Wheww. X that one off the fuck-it list. Done watched Roland Joffe’s 1995 bid for Oscar’s acclaim, The Scarlet Letter. Script by Douglas Day Stewart (The Blue Lagoon, Officer and a Gentleman, among other stuff, and yes, it sure does look like he’s coat-tailing the actor). Demi Moore (Hester); Gary Oldman (1st sighting naked, Arthur Dimmesdale), Robert Duvall (Roger Prynne [aka Chillingworth]), Joan Plowright as Mistress Hibbins. Still WikiP touts this joint as “one of the worst films ever made.” It plainly chirons that it’s “Freely adapted” from Hawthorne’s book, and given how poorly most people read The Scarlet Letter, not trying to follow what would have been the Sacvan Bercovitch or Jane Tompkins version in the 90s is hunky-dory (although a Sedgwick/Butler/Leverenz version woulda been nice).
We’ll see if it holds up to that estimation: could it be as bad as the Star Wars Holiday Special, the animated Titanic, or . . . Red Dawn? Demi Moore’s Hester shows some spine and refuses to succumb to Puritan guilting, but . . . well . . . after Stewart’s script moves the time from the 1640s to the 1660s, the film somehow links Hester and Arthur’s affair to the start of King Philip’s War, (because Arthur is the *only white dude who gets native culture sez Metacom/King Phillip and reasons). Stewart’s script also asks viewers who know any 17th Massachusetts history to think that Puritan magistrates would have forgotten about all that Ann Hutchinson stuff when Hester starts doing the exact same thing Ann did 20 years later.
Still, it could maybe kinda sorta turn into a cool movie. That cast. Got thrown to the wolves of an incredibly stupid script.
I get some of why they changed Arthur and Roger. Well, Arthur, anyway. Although the idea of having Oldman play Arthur as a test-run for Dracula, hmmm, promising. But, not using Robert Duvall to the nth degree of psychological torment to go after Arthur and instead making him a psychotic misogynist with a strategically-triggered conscience? It was peak Thelma & Louise times, so maybe it made sense in focus-group testing to have Roger torment Hester more than Arthur. And . . . of course, Last of the Mohicans . . . generated acclaim and $$$. I’m guessing the elevator pitch for SL had to be something like “yadda yadda mistaken adultery, feminist consciousness, Indians.” Pocohontas, was also 1995, the native casinos were opening, who knows. Sadly, Brokeback Mountain took until 2005, so the idea of actually using the emotional tension between Arthur and Roger is a “not appearing in this film” (Although I do think there might be a moose.).
I don’t write these suspense things or listicles well: I wanted to like the movie, and then the awful horrid things just plopped out: beyond the historical mash-up, which only a cultural studies grad student mainlining Lyotard, Zizek, and Harold Hecuba* could justify, this adaptation sucks because it tries to re-make Arthur and Roger according to 90s notions of masculinity (and divinity). & that adaptation ignores why Arthur is unfilmable—at least in a cultural product designed to sell models of masculinity: Arthur is the end-point of an early 19th century attack on Ministerial identities like Jonathan Edwards or Cotton Mather. But the big problem is the film’s Hester. Stewart’s script denies her the culture-changing agency she wields in the novel, so you have the weird phenomenon that the supposedly inaccessible 1850 novel contains a radical feminist character and the 1990s adapation has a 1660s Gwyneth Paltrow wellness consultant.
And that’s why I'm writing this, because yet again, willfully or not, we have an example of cultural agents doing the exact thing that Hawthorne says won’t work: using rhetorical strategies to contain, re-direct, and pervert Hester’s revolutionary energies. My shouting to an audience of dozens has been that the perversion has worked all too well, and one of our best resources for imagining a different culture remains undeveloped.
Anyway.
Instead of working with what Hawthorne gave him, and building from initial scenes of hostility and rejection to the eventual acceptance and love of Hester’s charity and activism, Douglas Day Stewart makes her a latter-day Ann Hutchinson. Readers. This is Gilligan’s Island adapts Shakespeare stupid. Hester starting another group meeting like Hutchinson (which the authorities discuss and tolereate several times) would have been a non-starter.
Beyond being historically ludicrous, this move insults Hawthorne’s Hester, who, presumably aware of what happened to Mrs. Hutchinson, rarely speaks, never seems to hold meetings, and changes her culture through her art and activism in visitations (like a minister’s wife . . . drum roll).
Of course, the costuming should get its own post since Hester changes Boston through her fashion design. Gabriella Pescucci gets the emblem wrong (but this can’t be assigned to her, since the script completely blows off Hawthorne’s insistence that Hester designed the emblem, her gown, and Pearl’s attire deliberately to control the event). Hawthorne specifies Hester wears a scarlet gown that upstages the black gowns Bellingham and Wilson wear, in the movie she sports a blue bodice and skirt affair. Similarly, the costumers decide to put Arthur (and Roger) in dashing military-esque duds instead of the academic gowns that would have been more appropriate to their stations. This costuming decision shows they wanted to pose Arthur as a worthy, ahead-of-his time match for Hester, which, completely changes the dude’s function in the story.
