[While I did teach a couple online courses during my Spring semester sabbatical, I didn’t have my usual slate of classes by any means. So in lieu of my usual Semester Reflections series, this week I’ll share a handful of texts I read over the last few months, leading up to a weekend post on what’s next!]
On two ways to AmericanStudy a striking change between a novella and its film adaptation.
[NB. My Mom is a huge fan of the film Train Dreams, shared it with my wife and I, and gave me the novella for Christmas. So this post is most definitely in honor of her!]
The opening sentence of Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams (2011) is a hugely bracing one: “In the summer of 1917 Robert Grainier took part in an attempt on the life of a Chinese laborer caught, or anyway accused of, stealing from the company stores of the Spokane International Railway in the Idaho Panhandle.” When last year’s acclaimed film adaptation of the novella gets to that same event, not at the very opening but roughly 15 minutes in, it makes a pair of striking and significant changes to how things unfold: Grainier is not involved in the attempted lynching, and in fact seems to be trying to stop it (he keeps asking the mob “What’d he do?” and appears to grab at the Chinese worker to try to keep him from being killed); and the lynching is not only attempted but tragically succeeds, as the white supremacists throw the Chinese worker off of the train bridge they’ve just completed building. In both cases, the event haunts Grainier for the rest of his life, but both the event and his role in it are quite distinct in these two versions.
In the comments section of my the great Outlaw Vern’s review of the film (I don’t normally read, much less engage and even feature in a blog post, internet comments sections, but Vern’s are consistently thoughtful and add a lot to the films in question for me), the commenter Matt makes a compelling case that the film’s changes to this scene, and especially to Grainier’s role, are for the worse, arguing that the film is “cloyingly sentimental” and “blind to actual prejudice,” and that making Grainier “a non-racist” is “not only anachronistic, but also a way of babying a modern audience and providing a shield for the (white) filmmakers to hide behind.” I don’t agree (more on that in a moment), but I will say that this change does mean that the film can’t really engage with one of the most central layers of white labor and the labor movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries: how consistently driven by white supremacy that community and movement were. An individual worker like Grainier might not have been a violent white supremacist, that is, but to suggest that the community of white workers in a place like turn of the century Idaho was divided on the question of how to treat Chinese workers is certainly to sanitize the historical realities.
On the other hand, the film’s Grainier (played so beautifully by Joel Edgerton) is quite literally haunted by the Chinese worker for the rest of his life: he frequently sees his ghostly presence; and even asks him directly, once unthinkable tragedy has befallen Grainier and his family, whether that loss is punishment for Grainier’s actions (or at least failure to act) during the lynching. Which helps explain one of the film’s opening lines (not the very first, but quite early): “One of his earliest memories was that of observing the mass deportation of 100 or more Chinese families from the town. Grainier was baffled by the casualness of the violence.” This is the story of one quite ordinary man’s life in his small Idaho world, and yet to my mind the film, even more than the novella, makes clear how much larger elements of American community and history, including and even especially white supremacist prejudice and violence that is overtly outside of this one man’s perspective, affects every part of that life. Not only because it’s part of his world, but also because he was not able to stop it, and so for both reasons carried it with him for the rest of his days. Plenty in there to think about in 2026 America, I’d say.
Next sabbatical read tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What have you read recently?
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