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Except maybe it’s not so startling, since it pretty well describes my attitude too. Why worry about literal replication when you can get that by rereading the original material? And why make a movie at all if you’re not giving back more than you already have? What you want is something the book doesn’t provide . . . since, more than likely, it can’t.
What you wonder about The Player, crass commercialism aside, is why anyone would want to film it—I mean this novel specifically, and not as just another specimen study in movie-industry corruption (for which you could use—well, almost anything, I guess). Since it’s all interiority, about one character’s transforming the “subconscious” (which Tolkin evidently considers a kind of existential bad faith: here’s what you’d see if you didn’t avert your inner eye) into pure intentionality. It’s “Where id is, there shall ego be” with a vengeance—or maybe a fictionalization of Erving Goffman‘s sociological classic The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, where every aspect of human personality becomes a deliberate “peformative” act. None of which has any relevance to what Altman came up with—or, for that matter, Tolkin himself, who wrote the screenplay and even got an Oscar nomination for it. An act of self-evisceration, like creative hara-kiri. Why would anyone gut his own best work this way?
“If you liked the film, don’t read the book.”
