I've been waiting all year to write this one. I can't wait any longer...!
Back in 2012, I had what I dubbed "My Trojan Year," although the actual blog post I wrote about it, apparently,
was called something else (which was kind of disappointing to learn). I read a lot more Trojan War stories that year than I experienced versions of Cervantes'
Don Quixote in 2019, but there was enough.
First was
Don Quixote itself, which I had never read before, but a copy of which had long been on my to-read list, probably due to length. I found it incredibly enlightening, considering previously I only knew the story from cultural memory and
Man of La Mancha (I saw a local production of it once, and enjoy the 1972 film version starring Peter O'Toole). The story is infinitely more complex, in any manner of ways, than I could've imagined. Like a lot of older novels, it's a far different kind of narrative than we have today. Thankfully, it's no
Tristram Shandy! (But thanks to the brilliant film adaptation of
that one, I'd love to revisit it some day.) And it
is a story of ideas, but not
necessarily the ones (or
just) the ones from the musical. It's not
all "impossible dream" and windmills (which, as you might expect, show up fairly early). Anyway, the Goodreads review I wrote was one of my favorites from the year, too.
I of course went out of my way to catch Terry Gilliam's
The Man Who Killed Don Quixote when it finally received wide(r) release this year. This was a movie that famously,
infamously, underwent a tortured production history, to the point where there was actually a film release (a documentary, anyway) long before it finally became a reality, called
Lost in La Mancha, and for years seemed as if the only way fans were going to be able to experience Gilliam's vision. As I detailed in another post on another blog, I opted for the DVD release of the movie, which was...about equally problematic as anything else about its sorry history. Walmart didn't carry it. Target only had the Blu-ray. And Amazon didn't even officially carry it, instead listing independent vendors. (Amazon has officially become the 21st century Sears catalog, the Walmart of conglomerate shopping. Yay.) But order it I of course did, and unlike a lot of other people who bothered to make the effort to see the results, I thoroughly enjoyed it. It's still my pick for best film of the year.
Later in the year, Salman Rushdie released his latest novel,
Quichotte (pronounced "key-shot"). Apparently inspired at least as much by a French opera version of
Don Quixote as anything else (and as usual, Rushdie had plenty on his mind), the results are about as good as anything else I've read from the author (but it's no
Satanic Verses, which to be fair few enough books are).
I didn't really plan any of this. I mean, the Trojan Year thing was sort of easy to arrange, but I couldn't really plan for Rushdie's next book to center around
Don Quixote. I knew, coming into 2019, I had as good a shot as there had ever been to finally see
Man Who Killed Don Quixote, and so that was the impetus to finally read the book, I admit. I didn't
wait to read it, all these years, on the off-chance Gilliam's movie would finally get made (much less shake loose from ridiculous "producer" entanglements). That would have been absurd!
But I like that I ended up enjoying all three versions so much. They each had their own things to say, even though they were basically playing from the same playbook.
Which meant, as the Trojan Year had already prodded me to think (props to anyone who went back to read about it), all over again, that I simply can't abide the perennial laments about remakes. It seems you can't go a single year without someone (and usually,
a lot of someones) complaining about the latest Hollywood remake. (I guess Disney gets a free pass when it does those live action remakes of their animated hits, but I digress.) I like to point out that the history of storytelling is all
about retelling the same stories, that most of the old stories we know we wouldn't even recognize if presented with their original versions. The mark of a good storyteller isn't the story but how they tell it.
If I were to come up with a story that was popular enough for someone else to feel like making their own, I'd welcome it, I really would. If I were lucky enough to get a movie made out of a story I wrote, I wouldn't sit here complaining about how "unfaithful" it was. If my story wasn't strong enough to stand changes, I clearly didn't do a good enough job with it in the first place! If someone improved on it, great! And if someone just wanted to add to it, great! (Ironic, given that
Don Quixote, as it exists today, is presented in two acts, the second of which Cervantes wrote because someone had written what he considered a poor imitation. I suspect history would have forgotten the imitation, as it did, even if Cervantes had never addressed it, much less written it into the second act!)
And speaking of which, a couple years ago I confessed to a second-cousin that I had a Hamilton story I wanted to write, this when
Hamilton was still raging across pop culture. She winced, suggesting that it was now a moot point. But it really isn't. Even if the story I still hope to write is nowhere near as pervasive, it still deserves telling, and has a vastly different viewpoint than the musical. A few months back I watched
White House Down and
Olympus Has Fallen, which were two Hollywood productions that obviously overlapped significantly. But I found the results different enough, and not just because one was obviously a Channing Tatum vehicle and the other a Gerard Butler vehicle (which ended up producing two sequels), and Tatum and Butler are very different screen personalities. Maybe it's because I don't believe in reductive logic when it's pointless, but there's always more room to wiggle in a story than people tend to allow.
And anyway, between a Trojan Year and a Quixote Year, I can't wait to see how this happens again...
