EVELYN WAUGH thought movies vapid and dishonest, one of the evils of the modern age. In the Waughian universe, the film industry attracted self-promoters and hucksters, always at the ready to trade their own self worth for a bloated swell of bogus importance. Hollywood is the setting for the displaced English gentlemen in The Loved One, for example, and in Vile Bodies (1930), Colonel Blount acts, donates his house, and loses a fortune in a terrible historical film about John Wesley.
But this scene from Vile Bodies is excised from Bright Young Things, Stephen Fry's recently released film adaptation of the book in America. The scene's details--a hilarious misunderstanding of the word "shooting," the cheery fabrication of Wesley's life, and Colonel Blount's debasement of his ancestral home--disclose Waugh's bleak belief that movies distort and destroy the integrity of everything.
Nevertheless Bright Young Things (Waugh's working title for Vile Bodies) is a funny film. Like the book, the film is essentially a pastiche of incidents in the lives of people who relish seeing their names in gossip columns. It follows the misfortunes of Adam Fenwick Symes (played by Stephen Campbell Moore) who arrives in England from France, only to have the unpublished novel that was to be his livelihood confiscated by customs officials. ("If we can't stamp out literature from the country, we can at least stop it being brought in from outside.")
So Adam, now penniless, calls his fiancée (Emily Mortimer): "I say Nina, I don't think we shall be getting married after all."
Fortune dances before Adam, flying away every time he almost grabs it. He makes £1,000 on a bet, and then bets that money again on what he finds out right after is sure to be a losing horse. He receives a £1,000 check from Nina's father--only to find that it is bogus because Colonel Blount (Peter O'Toole) signed it "Charlie Chaplin." He gets a job as a gossip columnist, but loses it when Nina writes the column for him and unknowingly disregards instructions from the newspaper's imperious owner, Lord Monomark (Dan Aykroyd). Adam gets engaged and disengaged to Nina with every turn of his luck, and eventually, she leaves him for Ginger (David Tennant)--who buys her from Adam for the sum necessary to pay his hotel bill.
Adam and Nina belong to a group of bright young things, who fester merrily in an incestuous atmosphere of gossip and scandal. It is here that Fry's film shines, both in the cast of character actors he assembled and in his evocation of a bright, colorful and supremely fashionable place where nothing much matters except having fun. The smart set hop from party to party, dinner to dinner, viewing everything through snobby and derisive eyes which coddle feelings of boredom and superiority.
FENELLA WOOLGAR is perfect as Agatha Runcible, the dippy socialite. (In Vile Bodies, Agatha "heard someone say something about an Independent Labour Party, and she was furious that she had not been asked.") Woolgar speaks the haute vernacular ("too, too shaming") with all the mannered inflections of a woman who makes a charming persona out of being self-conscious. Jim Broadbent, as the drunken major, valiantly maintains his stiff upper lip even as his speech is slurring, and Stockard Channing as the money-grubbing evangelist Mrs. Melrose Ape with her coterie of pre-pubescent "angels," bellows a sanctimonious holiness through the most decadent of parties.
Fry has said in interviews that the reason he wrote the script and directed Bright Young Things was because he saw Vile Bodies as a contemporary book, paralleling our own society's obsession with gossip and celebrity. The comparison is mostly valid, but Vile Bodies is not, at its essence, a book about gossip and celebrity. Though funny, it remains a dark and grim book about a society racing toward its own oblivion. The bright young things have not-so-bright endings: Runcible dies in the loony bin, Balcairn the gossip columnist gases himself, Ginger betrays his friends, Nina becomes an adulterous mother, and the former angel Chastity finishes as a prostitute. The book leaves the depthless Adam on the battlefield, his promised fortune of £35,005 worthless, about to be carried away by the "swirling tycoon" of the war.
Fry increases the bright young things' bad behavior: They all snort cocaine, for example, and it's hinted that some support Hitler. But in the flippancy of his narrative, Fry removes the gloom in the otherwise gay lives of the characters--which allows him to distort the ending. Bright Young Things ends on a note of maturity and sweetness, as if the vile bodies came to the realization that there was more to life than an endless succession of parties.
