor first appears speaking and acting like an android, a sign of how out of place he feels. He's one of the three children who travel to a fantasy dimension, but we never get into his head the way we do with the other two.

Eventually it turns out (***SPOILER***) that Thor is a changeling, which both explains his condition and leads to him making his home in that other place. (It's actually occurred to a number of people that autism might be the root of myths about changelings.)

One last possible example: some parents of children with Asperger's have interpreted Charles Wallace Murray in A Wrinkle in Time and its sequels, and perhaps even Meg Murray herself, as fitting along the autism spectrum. Again, Madeleine L'Engle portrayed Charles Wallace's unusual behavior as connected to larger forces in the universe.

The first two of these fantasy novels treat the autistic characters' conditions--whether explicitly stated as on the spectrum or not--as problems to be solved rather than as conditions of life for some people. All hint that the root of the characters' difficulties, and any remedies, come from out of this world. Does modern fantasy literature treat other chronic conditions the same way?

Credit Where It's Due

J. K. Rowling's recent statement that her character Albus Dumbledore is gay has produced a chorus of wishfulness. I've seen people wishing that Rowling had been clearer in her intended clues about Dumbledore, that she had depicted him as more open, that she had identified other adult characters as gay, that her Hogwarts students had keened about same-sex pairings as loudly as they do about opposite-sex pairings. Basically, these critics wish that Rowling had written different books.

But let's not neglect the books Rowling has written and what she's now said about them. What other children's fantasy writer has been as explicit about a beloved, admired character being gay?

Sure, there's now a fair amount of contemporary fiction for teens about being gay or having gay friends or relatives, as well as some in which homosexuality is present but not central. But Rowling has "outed" an authority figure and beloved mentor in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, a book for and about eleven-year-olds. Dumbledore is a major character in an ongoing series of multimillion-dollar movies, with his own articulated action figures (shown above, courtesy of The Collector Zone). Has any other children's novelist come close to giving a gay character that positive exposure?

Wikipedia's "List of LGBT characters in modern written fiction" now includes Albus Dumbledore. What other characters from children's literature does it include? What other children's author has contributed to that list?

Am I Blue?: Coming Out from the Silence, Marion Dane Bauer's 1994 anthology, contains stories by Bruce Coville, Jane Yolen, Gregory Maguire, and other fine fantasists. Coville's Skull of Truth from 1997 has what Wendy Betts calls "a fairly minor subplot" about a gay uncle (which was still enough to get it removed from school shelves in one Illinois town). But a targeted anthology and a subplot just don't have the heft of Dumbledore, the greatest wizard of his age.

I've written about the close relationship of the Scarecrow and Tin Woodman in L. Frank Baum's The Tin Woodman of Oz, and about Glinda the Good's appreciation of female beauty and lack of interest in men. But Baum would have surely disavowed any interpretations of his characters as homosexual (or sexual, for that matter).

I've noted the same-sex couple who mentor the kids in Diane Duane's So You Want to Be a Wizard, a portrayal of a relationship that's less fraught with tragedy and cliché than Rowling's. But according to Tsukara, Duane's response to questions about Tom and Carl's partnership is: "It's their business, so why should it matter to you?" Rowling has certainly not been that coy.

Only in comics have I seen writers do more to include gay characters in fantasy stories meant (at least in part) for young readers. And of course those efforts are far from bullet-proof against criticism.

For the people who have complained that Rowling wasn't forward enough in portraying gay characters, who among children's fantasy writers is ahead of her?

The Pen Is Mightier Than the Wand?

The first Maguffin in Diane Duane's So You Want to Be a Wizard is a pen. To be fair, it's the heroine Nita's favorite pen: "Her space pen, a present from her uncle Joel, the pen that could write on butter or glass or upside down, her pen with which she had never failed a test, even in math. . . . Silver barrel, grooved all around the lower half to keep the user's fingers from slipping. Her initials engraved on it. Hers, her pen."

Around the time Nita learns she can be a wizard, the leader of a gang of girls who regularly beats up on her steals this pen. So naturally Nita's first thought of how to use her magic is to get her pen back.

