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  • The Promise of Prose:Richard Stanley's The Color Out of Space and Film Absorption
  • Donald L. Anderson (bio)
Stanley, Richard, director. The Color Out of Space. Performances by Nicholas Cage, Joely Richardson, and Madeleine Arthur, SpectreVision, 2019.

In biology, "adaptation" describes the process an organism undergoes to better adjust to its environment. One of the implicit assumptions of film adaptations might be that a literary work, upon being adapted into film, is better suited for popular consumption within the cultural environment. Another assumption might be that following the tastes of the cultural environment, the literary work is now "better." A more neutral assumption may claim the literary work is simply becoming better suited for the visual medium that now constitutes its environment. It is often these unspoken assumptions that fuel the endless "which was better: the film or the book?" debates. There is, however, another way to think about the cinematic treatment of a literary work—absorption.

Richard Stanley's The Color Out of Space (2019) is not the first example of what I want to call "film absorption." David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch (1991), although likely not the first, remains a distinguished representative of film absorption. The film is neither completely Cronenberg's, nor completely Burroughs's. It is unmistakably far from an accurate visualization of the novel, which was deemed "unfilmable." Yet, it captures something Burroughsian, while still being Cronenberg-esque. "Absorption" in this sense identifies a synthesis of the author and director where the lines separating the two are undecidable.

What are the stakes for literature of the fantastic when adapted into film? Something is risked when the fantastic is visually realized. Will it be a disappointment? Can it live up to the promise of the prose? [End Page 162]

One of the most notable features of Lovecraft's fiction is the paradoxical way he describes something by not describing it. He spends as many words explaining something is indescribable as it would take to actually describe the thing. There are three early examples in The Colour Out of Space where he writes the phrase "impossible to describe" (178). The first time references the colors that emit from the meteorite and the second references the "proportions" of a deformed woodchuck (178). He later refers again to the colors as impossible to "put into any words" (176-8). When Lovecraft is not literally surrendering to the impossibility of description, he uses opaque and at times "purple" prose. For example, readers are asked to imagine how the Miskatonic professors had seen that "cryptic vestige of the fathomless gulfs outside; that lone, weird message from other universes and other realms of matter, force, and entity" from a fragment of the meteorite (176-7). Lovecraft renders the presence of something monstrous or weird from an absence of description, or by insisting something is outside our understanding of physics. His prose indulges in what I would call "negative description" where an image is summoned by way of its impossibility. To put it in Derridean terms, the impossible description of a thing is its very condition of possibility. It is this feature that leads Graham Harman to insist "any filmed version of Lovecraft would fall short of capturing his allusiveness" (80).

I would argue it is this "negativity" in Lovecraft's prose that has resulted in so many films revealing, at times gratuitously, that which Lovecraft refuses to describe. His prose offers the promise of a vacant womb that provides filmmakers fertile space to capitalize on what is absent. In this way, his work is perfect for cinematic absorption, but also troubling because his prose provides little guidance for visualization. Stanley's recent adaptation (absorption) is of this variety, exploiting the author's negativity. While some characters and aspects of the setting are simply altered or newly added, other aspects of the film take a significant amount of liberty with the original text. What is relevant to my discussion here is also the film's theme of absorption that Stanley explores. In the film Lovecraft's Nahum Gardner is Nathan Gardner, who has inherited his late father's farmhouse. Early in the film he describes his father as strict and hostile. He...

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