Unit Content
Guiding Questions
Do these works from the 1950s-1960s share commonalities with today’s students’ anxieties and experiences as they navigate their coming of age and can these “dated” pieces relate to their own truth and to the modern world?
The Language of Film
Before we get involved in reading our novels, it is important to introduce students to film terminology and teach them to look at movie trailers or movie clips with a critical eye. In John Golden’s book Reading in the Dark: Using Film as a Tool in the English Classroom, it is suggested that teachers go about using movies in the wrong order. Golden writes, “We tend to read a written text and then watch its counterpart on film, but what this book is suggesting is that we reverse the order; use a film clip to practice the reading and analytical skills that we want our students to have and then turn to the written text.”7 This is exactly what I want to do; start with film and then turn to the text. Students are much more enthusiastic about analyzing a movie, but the skills of analyzing text are one and the same. Linda Costanzo Cahir, in Literature into Film: Theory and Practical Approaches, compare literature and film when she writes, “Literature and film composition, unlike a painting, for example, both comprise a series of constantly changing images.”8 She then mentions how analyzing a film is much like analyzing a text where she compares the film frame to a word and film sequences to syntactical structure.9 The lightbulb goes off and this makes sense to me. For example, I might use the sentence from Plath’s The Bell Jar, “[The rain] flew straight down from the sky in drops the size of coffee saucers and hit the hot sidewalks with a hiss that sent clouds of steam writhing up from the gleaming, dark concrete.”10 When doing a close reading, we might focus on the words “hiss,” “writhing,” and the image of the “gleaming, dark concrete.” I would ask students to connect this to the tone or theme of the novel. Likewise, when viewing The Girl Interrupted movie trailer, I might pause on a frame where the six patients from Claymore mental asylum are breaking into the office that contains their personal files and have students analyze the arrangement of characters, the lighting, and camera angle and then connect these components to the tone and theme of the film. Since “film and literature have aesthetic equivalents in methods and style”11 and as a teacher, I understand the importance of teaching terminology when analyzing a written text, I now realize that it is just as important to give my students the same analytical tools when discussing or considering film. So using either a rolled up piece of paper, as Golden suggests in his book, or even their own phones, the unit begins with defining and demonstrating the different type of shots, angles, lighting, camera movement. This is described in great detail below in classroom activities.
After familiarizing them with the movie analysis lingo, I will show a few movie trailers or clips and demonstrate how to break these examples down using our newly acquired terminology. I will show the movie trailers for Igby Goes Down, Rushmore, Girl Interrupted, and Revolutionary Road. I chose these trailers because they seem to be inspired by these two books and carry similar themes. It could also be useful to also have students study clips from the films of different iconic filmmakers (such as Hitchcock, Wes Anderson, etc.) to help aid in discussion of mise-en-scène. For example, I might show frames from Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums, specifically when Richie, Margot, and Chas are introduced as children. Each frame, Richie with his tennis balls, Margot with her plays, and Chas with his business suit, without any dialogue beautifully begin to show who these kids are.12 I would walk students through each frame and discuss how Anderson uses mise-en-scène to develop characterization. While viewing these various film examples, Seglem also suggests having students “tak[e] notes over the events of the plot, making observations about characters and their motivations, noting the effect music has on each scene, and writing down various other observations. At the conclusion of the movie, students… reflect on how the theme is developed in the movie.”13 Students will do this same type of analysis on the chosen movie trailers or clips, focusing on music, lighting, camera angles, editing, mise-en-scène, etc. Again, this process should be familiar to them, as film analysis is akin to literary analysis and students will have already been introduced with the concept of annotation. This movie trailer and clip analysis allows students to recognize the importance of film techniques and how to use these to best represent their concept and adaptation of the novel when it comes to their final project of creating their own movie clip or trailer of the coming-of-age novel they chose. This is where their adaptation brainstorming will begin, noticing how other filmmakers affect their audience-- what works and what doesn’t.
