The cinema is cruel
like a miracle. We
sit in the darkened room
asking nothing
of the empty white
space but that it
remain pure. And
suddenly despite us
it blackens. Not by
the hand that holds
the pen. There is
no message.
… Oh what is
this light that
holds us fast? Our
limbs quicken even
to disgrace under
this white eye as
if there were real
pleasure in loving
a shadow and caress-
ing a disguise!

(Selected Poems, Knopf, 1974)

Film as ravishment of its viewers is a trope remarkably like that of the sixteenth-century puritan pamphleteers (such as Stephen Gossan) who saw the theatre as a kind of rape, a space that made prostitutes of its female viewers and animals of its male viewers. Of course, O’Hara stands up for the libidinal pleasures of the movies, but he questions their reality, while the image of ‘loving a shadow and caress- / ing a disguise’ suggests not only classical antecedents, but also the world of detective fiction and film noir. Cinema’s lack of fidelity to our desires is an apposite starting point for discussing the relation between poetry and film, and that rare thing: the adaptation of a poem into a feature film.

In May The Monkey’s Mask will be released in Australia. The credits state that the film is ‘based on the book The Monkey’s Mask by dorothy porter’. Coolly lower case, this is silent on the book’s primary feature: it is a poem. The Monkey’s Mask, a lesbian detective novel in verse, was first published by Hyland House in 1994 and is now one of the bestselling books of Australian poetry, the film tie-in allowing yet another reprint. Its adaptation is of interest because narrative poetry is so rarely – almost never – a source of narrative film (though recently Eugene Onegin was released as Onegin). While poetry has long been enamoured by film (see Laurence Goldstein’s The American Poet at the Movies or The Faber Book of Movie Verse), film has shown only sporadic interest in poetry.

Ironically, the developments in modernist poetry that also occurred in film (simultaneity, montage, and speed) were the developments that moved poetry away from the seductions of narrative and a wide audience. Consequently, the figure of the poet resonates as a Romantic figure for filmmakers, but poetry itself is either irrelevant or impossible to film. Cross-generic ‘poem-films’ are very rare and, as the early examples of Auden’s ‘Night Mail’ and Douglas Stewart’s poetry in The Back of Beyond show, they are usually documentary in intent. The best known are probably those by John Betjeman and Tony Harrison, none of which is a narrative feature film. Films sometimes have short poems flown in for effect, such as John Pudney’s ‘For Johnny’ in The Way to the Stars, Auden’s ‘Funeral Blues’ in Four Weddings and a Funeral, or Neruda’s ‘The Dead Woman’ in Truly, Madly, Deeply. Interestingly, these are all elegiac poems that highlight the tension between fidelity and ‘moving on’, themes central to their host films.

Given its parody of the hard-boiled school of detective fiction, it is not surprising that The Monkey’s Mask has been adapted for film. The poem is filmic in style, as Geoffrey Dutton noted in his review (Courier Mail, 10 September 1994), and the organisation of the first-person lyrics imply a filmic sense of montage. The narrative centres on Jill Fitzpatrick, a thirty-eight-year-old private detective (she’s twenty-eight in the film) who is asked to find Mickey Norris, the missing daughter of a conventional couple from Sydney’s North Shore. Fitzpatrick, a working class ex-Catholic lesbian living in the Blue Mountains, is an outsider, as the genre demands. The job is routine, until Mickey’s body is found strangled and apparently raped. Mickey’s poetry tutor, Diana Maitland, is one of the suspects, along with her lawyer husband, Nick. Two poets are also implicated: slick Tony Knight and born-again Christian Bill McDonald, who allow a deal of satire regarding the pretensions and absurdity of the poetry scene.

The central, and darker, matter of the verse novel is the tortuous affair between Jill and Diana, which distracts Jill from the business at hand, and proves almost deadly. When Bill, who, among others, had been sexually involved with Mickey, offers some hard evidence regarding the case, he dies in a suspicious car crash. Jill begins to suspect Diana and Nick, but not before Diana has introduced her into the arcane pleasures of strangulation-orgasm. Violent sexuality, it turns out, is the central trope of the ‘victim poetry’ that Mickey wrote for Diana’s poetry classes. As parodies of teenage angst-ridden poetry Porter excels herself. These sub-Plathian poems of self-hatred and self-pity ring utterly true. Jill assumes that, whatever their literary quality, they might point to the murderer’s identity. The resolution of the mystery comes about not through Jill’s exegetical prowess, but a move from the killer. Jill survives this but, unable to prove anything, she tells Mickey’s parents that their daughter was murdered by someone she didn’t know, takes the cheque and moves on. After one last meeting with Diana, Jill exhorts herself to ‘forget the bitch. / Case solved’.

