In 1992, Salman Rushdie printed a ruminative essay in The New Yorker about “The Wizard of Oz” and its shocking affect on his personal writing. As a baby, in Bombay, he titled the primary story he ever wrote “Over the Rainbow.” Rushdie was captivated by the film’s twin themes of escape and homecoming. The movie, he argues, is “about the joys of going away, of leaving the grayness and entering the color, of making a new life in the ‘place where you won’t get into any trouble.’ ” It can be evenly interpreted, he suggests, as a sort of homage to the immigrant expertise—with Judy Garland’s beguiling “Over the Rainbow” serving as a “grand paean to the Uprooted Self.” Rushdie’s work factors to the attract of this concept of reinvention. One extra step down the Yellow Brick Road (and towards much less travelled shores), he appears to be saying, and also you’re properly in your strategy to releasing your creativeness.
This week, we’re bringing you a choice of items in regards to the affect of movie on literature, and vice versa. In “A Psychotronic Childhood,” Colson Whitehead writes about how his childhood love for B-movies and science fiction influenced his prose. (“When I finally got around to writing my own horror novel, ‘Zone One,’ years later, I tried to capture this elemental terror, of the familiar turned homicidal.”) In “The Movie Lover,” Pauline Kael displays on how she discovered her personal voice as a movie critic. In “Slow Fade,” Arthur Krystal examines F. Scott Fitzgerald’s sophisticated relationship with Hollywood. (“Billy Wilder, who seemed genuinely fond of Fitzgerald, likened him to ‘a great sculptor who is hired to do a plumbing job.’ ”) In “No. 1512—II,” Lillian Ross chronicles the tensions behind the scenes of John Huston’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Red Badge of Courage.” Finally, in “The Clockwork Condition,” Anthony Burgess explores how Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 movie captures the spirit of his dystopian satirical novel, “A Clockwork Orange.” (“Alex is a comic reduction of Alexander the Great, slashing his way through the world and conquering it. But he is changed into the conquered—impotent, wordless.”) Film and literature alike tackle new layers of that means with the passage of time. We hope that these items encourage some satisfying cinematic (and literary) detours this weekend.
—Erin Overbey, archive editor
Revisiting “The Wizard of Oz.”
Learning from B-movies.
My life as a movie critic.
The creator feedback on his most well-known guide, in 1973.
“Everything has just gone zoom.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood.
