Suggested reading: Google Glass

Novelist Gary Shteyngart wearing Google Glass.
Photo: Emiliano Granado

Another in the occasional series of my favorite recent articles, posts, etc. from around the web:

1. Gary Shteyngart on the seductions and irritations of Google Glass ("O.K., Glass: Confessions of a Google Glass Explorer," The New Yorker, Aug. 5, 2013):

'Outside, the summer is coming together at last and Manhattan is just on the right side of sweltering. The man jerks his head, and slides his finger against the right temple of the glasses, across the so-called touch pad. A pink rectangle above his field of vision, which looks like a twenty-five-inch television screen floating some eight feet away from him, is replaced by another message: "SVO Hav Su flight 150 225pm delayed." The man has been Googling the N.S.A. leaker Edward Snowden on his computer, and now his glasses, which are synched to his Google Plus account, are informing him of a delay on the next Aeroflot (Su) flight to Havana out of SVO (Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport). Another flick of the index finger, and a different screen clicks into place. Now it would appear that someone named Chris Brown is defending himself on Twitter and that a water bed for cows has been developed. The man has subscribed to all the news sources currently available for his spectacles: the New York Times, CNN, and Elle...

'There is too much traffic on Park Avenue and Second Avenue to take a taxi downtown to the Momofuku Ssäm Bar. The man does not remember telling his glasses about enjoying that restaurant, but somehow they know.'

2. John Lanchester on the implications and consequences of Google Glass ("Short Cuts," London Review of Books, 23 May 2013):

'Look at the videos and it’s hard not to be impressed by the technologies incorporated in Glass. Think about it for five minutes, though, and it’s hard not to be alarmed by what they might mean. To dispense with one of the subtler consequences first, what does this mean for the user of Glass, in their interactions with other people? We already have an unprecedented range of tools for not-being wherever we are and not-doing whatever it is we’re supposed to be doing. But at least when we take out a phone to check our messages, people can see that we’re doing it. What if we could do that without anybody knowing? The already extensive ecology of Google Glass parodies dwells with some force on this point: we see a first-dater ask his date’s surname then check her page on Facebook. He finds out she likes dogs, looks up some dog jokes, then gets bored and, after photographing her cleavage when she bends over the table, starts watching a football match on his Glass. All of this unbeknownst to her. The user of Glass has the option to be permanently not-there. She can go into internal exile, at will and for ever...

'The cruder and more obvious problem with Glass is less to do with the user’s self-engagement, and self-withdrawal, and self-whatever, and more to do with the effect on the rest of us. Imagine a world in which anyone around you can be recording anything you say, filming anything you do....It’s hard to get one’s head around the disruptive potential of this omnipresent recording. At the end of an hour’s general chat in a newspaper office the other day, the conversation turned to Glass, and we all replayed the talk in our heads, editing out the bits we wouldn’t have said if it had been possible someone present had been recording everything. The conclusion was we’d have managed about five minutes’ small talk about the weather, followed by a 55-minute silence.'

You can see the Google Glass parody Lanchester refers to, "How Guys Will Use Google Glass," along with many others, on YouTube.


3. Google Glass will make designing cheating-proof college assignments and exams even harder. But James M. Lang writes that the high number of college students who cheat do so not because they can, but because they are encouraged to ("How college classes encourage cheating," The Boston Globe, August 4, 2013):

'College administrators largely seem to have accepted the notion that the blame for cheating lies either at the feet of morally bankrupt students or within the overall campus climate. As a result, their efforts to reduce cheating have focused on creating first-year orientations or seminars on academic integrity, or on instituting deterrent measures like suspensions or expulsions for cheaters who are caught.

'But the stability of cheating rates over the past 50 years suggests that these efforts are not having their desired effect—and an interdisciplinary new line of research in education and psychology may help explain why. Increasingly, these findings point to a radical proposition: that the very nature of the college education we provide to our students, in both its design and delivery, may turn out to be the deepest cause of cheating on campus.

'In other words, it may be that cheating rates are so high because too many university curriculums and courses are designed for cheating. And, based on current trends in college education, the problem may be about to get worse.'

