Stealing the Name but Not the Thunder

Most of us have made our peace with Hollywood's insatiable appetite for things we hold sacred.

Desperate for new narratives, the movie business never stops churning through the old ones, making all too specific and real the things we prefer to keep in soft focus in the privacy of our imaginations. The heroes of the past, Achilles and Alexander, are now embodied by the same muscle-bound men who stare at us from the pages of tabloids in the grocery checkout line. The great cities of the historical mind's eye, ancient Troy and Babylon, have become part of a strange, public yet imaginary architecture of the cinema. We know what the Civil War sounded like, the violent clang of knights jousting, the groaning and creaking of a wooden sailing ship straining under the force of the trade winds. Hollywood has made it all real, in its own surreal way.

And yet we still wince, from time to time, when the machine of Hollywood intrudes on some dear corner of the past, some novel we love, some children's book we can't abide seeing reinterpreted in the cold, pragmatic world of adult motivations. Our individual limits vary, and sometimes that sense of latent outrage -- that Hollywood has stolen something -- takes us by surprise. Is it a Jane Austen novel turned into a teen sex romp that triggers it? Or a Henry James novel? Or perhaps it's Curious George, the insouciant monkey we remember from bedtime and the waiting room of a long forgotten pediatrician, appearing on movie screens next month? At these moments there's a remorseless quality to the movies. We let you have everything else, but now you want this too?

"Tristan & Isolde" may cross that line for opera lovers. Co-produced by Ridley Scott, who brought us his vision of the Crusades and 12th-century Jerusalem in last year's "Kingdom of Heaven," "Tristan & Isolde" is a standard-issue sword and sex romp, with a bloody battle scene at the same point in the movie that Richard Wagner, in his opera, has barely finished the prelude. The actors, James Franco and Sophia Myles in the title roles, are lovely and blank, like animated versions of some insipid pre-Raphaelite painting. Wagner's "Tristan and Isolde" is all depth, all psychology, an opera in which most of the singing is done sitting, or in a near swoon, or lying half-dead on a bier. The movie, which opened on Friday in Washington, is all action, motion, surface sex appeal and beautiful pictures. The movie and the opera share a title, but the two versions couldn't be further apart.

Is this sacrilege?

It's a little peevish to blame Hollywood for treading upon Wagner when Wagner himself was treading upon medieval romance to find fodder for his music dramas. Opera composers were just as voracious in their day as Hollywood is in ours. They mined Shakespeare and Euripides, almost-forgotten fabulists such as the Renaissance poet Torquato Tasso, the historians of old Rome and the playwrights and novelists of their own day.

Gounod turned Goethe's philosophical "Faust" into a fast-paced potboiler.

Verdi's librettist chopped off whole acts of Shakespeare's "Othello" to make his own "Otello."

Indignities aplenty have been heaped on old narratives by the opera makers of yesteryear.

And yet it still feels wrong to see "Tristan and Isolde" on the silver screen. More wrong, for some reason, than borrowing from Puccini's "La Boheme" (which borrowed from tales by Henri Murger) to make the Broadway show "Rent." Or borrowing from Bizet's "Carmen" to make a musical, "Carmen Jones," which eventually became a movie with Dorothy Dandridge. "Tristan and Isolde," four solid hours of slow-moving angst, is the epitome of operatic seriousness, an opera with such gravity of purpose, such extraordinary depths of pain and existential longing, that Hollywood should be ashamed to trespass on its turf.

The recoiling against remakes -- no matter what form they take, and what medium they borrow from -- tells us a lot about our basic relation to art. When we discover that a beloved book has become a movie, perhaps there's a simple sense of theft, of being cheated. Why, if we have invested the long hours it takes to read a novel, should it be so easily available to anyone, for the small investment of $8.50 and two hours of butt time? In a world of rapid consumption, the act of reading is an irrational devotion to an obsolete technology, like baking homemade bread or knitting your own sweaters. This is what might be called the selfish, proprietary approach to the sacred narrative object.

A more generous resistance is based on the conviction that only the original work can give audiences the real experience. You may follow the plot of an E.M. Forster novel adapted for the screen, but without hearing the voice of the author, with his asides and observations and plummy English tones in your head, you haven't, in fact, really experienced "Howards End" or "Where Angels Fear to Tread." This is a paternal, protect-the-innocent approach to preserving the original object, especially beloved by people who consider translation from one language to another an unforgivable violence.