Recasting across David Lynch's Wild at Heart and Álex de la Iglesia's Dance with the Devil

There's a story about when two different films were being made of two different Elmore Leonard novels by two different directors for two different production companies at the same time: Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown (1997) and Steven Soderbergh's Out of Sight (1998). Both novels and thus both films featured appearances by the character Ray Nicolette. (I haven't see either film, but I believe he's a central character in Jackie Brown and a cameo in Out of Sight.) Tarantino cast Michael Keaton as Nicolette, and Steven Soderbergh asked if he could do the same for Out of Sight, to maintain continuity. Thus followed a lot of legal wrangling between the two production companies over the ownership of the character and Keaton's performance of the character, until Tarantino stepped in to say that his production company needed to just give the character to Soderbergh's, and that was that, and Michael Keaton appeared as the same character in two otherwise completely unrelated films.

This doesn't always happen, of course. Probably it almost never happens. The Marvel character of Quicksilver, a mutant whose real name is Pietro Maximoff, appeared in both 2014's X-Men: Days of Future Past and 2015's Avengers: Age of Ultron played by completely different actors in completely different circumstances. (I liked the X-Men version better.)

Earlier this year I read the first seven Sailor & Lula novels by Barry Gifford, and I grew curious about the film adaptations, because the first two books, Wild at Heart: The Story of Sailor and Lula and Perdita Durango, have both been adapted into films, but by completely different directors with completely different casts: David Lynch's Wild at Heart (1990) and Álex de la Iglesia's Dance with the Devil (1997). Though recently I've been watching most any film adaptations of books I read, my motivation for watching these films back to back was mostly to see to what extent they could be perceived to go together.

The books aren't exactly sequels per se; Perdita Durango is a side character in Wild at Heart, who gets her own adventure in the second book. Sailor and Lula, the stars of every other novel in the series, do not actually appear in Perdita Durango. So the main character who carries over between Wild at Heart and Dance with the Devil is Perdita herself:

Isabella Rossellini as Perdita in Wild at Heart

Rosie Perez as Perdita Durango in Dance with the Devil

I'm not sure if it's possible to rationalize these two characters as the same person. Isabella Rossellini's version in Wild at Heart is apathetic and sardonic, unreacting and uncaring. She's the girlfriend of a hitman, and seems to have something of a history in the business herself-- Sailor comes to her to find out if a hit has been placed on him. Rosie Perez's version in Dance with the Devil, on the other hand, is wild and impulsive and giggly. We don't have a clear vision of what she did prior to the film's events, but she quickly hooks up with a drug smuggler/bank robber/witch doctor/kidnapper seemingly mostly for the thrill of it, which it's hard for me to picture the Rossellini version doing.

Rossellini is Italian (though not playing Italian), whereas Perez is Puerto Rican (though again, I don't think playing as such; the character seems to cross the Mexican-American border a lot, but I'm not sure it's ever said which side is her home). I'm not sure how much that difference matters. They are both equally unperturbed by violence, however; when Rossellini's hitman boyfriend is blown apart (literally), she just legs it without a second thought, while Perez's version sees some pretty terrible things and does some pretty terrible things in the course of her adventures.

Perdita actually isn't the only character who appears in both films. There's also Marcelles Santos, a gangster chief: (In Wild at Heart he's based in North Carolina, in Dance with the Devil, Texas.)

J. E. Freeman as Santos in Wild at Heart

Don Stroud as Santos in Dance with the Devil

I liked both performances, but they're not really the same. Freeman is very intense, very focused, whereas Stroud plays it comic but then says completely something completely awful in a totally genial way.