Despite extremely favourable reviews, the book has some detractors, and literary academics sometimes, if not always publicly, seem suspicious of the book’s ‘poetic’ status. Such suspicion was voiced most clearly, however, not by an academic, but a fellow fiction writer. Finola Moorhead’s notorious review in Southerly (55:1, 1995) describes the work as ‘very easy to read. It is formally slick; a derivative, lesbian-porn “thriller” sped-read for you’. Poetry, it seems, attracts such anxiety when it moves beyond the ‘high’ and ‘lyrical’ modes. While Porter is not often epigrammatic, her imagery is striking, and she is adept at dramatic monologue. The Monkey’s Mask develops the technique that Porter first used in Akhenaten, her verse-novel of the eponymous ancient Egyptian Pharaoh, and avoids the difficulties of an unsympathetic narrator, as occurs in the latest of Porter’s verse novels, What a Piece of Work. Given that simply in terms of word count The Monkey’s Mask is more novella that novel, the work’s plot is surprisingly complex, and its use of motif extremely rich. It is also simultaneously gothic and satirical in tone. Whatever its faults, Porter’s book is a masterpiece of organisation, concision, and pacing.

Because it is poetry, the success of The Monkey’s Mask has led to discussion about what this success means. Lyn McCredden’s ‘Literary Reputation: Dorothy Porter’ (Notes & Furphies 34, 1995) sees Porter’s case as saying something about the role of literary journalism in the formation of reputation when ‘confronted with a well-organised, plausible, determined seller of her own poetry’. This is one of numerous references to Porter’s interventionist role in the book’s successful marketing. Most pieces – from critical essay to newspaper profile – gesture towards this, often in terms of Porter as a self-empowered poet getting her hands onto the publishers’ marketing machines. But does, for instance, Peter Carey’s plausibility routinely get remarked on? Clearly, assumptions concerning the role of the poet involve the degree to which she or he should be visible in the market.

At the same time, The Monkey’s Mask is also often credited with having begun a resurgence in popularity for poetry, and the publication of other narrative poems is often alluded to (though the stylistic heterogeneity of works by Porter, Les Murray, Geoff Page, Philip Hodgins, and Alan Wearne is not commented on; nor that – save Page – these poets wrote verse novels before Porter). Some journalists’ statements are deeply question-begging. Kate Torney in the 7:30 Report (22 October 1999) claims that: ‘While Porter’s unconventional style has done little to win the hearts of traditionalists, it’s attracted a huge following of young people and can take some credit for the resurgence of pub poetry.’ Sour traditionalists; a youthful constituency; getting into the real world: Porter, it seems, is a one-woman literary revolution. (And pub poetry, like disco, is always undergoing a resurgence.) Porter, on the other hand, typically reminds her interviewers of the ancient and popular antecedents of narrative poetry (though The Monkey’s Mask is less epic than Jacobean chamber pieces). ‘Ancient’, ‘Orphic’, ‘sexy’, and ‘dangerous’ are terms Porter uses to revive poetry.

To revive one must adapt. The Monkey’s Mask has been made into a talking book, a radio play and a stage play. This film, then, is the fifth work to go under the title The Monkey’s Mask, though it is too simplistic to see the film as just another stage in popularising the poetry. With its R rating and arthouse style, Samantha Lang’s adaptation is more ‘film’ than ‘movie’, and despite its textual fidelity, it is slower and more mannered than the book. Its attempts at satire are usually risible.

