Possession, in print and onscreen
Watching the 2002 movie adaptation of the Booker Prize-winning novel
Sometime around 2010, I picked up AS Byatt’s Possession, maybe because I was working my way through books that won the Booker Prize. The book is some kind of uber-clever British literary delight, but I will tell you for free that by the time I closed the back cover I still had no better idea what had happened than when I’d started out. Well, that was weird, I thought to myself, and forgot about it. That is, until tonight, when I saw that the 2002 film adaptation, starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Aaron Eckhart, was available for free on Netflix.
According to Wikipedia, the book is a masterpiece of themes and sendups:
The structure of the novel incorporates many different styles, including fictional diary entries, letters and poetry, and uses these styles and other devices to explore the postmodern concerns of the authority of textual narratives. The title Possession highlights many of the major themes in the novel: questions of ownership and independence between lovers; the practice of collecting historically significant cultural artefacts; and the possession that biographers feel toward their subjects.
Because this was a time period when I bought books, I still have my copy lying around, and I exhumed it for purposes of this post. The book opens on the same scene as the movie, but offers understandably more context. Roland Mitchell, a part-time research assistant to a professor, heads down to the London Library to examine a copy of Vico’s Principi di una Scienza Nuova. This copy, apparently, was once owned by Randolph Henry Ash, a Victorian poet whom Roland is studying. Vico and the Principi are actual texts, Ash and his many poems, which appear excerpted throughout Possession, were invented by Byatt. The reader begins to glimpse the outlines of Byatt’s conceit, the same way Roland sees George Eliot’s “black silk skirts, her velvet trains” passing among the stacks and tables of the London Library. Something imagined, something extant. In the novel, the Vico in question is described as “thick and black and covered in dust”, and has been removed from “Locked Safe no. 5”. This background is essential, because within it, Roland stumbles upon the items that will kick the whole plot into gear: two undiscovered drafts of letters that Ash wrote to an unnamed woman. One letter begins passionately, Since our extraordinary conversation, I have thought of nothing else.
Roland does a double take. Ash’s extensive correspondence is “not of the most lively,” which Roland likes. Roland is the type of man who finds, when fighting with his girlfriend, that silence is his “only form of aggression.” Electrified by the possibilities of the letters, the normally bloodless Roland sneaks the letters out of the library in his “battered and bulging briefcase.” It’s an act of daring madness and rebellion, mirrored by the rebellion blooming in the letters themselves.
Now consider how the movie treats this same scene of discovery. Roland is played by Aaron Eckhart, and of all the ways in which this film gives an inaccurate impression of the lives of PhD holders in the humanities, the most extreme is probably Eckhart’s gorgeousness and sun-kissed blond hair. As if that guy ever gets outside. A barely-seen librarian hefts the Vico into Eckhart’s hands, someone makes a joke about Americans, and Eckhart pulls the letters out of the papery soup. There’s no context, no explanation, and the viewer is left wondering how the hell a rando managed to unearth Victoriana in a library book. With a glance and a grin, Roland palms the letters.
While the book is interested in Roland’s interiority, the movie mines the character for cheap laughs, for low-blow jokes at the expense of American stereotype. Roland is, I suppose, supposed to play the foil to Maud Bailey, the women’s studies scholar whom he recruits to help him track down Ash’s literary partner. Despite Paltrow’s decent performance in the role, they don’t play off each other well, resulting in scenes that feel both cringe-worthy and improbable. “I’m more of a Brush and Flush kind of guy,” says Eckhart’s Roland, when he and Paltrow are forced to share quarters at an inn. Perhaps tellingly, this is both the movie’s low point and its high point from a humor perspective. It’s unfunny. Hopelessly so.
Perhaps the scene that most astonishingly illustrates movie Roland’s issues is one that I’d love to embed but can’t find (in English) anywhere. The dialogue goes like this:
Maud: I don’t mind that.
Roland: See, you could grow to like Ash.
Maud: Yes. He’s sort of a soft-core misogynist.
Roland: [Laughs] Why do you always tie your hair up like that?
Maud: It’s to do with Fergus Wolfe, mostly.
Roland: Fergus? How to do with Fergus?
Maud: When we met, he drove me mad quoting Yeats. “Who could love you for yourself alone…”
Both, together: …”and not your yellow hair.”
While it’s hard to fully illustrate it with just words, let’s just say that in the movie, the only good lines go to Maud, as if the filmmakers can’t imagine a Roland who’s equally pedantic.
Now consider this excerpt from the book, dealing with the same conversation:
“Tell me — why do you always cover your hair?”
He thought for a moment he might have offended her, but she only looked down, and then answered with a kind of academic accuracy.
“It’s to do with Fergus. With Fergus and with its color. I used to wear it very short — sheared short. It’s the wrong colour, you see, no one believes it’s natural. I once got hissed at a conference, for dyeing it to please men. And then Fergus said, the shaved style was a cop-out, a concession, it made me look like a skull, he said. I should simply have it. So I grew it. But now it’s grown, I put it away.”
“You shouldn’t. You should let it out.”
…
He waited. Maud untied the head-square. The segments of the plaits were like streaked and polished oval stones, celandine yellow, straw-yellow, silvery yellow, glossy with constricted life. Roland was moved — not exactly with desire, but with an obscure emotion that was partly pity, for the rigorous constriction all that mass had undergone, to be so structured into repeating patterns. If he closed his eyes and squinted, the head against the sea was crowned with knobby horns.
“Life is so short,” said Roland. “It has a right to breathe.”
The act of Maud letting down her hair takes nearly two pages, and has a sort of implied orgasmic effect, ending with her face flushed. Good Lord. “Not exactly with desire,” my foot. But these are the kinds of subtleties that the film seems deeply disinterested in.
As the plot progresses and the two scholars start to fall in love, or rather, fall under the spell of their dubious source material, the movie gets misguidedly earnest. Rather than being a satire that pokes fun at modern mating rituals, the movie presents these rituals as necessary facts.
“I had to see your face,” says Eckhart to Paltrow at one point, with unself-conscious triteness. This dialogue isn’t banal in a “make fun of romcoms” way, it’s banal in a “the scriptwriters might have been out to lunch” kind of way. If they were going to turn it into a superficial love story, they could at least have made it interesting! Instead, Maud and Roland bumble their way through romantic confessions that feel about as ferocious as tepid water.
The book is a collection of multi-voiced texts: imagined letters between Ash and his lady, the poet LaMotte; multi-page Ash “proems”. As a reader, I found this excess obtuse and somewhat self-indulgent, and it also means I don’t envy the scriptwriters their task. How do you bring these voices, these juxtapositions, these variations of form and tone, to the screen? Possession alternates between the seen and the implied, the heard and the echoed. Real and imaginary poems collide, philosophical concepts coalesce and explode, parentheticals make elaborate jokes intelligible only to people with PhDs in financially unwise fields. None of this stuff is great fodder for mainstream movies, at least, not at first glance. I appreciate that somebody tried.
The movie does succeed at one thing the novel doesn’t even attempt: a somewhat coherent narrative. I think, in retrospect, I was on some level supposed to get lost in Byatt’s Possession, or at least, lose sight of any line between fact and fiction. In terms of romance, the book mocks it but with gentle fervidity; the book opens with a selection from Robert Browning, whose own literary and epistolary romance with Elizabeth Barrett is a legend. Indeed, this story owes an enormous debt to the Brownings, whom Byatt has studied. “How did you contrive to grasp the thread which led you through this labyrinth?” the poem asks. I didn’t, really. Maybe that’s not a film that would have played well in cinemas.