Most difficult to reconcile is Reggie, a small-time gangster hired to do a hit by Santos, because he changes race between the two films:

Calvin Lockhart as Reggie in Wild at Heart

Carlos Bardem as Reggie in Dance with the Devil

In Wild at Heart, he's hired by Santos to kill Harry Dean Stanton's Johnnie Farragut (my favorite character in either film; a nice private detective to whom Lynch does terrible things that he does not deserve). In Dance with the Devil, he's made into the cousin of Romeo, Perdita's partner in crime. Reggie is hired by Santos to eliminate Romeo after Romeo botches a smuggling operation he's doing for Santos. Beyond the race transformation, it would sort of stretch coincidence that Santos would hire Perdita's boyfriend to kill Sailor and Romeo's cousin to kill Johnnie Farragut, and then later hire Romeo's cousin to kill Perdita's partner! (At the time of Wild at Heart, Perdita and Romeo have not met, and they don't meet through Reggie or Santos; they just bump into each other on the U.S.-Mexican border.) Though Barry Gifford loved coincidence, so maybe it's totally in-keeping with the style of the novels.

There's also Juana, Perdita's sister. The two versions can't have anything to do with each other, I think:

Grace Zabriskie as Juana in Wild at Heart

Andaluz Russel as Juana in Dance with the Devil

In Wild at Heart, she's another contract killer (working with Reggie, actually). Lynch builds this out of one(!) mention in the whole novel-- Perdita tells her boyfriend that her sister Jauana called, and that's all Juana has to do with anything. I don't think the film ever specifies that Perdita and Juana are sisters, though I guess they do have the same hairdo. In Dance with the Devil, she only appears in occasional flashbacks of Perdita's: she was murdered by her husband years ago when he snapped one day.

I'm sure there are other examples I can't think of of two books in the same series that get adapted into films relatively independently. You could probably make Wild at Heart and Dance with the Devil line up if you really squinted and contorted and ignored the race change-- surely Reggie could be Romeo's cousin, and maybe Juana got killed by her husband between the two films, and maybe Santos moved his whole operation to Texas. And we're just seeing different facets of Perdita's personality on different days-- the differences between Rossellini's and Perez's Perditas probably aren't any bigger than, say, Ed Norton and Mark Ruffalo's Bruce Banner, who are definitely meant to be the same guy. (And don't forget that Billy Dee Williams and Tommy Lee Jones both played the same Harvey Dent!)

What's interesting is what does line up: tone and technique. Gifford's original novels discuss some very brutal events, but always in a very matter-of-fact fashion. The books tell about terrible things, which usually don't feel terrible thanks to the detachment of his speakers. Both Lynch and de la Iglesia use the same technique of cross-cutting this detached narration with flashbacks to the actual brutality of the events. And in Lynch's case, he sometime heaps on extra violence not implied by the accounts given in dialogue. I found this removed a lot of what made the books charming and interesting to me; the films are less depictions of eccentric characters and more unfoldings of grotesque spectacles. There's a cynicism to it all-- Gifford loved Sailor and Lula, whereas Lynch is mocking them. (I haven't cared much for Perdita Durango in any incarnation, to be honest.) They have their moments, but on the whole, both films left me cold.

Review: Sailor & Lula: The Complete Novels by Barry Gifford

Trade paperback, 618 pages
Published 2010 (contents: 1990-2009)

Borrowed from the library

Read March 2016

Sailor & Lula: The Complete Novels
by Barry Gifford

A few years ago now, I read the comic adaption of Perdita Durango, the second novel of the Sailor & Lula series by Barry Gifford, and I was sufficiently intrigued to pick up the books themselves, the first seven of which are collected in this volume. All of them concern, at least peripherally, the relationship between Sailor Ripley and Lula Fortune, a couple from North Carolina.

     "Ever'body got a past," said Red.
     "Just some got more future in 'em than others," Buddy said.

