While still ruminating on the whole Lucas changing his art debate (and the extent to which he is or is not “allowed” to do that), I was reminded of Annie Proulx’s short story Brokeback Mountain
Why? Well, she is plagued by people who “fix” her story and then mail it to her. She can tell it better than I:
“Brokeback Mountain” has had little effect on my writing life, but is the source of constant irritation in my private life. There are countless people out there who think the story is open range to explore their fantasies and to correct what they see as an unbearably disappointing story. They constantly send ghastly manuscripts and pornish rewrites of the story to me, expecting me to reply with praise and applause for “fixing” the story. They certainly don’t get the message that if you can’t fix it you’ve got to stand it. Most of these “fix-it” tales have the character Ennis finding a husky boyfriend and living happily ever after, or discovering the character Jack is not really dead after all, or having the two men’s children meet and marry, etc., etc. Nearly all of these remedial writers are men, and most of them begin, “I’m not gay but….” They do not understand the original story, they know nothing of copyright infringement—i.e., that the characters Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar are my intellectual property—and, beneath every mangled rewrite is the unspoken assumption that because they are men they can write this story better than a woman can. They have not a clue that the original “Brokeback Mountain” was part of a collection of stories about Wyoming exploring mores and myths. The general impression I get is that they are bouncing off the film, not the story. There’s more, but that is enough, ok?
That’s right: People are mailing Annie Proulx their own Jack/Ennis slashfic.
If there is room for Lucas to go back and “fix” his story even after it has been adopted/memorized by countless people, it seems to me that there must be room for us to go back and fix the stories of others.
If not, why not?
Absolutely. She can take her intellectual property and shove it up her intellect.
It shouldn’t make me this happy to know that people are sending Annie Proulx homemade slashfic.
But it does.
For me, the fact that she hates it with such contempt is what makes it so wonderful.
I tend to agree. She seems to be taking a very selfish view on this. You openned this up for public viewing, and that will mean slashfic (I first spelled that slashdic, Freudian slip). Grow up.
Megh; I’d probably get pretty tired of getting unsolicited porn rewrites of my art.
Of course, I’d probably remember then that I have this fishing huge check from the movie rights that lets me hire someone to go through my mail, and care less.
What’s really telling is the assumptions she reads in to the motives of the slashfic authors. She assumes that they want to demonstrate that a man can tell the storry better, and it couldn’t possibly be that they’re so brokenhearted over just how incredibly sweet and sad the story really is — which may be why it’s men who must begin by saying “I’m not gay but…” since for a lot of them, they had never confronted the issue that two men might genuinely fall in lifelong love with one another before and are coming to terms with the fact that this is indeed a good thing.
Seems to me that she ought to be complimented that the slasfhic authors were so deeply moved by the story she wrote. But, her emotions and her own prejudices are as much her intellectual property as are the characters of Jack and Ennis, I guess.
“[T]hey had never confronted the issue that two men might genuinely fall in lifelong love with one another before and are coming to terms with the fact that this is indeed a good thing.”
You know, I didn’t get that at all. I don’t know about the original story, but I distinctly remember watching the movie and wondering how it was that it was supposed to make people on the fence about gay rights feel better about them.
I kinda got the vibe that I’ve seen people complain about with regards to The Help.
“Thank goodness society isn’t like *THAT* anymore!”
I really wonder if anyone is ever going to start telling writers what the word ‘publish’ means.
But Jaybird, these things are done all the time. In fact, I really enjoyed Gregory Maguire’s retelling of the Wicked Witch of the West. Frank Miller certainly took Batman places Bob Kane never intended him to go, and I would argue we’re better off for it. And John Gardner’s Grendel is one of my favorite books of all time, and mythic or not contains more “truth” for me that Beowulf.
Heck, most of what Shakespeare wrote was doing exactly this.
And your post that introduced me to One eskimO (thanks again, btw) was going this exact thing in another medium.
Which, I suppose, brings us back to George Lucas.
What makes Nooooooooooooooogate different?
I suspect there are two different things working at the same time. The first is that for guys of a certain age (and it’s a wide range, so like both you and me) these were more than just movies, they were defining stories that might have been our equivalent of fairy tales. Had the decided to “colorize” the Wizard of Oz, for example, I might not care for it but my older sister would bust a gasket. Also, in this day of a million channels and endless websites, it seems to be one of the few truly common cultural denominators. (Just think how weird it is when you meet someone your age who’s never seen Star Wars.) I think this creates a feeling of both ownership and community, so when it gets changed without our consent it bugs us.
