Over the course of this show, Sean and I have covered all kinds of adaptations. Some were based on books, some on record albums, and some on Broadway Musicals (HA! Kidding about that last one; Sean would rather be dragged through broken glass and then dipped in rubbing alcohol).
But the one thing they had in common was some sense of fealty to the original source material. Well, that ends with this episode, hence the title “Subversive Adaptations.”
We start with Kiss Me Deadly, the 1954 film directed by Robert Aldrich. Aldrich takes a direct poke at the right-wing mentality of Mickey Spillane’s original novel. He carries us on a trip following Mike Hammer, who’s about as ignorant as we are regarding what’s going on.
From there we move on to 1997 and Starship Troopers, directed by Paul Verhoeven. Robert A. Heinlein’s novel was written on the cusp of his transition out of the “juvenile” science fiction he’d been doing. While the book depicts a relatively militaristic society, the story line spends most of its time in the central character’s military training and his move up the command chain, and not so much on the details of the war. (Also, a character who dies late in the film doesn’t make it past Page One of the book.) Verhoeven—a Holocaust survivor—gives us an eerily prescient view of what it looks like when fascistic politics takes precedence over common sense.
COMING ATTRACTIONS:
In our next two episodes, we take a slightly different turn. Rather than featuring films that have a common thread thematically, we’ll be looking at two films whose only commonality is the title. To that end, next time we’ll be screening two different films both titled No Way Out, from 1950 and from 1987.