Rumor has it that a movie is, indeed, being made of the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant: Lord Foul’s Bane (after *Lord of the Rings * was such a hit, it was inevitable).
Surely I can’t be the only one wondering how the writers are going to get around the* teensy-weensy * fact that the protagonist is not only a neurotic, whiny, self-pitying git, but is a rapist as well. (Mind you, I loved the books, but a fact is a fact.)
So, what do we think, kids? How in the Hell can anyone make this movie without destroying it? Will they try to make Thomas Covenant a nice guy? Will they change his rape of a trusting adolescent into, say, the theft of a meat pie left cooling on a window sill? What in the world can they DO with this? (Also, I was wondering – will he still be a leper, or will they turn his disease into something else?) Assuming for a moment that they DON’T try to sanitize him for our protection, is Thomas Covenant too repellant an individual (most of the time, anyway) to make for a good movie? His inner anguish and stupid behavior are all very well and good in a book, where Covenant’s motives can be made clear to the reader. In a movie, won’t he just look like an evil jerk?
I was appalled enough that they turned Ged into a white guy for the TV version of Wizard of Earthsea, but I can’t even imagine how badly they’re going to screw this one up.
Good questions. They might try to pull off the compartmentalized evil bit, as done so well by the Sopranos. However, assault rape is a tough pill to swallow from your hero within the first 20 minutes of the opening credits. Especially against an innocent young teen virgin. The actor would have to be very, very hot for general audiences to forgive that.
I’m thinking they might change it to some sort of allegory about domestic violence. Perhaps she takes a tumble on some rocks and gets some nasty bruises on her face, and all the townsfolk wrongly think he abused her. I dunno, though, cause if they try to continue the series, it would be tough to explain Elena.
Maybe they’ll go for the “morning regret” angle, where they have consensual sex, the word gets out, so she claims he raped her to prevent her father from killing her.
Geez, thinking back about that series, you really can’t alter the assault rape without seriously messing with the entire story. I share your apprehension with the adaptation.
Seems to be. Looks like a good course of antibiotics can pretty much wipe it out eventually. see here: here. That’s kind of why I thought they might want to use something else, instead. Acutally, when HIV first became prevalent, I used to think that it might be a good substitute, given people’s irrational fears surrounding it. I think this movie would pretty much have to be set in the time period of the 70’s, though, and even then, people who are unfortunate enough to have suffered from Hansen’s disease (a.k.a. Leprosy) would undoubtedly be offended by it.
God, what an awful thought! Physical attractiveness (of the rapist) as a mitigation for rape. [In the book, of course, the physical attractiveness of the victim is implied to be part of the “cause” of the rape. Equally if not more repugnant.]
See what I mean? This movie almost has to be doomed.
It’s been a while since I read the Chronicles, but I don’t remember that being the cause of the rape. Rather, it was Covenant being overwhelmed by the return of physical sensations after so long without them and losing control.
… thought he was completely insane and was hallucinating wildly; ergo it was only in his own crazed mind that anything was taking place, and since he was possibly dying right now he may as well have fun with his hallucination first. When in actuality he was only half-way off his rocker. If it actually happened at all and was not, in fact, simply a dream. Mwah ha haaaaaa!
I can’t imagine how any other disease could possibly be substituted. I haven’t read the books in over a decade, but I seem to recall that the reason he was the Unbeliever was because of the extreme discipline doing the VSE required for him to survive and retain all his appendages.
In other words, the moment he let down his guard, he was doomed to a life of debilitation in a convalescent home. So when he got to The Land, the fact that he was cured by the hurtloam (or whatever it was called) was a very real and direct threat to his very life. Thus his only choice was to disbelieve.
What other disease would have that aspect? That if you were temporarily cured for a year, your life would be in grave danger when that year was up simply because your daily (hourly! minutely!) enforced self-discipline would have eroded so far as to make you immediately and severely vulnerable to horrific consequences?
