Innacurate Movie

(Disclaimer: I fully acknowledge that Aidan wrote a similar blogpost analyzing the reasons that it would make it difficult to make an Invisible Man movie that's true to the book. I had a similar idea independently of Aidan's post, but when I heard he wrote about it I read it and thought it was so cool I had to write a blogpost about it too (go read it)! I hope I don't repeat any of his ideas, rather, I want to respond to them. I think Aidan makes a good point in his conclusion that there is so much preventing Invisible Man from translating into a film that captures all the nuances of the book, and it would be impossible to create one... but, what if you HAD to?)

To me, there are a few main challenges the book poses that you'd need to overcome to make it into a film. Number one, and it's the biggest problem, is that we know almost nothing about the narrator, and that is a significant point in the novel. Ellison deliberately withholds details about him, his appearance, his tastes, his name, even taunting the reader at points by dangling the possibility of another character saying his name but not doing so, in order to show us just how invisible the narrator is - we could paint our own picture of him, replace him with anyone we like in our minds, as long as he is a young black man. For a film adaptation, this is a significant challenge because we rely so much on our protagonist's acting to understand what's going on in the story, and we can't do that if we aren't supposed to see our protagonist.

There's the possibility that you could shoot the whole film from the first person perspective, going through life as the narrator and seeing everything he sees. This would be an awesome undertaking and a feat which, to my knowledge, has never been done with a full-length film (if it has, I want to see it!!). Shooting the movie this way definitely eliminates the problem of needing to see the narrator, but I think in some ways it clashes with the tone of the book. We talked about how, until the very end of the book, it is very "I" oriented - the narrator begins by saying "I am an invisible man" and talks about his own experiences for the duration of the novel. Therefore, the ending, when he finally points to us and says "I speak for you?" is pretty jarring. We're used to being sucked into his story line, not asked to think about ourselves until the conclusion. In this way, I think putting the viewer in the perspective of the narrator might be disadvantageous.

Additionally, the way I see it, the movie would be full of all sorts of surrealist/magical realist style choices, to embody the "dreamlike" quality we see in the book. This could be accomplished with lots of jump-cuts and subtle flashbacks. The show "Sharp Objects", which I've only seen a few episodes of, makes really interesting stylistic choices to disorient the viewer - the cuts are abrupt and we get a lot of random shots of objects (sometimes they're sharp ones) or people that we don't know the significance of yet. I think for Invisible Man, this means highlighting how the experiences in the narrator's life were "separate," as he says, and as the book is written, before he really understands his invisibility. Each chapter can be presented as an isolated episode, but I think random flashback cuts, even single shots of things which the narrator is missing or not understanding (like a veil, grandfather's laughing), would help show that the narrator is building towards consciousness, but isn't there yet. He's having thoughts but not putting them together, not synthesizing the separate experiences.

However, shooting this way still presents the problem of seeing the invisible narrator. Some possible solutions, based on some other films I've seen, might be to obscure the narrator, but not completely eliminate him from the movie. In "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind", one of my favorite movies, the main character has a procedure done to erase his ex-girlfriend from his memory. The cinematography that the director chose really emphasizes the ways people experience memories - only certain details are remembered. There is a scene where the main character is remembering when he and his ex-girlfriend first got together. They are in a bookstore talking, but all the books on the shelves are turned spine in so you can't see the titles. Other parts are shot with only the light of a flashlight, in a house flooding with water, people without faces, etc. Many of these stylistic choices would apply well to the narrator - if we can only see a corner of the narrator's mouth and an eyebrow, the other parts of his face obscured with color tint (perhaps white blobs!), shadow, blur, flashlight-light, we can still understand how the narrator might be feeling by his body language, and, with good acting, the minuscule movements in the parts of his face we can see. As the movie progresses, perhaps more and more of him becomes visible to the viewer, but never completely. The narrator does write, towards the end of the novel that we "won't believe that he's invisible" now that he's told us his story. That implies the narrator at least believes he is more visible to us. Additionally, we could obscure other details with the same tactics when shooting people the narrator interacts with. He is, after all, "blind as well as invisible". (Alternatively, I wonder if you could pull off something as odd as having the narrator be played by different people throughout the movie, which would be weird, or you could even have him literally be invisible.)

Finally, Ellison supposedly once said to a critic, something along the lines of "you don't think this novel is at all funny?" I think that while Invisible Man is a novel with serious social implications and many horrific scenes, absurdity and humor are huge parts of how Ellison makes serious points about racism, identity, and American culture. That said, you would have to make the film serious and intense, while maintaining Ellison's sense of humor throughout. I think there are many movies which do this effectively. "Do the Right Thing", directed by Spike Lee (you might watch it if you're taking Race Class Gender!) is a film full of dutch angles (where the camera is tilted and the subject is viewed at a discomforting angle) and weird, augmented-reality scenes, but it makes an extremely serious point about race-relations in America and nobody leaves the theater laughing. That said, I think Invisible Man would bode well with dutch angles and unflattering lighting during absurd moments, in tandem with harsh lighting and intense music to highlight the serious point in other places.

Alas, however, I think Aidan is right. It would be impossible to make a film true to the book. But I am too sad about that to not hope for one. I have so much love for this novel, and for magical realist and surrealist films, that I want to see them put together. Who knows, maybe someday it'll be made, and maybe the stylistic choices of the director would shed some new light on the story. What do you guys think, do you agree with my artistic suggestions? What else would you add or change? How would you adapt the final sentence to the screen, waking the viewers up to how they are implicated in the narrator's story?