That brings her in contact with Kit, another young wizard, who agrees to help. They conjure up Fred, a small portion of a white hole from another dimension, who also wants nothing more than to help retrieve the pen. It is, after all, a space pen.

Fred sucks the pen away from the bully, but it goes down the wrong way, causing him to belch up bits of inexplicable matter, such as a fighter plane and gold bricks. The only way Nita and Kit can help their new extradimensional friend--and retrieve her pen--is to go into the neighborhood's requisite spooky house.

That house turns out to be the home of a nice same-sex couple who tell the kids they have to go into Manhattan with Fred and, at precisely the right time and place, read another spell. Then and only then will Nita have her pen. (There may well be stationery stores in Manhattan or on the way that stock the same pen, but that possibility doesn't arise.)

In Manhattan, unscheduled construction has changed the only location where Nita can get her pen out of Fred. That spot is now hovering in the air above Grand Central station, higher than the Pan Am Building. So Nita, who's only been a wizard for about a week, decides to create a staircase out of air up to the sweet spot, heights or no heights. Then when she and Kit are halfway up, some werewolves roar after them and they have to choose whether to duck through their portal into another reality.

Meanwhile, I'm yelling at the book, "It's a PEN! It's JUST a PEN!"

To Duane's credit, near the end of the adventure Nita uses her pen to do a crucial bit of magic. She's not writing on butter or glass or upside down, but the pen doesn't simply disappear from the plot when it's back in her pocket.

Thematically, the pen also fits into the book's overarching theme of the power of books and reading. In the very first scene, Nita takes refuge in a library. Copies of a book titled So You Want to Be a Wizard snag the two kids into magic, and contain the spells they must read. The older wizards also consult books. The two Maguffins that follow the pen are The Book of Night with Moon and The Book Which Is Not Named (But Is At Least More Grammatical). So a writing implement has extra importance in this universe.

Still, it's just a pen.

It So Wants to Be a Movie

I missed Diane Duane's breakthrough novel, So You Want to Be a Wizard, when it was first published. I was busy doing other things like graduating from high school and learning how much more work there is in college. I didn't stop reading fantasy literature in the mid-'80s; I took courses on each of the three parts of Dante's Comedy and wrote my undergraduate thesis on The Hunting of the Snark. But I didn't have time to dig into anything new.

After finally reading this first novel in the Young Wizards series, I had a thought that I couldn't have had back then: it feels like a Robert Rodriguez movie waiting to happen. No, not the style that producer-director-writer-editor-etc.'s used for El Mariachi and Desperado and the recent Grindhouse. Rather, this is a movie for Rodriguez in his kid-movie mode, as in the Spy Kids series (and the lamentable Adventures of Sharkboy and Lava-Girl).

Consider the affinities:

• There are two protagonists, boy and girl. Even in his quarter of Four Rooms, Rodriguez followed a boy and a girl.
• Those kids have Latino heritage, like the main characters in most of Rodriguez's original screenplays. The boy, Kit Rodriguez (no relation), still speaks with a Spanish accent. The girl, Nita, is blonde and named Callahan, but her full first name of Juanita, which has got to mean something.
  
• The kids' magical companion is a bobbing point of light, easily created using CGI. Rodriguez owns his own CGI shop in San Antonio, Troublemaker Digital Studios.
• The heart of the book--from the fifth to the ninth chapters--takes place in a dark, skewed version of Manhattan, where dragons lurk in subway tunnels and cars are animate creatures. Again, that just cries out for CGI. And the artificiality of the result, which made parts of Spy Kids off-putting, would actually enhance the sense that there's something wrong with this Manhattan.

And did I mention the werewolves? Surely Robert Rodriguez likes werewolves.

On the other hand, someone would have to convince Rodriguez not to move the story to Texas, where he's set most of his movies. The New York area and Manhattan in particular are crucial to the character of the book.

In fact, some folks might be working on a So You Want to Be a Wizard movie right now. Back in January, Duane revealed that she was once again in talks with possible producers. She even posted some of her screenplay, showing how she had adapted the book's psychic conversations, which work perfectly well on a page, so that on screen they won't look like two actors staring into space. There's no producer-director-writer-editor-etc.'s name attached to this deal yet, but I can hope.