The other thing is that for a lot of people, myself included, it’s hard not to shake the feeling that the endless rereleasing with updates, tweaks and extras is just a greedy money grab, and some of us find that icky.
As to the latter, well… it’s a free country. As to the former, I still feel like an artist should always be free to build off of their own or other’s work, to any degree that they see fit. This doesn’t mean I have to buy it, though.
(Also, it’s possible that people just overdose on Star Wars geekyness.)
I fall into the money grab area. I do not care that he modifies things and chuckle over the “Han shot first!” people, but these constant releases are just to make a buck.
. Had the decided to “colorize” the Wizard of Oz, for example, I might not care for it
Don’t mean to quibble, but didn’t they invent technicolor film during the Wizard of Oz? IIRC they had already filmed the entire movie in b&w and then this color capability got invented so they redid it in color. They decided to have the entire dream sequence in color while the ‘life” version stayed b&w.
Hmm, have now killed ten minutes on wiki and it seems some of what my Mom told me about her favorite movie might not be the same as wiki says. On the other hand she’s my Mom so I believe her version. 🙂
” IIRC they had already filmed the entire movie in b&w and then this color capability got invented so they redid it in color.”
Even if this isn’t true, it’s a great enough story that it should be.
Well, a couple of things.
George can do whatever he wants with his movie. I still reserve the right to ridicule him for it, if he makes it *worse*.
Second, while I think that nobody has a right to demand that somebody sell them something, I think it’s perfectly reasonable to say, “Hey, you already sold me this. I bought this, when I was twelve. I loved it. I gave you a bunch of other money for other things related to this. You’re sitting on a pile of cash that other people gave to you for the same reason. You’re now changing *this* to *that*, and you’re only willing to sell me *that* on Blu-Ray.
Just sell me *this*. You can sell *that*, too, if you like, knock yourself out. I don’t want *that*. I want *this*.”
Slashfic hardly makes it impossible for you to read the original thing. Retconning isn’t so bad when you can go buy the original thing to which you became attached.
Hey, he still has the legal right, that’s fine presuming you buy the whole IP thing to begin with. That doesn’t mean I don’t empathize with people who don’t like it.
It is important to note that all of those works were in the public domain when the “derivative” work was written, or was done with permission of the copyright holder (Batma), while Proulx still holds her copyright on Brokeback Mountain, though I don’t think any of the fanfic violates her copyright.
That said, Grendel is definitely one of the greatest books of the 20th Century.
True, Plinko, but I think one issue is legal copyright, and the other is artistic license.
But Grendel. Yeah.
My own pride. I don’t want to play with other people’s toys and I’d frown upon people using my own toys but wouldn’t dissuade them except with remonstrance. Part of why I don’t like Alan Moore. Watchmen was a good story but it was simply reskinning old Charleston characters out of necessity. He played with Jack the Ripper not to mention The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen full of public domain personalities. Of course one can argue Ecclesiastes 1:9 but there’s a certain deftness and doing something fresh rather than shoehorning stuff into a cookie cutter and ‘edgy’ plotline.
I wrote this play about a prince whose uncle kills his father the king and marries his mother the queen. It’s a lot like Hamlet, OK, it’s exactly like Hamlet, except that I fix a really awful mixed metaphor by changing the line to
take arms against a host of troubles
Because if you tried to take arms against a sea of troubles, they’d get rusty. You might even drown.
Anyway, mine has all the good stuff and less bad stuff. So it’s better. Right?
Out, damned spot!
What about _Gertrude and Claudius_?
Did you ever see the Simpson’s version of Hamlet>? It shows a vial labelled “Ear poison. Do not get in eyes.”
That, my friend, is bliss.
It is one of my all-time favorites. Another is this bit of dialog by Steven Brust:
“You’re generalizing from one example.”
“Everyone does that. Anyway, I do.”
Oh, no! Not Yorick! I knew him. He was a funny guy, knew a lot of good jokes. Used to give me piggyback rides when I was a little kid. But now, he’s just this gross skull. I mean, ewww! I guess he won’t be telling any more jokes now.”
See, it’s easier to understand that way.
I guess he won’t be telling any more jokes now.
“You feel that wind? That’s some wind. It goes right through me.”