4. What about the data that Google collects from Glass wearers? Not only can it be used by Google to bombard you with personalized, geospatially-specific ads (as in this scene from Minority Report (2002)), but as reporters Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill recently revealed, the National Security Agency collects data on users directly from the servers of Google—as well as Yahoo, Facebook, Skype, Apple, and Microsoft—including the content of communications ("NSA Prism program taps in to user data of Apple, Google and others," The Guardian, 6 June 2013):

'The National Security Agency has obtained direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet giants, according to a top secret document obtained by the Guardian.

'The NSA access is part of a previously undisclosed program called Prism, which allows officials to collect material including search history, the content of emails, file transfers and live chats, the document says.

'The Guardian has verified the authenticity of the document, a 41-slide PowerPoint presentation—classified as top secret with no distribution to foreign allies—which was apparently used to train intelligence operatives on the capabilities of the program. The document claims "collection directly from the servers" of major US service providers.'

The companies have denied that they are cooperating with the NSA, but perhaps we should give their denials the same weight we give to Director of National Intelligence James Clapper's testimony before the Senate, as discussed June 10 on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (hosted by John Oliver):

5. Amy Davidson writes about reports in The Washington Post that the NSA broke its own rules on collecting data on U.S. citizens 2776 times in 2012. We know this, by the way, only because the NSA itself has said so. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court that supposedly oversees requests by the NSA and other agencies for data collection within the U.S., according to its chief judge Reggie B. Walton, "does not have the capacity to investigate issues of noncompliance" ("Breaking the Rules Thousands of Times at the N.S.A.," The New Yorker, August 16, 2013):

'As it turns out, there are numbers packed into the numbers. An "incident" can have affected multiple people—even multitudes. In a single one of the two thousand seven hundred and seventy-six cases, someone at the N.S.A. made a mistake in entering a number into a search request. As a result, instead of pulling information on phone calls from Egypt (country code 20) the agency got data on "a large number" of calls from Washington, D.C. (area code 202). How many, and what did they learn?...Another incident involved "the unlawful retention of 3,032 files that the surveillance court had ordered the NSA to destroy…. Each file contained an undisclosed number of telephone call records." The Post said that it was not able to tell how many Americans were affected in all. Those two examples suggest that the number could be very, very big—even by the N.S.A.’s standards.'

Cairo in flames

Cairo, August 16, 2013. Photo: AMR Abdallah Dalsh, Reuters/Landov

What was going on in Cairo?

Cautiously, he began to walk, then beckoned to a man coming toward him. 'What's going on in town?' he asked.

'The last day's come,' was the bewildered reply.

'What do you mean? Protest deomonstrations?'

'Fire and destruction,' the man yelled, moving on...

The din was unbearable, as though every atom on earth were yelling at once. Flames were spreading everywhere, dancing in windows, crackling on roofs, licking at walls, and flying up into the smoke that hung where the sky should have been. The burning smelled hellish, a concoction of wood, clothes, and different kinds of oil. Stifled cries could be heard coming out of the smoke. Young men and boys, in frenzied unconcern, were destroying everything, and walls kept collapsing with a rumble like thunder. Concealed anger, suppressed despair, unreleased tension, all the things people had been nursing inside them, had suddenly burst their bottle, exploding like some hurricane of demons...

Men on the street corners urged people on. 'Burn! Destroy! Long live the homeland!' they yelled...

The streets were full of smashed cars; the sky had turned a deep red color as the fires blazed away under their black cloud of smoke.

—Naguib Mahfouz, Al-Summan wal-Kharif (Autumn Quail), 1962.*

--

* Translated by Roger Allen and John Rodenbeck, Anchor Press, 2000, pp. 292-295.

Opium addiction, Wilkie Collins and The Moonstone

Opium addiction, mixed-race parentage, same-sex affection, and anti-imperialism: all feature in what T. S. Eliot called 'the first, the longest and the best of modern English detective novels,' Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone (1868) [1].

