Olympia Washington is the kind of town that has three independent
bookstores all within spitting distance of each other, but my favorite is the
one that sports a chalk board in front that says, “Never Judge a Book By Its
Movie.” There’s a lot of truth in that slogan, of course, but it’s still almost impossible to resist going
to see the film versions of the books you love. Love is love, after all. One is
let down by it over and over again, but still I ran, I didn’t walk, to the filmed
version of Juliet, Naked, my favorite book by Nick Hornby.
The film is nice. I liked it. But the best thing about it was
that it forced me to reread the book, which is so much better. There’s a part
in it, near the start, when the protagonist, Annie, disparages the album called Juliet, Naked (a collection of demos of a previous Crowe album called Juliet) by thinking,
if she were still a teacher, she’d have played the two albums back to back to
her class, “so that they could understand that art was pretending.” And that’s
a little how I felt about the movie: that is, if I could, I’d make everyone
read and watch both. The film does a great job of indicating the differences
between a visual story and a written-down one. It provides certain notes on the
finished product; adds some details, and updates the plot to include social
media. But it can’t nearly capture all the nuances of what I truly love about
the book. Or about the act of reading, for that matter.
Juliet Naked isn’t really an obvious prospect for a movie,
anyway, since it’s about music, and films (like books) about music are almost always less than music
itself. (“Doing drugs is much more exciting than reading about doing drugs,” as
my old editor used to say. “And the same is true of music.”) The plot revolves
around a (fictional) artist called Tucker Crowe, who is a gloss on some kind of
under appreciated reclusive genius like Alex Chilton or Ryan Adams, or Paul
Westerberg, only he’s way less prolific than those men.
The back story tells us that in the halcyon days of the 80s,
Crowe released a record called Juliet which a handful of fans revere in part
because it was a good album, but possibly also because of its obscurity, and
because Crowe, mysteriously, retired from performing and recording directly
after it. The protagonist of the whole novel is Annie, who is the girlfriend of
a man who is the de facto head of the Tucker Crowe online fan club. The book
relates what happens when she starts an online relationship with Crowe, a
circumstance that eventually allows her to pay the hapless Duncan back for the
micro slights she’s endured at his hands.
In a sense, the whole plot is like an extended take on the
scene in Annie Hall when an outraged Woody Allen brings Marshall McLuhan out
from behind a billboard to explain “Understanding Media” to some loudmouth who
has been butchering its intent in front of him in line: “What he really meant
was…and here he is to prove it!!!”
That’s the broad outline, but as with all great books,
there’s a lot more to it than just a fun and romantic revenge fantasy. I think
the story could appeal to a wide group of readers, not just music fans, but to
me that’s its key theme. Early in the book, Annie writes a disparaging review of Juliet,
Naked for Duncan’s fan site, in order to rebut Duncan’s assertion that it is
better than the original album, and what pleases me so much is the way Hornby
describes exactly what and why I personally began reviewing records. The
record, he writes, “had somehow given her ideas about art
and work, her relationship, Tucker’s relationship, the mysterious appeal of the
obscure, men and music, the value of the chorus in song, the point of harmony
and the necessity of ambition, and every time she finished a paragraph, the next
one appeared in front of her unbidden, and annoyingly unconnected to the last.”
See, that’s how I write. That’s what I write. You can recognize
that, can’t you? Then, even more astonishingly, Hornby goes on to describe not
just how I write, but why I write as well. It happens when Annie reads Duncan’s
review of the same album, and she gets so angry that her anger mystifies her. She was angered, writes Hornby, “by his smugness, his
obvious determination to crow to the fellow fans he was supposed to feel some
kind of kinship with…his pettiness, too, his inability to share something that
was clearly of value in that shrinking and increasingly beleaguered community….
“Listening to music was something she did too, frequently,
and with great enjoyment, and Duncan had somehow managed to spoil it, partly by
making her feel she was no good at it.”
I, too, went through
life feeling like people thought I was no good at listening to music. Certainly
they never ceased telling me that. And after a while, my response was Annie’s:
sheer, unadulterated, rage. It bled out of me, onto the page – and that, in
turn, infuriated other people. But that’s a different story altogether.
A few other comments on the film, for those who are
considering going: obviously, it deviates from the book all over the place,
adds some characters, condenses some scenes, even changes a few major details
for more clarity, and the changes are stand-ins for things the book can
elucidate much more clearly and at length. Some of these changes are totally understandable,
if a bit Hollywood – the town she lives in is a cute as the set for Doc Martin,
rather than the dreary (and hilariously named) town the book is set in —
others, not so much: for example, a passage in the book that sees Annie
listening to the new record Juliet, Naked in the kitchen while cooking, is
elaborately staged in the film so that she is accidentally caught listening to
it…in her bra and panties. You could argue this was to mimic the title, but
obviously it is so we can see Rose Byrne in her bra and panties. Thanks,
Hollywood.
For the most part, however, the changes are fine. London
looks great, as does the seaside town she lives in. I thought Rose Byrne and
Ethan Hawke were totally ace choices for the leads, they were both extremely
lovable, and that’s important to loving this book. Also, there’s a scene that
uses the song “Waterloo Sunset” that’s worth the price of admission. I am never
not happy to hear that song, it is fucking un-ruinable anyway, and this
particular use of it is wondrous.
Juliet Naked isn’t exclusively for music geeks, though
it may well help if you know (or are) someone like that. Rather, it's about the limits of nostalgia,
and of art itself, to make life bearable. But it’s also about
childless women who are unhappy with that state, and/or who have settled for men who
can’t seem to grow up and join the real world, as well as people like Crowe,
who are in mourning for their glorious youth. Maybe who it's really for is people who
envy people like Crowe, because this book rips the wool off that myth and shows
you the sad and complex parts of glamour - albeit in a kind and gentle way. Hornby's greatest skill as a writer is showing the humanity in deeply flawed people. Duncan, Tucker, and even Annie are pretty dysfunctional. But you never have to hate them for it, and because of that, you don't have to hate yourself for having so many of the same failings.
Perhaps the coolest thing about “Juliet Naked” – about Nick
Hornby’s work in general — is that, despite the fact that the author clearly loves
music as much if not more than any of us – he also has stepped back
from it. He knows that all judgments about music are stupid because it’s all in
the ear of the beholder. The film does this even better than the book, actually,
possibly because, rather than alluding to Tucker’s music, we get to hear it,
and it is pleasant and well made, but not specially special; in order to
hear it as such you’d have to be primed, as Duncan and his pals are primed, to cherish
the obscure for the sake of it. (Some of the songs on the soundtrack are
written by Ryan Adams, Robyn Hitchcock, and Conor Oberst, and is said by the music director Nathan Larson to be
modeled on the sound of the record Big Star Third/Sister Lovers.) I especially
enjoyed a scene where Duncan inveigles a house guest into his basement lair to listen to
the hallowed “Juliet” record, and we watch as the guest spaces out and stops
listening, even as he gets more and more wrapped up in it. How many times did I
do this to my own friends before I learned to never, ever, ever play music for
people?
Spotify has probably changed this situation, in that people
are less likely to do what Duncan does and force someone to sit down and listen
in real time to music played on a real system in a real room that looks like a
dungeon. Still, sharing your heart’s dearest music is never a good idea. Music is a
private pleasure; it is treasured best in private.
Telling people to read
books or go to movies is much less fraught, however,and here I am telling you: Run, don't walk.
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