Hear Me Out: ‘The Bell Jar’ doesn’t need a movie adaptation
Fans of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (there are a lot of us) are probably unaware that there was once a movie adaptation of the novel, and that’s because it was a giant failure.
Directed by Larry Peerce from a screenplay by Marjorie Kellogg, the 1979 film brought Plath’s loosely autobiographical story of an aspiring young writer’s mental breakdown to the big screen with a heavy hand. Upon its release, critics weren’t impressed in the slightest; its reception was a sharp contrast to the novel’s legacy as one of the most searingly intense and honest examinations of a young woman’s crumbling interior world. Gene Siskel from the Chicago Tribune labelled the film “downright laughable”, while The New York Times’ Janet Maslin was quick to call the movie “disastrous”.
Perhaps The Bell Jar was unadaptable, as a lot of great novels seemingly are; when a piece of writing that is so crucially centred around digging into the most psychologically challenging arenas of the mind is transformed into a movie, it often stumbles, the essence of the written word not fully there. Sometimes, there are just too many vital narrative elements that can’t be accurately translated in the same way as they can be in a book, leaving an adaptation feeling rather flimsy and undercooked; for instance, when JD Salinger penned The Catcher in the Rye, he was adamant that it could never be made into a movie, precisely because the most important element of the story is Holden Caulfield’s voice, which narrates his struggles as he grapples with grieving his brother.
You could say the same for The Bell Jar, which dissects such a complex state of mind, because really, there is no good way to put that beloved fig tree analogy on the screen with the same impact as the quote from the book: “I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor…”
The reason I’m arguing against an adaptation of the novel, which, like many women, I devoured as a teenager during a pivotal stage in coming of age, is that an adaptation has just been announced, which seems like its in very early stages, but Women Talking director Sarah Polley is set to direct, while global pop sensation Billie Eilish has been attached to star.
The musician is in talks to play the central character of Esther Greenwood, a 19-year-old who begins writing for a fashion magazine in New York City, only to fall into a depressive spiral. It’s a tough story to read, refusing to shy away from heavy themes like suicide and shock therapy, raising the question of whether Eilish be able to master this; it’s not like she has much acting experience besides playing Eva in the TV series Swarm, although that is not my primary issue here.
While I do think casting Eilish, just another recent example of a high-profile pop star entering the film industry despite the legions of budding actors who will thus miss out, is the wrong choice, I simply believe that the story should stay within its pages. There’s no need to bring such an introspectively rich novel to the big screen, as it just won’t have the same effect.
Kirsten Dunst was once set on adapting the novel, and considering her ties to Sofia Coppola, you can imagine that she might have had some interesting ideas (although, if anyone has to adapt the novel, then it should surely be Coppola). The actor has similarly experienced depression, and her role in Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides as Lux Lisbon, a mentally-ill teenager who commits suicide, exists in a similar kind of state of mind to Esther. This perhaps would’ve been the best version of The Bell Jar, but Dunst stepped back from the project to focus on motherhood, leaving it a great ‘what if’ story.
What I’m saying is, let’s just abandon a film adaptation of it altogether. We’ve all survived without any adaptations of classics like The Catcher in the Rye, The Secret History, and Blood Meridian, so sometimes it’s OK to let novels remain as just that, novels, and The Bell Jar certainly seems best left on paper, wrapped up in Plath’s impeccable prose.