Collins' novel isn't actually the first English detective novel; that honor, according to crime writer and critic Julian Symons, belongs to The Notting Hill Mystery (1865) by the pseudonymous 'Charles Felix' [2] (recently discovered to be the publisher Charles Warren Adams, thanks to detective work by Paul Collins [3]). Mention should also be made of Inspector Bucket (in Charles Dickens' Bleak House (1853), and the Chevalier Dupin (in American writer Edgar Allan Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841) and other stories) as precursors. But Collins' novel remains compelling, less for the implausible solution of the mystery than for what it reveals about its author's unconventional life and unusual attitudes.

The Moonstone is a huge (and, legend has it, cursed) diamond brought back from India by a British soldier, who looted the jewel and murdered its guardians during the storming of Seringapatam. This is only the latest in a series of thefts of the diamond: it was originally taken from a Hindu temple by a soldier in the army of the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb; all of its owners have met untimely ends. Decades later the British soldier bequeathes the sacred diamond to his niece, Rachel Verinder, on her 21st birthday, and at midnight the same night it is stolen from her bedroom.

Three mysterious Indian "conjurors" have been seen in the neighborhood, and at first suspicion falls on them. But when the famous detective Sergeant Cuff is brought in to solve the mystery, he deduces that someone in the house has stolen it. The housemaid Rosanna Spearman and Rachel herself are soon the chief suspects. But after Rosanna's apparent suicide and Rachel's refusal to tell all she knows, Sergeant Cuff's investigation reaches a dead end. A year later, the case is reopened by Rachel's cousin Franklin Blake, who had been in the house the night of the theft, aided by the physician's assistant Ezra Jennings.

Mixed-race parentage: Jennings' skin is "of gipsy darkness," his nose "presented the fine shape and modelling so often found among the ancient people of the East, so seldom visible among the newer races of the West," and his "thick closely-curling" black hair is turning white, but in irregular piebald patches [4]. The description is clearly intended to suggest that Jennings has mixed-race parentage, which indeed he confirms just a bit later in the novel. While some of the other characters view him with suspicion on this account, Blake treats him with sympathy and respect. And as it turns out, it is Jennings who largely solves the mystery of the theft of the Moonstone.

Opium use: We also discover that Jennings is suffering from a debilitating disease, to allay the symptoms of which he regularly uses opium. Jennings complains to Blake about the general "ignorant distrust of opium" [5] and gives him a copy of Thomas De Quincy's Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821). But Jennings also tells us about the "dreadful night[s]" that are "the vengence of...opium, pursuing me through a series of frightful dreams" [6]. Jennings is caught in a double bind: he needs opium to free himself from the pain of his disease, but it is gradually destroying his ability to function:

"The one effectual palliative in my case, is—opium. To that all-potent and all-merciful drug I am indebted for a respite of many years from my sentence of death. But even the virtues of opium have their limit. The progress of the disease has gradually forced me from the use of opium to the abuse of it. I am feeling the penalty at last. My nervous system is shattered; my nights are nights of horror. The end is not far off now." [7]

Collins knew whereof he wrote. He had begun using laudanum (opium powder dissolved in alcohol) in the mid-1860s to alleviate chronic pain and headaches, and his use of the drug quickly became habitual. Jennings reports that his own "full dose" is 500 drops [8], and he tells Blake that this is "ten times larger" [9] than a typical dose given to an unhabituated adult. Since Collins had been using laudanum regularly for several years by the time he wrote these passages, we can guess that his own levels of use were approaching those of Jennings.

The Koh-i-Noor Diamond

There is a legend, promulgated later on by Collins himself, that he dictated large sections of The Moonstone while under the influence of the drug and virtually unconscious of what he was producing. Editor John Sutherland's recent examinations of the manuscript, though, found that there was only a portion of the "Miss Clack" section (about eight pages in the 1999 Oxford edition) that aren't in Collins' own handwriting, although the twelve pages that follow the dictated section are in pencil, which may indicate that Collins wrote them while laid up in bed [10].