How Waugh would have hated it! His most scathing fictional satire of the film industry is in the opening chapters of The Loved One, where he pillories English expatriates desperately trying to fit into the Hollywood scene. In his nonfiction too, Waugh rails against films, pitching himself as one of "hundreds of thousands of mature, sensible, men and women" who find films "boring and irritating." "There is hardly a single film for which one does not make allowances," he wrote in 1930 in the Daily Mail. "One has to make a deliberate effort to put oneself in the state of mind to accept and enjoy the second rate." The film industry insists "upon everything being suitable for everyone. The result is that it produces a commodity mildly unsuitable to almost everyone."
IN ANOTHER ESSAY, "Why Hollywood Is a Term of Disparagement" (1947), Waugh described the "inhumanity" of the lives of screen actresses and castigated Hollywood for its disrespect to artists. "Literary considerations are as despised in the film studios as in those of modern painters," he wrote. "Each of the books purchased [by studios] has had some individual quality, good or bad, that has made it remarkable. It is the work of a staff of writers to . . . obliterate it. We all know frightful examples of favorite books we have seen thus sterilized."
Waugh stood by his beliefs. When it came time for him to sell the film rights of Brideshead Revisited (1944), he traveled to Hollywood on the studio's dime, but never intended to sell the rights at all, says biographer David Wykes. Waugh believed Americans and the studio heads courting him had a misplaced enthusiasm for the book. They "see Brideshead purely as a love story," Waugh wrote in his diary in 1947. "None of them see the theological implications."
Waugh's concerns were not misplaced. The 1965 screen version of The Loved One careens wildly into a world of jet-propelled funerals and morbidly obese gluttons who eat whole pigs, destroying Waugh's satire by lurching into the ludicrous. Waugh's first novel, Decline and Fall (1928), about the misadventures of the hapless Paul Pennyfeather, was similarly lost in celluloid translation. The 1968 film--renamed Decline and Fall . . . of a Birdwatcher--is less a spoof of the English upper classes or a comic vision of a world gone to hell than a screwball caper of incoherent adventure. It's a film in the same vein as Dude, Where's My Car? or Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle: a jumble of events held together in tenuous cohesion by the recurrence of similar characters.
A Handful of Dust (1934), the novel Waugh wrote in the bitter aftermath of his divorce from first wife Evelyn Gardner, made a better film in 1988. Directed by Charles Sturridge, the film shows the family country home of Hetton in its cold emptiness, rooms too big for the few people who rattle around in them, and contrasts it with Brenda's delightfully modern London flat, which is small but bright and cheery, painted in pastels, decorated with "chrome plating."
Sturridge had made an earlier and very popular attempt to adapt Waugh, codirecting with Michael Lindsay- Hogg the BBC's eleven-hour miniseries of Brideshead Revisited in 1981. Brideshead Revisited was Waugh's most financially successful book. Subtitled "The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder," the book tells of Ryder's infatuation with the Flyte family, a group of aristocrats who live in a grand old home called Brideshead, and of his gradual appreciation and understanding of Catholicism. Waugh, who converted to Catholicism as an adult, held the book close to his heart. The dramatic scene of Lord Marchmain (Sebastian and Julia's prodigal father) making the sign of the cross on his deathbed--returning in both body and soul to his faith--was the crux of the book and a measure of how central Catholicism was to Waugh.
THE MINISERIES captures the book's rich and dreamy nostalgia, and it is more or less faithful to the book's eschatological concerns. But in 2005 a new film version of Brideshead Revisited starring Jude Law as Sebastian Flyte and Paul Bettany as Ryder will be released, and, if all goes as planned, it will fulfill Waugh's fears about adaptations of the book and his criticisms of the film industry. According to the Independent, screenwriter Andrew Davies is intent on remaking Brideshead Revisited as a love story between Ryder and Julia and cutting out the "theological implications." As Waugh mused about Hollywood's distortion of a Somerset Maugham story: "Why, one wonders, do they trouble to purchase rights?"
Gaby Wenig is a writer living in Los Angeles.