Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing – Is the Film More Absurd than the Novel?
Surfacing, starring Joseph Bottoms, is not only an astute interpretation of Atwood’s work, but it is also a marvellous film in itself. Yes, marvellous. Certainly, it does justice to Atwood’s portrayal of substanceless women, but if it has any clearly defined themes, they are lost on the audience. What more could an audience want but a film that is incoherent and that is filled with vivid imageries?
A woman dancing half-naked with a maggot-infested heron. A deadly fight breaking out because someone pipes up, "You play as well as you shoot?" The narrator searching for rock paintings. These fragments make up the backbone of this film and yes, they are shown in the proper sequence, unlike Margaret Atwood’s novel! No more pieces of information surfacing at unpredictable points in your mind, no further need to decipher the narrator’s invented past, and best of all, no need to agonize over the narrator’s painful process of finding her authentic self. In the film, the narrator is given a name, Kate. She is now more tangible, unlike Atwood’s narrator. Everyone knows that tangibility is what makes a piece of work great. At any rate, the film does a great job of stripping everything down to their essentials. Why make you plod through Atwood’s depiction of the tensions that exist between the French and the English? Just remove all that political nonsense! Why create suspense about the truth behind the narrator’s father’s drawings? Remove this as well, for it is a waste of time! Film viewing time is better spent on David and Anna’s preoccupation with sex, after all.
Now, be forewarned: Relationships in the film have taken a different route from that of Margaret Atwood’s novel. "Kate" and her boyfriend Joe exchange many a word in the film, and they know one another well. Joe is easygoing and he even romps with David. In Atwood’s Surfacing, Joe is quite a different character. He is quiet and sullen, and he does not even like having the narrator look at him! Being unmarried is looked down upon in this little town, but in the film, when Evans sees "Kate" and Joe together, disapproval is apparent, and Evans comments on how Kate is "growed (sic) up and married." Of course, it may be suspicion on Evans’ part, but one cannot be sure. The most important discovery that the narrator makes in Atwood’s Surfacing is the discovery of her authentic self – the discovery that she needs not be a victim of her false self.
In conclusion, details involving the characters and symbolic meanings to objects are the factors that make the novel better than the movie. Leaving out aspects of the novel limits the viewer’s appreciation for the story. One may favor the film over the novel or vice versa, but that person will not overlook the intense work that went into the making of both. The film and novel have their similarities and differences, but both effectively communicate their meaning to the public.
Janie’s first attempt at love does not turn out quite like she hopes. Her grandmother forces her into marrying Logan Killicks. As the year passes, Janie grows unhappy and miserable. By pure fate, Janie meets Joe Starks and immediately lusts after him. With the knowledge of being wrong and expecting to be ridiculed, she leaves Logan and runs off with Joe to start a new marriage. This is the first time that Janie does what she wants in her search of happiness: “Even if Joe was not waiting for her, the change was bound to do her good…From now on until death she was going to have flower dust and springtime sprinkled over everything” (32). Janie’s new outlook on life, although somewhat shadowed by blind love, will keep her satisfied momentarily, but soon she will return to the loneliness she is running from.
The play begins with a grand celebration, in which the characters toast to the New Year. Agnes admits that she feels relatively safe living at Berlin at this time, and the group decides to make up a story together. They story is of a cold night and a watchman who tries to beat nature by fighting back and arming himself with a warm coat and scarf. At first he succeeds, but later finds that even his coat and scarf are
woman she once knew. Both women only see the figure they imagine to be as the setting shows us this, in the end making them believe there is freedom through perseverance but ends in only despair.