Mixed-race parentage and opium use are not the only subjects about which surprisingly positive attitudes are expressed in The Moonstone. Other areas where monolithic assumptions about Victorian points of view are challenged include:

Same-sex affection: In an era where middle- and upper-class men and women occupied virtually separate spheres, feelings of friendship between members of the same sex could be expressed in terms that may strike modern ears as rather heated. Jennings, for example, when writing of Franklin Blake, uses the words "attraction" and "yearning":

"What is the secret of the attraction that there is for me in this man? Does it only mean that I feel the contrast between the frankly kind manner in which he has allowed me to become acquainted with him, and the merciless dislike and distrust with which I am met by other people? Or is there really something in him which answers to the yearning that I have for a little human sympathy—the yearning, which has survived the solitude and persecution of many years; which seems to grow keener and keener, as the time comes nearer and nearer when I shall endure and feel no more?" [11]

Such impassioned declarations also occur between women in the novel. Lucy Yolland, the daughter of a local fisherman, says of the housemaid Rosanna Spearman,

"'I loved her...She was an angel. She might have been happy with me. I had a plan for our going to London together like sisters, and living by our needles. That man [Franklin Blake] came here, and spoilt it all...I meant to take her away from the mortification she was suffering here...Where is he?...Where's this gentleman that I mustn't speak of, except with respect? Ha, Mr. Betteredge, the day is not far off when the poor will rise against the rich. I pray Heaven they may begin with him. I pray Heaven they may begin with him.'" [12]

Anti-imperialism: The Moonstone would seem to be full of orientalist exoticism: a cursed Indian diamond pursued across the centuries by mysterious, inscrutable and murderous Hindu holy men. But a closer look reveals something a bit different. In his preface to the first book edition Collins wrote that he based the Moonstone in part on the Koh-i-Noor Diamond, "the subject of a prediction, which prophesied certain misfortune to the persons who should divert it from its ancient uses" [13]. Since the Koh-i-Noor had become part of the British Crown Jewels in 1850, Collins would seem to be issuing a warning to his fellow Britons about imperial plunder.

And on the night of the re-creation of the Moonstone's theft, among Franklin Blake's reading material is Scottish novelist Henry Mackenzie's The Man of Feeling (1771), which includes the following sentence: "You tell me of immense territories subject to the English; I cannot think of their possessions, without being led to enquire by what right they possess them" [14].

There is also the ultimate fate of the Moonstone. In the final pages of the novel (spoiler alert!) the English adventurer Murthwaite, in disguise as a Hindu pilgrim, travels to a religious ceremony outside the western Indian city of Somnauth (where there is indeed an ancient temple). He describes the setting and the huge crowd as "the grandest spectacle of Nature and Man, in combination, that I have ever seen" [15].  When the image of the four-armed god Shiva is revealed to the ecstatic celebrants, Murthwaite sees the gem gleaming from the statue's forehead. It's difficult not to feel that Murthwaite, and his creator Collins, think that this is the stone's rightful place.

Film and TV adaptations: The Moonstone has been filmed three times, in 1909, 1915, and 1934, and was adapted for television by the BBC in 1959, 1972, and 1997. The 1997 version stars Keeley Hawes (later of Wives and Daughters (1999) and Tipping the Velvet (2002)) and Greg Wise (of Sense and Sensibility (1995)); the 1972 version features Vivien Heilbron and Robin Ellis (earlier featured in Sense and Sensibility (1971) and Elizabeth R (1971), and later the star of Poldark (1975-77)). If I see any of the BBC Moonstone adaptations I'll update here.

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1. T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays: New Edition, Harcourt Brace, 1950, p. 413.
2. Julian Symons, Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel, Faber and Faber, 1972, pp. 53-54.
3. Paul Collins, "The Case of the First Mystery Novelist," New York Times, January 7, 2011.
4. Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone, edited by John Sutherland, Oxford World's Classics, 1999, p. 319. Mention should be made of Sutherland's excellent introduction and notes to this edition, which raise many of the issues discussed in this post.
5. The Moonstone, p. 381
6. The Moonstone, p. 392.
7. The Moonstone, pp. 375-376.
8. The Moonstone, p. 405.
9. The Moonstone, p. 387
10. John Sutherland, "A Note on the Composition," in The Moonstone, p. xxxvii.
11. The Moonstone, p. 393.
12. The Moonstone, p. 184.
13. The Moonstone, liii.
14. Henry Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling, Oxford World's Classics, 1987, pp. 102-103.
15. The Moonstone, p. 465.