Reading and Analyzing Their Chosen Bildungsroman
This unit focuses on two mid-century bildungsromans, The Catcher in the Rye and The Bell Jar, and students will get to choose which novel to read. Choice is important in the high school classroom because it gives students ownership of the material. I want to present the final project of creating a modern adaptation and filming a scene or creating a movie trailer before students read their chosen book so that when they begin reading, they can annotate it as a filmmaker would, focusing on possible scenes and images to use in their final project. In Literature into Film, Cahir reminds readers, “The literary text is strip-mined for the riches the filmmakers can use to produce their own vision of the work.”14 Even though their modern adaptation will be its own thing, it should be “fertilely tethered to its literary parent.” 15 This should be highlighted as teachers go over ways to help students annotate their chosen novels, using the filmmaker annotations strategy showcased below. It should also be mentioned to students that as they are reading, they should be brainstorming all the possibilities for their modern adaptation, creating adaptation mind maps described later. Having them do this will instinctively make them take the text they are reading and instantly make connections to their own world, my ultimate goal for this unit.
As they read, students should also consider critically examining the point of view and development of these two characters, Holden and Esther -- looking at race, gender, and socioeconomic status and what these novels offer in terms of criticism of the period in which they were written.
The Catcher in the Rye: Historical Context and Analysis
Published in 1951, J.D. Salinger uses the narrative frame of being in a mental institution as Holden Caulfield recounts his story of his deteriorating mental state two days before Christmas in 1949. Readers hear about how he gets kicked out of Pencey Prep boarding school and his judgements of his classmates and teachers in his school and follow him to New York City as he drinks, smokes, and cusses his way through the city streets. He checks into a hotel, goes to a nightclub, has a violent encounter with prostitute and her pimp all the while giving his unique, pessimistic, funny, blatantly honest views on girls, sex, phoniness, death, and a variety of other things teenagers deal with. As he increasingly becomes more depressed, we gain more insight into his thoughts of death and suicide. The next day, Holden reaches out to an old girlfriend Sally who disappoints him, and then he sneaks into his own house to see his little sister Phoebe who seems to be more adult than Holden is. Finally, he visits an old English teacher whom Holden trusts. Mr. Antolini offers him a place to stay for the night, but he wakes up in the middle of the night to find his teacher patting his head. Fleeing that unusual situation, he is confused as what to do next and plans to “go west,” but not before he says good-bye to his sister Phoebe. As the book continues, we realize how mentally and physically sick Holden is, but in the end, we see him in a recovery state, telling us this story from an asylum, reflecting on his experience and giving us a glimmer of hope.
After our quick study of the language of film, students will do a little individual research into the historical context of the novel, information on Salinger himself, and on the novel’s history of being banned to help orient students and to help them understand the characters, language, and significant themes in the book. In “Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye,” Sarah Graham writes, “It is important to acknowledge that he is sensitive and kind as well as rebellious, with a keen sense of right and wrong. In many ways Holden is a product of his time and place… and he faces the uncertainties of being young in post-war America with insight and anxiety.”16 Students will find that this time in the 1950s was fraught with the Cold War, McCarthyism, the rise of the suburban status quo and conventional family values, the birth of teenage culture, and the importance of conformity.17 I might even direct students to the “Shy Guy” video that was shown in schools during the 1950s so that they can get a sense of the culture. Students should understand that “Holden’s willingness to confront taboo subjects”18 is what makes this text so controversial. Holden’s rejection of the typical masculine stereotypes, openly sneering at the idea of working a job that he would hate and doing mundane things like going to the movies (hopefully, the irony will not be lost on the students), should be reinforced as well. This will be echoed and be a point of comparison for those students reading The Bell Jar.