What, would the AIDS patient get so accustomed to not using a condom that they would be unable to return to the discipline of using them? That’s a sarcastic statement, sure, but leprosy and its associated Visual Surveillance of Extremities was specific and crucial to pretty much every motivation of the main character through the entire first chronicles. It’s in his friggin’ name even!
That was my favorite aspect of the Chronicles, btw. The names. “Ur-Lord Thomas Covenant, Unbeliever and White Gold Wielder” really is a snappy title.
I suppose renal failure requires dialysis, but you don’t “forget” to do that. You can easily forget to do the VSE. Especially after a year of not needing it.
I missed that. Yeah, that would do it. I don’t see why it would be offensive to people if that were truly the best coping method available at the time.
They could go all campy with platform shoes and huge polyester lapels. It could spawn a 70s revival.
Insulin dependent diabetes, perhaps? Get a free pass for a year, forget to be vigilent about checking your blood sugars…doesn’t have the “oogey” factor of leprosy, though.
I suppose it could be done with trauma and nerve damage - which was, minus the trauma, what Covenant’s worry was. If you have nerve damage from anything, be it leprosy or a severed nerve, due vigilence is required, lest you inadvertantly burn your hand off on your stove and not notice.
Yes, nerve damage would work perfectly. I probably should have thought of that myself. The leprosy was incidental. The VSE is the only thing that was relevant to the book. Well, the pariah thing was a notable aspect, but it was secondary at best.
Leprosy is curable, but is it reversible? If he had long enough to kill off all his nerves before he got treated, he’d still have most of the same problems, right? Plus, since the people in his town were a bunch of ignorant pricks, you can still have the pariah thing with the added bonus that he suffers it even though he doesn’t have leprosy anymore.
Really? I kind of thought the big issues were vulnerability and “the pariah thing.” At least, that is, until the whole post-rape guilt “everything I touch turns to crap,” “don’t try to foist this responsibility on me” riff really gets going.
The funny thing is that I wasn’t even out of high school when I first read the Chronicles, and I thought they were the greatest thing since sliced bread. Then, for a number of years, I thought they were kind of pretentious and sophomoric. (Or “puerile,” as Lord Foul would have said. Those books were great little vocabulary builders, if nothing else!) Now, years later, carrying around the guilt of at least a half-dozen instances where I made terrible decisions in situations where it seemed that doing something was wrong and doing nothing was worse, I begin to understand just how *&^%$'d Thomas Covenant really was.
So – I kind of get the impression that my initial assumptions were correct – the leprosy is kind of a requirement and the rape thing is both virtually impossible to deal with in a movie, and indispensible to the plot. Oy.
It was a different era, true, but didn’t Sean Connery’s character rape Tippi Hedren in Hitchcock’s Marnie? And he still managed to remain a sympathetic protagonist. It can be done, if the director is skillfull enough.
And as others have noted, the rape may be essential to the storyline. Would a murder have the same effect, even if the movie was limited to just the first book?
It would have the same effect only if the movie was limited to the first book. The daughter his rape fathers becomes a main character in subsequent books.
Covenant is not particularly appealing in the books, certainly. The recent Vanity Fair was a good example of how Hollywood is not friendly to the idea of unfrepentantly despicable protagonists these days.
The only way I could see them making this work is by focusing and magnifying the point that Convenant didn’t believe he was raping anyone real. They’ll probably make the viewer question the reality as much as Convenant does, and lead us to assume, as he does, that he’s having a psychotic break. That way, we can “forgive” him the rape. The daughter can still be born, and the book’s not too messed with.
After all, we forgave Spike his attempted rape of Buffy, and even rooted for the two of them to get back together!
Speak for yourself, WhyNot. Of course, by that point I hated both characters so much that I probably would have been glad to see them together, if only for how miserable it would make them.
The only reason Spike was “forgiven” was that he was presented as such a weak man - er- vampire that he wasn’t responsible for his own actions any more than an animal would be.
Actually, that is how I viewed Covenant during the rape, so maybe it would work… Maybe they could give him a suicide attempt or something equally dramatic to atone.