Second- and third-generation stars, and films: Student of the Year, Bol Bachchan, Teri Meri Kahaani

Last week we caught up with three movies released in the second half of 2012 that feature second- and third-generation Bollywood actors: Student of the Year, Bol Bachchan, and Teri Meri Kahaani. Unfortunately, it wasn't only the stars that were second- and third-generation.

Student of the Year feels like a pile of old scripts in Karan Johar's office got accidentally shredded and then randomly reassembled. It combines the "son seeking domineering father's approval" plot of Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham (Sometimes joy, sometimes sorrow, 2001) with the "two boys in love with the same girl" plot and flashback structure of Kal Ho Naa Ho (Tomorrow may never come, 2003) and the swishy gay stereotypes of Dostana (Friendship, 2008). But most of all, SOTY feels like the college scenes from Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (Something is happening, 1998) stretched into a feature-length movie (and that's not intended as a recommendation).

Shanaya (Alia Bhatt, daughter of director/producer Mahesh Bhatt and actress/director Soni Razdan) is the queen of St. Teresa's College; the role seems modelled in equal parts on Kareena Kapoor's Pooja (from K3G) and Alicia Silverstone's Cher (from Clueless (1995)). Despite her queen-bee status she's taken for granted by her boyfriend Rohan (Varun Dhawan, son of director David Dhawan), who wants to be a rock star but at the same time craves the approval of his father Ashok, a corrupt business tycoon. New man on campus Abhimanyu (Sidharth Malhotra, not a star kid) decides to help out Shanaya by flirting with her to make Rohan jealous, but soon realizes that he's really falling in love with her himself—the subtext of "Radha":

(Music: Vishal-Shekar; lyrics: Anvita Dutt Guptan; playback singers: Shreya Ghoshal, Udit Narayan, and Vishal Dadlani)

We didn't recognize her, but Rohan's dance partner Tanya is Sana Saeed, who played Rahul's daughter Anjali in KKHH.

Meanwhile, Rohan resents the way the self-made Abhi has ingratiated himself with Rohan's father. The tensions among the three come to a head during the annual Student of the Year competition, when something happens to cause a final break between Rohan and Abhi.

That "something" is referred to by the other characters throughout the film in the hushed tones usually reserved for mass catastrophes. What happened isn't revealed until the film's final scenes, but my partner and I had guessed it by the interval, making the second half pretty suspenseless. And despite the attempts by director Johar and screenwriter Rensil D'Silva to give the wealthy Shanaya and Rohan troubled home lives (see, even rich kids have problems!), the sheer level of privilege on display made it hard to feel like anything truly significant was at stake for these characters. Family money will clearly enable them to come out ahead in "the competition of life," as one of the film's taglines has it.

On the plus side, Alia Bhatt has striking, unconventional looks, and Sidharth Malhotra is tall, hunky and has an assured screen presence. On the negative side, Rishi Kapoor's Dean Vashist is a compendium of offensive gay stereotypes, such as fawning over the straight sports coach (Ronit Roy) and acting with undisguised hostility towards his wife (Prachi Shah).

The four friends/sidekicks of Shanaya, Rohan and Abhi, who include the unhappy Sudo (Kayoze Irani, son of actor Boman Irani), are woefully underdeveloped even though they narrate the film. In particular, I thought the subplot involving Shruti (Mansi Rachh), Shanaya's best friend, had a lot of unexplored potential. Shruti clearly has a major girl-crush on Shanaya, and it's not clear whether those intense feelings are developing into romantic ones. But that subplot and its possible complications are dropped, alas, and the film seems overeager to heterosexualize the present-day Shruti. Giving her story more screen time would have made SOTY a different and more interesting film.