Thus shunted aside from the story of her changing culture through fashion design to one in which she is an Oprahesque consciousness-raiser (and confederate of a wonderful Joan Plowright as Mistress Hibbins), Demi Moore’s Hester is a passenger in her own film. Even as it seems to want to center women—and it shows several sequences of women in community and directs the camera’s gaze to naked men as objects of desire or aversion—the movie whiffs on the chance to show the work that Hawthorne narrates as being central to what made Hester memorable in Boston.
It also erases Hawthorne’s attack on the internal terrorism the magistrates use to try maintain conformity. Every day for years in the book— at least 3, likely 5, maybe 7, until her charity and patience change her reputation, Ministers would harangue her in the street, change sermons to attack her when she showed up to meeting, and children would chase her through the streets shouting “adulteress.” No wonder Pearl threw rocks at them. [look it up, it’s all there, although you have to use your imagination a little bit because of how Hawthorne writes].
The movie collapses all this horror into one drummer boy who tries to follow behind her and her slave Mituba as she rides through the town in the horse and buggy Hawthorne never mentions her using. Everyone hates a little drummer boy, of course, but this symbolic condensation minimizes and ridicules the very real coercive horror deployed by the town officials—easily the equal of any poisoning offered by Roger—against their own people, using Hester and Pearl as vectors. It’s either a consequence of that late 20th-century minimization of power, or a spill-over from those Die Hard blatherings about the force of individual power, or some of both. But by raising Hester’s status and making her torment ridiculous, it minimizes the possibilities of her triumph.
Wait, you’re saying: Hester has a slave in the movie? What?
Yep. Tituba from Salem Village has somehow wound up stuck into the movie as a speechless slave who gets “thrown-in” when newly-arrived Hester buys the time of 2 indentured servants. Because why? To show Hester’s access to wealth? Implicate her in slave-owning? She doesn’t free Mituba, who winds up being victimized multiple times in Roger’s attempts to somehow persecute Arthur by involving Hester in accusations of witchcraft. Her character’s presence in the movie is almost as bad as the voice-overs, allegedly provided by Pearl. They add nothing to the movie, sound awful, and raise a point about the incommensurable gap between cultural formations that Hawthorne addresses in ways that a voiceover presumably speaking to us from the beyond can’t.
It all adds up to faux-progressivism: offer one minimal token of rich white woman advance but take away all of the actual possibilities that might make advance for others possible. Because all that Hester has, really, in this movie, is that wealth and what Arthur sees in her. And Arthur . . . wheww . . . that’s another post. Sure she tells someone she thinks God talks to her, but, UNLIKE the book, we don’t see her doing anything but listen to conversations. Worse, for me, the movie’s scared to follow Hawthorne all the way to Hester’s free-thinking atheism and radical feminism. Now, scenes of women interacting for their own pleasure and benefit ARE important, but viewers don’t see them leading to anything in whatever Massachusetts town it is.
I don’t really get why, unless the quest for Academy nominations led everyone to try impose 20th century paradigms of the narratives and masculinity that gets Harvey Weinstein to ok nominations drove all of the adapting. It ain’t any awareness of Hawthorne’s withering critique of how institutional identities corrupt individuals and societies.
Hawthorne wanted to understand why the Standing Order had never been able—for all of its bluster, for all of the money thrown at it, all of the moral panic it generated—to actually control and sustain society. The simple answer hiding in “The Custom House” and the end of The Scarlet Letter is that committed, sustained acts and the fashions we use to make our lives also made our culture and our attitudes. Hester fashioned culture because she stayed. So, when the 1995 adaptation has an Arthur who stepped out of a 90s self-help seminar instead of being a Cambridge-educated Congregationalist leave for “the Carolinas” with Hester and Pearl so . . . so, what, so they can go be better slavers?? . . . it severs any possibility of linking Hester’s understanding to community activism.
But that’s ok, because we don’t need to know anything about the Standing Order and how it continues to proliferate in the “genealogies” of insitutional cultures and expectations. The structures of discourse and shame-terrorism that would be cool with kids running around yelling slurs at adults to shame them are just discredited relics of the past, or things that only happen in places like Abilene. Sure. We don’t need to develop narrative identities capable of staying instead of running away . . . sure. We don’t need to . . . as Hester spent serious time working on . . . developing understandings of how to be ourselves and related to others that begin to work past the Roman “confusion between care and domination” that suckered Freud, Fanon, and a host of others into knowing that historically-produced and culturally-transmitted patterns of behavior are natural “feelings of love and affection.” We’d have to remake everything. And it will be hard. And we’ll be different. [quotes from “Conclusion” of Dawn of Everything, Graeber and Wengrow . . .