Most theorists of film adaptation, such as Brian McFarlane and James Griffith, have long moved away from seeing the literary text as primary, or from arguing that only second-rate literature can produce great film. Nevertheless, the adaptation of a book still occasions, among audiences and critics, anxiety regarding not only fidelity to the text, but also fidelity to the experience of reading the text. Interestingly, other forms of adaptation don’t attract such theoretical attention or popular anxiety. Adaptation from novel to opera, or from Shakespeare to opera, occasions less attention and anxiety partly because the forms are manifestly different in their enunciation, and partly because they enjoy similar cultural capital (who’s going to argue, now, with Verdi about Otello?). Other forms of adaptation attract less critical interest for the opposite reasons. Adaptation of book to talking book, for instance, attracts little critical comment. However, issues that might appear simply ‘pragmatic’ ones – such as abridgment, whether to give the text to one or many voices – are as interpretive as camera angle, lighting, and so forth in film. As with film, dramatisation is interpretation. This is obvious in the theatre where a text can be performed ‘against itself’ (a feminist version of The Taming of the Shrew, for instance).

The film of The Monkey’s Mask retains Porter’s poetry as dialogue or Jill’s voiceover (voiceover being a common technique of film noir). This appears initially to be an uncommon fidelity to the text (Onegin, on the other hand, doesn’t attempt this). But while the structure of The Monkey’s Mask is largely unchanged (scenes in the film mostly correspond page by page with the book), very few of the lyrics appear uncut. Instead, the film employs small fragments of poems. In addition, three characters disappear. One of them, Jill’s mother, is replaced by Jill’s father, presumably giving a sense of Jill’s class background.

Aspects that make the book seem ‘filmic’ – its pace, use of montage and motif – are, in fact, not pronounced in the film. The book’s use of motif is seen in the numerous images of hands, necks and labyrinths. The latter, the home of monsters and conventional iconography of the threatening city, is seen in references to things coiling and twining (even Mrs Norris’s tea is ‘Twinings’). There are a plethora of references to hands and throats. At one point the throat’s sexual function is prefigured through Diana’s voyeuristic gaze:

I hold out my arms
‘No,’ she says, ‘I like to watch’
I give in
and feel her eyes touching me
       from throat to cunt.

The film uses visual motifs much less programmatically, though there are some nice shots of Diana’s (that is, Kelly McGillis’s) hands looking their age. This emphasis on hands and throats works thematically as well as in terms of imagery. As well as codifying the sexually dangerous activities that led to Mickey’s death, they suggest the condition of those in love and in trouble; those hand in hand, hand in glove, at each other’s throats, in the palm of someone’s hand, around someone’s little finger, playing into the hand of someone, showing their hand, and so on and on. These images stress the agonistic quality of love.

In film noir, sexual love is both about power and is a debilitating force. This – along with old-fashioned misogyny – is one of the reasons why noir needs the femme fatale. The detective being diverted from his (in this case, her) duty is a powerful image of desire’s debilitating force. If Jill simply discovers that love, like the law, is blind, her discovery has both tradition and popular experience on her side. The difference between being fucked and being fucked over is disconcertingly slight. Part of the frisson in watching the sex of this film comes about from how quickly we apprehend that the fucking is the being fucked over.

While the book is more easily explicit with regard to sex, the film is more explicit in other areas, especially in its more definitive ending. Changed endings are often the source of accusations of infidelity on the part of filmmakers, since endings are important both in terms of narratology and the emotional weight ascribed to them. Anne Kennedy’s script (assuming that the director, editor and producers have been faithful to it) gives a clearer and more conventional ending, though, as the matter is handed to the law, it is not clear that the guilty will be suitably punished. This is more effective than the vaguer ending in Porter’s book primarily because it is linked to the character development of Detective Sergeant Wesley. In the book, his homophobic rantings come to nothing. In the film, the image of him listening to Jill’s taped evidence nicely undermines for him, and us, the assumption that heterosexuality is ‘straight’ sexuality.

But the film ignores the highly charged moment of the last poem, save for the revised and conventional maxim of ‘Forget the bitch. Case closed’. The book’s closing lines are apocalyptic, grotesque and oblique. The rain of Sydney is imaged as the Flood, and with her wet, coiling hair Jill thinks that:

I could be Medusa
out for a stroll

okay, Medusa,
turn all these fuckers
to stone

turn those fraud poets
to marble
a staircase leading nowhere
in a Stalinist museum

turn Nick
to sandstone
and let him crumble

turn Diana ...
loose.