Bol Bachchan (Say "Bachchan") is also a mashup, this time of Hrishikesh Mukherjee's Gol Maal (Confusion, 1979) and Rohit Shetty's slapstick Golmaal series. After breaking into a locked Hindu temple to rescue a child, Abbas Ali (Abhishek Bachchan, son of actors Amitabh Bachchan and Jaya Bhaduri Bachchan) is asked for his name by the village strongman, Prithviraj (Ajay Devgn, son of director Veeru Devgan). Before he can answer, a friend (played by Krishna Abhishek, nephew of actor Govinda) blurts out "Abhishek Bachchan!" That Abhishek Bachchan's character is called Abhishek Bachchan is one of the movie's recurring gags; others include Prithviraj speaking in mangled English, and the moustached Abhishek pretending to have a clean-shaven twin named, of course, Abbas Ali.

This alleged comedy does have its (few) moments of brainless fun, and it's clear that Abhishek (the actor) is quite comfortable in comic roles. But for me the high point of the movie was the opening credit sequence, featuring Amitabh Bachchan schooling both younger actors in screen charisma, grace, comic timing, and elocution; it goes swiftly downhill from there:

(Music: Himesh Reshamiya; lyrics: Farhad-Sajid; playback singers: Amitabh Bachchan, Abhishek Bachchan, Ajay Devgan, Himesh Reshamiya, Mamta Sharma and Vineet Singh)

Teri Meri Kahaani (Our Story) features three love stories set in periods fifty years apart: 1960, 2010, and 1910. In 1960, Govind (Shahid Kapoor, son of actor Pankaj Kapur and actress/dancer Neelima Azeem) is an aspiring music director in Bombay who meets starlet Ruksar (Priyanka Chopra, not a star kid); love and misunderstandings ensue. The costume, hair, and musical styles seem modelled on movies from significantly later in the decade, such as Teesri Manzil (The Third Floor, 1967); nonetheless, it's fun to watch Shahid channel his inner Shammi in "Jabse Mere Dil Ko Uff":

(Music: Sajid-Wajid; lyrics: Prasoon Joshi; playback singers: Sonu Nigam and Sunidhi Chauhan)

The 2010 section tries to show a modern romance conducted via Facebook and Twitter, but director Kunal Kohli's onscreen use of texting acronyms feels self-conscious and instantly dated. Krishna (Shahid) is a college student who has just broken up with his girlfriend Meera (Neha Sharma) when he meets—who else?—Radha (Priyanka). Meera takes revenge by posting embarrassing photos of Krish online, and he retaliates in kind. Radha can be excused if she wonders about this guy's emotional maturity.

In 1910, Javed (Shahid), a poet of wine, women and song, woos Aradhana (Priyanka), the daughter of a freedom fighter. However, she is distressed by his lack of commitment (both political and emotional), and her father disapproves of the match. This part of the film feels like it lost crucial pieces of its conclusion in the editing room; director Kohli makes the ending feel rushed and incomplete.

We also discover here that Javed and Aradhana have vowed to be together in all their lives to come. But if that is what is supposed to tie these stories together, either our lovers are short-lived (are they reborn every 50 years?), or Kohli and his screenwriter Robin Bhatt (one of Alia's uncles, to bring this full circle) couldn't be bothered to be coherent and thought we wouldn't notice.

My advice, for what it's worth: for a better Shahid Kapoor movie, watch Vivah (Marriage, 2006); for a better Abhishek Bachchan comedy co-starring his father, watch Bunty aur Babli (2005); and for a better Karan Johar-associated film, watch Kal Ho Naa Ho.

Rebecca

"Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again." The famous opening of Daphne du Maurier's novel Rebecca (Doubleday, 1938) evokes dreams, or perhaps nightmares, and nostalgia for what is irrevocably lost, encapsulating (though we don't know it yet) the journey its heroine will undertake over the course of the novel.

The heroine—whose name we never learn—is a young, shy and naïve girl who has been hired as a ladies' companion. While staying with her overbearing employer in Monte Carlo, she encounters the brooding widower Maximilian de Winter, and they begin to spend time together. When de Winter learns that she is about to leave for America with her employer, he abruptly proposes marriage, and she accepts, although her first prescient response is "I don't belong to your sort of world." And no sooner does she return with de Winter to Manderley, his family estate on the southwestern coast of England, than she begins to discover how right she was.

