Depraved indifference

Even /b/ (not even remotely close to work safe; if you don't know who they are, you don't want to) is complaining that Disney has "no soul" in regards to the upcoming release of Bridge to Terabithia. I read the book when I was pretty young (I suppose I was seven, thinking back to when and where I read it, but I read everything in the house at this age, so that could be wrong). It was used as a text in school, but I believe this was some years later (as I remember it being assigned in fourth? fifth? grade). Regardless, it's interesting to note people's reaction to it. I was of course, very fond of the book as a child. Some piece of me is still clutching onto it, even at thirty. I reviewed the wikipedia article, and indeed it looks like my memory of the book is accurate. The trailer doesn't seem to really jive with the book, but then the trailer is designed to get kids into the theater (instead of getting them to fucking read the book!), not to convey literary accuracy.

The reactions seem to be based (as in the case of 4chan) on something "sacred" being defiled in some way by either depraved commercial exploitation of the film, or perhaps by the more benign "totally screwed up the story." I initially was pretty revolted myself, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the seven year old in me is clutching onto a book that's not especially significant, and I suppose it even makes sense that Disney (whores that they are) would filminate it.

I came to this conclusion about remembering other books that were very dear to me when I was a kid. Perhaps the most relevant example is the Asimov books. Good grief, I read every single one of them. I thought they were masterful fiction, that this guy was one of the best authors evar. I was actually pretty hurt when we lost both Roddenberry and Asimov so close together (I was too young to understand who Sagan was at the time). But when I think back to the substance of those books, I inevitably wind up with a comparison of, say, Ring and the Foundation books, especially the latter ones. (or even At The Mountains of Madness and The Hardy Boys...!)

When I think back to how long I've actually been reading "new" books vs the Asimov crowd, it's hard to find the inflection point. I read so voraciously as a child, everything from my mother's textbooks from college to contemporary juvenile fiction, classic fiction, and I even eventually got around to Sagan and Gleick (I suppose reading Chaos and John Gribbin at eleven could be considered precocious). So while I think now that there was a point at which I shifted from juvenile books to !juvenile books ("adult" is not the right term), there probably isn't.

I digress. The point here is that the books I read today are vastly better than the Asimov books. Bridge to Terabithia is a very sweet (if hard to swallow) story. Yeah, Disney will fuck it up. They're good at that. But nobody's desecrating the Talmud here. You may remember that "I, Robot" was recently destroyed in film (and I dearly loved The Robots of Dawn). I was more than a little irritated by this, but it didn't feel like somebody was hurting my story (this is what has /b/ up in arms, they just don't understand it's because their mutant bodies actually contain feelings), because it's a very different kind of book. I, Robot was an interesting, engaging read. Bridge to Terabithia (at least for me) was something one read, by oneself, and had a personal experience with it. I mean, how could you not? At age seven? Or even eleven or fifteen? Discussing death? Or unrequited love in a way every adolescent boy understands? So, when somebody comes along and decides to make a movie out of it, to make money off it, and to most likely clobber the book's story, it kind of stings.

Consider a corollary: a childhood friend is found naked on the internet. Sure, we all see porn, we know it's there and what it is, but it's not our friend with that big glob of ... nevermind. So it seems that the problem is not in the making of the film, but in our not understanding — not wanting to understand — why we are sentimental to this book in particular. I could list a few more that people would feel this way about, but I'd come across as a sappy fool.

Or, maybe I've just said that one can defile children's fiction all they want because it's not important. This is probably wrong.