Cher
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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John Updike dies. I have never read anything by him. My only memory remotely connected to the physical me is a foreign professor who came to teach us English at the HIVT, where I studied for translator.
He described a scene in one of Updike's Rabbit novel sequence in which the main character inserts a gold coin into the vagina of his partner.
I was instantly put off, although I am not naturally aversed by debauchery.
That partner appears to be Janice, I find now.
The whole story was described by this teacher as terribly a middle-class everyman, perhaps best described in Europe as the petit bourgeois who was a fan of the work of Jacques Brel, one who was laughed at by Brel despite (or perhaps, because) being a fan. It is a character I find difficult to indentify* with.
For a writer of such fame, it is strange that so few of his works have been adapted for film (see unfilmability), is this due to the aforementioned unfilmability or just that no filmmaker was inspired enough by the stories of Updike?
From IMDb:
- (6.30) - The Witches of Eastwick (1987)
- (6.24) - Too Far to Go (1979) (TV)
- (6.22) - The Roommate (1985) (TV)
- (5.43) - Rabbit, Run (1970)
- (5.38) - A & P (1996)
The films are preceded by their IMDb scores which are a fairly reliable assessment of tastes.
The Witches of Eastwick is his most famous work in filmland (it is far to easy for a writer to be famous in bookland). In 1987, the novel was adapted into a film starring Jack Nicholson as Darryl, Cher as Alexandra, Susan Sarandon as Jane, and Michelle Pfeiffer as Sukie.
*Indentification is a term used in literary and film studies (but also in the static visual culture realm, so perhaps better umbrellad by the term narratology) to describe a psychological relationship between the reader of a novel and a character in the book, or between a spectator in the audience and a character on screen. In both cases, readers and spectators see themselves in the fictional character.
Identification is usually supposed to be largely unconscious: a reader may be aware that she likes a given character, but not that she actually see that character as an alter ego, a version of her, or a projection of her aspirations for herself. It would be a mistake to think all heroes foster identification, or that all villains inhibit identification—many, perhaps even most, characters elicit some degree of identification on the part of the reader or spectator.
Diary of an insatiable slut.
