Ursula K. Le Guin has been among my favorite authors ever since I read A Wizard of Earthsea when I was, what? seven?, so some might say that the following might be tainted by the impossible purism of the lifelong fan. Not so. Of the seven people who gathered with me Sunday afternoon to watch the SciFi Channel Original Miniseries "The Legend of Earthsea," four of them had no exposure to the purported source matter yet all agreed (loudly, at times, to drown out the dialogue) that it was a hideous work of television purely on its own merits.
It was at about the hour mark that I realized what particular screenwriters' disease had left its mark on the production. I'm not sure what the name is, but here are the symptoms:
- Everything of note must be experienced through dialogue.
- Everything expressed through dialogue must be made explicit.
- Dialogue must operate primarily in the context of the viewer, secondarily in the context the characters inhabit.
- The most urgent task is to convey information about the plot. If a character or plot device cannot be fit into a familiar trope, then s/he/it should be discussed at length (see previous).
- And this is the real killer -- everything that makes it to the screen must be Notable.
It's a style that works quite well enough for campy ahistorical shows like "Xena" or "Buffy" and "Angel", but for this context it was Teh Stupid. The painful revelation came in a scene of Vetch visiting Ged on his sickbed: Ged proceeds to relay the content of the previous scene between him and the Archmage to Vetch, and Vetch tells Ged how the creature they just fought "totally slapped me around" (probably not an exact quote, but the tone is right) not minutes after we saw the bad CGI creature do exactly that, with a dramatic closeup, even.
Le Guin's books -- all of them, really, but specifically the Earthsea books -- have a marvelous quietness to them. To my mind, this makes them ideal for adaptation by confident hands; it takes real artistry to know how to keep things simple and find the meaning in silence; "only in silence, the word", says the epigram to Wizard. Unfortunately, "The Legend of Earthsea" (brought to you by the writer/creator of The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne and the director of the Jake 2.0 pilot) only communicates through verbiage and action. It is this last that causes the core of the trouble, taking this venture out of the simple awkwardness of shifting a story from one medium to another and into actual destruction of the source work.
The conflicts in A Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan are personal ones (what my high school lit teacher would have called "Man Against Himself [sic]") about taking responsibility for the evil that we do out of thoughtless pride, in Ged's case, and for the evil that we do out of ignorance and rote, in Arha/Tenar's (the next book, The Farthest Shore, is about taking responsibility for the evil done by others for which you bear no fault). They contain plenty of action and eye candy, sure, but what they don't have is a Villain. Even the (original) gebbeth, as it turns out, can't entirely fill that role.
The team of Rob Lieberman and Gavin Scott (or whoever directed them) needed a Villain to defeat, and so they introduced the character of not-Viggo-Mortensen, the "Kargoid" (did they change "Kargish" out of some weird copyright restriction?) king with plans to conquer all of Earthsea. Once he's introduced, oh, then the whole integrity of the story begins to unravel. It's not just the strange inversions of Kargish society and religion needed to introduce a lackluster intrigue-in-the-nunnery plot that weaves their pretty-crown-wearing battlement-pacer into Tenar's story: once you start inventing major characters to support atextual themes, you've then opened the door to change anything at all, and details that made the original theme strong are turned into irrelevancies and scrambled at will.
The end result, in this case, was to strip the characters and the stories themselves of the dignity that make them so compelling:
- The dragon Yevaud, in the book, is impressive not because he flies and breathes fire but because he embodies quiescent strength and inaccessible knowledge; the dragon of "Legend" is a wisecracking, ungainly showoff.
- The final confrontation between Ged and the gebbeth consists of exactly one word spoken by each of them; in "Legend", we're instead treated to a wordy episode of "Ged, This Is Your Life", followed by a puerile is-so-is-not-is-so argument.
- The young girl Arha who must decide who she is because her identity was ritually stripped from her as a child, a girl poised between being a figurehead of power and ascending to actual authority, becomes a Tenar who scored highly on the Priestess Exams and who never acts but is only acted upon.
When Le Guin came back to the Earthsea story in Tehanu with an eye towards exposing its flaws (I first typed "exploding", which may be just as accurate), that same unflappable dignity of the wizards (all of them male) was one of the first things to be torn down -- one reason I suspect many loyal fans of the first three hate the fourth so much -- but she did so with purpose, so as to expose the weakness and damage that are concealed by the quietness of power.
And I haven't even touched on the issue which seems to have shoved the most words around on the internet about "Legend": the miscasting of Ged, Vetch, and all but one of the other non-Kargish characters with white actors. Le Guin addresses most of this problem quite comprehensively at her web site (here's her Index of Earthsea comments and links), but there's one other angle that I haven't yet seen explored: even if the casting department had had the will to cast brown-skinned characters (other than poor Danny Glover as the Mystical Black Man), I think that the introduction of the Kargoid [sic] plot to conquer all of Earthsea made it a political necessity that the books' ethnic divisions be scrapped. White soldiers invading across the seas and subjugating brown people, one of whom is our male lead, would be too familiar and too dangerous an image without the protecting shield of historical fact.
Ah, but enough of that. We had a great time joking about/at it, even if we were all dog-tired after four hours. Some people I like got to meet other people I like for the first time, and I got to see some people I like that I don't get to see as often as I'd like. Susan kept us informed at the multiple congruencies between what we were witnessing and the computer game "World of Warcraft", and pointed out that we shouldn't be expecting much from the network that produced "The Puppet Master vs. the Evil Toys." Mo kept us informed of which of the characters secretly (secretly!) lusted for each other. We kept our eyes peeled for the lemur. I got to say, "ignore this part, it's all made-up filler" every 10-15 minutes and still get a general laugh from everyone to ease my bitterness. People brought lovely snacks, especially Kristianna's sweet bread thing that was gone before I could ask what to call it. I got to evangelize a little for the original books such that I've now lent out all of my Earthsea books except Tehanu, which I'm thinking it's time to re-read. Truly, good things can come from bad.
