"When the curtain fell at last, it was an act of mercy."

So I've been reading, finally, the above-pictured book, Revolutionary Road. (Yes, reading a very depressing novel which relates to my research topic is my current means of relaxing. [Yes, I need to find other hobbies.]) OK, I'm about to finish it, and I'm remembering that a movie starring Leonardo "Dee" Caprio and Kate Winslett or whoever was in the works, and I'm thinking that there's no way I'm going to like the movie. Part of what I like about Yates (I'm no literature expert and have only read this and his collected short stories, so, yeah) is how brutally unromantic his characters are, and I don't know how that works in a movie, in anyway other than some sort of ham-fisted "ooh look at me I'm dark" kinda tripe. One of my favorite things about RR is how clearly it shows that the quest to be some "authentic, sophisticated, unique individual" is useless by its very premise (Yes, I'm probably projecting. I said I'm not a literature critic, so boo) , and I just don't think that contemporary movies are equipped with the tropes and symbols to convey this in an elegant manner.

My other favorite thing, as someone who likes to read critical histories of the family and all that, is how we are shown that the archetypal 50s "traditional" family was, far from the natural ordering of human life, something that resulted from very particular historical, economic, geographic, and psychological circumstances, that had to be worked at and all that. This way of life was new and strange to its participants, neither the default way of being like in so much Republican propaganda nor the Well Of Emptiness And Source Of All That's Wrong With The World that many "critical" looks back on the era present. The gender division of labor within the household, Frank's need to feel like a man, the figuring out of class and social positions in a new and growing geographic space, all took a lot of work, like all living does. It just seems like it will be so hard, through the medium of major American film, to show this. To the contemporary reader there's something surprising and remarkable about how the era that, in nostalgiast propaganda and entertainment ever since then, has been portrayed as "when things were normal," was so clearly to its participants an unusual, difficult time, with social and psychological demands that often felt novel and, to the Wheelers, excessive. I'm worried that the nuance and pain of the novel will turn into nothing but "the 50s were bad because people had to CONFORM, man," or that the Wheelers are going to come off as some romantic figures representing our quest to find our true selves, or some other common story that is boring to me.

I think I'm going to feel like I did when I saw the film version of Ask The Dust, but even worse, because Yates seems like a harder writer to put to screen then Fante, and this movie will all but certainly not feature a naked Selma Hayek.