The Bell Jar Background: Historical Context and Analysis
A representation of mental instability and published under a pseudonym in 1963, Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar’s offers another teenage point of view. Protagonist Esther Greenwood experiences a mental breakdown while she questions societal expectations and contradictions of the 1950s. The novel seems to be divided into two parts. The first being about her spiral into depression and uncertainty during a New York City month-long internship at a fashion magazine. She is an intelligent, overachieving, curious, funny girl whose family is of lower socioeconomic status trying to navigate her world, while fixating on the paradoxical disparities between men and women. During this New York City internship, she meets new friends like Doreen, a southern belle with a promiscuous side, has a mentor named Jay Cee whom she just cannot impress, tells us about her hypocritical, on-again-off-again boyfriend Buddy, the quintessential 1950s, chauvinistic man, and ends this first part by describing her experience of an attempted rape. This seems to be the tipping point for her spiraling depression. The second part of the book focuses on her decline into depression especially after not getting accepted to a much-desired summer writing program, her suicide attempts - the last being almost successful, her experience in a mental asylum, the death of her friend Joan, and her eventual recovery.
After our quick study of the language of film, students will be required to do a little of individual research about Sylvia Plath, finding out that this novel is semi-autobiographical and that Plath did eventually commit suicide in 1963, and about the world of the 1950s, focusing on the role of women and societal expectations during that time period. In “Individual Mobility and the Sense of ‘Deadlock’: A Cultural Materialist Analysis of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar,” Azhar Noori Fejer and Rosli Talif describe the world of the 1950s as a time when “political and social ideologies … were encouraging young women to seek a husband, take care of children, and maintain biological roles.”19 The authors continue to depict a woman’s role in this time period by using Betty Friedan’s description of how the media created this image of the “‘happy housewife heroine.’”20 The perfect woman was seen as “healthy, beautiful, educated, and as having no concerns except for her husband, children, and home. She has supposedly found true feminine fulfillment.”21 This powerful image did not paint a truthful picture for most women. A majority of women were unhappy with the monotony of being a housewife and doormat for their husbands, leaving them crestfallen and fed-up.22 During this time period, “scientific literature” concluded that feminism was “‘a deep illness’ and education for women could only bring trouble: ‘the more educated a woman is, the greater chance there is of sexual disorder.’”23 This is essential for students to recognize because it explains so much of Esther’s “struggle for self-determination and power in the face of antagonistic social forces”24 and leads them into a greater understanding of her character.
Adaptation--To Adapt or Not to Adapt: That is the Question
When teaching students about adaptation, it’s important to let them know that “The adaptation is a new original. The adaptor looks for the balance between preserving the spirit of the original and creating a new form,”25 and that “by its very nature, adaptation is a transition, a conversation, from one medium to another.”26 I want students to understand that their final project is their modern interpretation of a book that is a product of the generation it was written in. How can students stay true to the story line, but make it more relatable to teens today? This is their challenge.
Theory of Adaptation
In A Theory of Adaptation, Linda Hutcheon defines adaptation as “A creative and an interpretive act of appropriation/salvaging. An extended intertextual engagement with the adapted work. Therefore, an adaptation is a derivation that is not derivative --a work that is second without being secondary.”27 This is at the core of this unit and so important to convey to my students. I envision having discussions centering on what an adaptation really is and how it differs from plagiarism, song covers or music sampling, and prequels or sequels as Hutcheon brings up in her book.28 As we go through this discussion of adaptation, I want students to understand that “An adaptation is not vampiric: it does not draw the life-blood from its source and leave it dying or dead, nor is it paler than the adapted work. It may, on the contrary, keep that prior work alive, giving it an afterlife it would never have had otherwise.”29 This is what I am asking them to do during this unit -- to breathe contemporary life into these works that may have already become difficult to relate to and, through their modern translation, bring comfort to teens today that they are not alone in feeling dissatisfied and depressed in this hypocritical world. I want students to see that literature, no matter how obsolete and old-fashioned it may seem, can be made relevant with the help of adaptation. Hutcheon writes,“Adaptation is how stories evolve and mutate to fit new times and different places.”30