Mickey’s ghost is invoked, imagined in the fig trees of the Domain: ‘she’s growing dark // she’s wearing a monkey’s mask’. While this might not explain the title as such, the film makes no reference to it at all. The book’s fin de siècle postmodernism becomes in the film simply ‘fin’.

The classical metaphor and reference to Basho may not be in character, but Jill’s poetic vision posits opposing models of poetry. In its embittered knowledge of poets and ‘the world as it really is’, to quote Mickey, this poem presents an anti-Orphic model of poetry. Rather than reinvigorating the dead, poetry here is deadening: it turns the living into stone, it turns the loved one loose, rather than giving her new life. But Mickey’s ghost makes the poem interestingly ambivalent. Enigmatic though her appearance may be, it is an Orphic moment, giving the dead girl a kind of new life: young woman as animus. (Akhenaten ends on a similarly ambivalent vision of poetry as both scraps upon the winds of time and as a life-giving force.)

Poetic theory, then, is central to an understanding of the book, and its adaptation to film. One of the reasons that Moorhead’s attack seemed so ‘breathtakingly literal’, as Kathleen Mary Fallon put it (Southerly 55:2, 1995), was Moorhead’s statement about Mickey: ‘This girl is a real poet and would have developed, had she not been murdered, into a worthwhile writer.’

This, in terms of conventional literary criticism, is utterly risible. But Moorhead adds this: ‘It is plain, because if you really listen she moves you.’

The film shows how moving Mickey’s bad poems can be. Rather than appearing only in the middle of the narrative, her poems frame the film. One is performed at the film’s beginning by Mickey (who doesn’t appear in the book), living and breathing at a poetry reading in a pub. ‘Love is a torture’ is made into better poetry through performance and the skilful excision of a weak line by the scriptwriter. This becomes a moment of pathos when we see it played back in grainy video after Mickey’s death. The film’s ending has a crossfaded voiceover of first Mickey, then Jill, reciting: ‘I know the world as it really is. / Endless war, my heart in flames. / But I can smell the sweetest water / When I swim in that water / I am an angel.’ This short poem is one of Mickey’s better (her worst don’t appear at all). Shorn of Jill’s cynical response, and taking its place at the end of the film, it suggests a kind of apotheosis of the young poet: not a monkey’s mask, but an angel.

Critics who view Porter’s ‘killing’ of bad poets as seriocomic at best ignore the relationship between Mickey and Jill. Susie Porter’s marvellous performance as Jill emphasises the tough vulnerability more obviously associated with Mickey. The linking of Mickey and Jill occurs in symbolic ways. One of Mickey’s poems contains the lines: ‘you tell me I’ve got nothing to say / I’m just a cunt.’ In the film, the backhander given to Jill by Wesley, the bent but sexually straight cop, has left her with a large scar. Jill might not have ‘lesbian’ tattooed on her forehead, but the ‘gash’ there is a blatant reminder of her sex. If this seems a little outré, a less tendentious connection is seen in the fact that Mickey is the innocent writer, sentimental and sincere, while Jill is the innocent reader. After reading ‘Love is a torture’, Jill says:

‘Some bastard
  was giving her a very hard time.’
Diana yawns
  and touches my cheek
‘Oh, Jillie,
  you’re so sweet.’

Diana, the literary academic, finds Jill’s biographical readings of Mickey’s poems amusingly naïve, though she has extraprofessional reasons for taking this stance. Jill follows Mickey’s trail as her unconscious double rather than as a good detective: ‘I imagine I’m Mickey / seeing someone / I imagine I’m Mickey / obsessing, obsessing / and writing poems’, until, like Mickey, she becomes a poet manquée too, writing a poem for Diana: ‘I’ll write you a poem, bitch / ... I’m not at your feet / I’m at your throat.’ It is an obvious irony when Jill apostrophises Mickey’s photograph, saying ‘we’re so different, kid’.

Numerous literary critics have noticed that the book is ‘really’ about sexual love and responsibility, though film critics (the film has already been shown in Britain and elsewhere) have been less comfortable with the ‘weakness’ of the conventional detective plot. This is odd since, if anything, the film makes clearer the thematic importance of love and responsibility. Gillian Rose’s description of love in Love’s Work (Chatto & Windus, 1995) is relevant here: ‘There is no democracy in any love relation: only mercy. To be at someone’s mercy is dialectical damage: they may be merciful and they may be merciless. Yet each party, woman, man, the child in each, and their child, is absolute power as well as absolute vulnerability. You may be less powerful than the whole world, but you are always more powerful than yourself.’