Evil will triumph because when there is no opposition towards evil, over time even the ethical people will become corrupt. In The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, Death states that Alex Steiner, a German citizen who is a member of the Nazi party, “[had] an itch in his heart, but he made it a point not to scratch it.” (60). Before World War II, Alex Steiner was a man who lived by good morals, however after the rise of Nazism he became corrupted by the Nazi propaganda. The “itch in his heart” reveals that he knows deep inside that his decision to support Hitler, is morally incorrect, however he is so corrupted, that he decides to ignore his subconscious (60). According to an article from The Huffington Post called “Do Good People Turn Evil?” by Adam Grant, it states, “ordinary men would inflict severe pain on others simply because they were asked to do so by an authority figure in an experiment” (Grant). Ordinary people who lived by good morals suddenly decide to cause others pain because someone is instructing them to. When principled people listen to others and let them corrupt their point of view, they make the wrong decision. In the article from The Atlantic called, “When Good People Do Nothing: The Appalling Story of South Carolina's
In Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, she presents a number of very interesting facts regarding the ways that the sexual imagery of men and women respectively are used in the world of film. One such fact is that of the man as the looker and the female as the looked upon, she argues that the woman is always the object of reifying gaze, not the bearer if it. And “[t]he determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to be connote to-be-looked-at-ness” (487). Mulvey makes the claim that women are presented and primped into this role of “to-be-looked-at-ness”. They are put into films for this purpose and for very little other purposes. However, this argument cannot be incorporated with The Treasure of the Sierra Madre; the existence of women in the film is extremely insignificant to an extent that could be considered absent. “In a world ordered by sexual imbalance,” male serves as the dominant figures with which the viewer can identify, women only appear in the film for a very short moment of time. For instance, the appearance of women is only shown when Howard rescues the ill child in the village and his return to the village for hospitality reception...
It has been said of Anton Chekhov, the renown Russian short-story writer, that in all of his “work, there is never exactly a point. Rather we see into someone’s hear – in just a few pages, the curtain concealing these lives has been drawn back, revealing them in all their helplessness and rage and rancor.” Alice Munro, too, falls into this category. Many of her short-stories, such as “Royal Beatings” focus more on character revelation rather than plot.
What does the story of Atlas Shrugged have to say about the relative powers of good and evil and the conditions under which one is victorious over the other?
The sexual politics of the man-woman relationship, or more specifically the sexual exploitation of women by men, is a clear concern in Margaret Atwood's "Backdrop Addresses Cowboy." Although the oppressor-as-male theme is by no means an original source of poetic inspiration, Atwood's distinction is that she views the destructive man-woman relationship as a metaphor for, symptom and symbol of, bigger things. From the vantage-point of feminine consciousness, Margaret Atwood empahsizes the "backdrop" as being not only the woman, but also the land and the spiritual life of the universe; the "cowboy" is both a man bent on personal gain (possibly an American based on Atwood's strong anti-American sentiments in her novel, Surfacing) and an emissary of technological progress.
Next let us consider the vivid scenery depicted throughout this specimen of literature. Compared to other attempts at re-imagining this piece of literature none of them materialized virtually close to the number of scenes in this film. First, amidst the introductory we are given the scene of Lena catching the public bus transportation system home from work, affording us the opportunity to view the magnificent city on...
At the outset, Atwood gives the reader an exceedingly basic outline of a story with characters John and Mary in plotline A. As we move along to the subsequent plots she adds more detail and depth to the characters and their stories, although she refers back with “If you want a happy ending, try A” (p.327), while alluding that other endings may not be as happy, although possibly not as dull and foreseeable as they were in plot A. Each successive plot is a new telling of the same basic story line; labeled alphabetically A-F; the different plots describe how the character’s lives are lived with all stories ending as they did in A. The stories tell of love gained or of love lost; love given but not reciprocated. The characters experience heartache, suicide, sadness, humiliation, crimes of passion, even happiness; ultimately all ending in death regardless of “the stretch in between”. (p.329)
Effectively using these elements in a piece of literature enhances the reader’s curiosity. One prime example of such usage of these elements is seen in Kate Chopin's writing. Her use of foreshadowing and use of emotional conflicts put into few words in the short piece "The Storm" adds an element that is alluring, holding the reader's interest. In this short piece of literature, a father and son, Bobinot and Bibi, are forced to remain in a store where they were shopping before the storm, waiting for the storm to pass over them. In the meantime, the wife and mother, Calixta, whom is still at home, receives an unexpected visit from a former lover named Alicee. The two have an affair and the story starts to come together. The story shows us how we tend to want what we beli...
Murray, Jennifer. "Love and Anxiety in the Early Postmodern World of Margaret Atwood’s Dancing Girls." E-rea. E-rea, 1 Aug. 2008. Web. 16 Mar. 2014.
The major issue that runs through the film that I am going to discuss in this chapter is that there are elements of the gothic, grotesque and me...
Catherine Deneuve’s film roles are typically characterised by ‘a temperament at once passionate and inviolable’ (GEOFFREY HARTMAN). To what extent, and in what ways, is this manifested in any ONE OR MORE of the films you have studied on the module?