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Originally Posted by grady
The last part of your message with the questions reminds me a great deal of one of the internal monologues/voice overs of a character in The Thin Red Line.
I didn't have quite as an adverse reaction to Cloverfield as the The Road but each is incredibly bleak at times and borderline unbearable in their own unique ways. I found The Road to be far more gripping in that the unknowns feel much greater and powerful. Not to devalue a giant beast ravaging the isle of Manhattan as not terrifying or gripping but rather the idea that the great nuclear apocalypse has already happen in The Road, maybe 5 years prior and we're reading about the fallout(no pun intended). What I find so amusing is that it's a post apocalyptic sci-fi-type setting but all that stuff has been stripped away. It's also amusing that it's kept in the literature section at most book sellers but could easily be kept in sci-fi.
One more bit of amusement: It was an Oprah book club of the month selection! I regaled in the image of soccer mom's and Oprah viewers reading this book and being terribly frightened or potential disgusted by the novel.
Then it went on to win a Pulitzer.
After reading The Road in the Fall 06 I've been somewhat fearful of how the eventual film translation would turn out. Particularly that you're dealing with two different mediums and so much of the novel is internalized.
The film does seems to have a good creative team behind it though. John Hillcoat is directing the film. He made a film a couple years back written by Nick Cave and starring Guy Pearce called The Proposition. If you haven't seen it do check it out, it's an Australian western. Viggo Mortensen has been cast as the lead in the film along with Charlize Theron as his wife in what I presume will be periodic flashbacks.
Over the next couple weeks the film will be shooting scenes here on the Oregon coast. Part of me wants to go rubber neck and see if anything can be seen, but I imagine they'll be shooting in pretty damn remote areas away from the peering eyes of locals and Viggo fans.
Have you read any other novels by Cormac McCarthy oceanic?
One other thing to check out is the following link to an enjoyable book review of The Road written by Michael Chabon and published in the New York Review of Books last Winter.
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Media of all kinds try so hard to "give the people what they want", with the common belief that what they want is choice, options, detail. Do these things make consumers feel safe, in control or sophisticated? I don't really know. I'm hugely interested in the psychology of marketing and the methods of selling, although I admit I don't really have a critical eye for that kind of stuff and am often times very, very opposed to its manipulations. My danger is that I might head towards the point where I stop being analytical and just blindly angered. I need to stay wary of that. Anyways, with Cloverfield the thing that stood way out for me was the way the film snatched all that choice, all those options and any real details away from the viewer and left us all hanging, clinging onto visual, real-time image, often blurry, and nothing else. It was like all that choice obsession finally did away with itself and from its ashes emerged the new choice which, unbelievably, is NO choice. With all the viral marketing and commerical success of Cloverfield, I'm willing to believe that the makers of the film are marketing-savvy individuals. I couldn't stand the acting in the film and thought the characters were empty, but even still, the film makers obviously knew what they were doing by using the actors they did and succeeded in reeling in the hardcore movie-going demographic that consists of late-teens and twentysomethings. That, coupled with this strange new absence of choice, made me feel very, very uneasy. Maybe the same thing was done in Blair Witch... I don't remember that movie too well and when i did see it all those years ago I wasn't nearly alert enough about these kinds of things to have a say in the matter. I felt the same way reading The Road as I did watching Cloverfield, and both blew me out of the fucking water. I knew The Road won a Pulitzer, but I didn't know it was an Oprah book. I know Oprah doesn't want to coddle or placate her followers, but still... what a horrible story. Much more terrifying and with what seem to me to be much more massive implications and judgments than something like A Million Little Pieces. I really wonder what loyal Oprah fans had to say about it. I also wonder what kind of effect the story would have had if the ending had not taken a turn for the hopeful. Any thoughts on the conclusion, Grady?
I understand your fears on the movie adaptation. I'm guessing the internalized nature of things will come through as facial expression and hopefully nobody overdoes anything. Considering Mortensen's body of work, I've got some faith, and I've heard nothing but good things about The Proposition and I'm surprised at myself for having not gotten off my ass and checked it out yet. Among other reasons, because I've become really interested in the Western genre over the past few months. I'm guessing a lot of people have and McCarthy's No Country probably had a lot to do with it. It did for me.
Speaking of which, The Road is the only book of his that I've read. Got any other recommendations for me? At the back of The Road, there are a few short summaries of his other works. They all sound interesting, to be honest. In the meantime, I'll check out that review of The Road. Thanks for the link.