Film Studies

Mickey and Mallory love to kill. Murder comes naturally to them – it’s all part of a successful day’s work. Bullets fly, bodies drop, and the couple move on as if enjoying a prolonged shopping spree in which the objects consumed just happen to be human lives. Their actions blend in perfectly with a culture that emphasises mass production, mass consumption, repetition, seriality. After all we live in an era that has not only produced a new breed of serial killers but also raises them to the status of folk heroes – icons to be consumed, in turn, by the media, fans, filmmakers, writers, profiteers. Mickey and Mallory are also deeply in love; a starry-eyed Romeo and Juliet whose passion, in the post-consumer society, feeds on a continual diet of violence, cruelty, death. (It is perhaps telling that in many contemporary films, violence and murder serve to unite the couple rather than drive them apart.) This circuit of consumption, repetition and seriality is self-regulating, continuous, carnivorous.

Words and Images is a valuable contribution to the rapidly growing body of work on Australian film culture and a welcome addition to the relatively small collection of volumes dealing with the film-literature connection. As McFarlane notes there is not, as yet, a ‘definitive work’ on the art of adaptation, though George Bluestone’s Novels into Film (1957) established a fairly solid base for others working in this area. McFarlane’s acknowledged indebtedness to Bluestone is most evident in the method he adopts in order to examine individual adaptations. Essentially it is one of determining and exploring changes to texts, that is, the major alterations and manipulations which take place in the process of adapting a narrative from one medium to another.

People tell you one week that they liked Gallipoli, but the next they’re not so sure. Gone are the days of intuitive gut felt reaction – everyone wants to make sure their judgements are intellectually sound. They read every ‘expert’ on the subject and come back with another opinion. Reading the script gives you another variation. The skeleton is there, warts and all.