At Manderley the couple's honeymoon idyll is shattered, as the new Mrs. de Winter everywhere encounters the indelible traces of de Winter's first wife, Rebecca. Rebecca was seemingly perfect: beautiful, graceful, tasteful, at ease in every situation, a gracious hostess and a beloved mistress of the household. In contrast the new Mrs. de Winter is uncertain, clumsy, and feels at every turn her inferiority to the worldly Rebecca. Anyone who has ever felt the awkwardness of entering a social situation governed by unstated rules that everyone else seems to know instinctively—and that's pretty much all of us—can't help but empathize with her.

Our heroine's feelings of inadequacy are made infinitely worse by the malevolent housekeeper Mrs. Danvers, who preys on her insecurities and has an identification with Rebecca that is unhealthily close.

Looming over everything is the mystery of Rebecca's fate: she apparently drowned in a boating accident, and Maxim de Winter identified the battered body that washed up on shore. But then her sunken boat is discovered, and inside is a woman's corpse...

The film rights to Rebecca were bought by producer David O. Selznick (who also produced Gone With the Wind (1939)), and it became the first movie Alfred Hitchcock directed in Hollywood. The two men clashed over the script of the film, to which Hitchcock ill-advisedly tried to add scenes not in Du Maurier's book that appealed to his earthy sense of humor. One of Selznick's notorious memos to Hitchcock read in part:

"[Every] little thing that the girl does in the book, her reactions of running away from guests, and the tiny things that indicate her nervousness and her self-consciousness and her gaucherie are all so brilliant in the book that every woman who has read it has adored the girl and has understood her psychology, has cringed with embarrassment for her, yet has understood exactly what was going through her mind....[Your changes in the script] have removed all the subtleties and substituted big broad strokes which in outline form betray...just how bad a picture it would make without the little feminine things which are so recognizable and which make every woman say, 'I know just how she feels...I know just what she is going through...'" [1]

Despite the many brilliant Hitchcockian touches in the film, the director claimed in his famous interviews with François Truffaut that "it's not a Hitchcock picture" [2]. In fact, as Truffaut points out, with its emphasis on the heroine's state of mind and its theme of over-identification, the film is a template for several of Hitchcock's later masterpieces such as Notorious (1946) and Vertigo (1957). Franz Waxman's haunting, evocative soundtrack for Rebecca also seems to have been a model (in emotional, if not musical terms) for Bernard Herrmann's great score for Vertigo.

Although the solution to the mystery had to be changed to satisfy the Production Code, the film is remarkably faithful to the atmosphere of the book. And the touches added by Hitchcock, including the slightly altered dénouement, are highly effective. In one example, as Maxim and his bride drive up to Manderley for the first time a sudden rainstorm breaks. (In the novel, it's sunny.) The new Mrs. de Winter is quickly soaked to the skin, and so as she meets the impeccable Mrs. Danvers and the household staff who have been assembled to greet her, she looks bedraggled, lost and forlorn—an outward representation of her inner anxieties.

The casting is perfect, from Joan Fontaine's tremulous heroine, to Laurence Olivier's dark, enigmatic Maxim, to Dame Judith Anderson's creepily effective Mrs. Danvers. Rebecca went on to win the Academy Award for Best Picture, the only Hitchcock film to be so honored (although the award was actually given to Selznick, the film's producer). George Bruce also received the Academy Award for Best Cinematography, but Hitchcock was bypassed for Best Director (as he would be throughout his career).

Rebecca was also adapted into an Indian movie, Kohraa (Fog, 1964), directed by Guru Dutt's former art director Biren Nag and starring Waheeda Rehman. For an excellent review with many tantalizing stills, please see MemsaabStory.

Update 20 July 2013: Thanks to Rajshri Films, Kohraa is available for viewing on YouTube with English captions, for free.

