The Monster Within: Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley (2021)
2022; Oxford University Press; Volume: 16; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/adaptation/apac013
ISSN1755-0645
Autores Tópico(s)Media, Journalism, and Communication History
ResumoGuillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley opens with its protagonist, Stanton Carlisle (Bradley Cooper), dragging a canvas-enwrapped body into a hole in the floorboards of a dilapidated farmhouse, setting the room on fire, and walking away as the isolated building burns in the background. In flashbacks of Carlisle’s memories of the event, we learn that the body belonged to his father, whom he killed after uttering ‘I’ve always hated you’. This serves as the backstory for the ensuing plot depicting the career arc of Carlisle as a con man able to ‘cold read’ his ‘marks’ to tell them exactly what they want to hear. But this backstory isn’t the one that William Lindsay Gresham wrote for Carlisle in his 1946 novel of the same name. Carlisle did indeed hate his physically abusive father and wished him dead, but his revenge merely consisted of reducing the sanctimonious man to tears by making him acknowledge that he beat the young Carlisle’s beloved dog Gyp to death in a fit of anger the day that his wife left him for another man. As Kamilla Elliott observes in her discussion of Luis Buñuel’s adaptation of Wuthering Heights (1954), ‘fragments of character desire’ that are left unrealized by authors can be fulfilled by adapters, allowing the story to be read not just in one direction—from novel to film—but in both directions, ‘from novel to film and from film back to novel’ (234). By literalizing Carlisle’s often-expressed desire to kill his father in the novel, del Toro creates a protagonist that is both Gresham’s and his own.
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