The reference to the child here might seem inapposite when discussing a genre like film noir, which is traditionally indifferent towards the conventional family. Though families in the traditional sense are indeed almost absent in The Monkey’s Mask, both the film and the book are obsessed with children and parents. Interestingly, Harvey Roy Greenberg writes in Screen Memories (Columbia University Press, 1993) that the orthodox Freudian line with regard to detective films is that ‘the private eye symbolises the curious child ferreting out the secrets of grownup sexuality’. However strained this might usually seem, it is curiously apt with regard to The Monkey’s Mask. Jill, in the course of her investigations, does ferret out secrets of grownup sexuality. What is more, the murder victim, Mickey, is likened to a child who has preceded, and predeceased, her detective-double in this respect. It is no accident that both the murder victim and the detective are so present as daughters.

The Monkey’s Mask dramatises not only the danger of ‘risky sex’, desire without responsibility, and contracts without fidelity, but it also dramatises parental failure. Parents figure as disappointing (Jill’s mother in the book); ineffectual (Jill’s father in the film); lacking insight and efficacy (Mickey’s parents); sexualised (Mickey’s older male lovers); or predatory (Diana, as Mickey’s tutor). It is no accident that the supreme example of ‘victim poetry’, the poem that Mickey’s poems aspire to, is Sylvia Plath’s ‘Daddy’. In The Monkey’s Mask, the violent sex, the violence between consenting women (which so offends Moorhead), are shown to be both potentially murderous and an alternative to the world of Mickey’s mother, with her ‘missionary-position face’. The only benign relationship, however, is between Mickey and Jill, and for much of the time Jill is unfaithful to her dead charge because she is distracted by risky sex with Diana.

This adaptation, then, is significant not only because its source is a poem, but also because it so clearly thematises issues to do with adaptation, especially fidelity. In the notes to the soundtrack of Magnolia, the film’s director, Paul Thomas Anderson, claims that Magnolia is an adaptation of songs by Aimee Mann. If the sprawling brilliance of that film seems incommensurate with Mann’s bittersweet adult pop songs (and there is at least one scene where it manifestly doesn’t), we should remember that adaptation can proliferate in almost any direction: biography into documentary; novel into concept album; song into film; play into ballet; romance into essay ... and on it goes. Harold Bloom’s theory of the ‘anxiety of influence’ is only one example of the shift from ideas of ‘influence’ to ‘intertextuality’ in literary production. All writing is to some extent rewriting, and to produce original work one must be unfaithful to one’s predecessors and as psychoanalytical theorists point out, one’s own conscious intentions. There is nothing necessarily bloodless about this. The occasion of our cry and the cry might seem incommensurate to the outsider, but the occasion is real nevertheless. Perhaps all expressions of art represent the replacement of one kind of infidelity (those inevitable acts of human frailty) with another (the infidelity of representation, of the artist’s adaptation of experience). This relationship between an occasion and its cry is what Mickey’s poems are concerned with. In the book, they are the source of satire; in the film, the source of strange pathos. Art, The Monkey’s Mask tells us, is mostly indifferent to the occasion of its cry. That is what makes it so difficult and so worthwhile.

The attention to love and ‘the grief of its interminable exercise’, to quote Rose again, in The Monkey’s Mask means that adaptation is not simply an intellectual issue. Both film and book are recognisable under the same title in that both worry over the same themes, but their conclusions are a little different. Porter’s text is the more equivocal of the two. In the end, everybody – Mickey, Jill, Diana and Nick, Mickey’s parents – simply walks away, unable to attend fully to the responsibilities of his or her desires. Neither angels nor monkeys, these characters, and the art forms that produced them, simply represent ourselves, to quote Auden’s great poem of infidelity, ‘Lullaby’, as ‘mortal, guilty’ and ‘The entirely beautiful’. And as this ending – humanistic, personal, and lyrical – demonstrates, critical essays can only partially keep faith with their sources.