Update 21 July 2013: M. Lapin has alerted me that there are a number of people who profess to love du Maurier's novel, but hate the Hitchcock film. In her post "Hitchcock Got 'Rebecca' Dead Wrong: Sucking the Soul out of a Classic Novel," Elizabeth Langosy complains about Joan Fontaine's "flirty smile and curled hair...[and] too-sophisticated voice" and Judith Anderson's physiognomy, which "looks nothing like the skeletal housekeeper described in the book." She also dislikes the screenplay's differences from the novel, in particular a scene where Olivier's Maxim de Winter is standing on a cliff in Monte Carlo, staring mesmerized at the crashing waves below and evidently on the verge of throwing himself over the edge.

To take her objections one at a time, I guess a "flirty smile" is in the eye of the beholder; I thought Fontaine embodied the heroine's shyness, uncertainty and desire to please painfully well. As for her hairstyle, the heroine is described by du Maurier as having "straight, bobbed hair," and indeed Fontaine's hair is shoulder-length. But it is often pulled back, flattened down, and otherwise deglamorized or made to look schoolgirlish. It's not a literal interpretation of du Maurier's description, but it captures its plain, unstylish essence:

As for her too-sophisticated voice in the opening scene of the film, the narration is in flashback, after the events of the film have taken place. As Maxim tells her in both book and movie after the revelation of Rebecca's fate, "It's gone forever, that funny, young, lost look that I loved. It won't come back again...You are so much older...." (p. 299 of my Avon paperback edition). I think the contrast between the halting, naïve girl who marries Maxim, and the more sophisticated woman recounting her dream at the opening of the film, is deliberate. Whether the effect is overdone is matter of taste, but I don't find it out of keeping with the character.

As for Judith Anderson not looking skeletal, I disagree. She is often lit by cinematographer George Bruce in a way that emphasizes her eyes, forehead and cheekbones, leaving the lower part of her face in shadow. With her severe, pulled-back hair, it indeed makes her face look skull-like:

And as for the scene where Maxim is apparently contemplating suicide, it is a substitute for one in the book where he drives the heroine to a Monte Carlo clifftop and stands looking over the edge, lost in thought. As we and the heroine discover later, he isn't thinking about suicide, but revisiting a place where he contemplated murder. This is another case where I think Hitchcock's change works very well on its own terms, making the aloof, enigmatic Maxim a more sympathetic figure than he might otherwise have appeared.

None of the differences between the novel and Hitchcock's film version "suck the soul out of the novel," in my view. As I wrote above, despite these differences, "the film is remarkably faithful to the atmosphere of the book." So I have to think that the objections of Langosy and others are rooted in something else; perhaps they simply can't tolerate any deviation from the letter of the book. But representing this novel, or any novel, that faithfully would require hours and hours of screentime. To bring in a version that is merely feature-length necessarily requires compressions, elisions and changes to the source. In Hitchcock's Rebecca, those differences from du Maurier's novel seem to me to be thoughtfully considered and effective.

Longosy praises the 1979 BBC adaptation written by Hugh Whitemore; she writes, "Although this adaptation takes four hours to tell the story, it replicates as closely as possible du Maurier’s depiction of the characters and events." That "although," I think, is curious; shouldn't it instead be "because"? While sheer length is not sufficient to guarantee scene-by-scene faithfulness to a literary source—see The Pallisers—I think it is a necessary precondition. The BBC miniseries features Joanna David (later Elizabeth Bennet's Aunt Gardiner in the great 1995 BBC adaptation of Pride & Prejudice) as the heroine, Jeremy Brett (later Granada TV's Sherlock Holmes) as Maxim, and Anna Massey (later Miss Stanbury in the BBC's 2004 adaptation of He Knew He Was Right) as Mrs. Danvers. The cast is certainly promising; if I have a chance to see it (it has never been issued on video, to my knowledge) I'll make a further report.

Update 31 July 2013: A (micro-)mini review of Kohraa is included in the comments below.

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1. Tania Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory, Routledge, 1988, p. 43.
2. François Truffaut, Hitchcock, Simon and Schuster, 1984, p. 127.