—Wild at Heart: The Story of Sailor and Lula (1990)

If anything sums up the "mission statement" of Wild at Heart, it's that. Ostensibly it's a road trip novel. Sailor's just been released from jail for accidentally killing a man in a bar fight two years ago, and he and his girl Lula aim to pick up where they left off, only Lula's mom doesn't approve of Sailor, and sends a private detective to hunt the two of them down as they flee to California... but the couple's money is running out. Wild at Heart is an odd story, mostly consisting of characters telling stories to one another, or to themselves, in short chapters of 2-3 pages. Sailor and Lula both tell each other about their first sexual encounters (neither are very pleasant); the private detective, Johnnie Farragut, is an aspiring writer, and a couple of his attempts are embedded in the narrative; Sailor and Lula tell each other about movies they've seen, books they've read, and music they've heard; and plenty of the people they meet on their travels have their own stories they relate. The "plot" is largely irrelevant; the joy of the book is letting these weird and often dark stories about strangely named people wash over you, but it took me a while to realize this and get into it all.

     "Need funds to research," Romeo said. "Like the $1,925 some fundraiser withdrew without permission this morning from the First National Bank of St. Bernard's Parish on Friscoville Street in Arabi. Science needs money, just like everything else."
     "You tellin' me you're a grave robber or a bank robber? I ain't totally clear."
     Romeo laughed and stuck a fork into his stuffed catfish.
     "Scientists gotta eat, too," he said.

—Perdita Durango (1991)

I didn't entirely grok Perdita Durango when I read the 1995 graphic novel adaptation by Bob Callahan and Scott Gillis. I'm still not sure I do. Perdita was a side character in Wild at Heart, an accomplice in a robbery Sailor gets involved in near the end. This story follows her, alongside a crazed scientist/cultist/psychopath named Romeo; they kidnap a young couple to use in a blood sacrifice, and the story follows their cross-country flight, as they talk and have sex. Perdita is an interiority-free enigma, which is clearly the point, but not enough of a point to keep me interested even across 120 pages. Probably the least interesting and most unpleasant of the Sailor & Lula stories, no doubt due to the lack of the stabilizing influences of Sailor and Lula themselves. Some good jokes, though.

     "Ain't it somethin', though, Dal, how it's just one weird thing happens after another?"
     "Stay tuned," said Dal, opening the front door. "I got a powerful hunch there ain't never gonna be a end to it."

—Sailor's Holiday (1991)

Sailor's Holiday feels like Gifford regretted the way Wild at Heart ended. Minor spoilers: at the end of Wild at Heart, Sailor is sentenced to ten years in prison for his part in a robbery. The book has an epilogue where he's released, gets to meet his ten-year-old son Pace for the first time, and decides he's better off away from Lula and Pace. Which is an okay, if depressing, ending for a single book, but doesn't really work if you want to write more stories with these characters. Sailor's Holiday feels like it exists to walk back the events of that epilogue. Six months later, Pace gets kidnapped, which causes Sailor to come gallivanting back into their lives in an effort to save him. This is less interesting and colorful than most of the other Sailor & Lula stories, mostly serving to get the characters back into position for more tales about their relationship, I felt.

"The world's an awful cruel place, son. Worst place I ever been."

—Sultans of Africa (1991)

It's been about six years since Sailor's Holiday, and the Ripley family lives in New Orleans now, and young Pace has fallen in with a bad crowd, much like his daddy did around the same age. While Lula goes on a trip to see her mother, Sailor has to track down and save Pace without his wife finding out what's going on. As always, the plot is not particularly riveting, but it's not meant to be. There are some fantastic irrelevant details here, especially the brothers Smokey Joe and Lefty Grove Rattler, son of Pie Traynor and Mary Full-of-Grace Rattler, the latter of whom now resides in Miss Napoleon's Paradise for the Lord's Disturbed Daughters. Flimsy but full of fun.

"Death and destruction ain't never more than a kiss away," she said. "Woman shot at the King of Sweden knew that much."

