A friend recently sent me this link: http://kriswrites.com/2012/12/26/the-business-rusch-the-all-important-fan-base/
The subject of the correspondence was Jack Reacher, a current Tom Cruise vehicle. Of course, there is more to this link than that. Kristine Kathryn Rusch is a novelist, writing under several noms de plume in multiple genres. My friend has, over the years, worn multiple literary hats as novelist, editor, and publisher. As I read the article, I perceived more at issue than Tom Cruise’s stature and I replied substantially as follows (with some light editing).
Interesting review/essay. I gather that the Jack Reacher character is a very large man, whereas Tom Cruise is not, and many Reacher fans have difficulty reconciling the two. I have not read any of the Reacher novels, nor has this movie has not been high on my to-be-seen list (I will probably see it this summer on our big family camp-out; we all usually bring a load of action movies, some good, some not so good). I am not a Tom Cruise fan, although Rain Man and Minority Report stand out in my mind as having been excellent. Because I have not read the novels, I have no pre-conceptions of the character. I have no problems with “little and pissed-off.” I rather dote on tough chicks, realistic and fantastic (Mattie Ross, Ree Dolly, Katniss Everdeen, What’s-her-name in Whip It, Arya Stark, or for that matter, Hannah, River Tam, Buffy – you get the idea, little and pissed-off is ok).
I recently saw The Hobbit and have no quarrel with it. I re-read the book in preparation. Of course it is not the book, nor should a thoughtful viewer expect it to be. For one thing, book and movie are two different media, and as a wise professor from north of the border once wrote, “The medium is the message.” As Rusch points out, being a slavish reproduction of the book can actually be a fault in a movie. I enter in evidence the PBS rendition of The Scarlet Letter (1979). On the other hand, you cannot stray so far as to give it a happy ending (1995), because then it ceases to be The Scarlet Letter and would do better with a different title.
For another thing, it has been nine years since The Return of the King (2003). In that interval, the audience has changed. In the audience of 2012 is a sizeable group who have neither read the book nor seen the LoTR trilogy. That makes a difference. That nine-year interval not only provides room for new material that overlaps with LoTR and ties the new movie to the old, but is probably necessary if the movie is to make any kind of sense to the viewer who is not familiar with the trilogy. One of Rusch’s statements in particular explains a lot: “…slavishly faithful to the spirit of the book, if not the book itself. The additions—and the only changes are additions—mostly come from the indices and appendixes and documents that Tolkien himself wrote to help himself with the book.”
A lot of what Rusch says about audience puts me in mind of Louise Rosenblatt’s The Reader, The Text, The Poem (1978). Although Rosenblatt is usually credited with “reader-response” theory, this term seems dismissive, somehow. She seems to have preferred the term “transactional theory.” The writer conceives an idea, but his idea is not the “poem” (or novel, or screenplay, or whatever you will). It exists only in his head. There is no transaction here. He writes. He operates upon his idea, his mental image. He shapes it into words, an intellectual construct. Now we have a text – ink on paper. This is the first step in the transaction, but the text is not the poem. The text is a medium. We need a reader .The reader operates on the text, those inky marks on paper and decodes them into words. From the words he constructs meaning. The circuit is complete. A text has become the poem. This is the transaction. The poem is, at both ends, a construct. Reading is a creative act, as is writing, which is why it always seemed to me natural to teach them together.
Ideally, the meaning the writer constructed and committed to the text and the meaning the reader constructs from the text bear a strong resemblance to each other, but it is not always so. The problem may be that the writer didn’t get it across, and/or that the reader just didn’t get it. There are all sorts of things that can get in between.
The essential dilemma is that the writer doesn’t know each and every one of his readers, or even any one of them. Rather, he must infer an audience. Hopefully, the writer’s inferred audience and the actual audience will resemble each other. A good writer knows (learns to accurately infer) his audience. The reader likely does not know the writer, but must infer him from his construction of meaning in the text.
Writer and reader negotiate meaning with each other through the medium of the text. Further, the writer and the reader both bring their own experiences, attitudes, and past reading to the negotiating table, some of it relevant, some of it not. All this informs the writing/reading. Does this mean that the text can mean anything? Of course not. There is writerly craft, and readerly craft, and the reasonable reading of a text. An informed reader and an uninformed reader are two different animals.
Rosenblatt may have been thinking primarily of poetry and fiction too. But the same principles seem to me to apply to writing for stage and screen as well. Therefore, it must be a daunting business to have millions of dollars riding on the correct inference of an audience of millions of individuals. I think that Jackson and his writers, Walsh, Boyens, del Toro, et al. managed it quite well. Reacher? I don’t know. Having neither read the books nor seen the movie, I am not sufficiently informed to have an intelligent opinion.