Another quality I find intriguing about the idea of adapting these mid-century coming-of-age novels is that “adaptation implies change. It implies a process that demands rethinking, reconceptualizing, and understanding how the nature of drama is intrinsically different from the nature of all other literature.”31 This is where students are going to problem-solve, think critically, and put their own modern stamp on this project. For example, think about the Baz Lurhmann’s adaptation of Romeo and Juliet where, although he keeps the Shakespearean language, he sets the film in modern day Verona Beach, an obvious nod to California’s Venice Beach, where the characters drive cars and have guns instead of swords. One important aspect of adaptation to remind students of is that “the nature of condensing involves losing material. Condensing often includes losing subplots, combining or cutting characters, leaving out several of the many themes that might be contained in a long novel.”32 This is where students need to be aware of a filmmaker’s intentionality. What is omitted or added? What is the atmosphere and tone conveyed? What in the story is being sped up or slowed down and why? Who is the filmmaker’s intended audience? A filmmaker is very mindful of the changes and decisions that she makes. More importantly, change or translation of an original text is inevitable and scary. Again, I plan on bringing up another recent adaptation using Lurhmann’s The Great Gatsby which we will have viewed earlier in the school year and point out some of the changes and decisions he made as he took Gatsby out of the 1920s to a more modern, stylized world that still captures the excesses of the roaring twenties. As Seger writes, “Making changes takes a certain amount of courage from the writer, but if writers are unwilling to make some changes in the source material, the transition from literature to drama won’t happen.”33 So in order for their final projects to be successful adaptations, students need to be aware of and intentional about the changes they make.
Adaptation Challenges with The Catcher in the Rye and The Bell Jar
In this part of the unit, I will break down the adaptation issues for each novel. For The Catcher in the Rye, it would also be important to examine why Salinger never wanted his novel adapted to a movie, specifically looking at the letter he wrote declining the movie rights. I would show this letter to students where he describes Holden as “unactable” and that he “can’t legitimately be separated from his own first-person technique.”34 Because there have been no movies made of The Catcher in the Rye, I will have students re-examine and look at loosely-based Holden characters like in the movies Rushmore, Donnie Darko, Rebel Without a Cause, and Igby Goes Down. Showing the trailers of these movies, students can critically look at other adaptations to see what worked and what didn’t in relation to the adaptation ideas they are toying with. For example, after looking at clips from Rushmore, students will see that both Holden and Max Fischer attend a prep school, although Max fiercely loves his school, both try to act older and feign confidence despite their obvious immaturity, and both are authentically and unapologetically themselves. Now Max is not an exact replica of Holden, but students should see how he is derivative of Holden.
For The Bell Jar, I will have students analyze clips from the 1979 made-for-TV version and ask themselves if it does the novel justice. There has been some controversy surrounding this film directed by Larry Peerce. According to an article in The Australian, Jane Anderson, who claims to be the inspiration for the character of Joan, sued the filmmaker for his suggestive interpretation, showing Joan “making sexual advances to Esther and proposing a suicide pact.”35 Anderson eventually won the case. Another important fact to mention is that Julia Stiles, a famous actor, attempted to adapt the book, but after many years, said, “The difficulty in adapting a novel like this is that so much is established by Esther’s interior narrative. On the other hand, Esther’s visual metaphors and hallucinatory imagination are perfectly cinematic.”36
Since both novels’ characters are very much in their own head, another issue I would want my kids to tackle, and this was also Salinger’s and Stile’s argument as well, is how do you capture that on film -- what is the best way to adapt the internal monologues that both these novels develop through their protagonists? Seger writes that “there are many novels, plays, and true-life stories that are simply not commercially viable. They are too difficult to adapt and will resist any changes to make them adaptable.”37 This is what Salinger believed about his own novel. However, Seger believes that most stories are adaptable -- even unusual stories can be successful.38 This should give students hope that it can be done. More importantly, I find that high school students really like to try to do something when there is the claim that it can’t be done. The advice that Seger gives is that “the material will often fight the writer… By knowing where and why the material resists the transition, writers and producers are better able to know what material is not worth the effort, and what problems need to be addressed in order to make the adaptation work.”39 This is definitely something that teachers would need pass on to students when they begin brainstorming for their adaptation.
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