—Consuelo's Kiss (1991)

With Consuelo's Kiss, Gifford raises his rambling plots to high art: this was my favorite story in the book other than Wild at Heart, and I really enjoyed each of the following ones, too. Sailor and Lula go on a road trip for Sailor's birthday (it's been a dozen years since Sultans of Africa) to see Elvis's home in Memphis. Meanwhile, Lula's mother is at the bedside of the dying gangster Marcello "Crazy Eyes" Santos, a recurring character in previous books. Meanwhile meanwhile, a sixteen-year-old girl named Consuelo is hitchhiking her way to the college where her lesbian lover goes, but she attracts some undesired attention. Meanwhile meanwhile meanwhile, Pace now lives in India. Sailor and Lula give Consuelo a brief ride, and later return to help her when she ends up in jail (only they can't): that's about all these tales have to do with one another. But as meditations on different forms of obsessive love, they come together perfectly: we see the best and worst that human emotion has to offer, and not always in the way you might expect. Surprisingly moving at times.

"Lula used to always say the world is wild at heart and weird on top, and sometimes it's tough stayin' out of the way of the weirdness. Kinda like a tornado, you never know where it'll set down or what'll be left in place after it blows through."

—Bad Day for the Leopard Man (1992)

Fun fact: despite Sailor's claim here in Bad Day for the Leopard Man, Lula never said such a thing before, though she does think it to herself in Wild at Heart. She only says it aloud in the film version of the first book! Which is appropriate, as one of the many plots of Bad Day for the Leopard Man is a hack film director with artistic aspirations (Pace works for him as a PA) saying he wants to make a movie of Sailor and Lula's story. Meanwhile, Lula gets kidnapped and everyone sits around the phone worrying. This is probably the least effective of the last three Sailor & Lula tales, though I did still enjoy it. Especially the glimpses into the weird mind of the film director, but even moreso the bittersweet, brutal ending, which made me realize how much I'd grown to like these characters.

"I don't think the world is so wild at heart any more, Beany, just weird on top. Probably each generation on its way out thinks what's come after them is missin' a bulb and dimmer for it. Then again, maybe it's just us old folks can't see so good and it hurts us to admit it."

—The Imagination of the Heart (2009)

The first six Sailor & Lula novels came out in a three-year period; this one appeared seventeen years later. It's a bittersweet coda, with Lula going on a Sailor-less road trip with friends to see Pace in a post-Katrina New Orleans. (The timeline of these books is fuzzy at best.) Much of the book is made up of Lula's diary entries, which are nearly heart-wrenching, though between them come the usual Gifford weird stories and strange hijinks, some of them quite brutal. I really liked this one, and it sums up the relationship between the two leads perfectly.

Review: Barry Gifford's Peridta Durango by Bob Callahan

Comic trade paperback, 112 pages
Published 1995
Borrowed from the library
Read September 2012

Barry Gifford's Perdita Durango

Script Adaptation: Bob Callahan

Art: Scott Gillis

There's hardly a review of the absolutely stunning graphic adaptation Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli did of Paul Auster's City of Glass that doesn't mention that it was originally commissioned as part of the "Neon Lit" series of graphic novels, which was intended to adapt contemporary crime/mystery fiction into graphic format. Upon a recent rereading of City of Glass, it occurred to me that I'd never even heard the title of another work in that series, so I went and looked it up.

Well, there was only one other, and it's this. Perdita Durango was originally a novel by Barry Gifford, second of his Sailor & Lula series; Bob Callahan scripted a comics adaptation of it that was drawn by Scott Gillis. Perdita Durango isn't terrible in any way, shape, or form, but coming on the heels of City of Glass, it's not remotely in the same league. The story doesn't do anything near as interesting with word/image interplay, it's simply a somewhat over-narrated tale of journey across America by two criminals. I don't know how long the original piece was, but this feels overly compressed; they've crossed America before they've even left.

Perdita Durango is dark, twisted, and occasionally funny, but perhaps its failing-- the thing that stopped me from ever really engaging with it-- is that you finish it without understanding Perdita. And not in a oh-isn't-she-such-an-enigma way, but in a we-have-nothing-interesting-to-go-on-not-even-an-interesting-lack-of-knowledge way. I have only the barest hint of who she is and what she does. Good prose-to-comics adaptations are capable of much; unfortunately, Perdita Durango does not achieve it.