I guess he won’t be telling any more jokes now.
Nah, it’s cool. You just take the cranium in one hand, and the jawbone in another…
You put the jaw in the cranium
Shake it all up…
On a similar topic, have you watched any of the various Phantom Edits that are out there? Some of them are really quite good.
I saw one (and I’m pretty sure it was the first one to get any traction because I’m sure it was back in 1999). I remember being surprised.
I shouldn’t have been surprised.
I don’t have a good taxonomy of these things either, but my favorite was one I saw where they simply dubbed over all the aliens with some kind of non-English “alien” language, and then subtitled new dialogue for them. It was an amazing improvement (especially, obviously, for Jar Jar).
Was it about egg salad?
The one I saw gave Jar-Jar a deep voice and gave him dialog closer to a stereotypical Native American (“Men. Bad.”) than to… whatever dialog category where Jar-Jar fits.
I believe it’s Mentally Ill Haitian Witch Doctor on a Helium Bender.
Here is a joke that was stale back in 2005. I hope you get to tell it today anyway.
Didja hear that George Lucas is going to make a movie about the Gulf War?
He’s calling it Jar-Jar Head.
Which is such a cliche.
Seen it in Photoshops, too.
It’s one of those jokes that just writes itself.
I think that Diana Gabaldon had pretty much the same reaction to slashfic of her characters. She made a blog post complaining about it and everyone’s ovaries exploded because OMG how DARE she THINK to TELL US that she DOESN’T LIKE US, doesn’t she KNOW we’re her FANS, if it weren’t for US she’d be NOTHING, she should just LET us do WHATEVER SHE WANTS and THANK us.
Which, on the one hand…no, of course you can’t stop people doing that.
But, on the other hand, you can’t stop someone doing much of anything. You can ask them not to, and you can punish them if you catch them at it, but you can’t make it impossible for it to happen.
But on the gripping hand, if you’re going to spend all this effort writing a story, why not make up your own characters to put in it? Insisting on using someone else’s pre-made characters just seems like either laziness or an attempt to ride someone else’s coattails (because nobody would look at your cheesy porno story if it weren’t Snape getting it on with Dumbledore, or whatever the pairing du jour is).
Although I’m also reminded of the “Haloid” short (synopsis: Master Chief from Halo meets Samus Aran from Metroid and they kill the Covenant. ALL OF IT.) The guy who made it posted a big rant about how he did all this work and choreography to make it look good, but if he hadn’t used Halo and Metroid characters nobody would have cared, and he has a whole bunch of other animation work and why don’t you look at that since you’re here, and so on.
(He then went on to do another short where all the girl characters from the Final Fantasy games have a big kung-fu fight, so there you go.)
> But on the gripping hand, if you’re going to
> spend all this effort writing a story, why
> not make up your own characters to put in it?
Because you’re not that good of a writer or you have limited imagination?
Which may be why a lot of slashfic is horribly wretched.
Some people *are* good, which makes the end product a real homage to the original thing itself, which is probably the end goal of anyone who does write slashfic; it’s just that the pool of slashfic writers is self-selecting for “largely incompetent writers” to begin with, on account o’ the whole lack of imagination and bad writing skills thing.
Insisting on using someone else’s pre-made characters just seems like either laziness or an attempt to ride someone else’s coattails.
I don’t think that’s it. I think it’s just that people like those characters, and want more stories about them than the author is willing or able to produce.
My guess is that, if I worked hard to create something beautiful, it would drive me fishing nuts if people were constantly ruining it and then expecting me to approve. If people had had the ability to Photoshop some of Picasso’s paintings and make the eyes point the same way, I doubt he would have greeted the end results with much pleasure had he received them.
To give “Brokeback Mountain” any kind of uplifting ending is to ruin it utterly. To make it even slightly happy is to miss the point entirely. Do fans have the intellectual right to do so? Sure. Something something free country, and all that. But why should Proulx be pleased with people taking a dump on her story, no matter how pleased with themselves they are at the final product?
Oh, I don’t think that Proulx should necessarily be pleased. I totally understand why she is not. That’s not what gives me a ball of sunshine in my stomach.
My joy comes from the fact that there are people out there who say not only “I will re-write this story but make the characters happy” but finish, look at the page, and say “I will mail this to Annie Proulx. I think she would benefit from reading it.”
That is *AWESOME*.
Well, when you put it that way…