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Hello my Beautiful Watchers and welcome back to Lost in Adaptation, the YouTube based review
show dedicated to discussing the plot and theme differences between books and the films
based on them. Before we begin I’ve been a bit reflective recently and I’ve decided
I need to be completely clear with you. There's been some complaints about a lack of transparency
in my review process. Some people thought they could see right through me while others
just had no idea where I’m standing on certain issues and I do have a habit of hiding my
opinions so sometimes you can’t see them coming.
You can’t tell but I’m doing that shit eating grin I do when I think I’ve been
very funny.
The Invisible Man was written by an author who’s featured on this show once already,
H to the G. Wells.
I may have gushed just a tad about Wells in my War of the Worlds adaptation review so
I’ll spare you a word for word repeat, the summarized version is this guy was just a
really good writer who was just redonkulously ahead of his time.
He was theorising credible sciences centuries before the rest of the world caught up and
is considered second only to Mary Shelly in influential founders of the science fiction
genre.
The Invisible Man was originally serialized throughout 1897 then republished as a novella
before the end of the year.
In 1933, Universal Pictures adapted the story to the big screen, directed by popular horror
film creator James Whale of Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein fame.
The character was so popular he became a member of the Universal Classic Monsters club and
was going to be a part of the aborted Dark Cinematic Universe played by Johnny Depp.
I’d love to say that the timing of this episode intentionally coincided with the reimagining
that we did get hitting cinemas but cards on the table this was just the next paid Patreon
request on the list and I just got lucky. Anyway here's my thoughts on the book just
as a book.
Like many influential stories, The Invisible Man is a little bit a victim of its own success
these days. It was the first to try out several things that were so popular they would later
become tropes in the genre, so a modern reader trying the book for the first time might find
it somewhat tropey due to no fault of its own.
You might also feel a slight absence of plot due to the main theme of the story being “What
if a guy could be invisible?” Now that we’ve had so many of those you kind of have to tag
on an “and” to the end to keep it interesting. e.g. “What if a guy could be invisible and
used that to torment and gaslight his ex?”
That said, it is still an engaging read. Like I mentioned, Wells had the double whammy advantage
of being a visionary and a damn good writer.
Unlike other books, I don’t think this one suffered overly for having been serialised
originally. Wells found the perfect balance between reminding readers of previous installments
without repeating anything to the point of annoyance.
Ok, moving onto my thoughts on the film as a unique entity.
This is the second adaptation I’ve seen where they keep the original British setting
of the book but hire an almost all American cast who don’t even bother attempting accents,
making it appear that England is almost exclusively populated by Americans.
I’m not sure I can fully express just how impressed I am with the special effects in
this movie. The clever tricks and hard work they put into pulling some of this stuff off
with 1930s film technology kind of boggles the mind a bit.
Even when it's clearly just the use of wires the amount of effort that must have been put
into getting the timing just right is super impressive. The film deserves a watch just
for that.
If you’re into old school sci-fi or horror this really is one of the classics.
Right, let's talk adaptation.
A mysterious man wrapped in bandages and dark glasses to hide his face and eyes (who is
later revealed to be called Griffin) trudging through a snowstorm to rent a room at an inn
in a small town in Iping, Sussex England.
The odd gentlemen attempting to gain as much privacy as possible so he may conduct weird
experiments in his room, though is constantly interrupted by his inquisitive landlords.
Griffin showing bouts of destructive anger and increasing hostility towards disturbances.
Eventually falling behind on his bill and the innkeeper attempting to evict him to violent
results.
When local law enforcement attempts to arrest him, an annoyed Griffin reveals that he’s
wrapped up so warm to hide the fact that you can’t see anything under his clothes, as
he had some time ago turned himself invisible with the use of a drug that he had developed
that makes things transparent.
Using his invisibility to successfully fight pretty much the entire town he escapes, leaving
the villagers to try to convince the world they’ve not all gone spontaneously mad.
Griffin deciding that finding a cure for his invisibility is pointless and breaking into
the home of a former colleague of his, Dr. Kemp to demand that he help him with his new
plan of world domination. Intending to spread a reign of terror over Britian by using his
invisibilty to murder random people until everyone is so afraid they’ll do everything
he says.
Kemp pretending to be on board but calling the police as soon as Griffin goes to bed.
Griffin once again using his invisibility to escape and issuing a death sentence on
Kemp for his betrayal.
The ending of the film diverges in quite a lot of details but the general result of the
Invisible Man eventually getting overwhelmed and killed by a large group of people is indeed
the gist of it.
As he passes away the invisibility drugs stop working and his body reappears.
The fact that this film predates the Hays code of cinema and its heavy restrictions
on what was acceptable to be on screen no doubt helped with staying loyal to the book.
Of course that said the evildoer received his comeuppance at the end anyway so there
at least wouldn’t have been any need to hit the main character with a lightning bolt.
:sips coffee:
Ahhh… So yeah not bad. Easily enough of the book in this that they are directly comparable.
Now let’s see if any of changes made by the filmmakers resulted in a fundamental shift
to the story.
So I mentioned the details of the endings differed a wee bit between the book and the
film.
In the book after Griffin passes his death sentence on Kemp, Kemp sends word to the local
police that this is their chance to trap Griffin using him as bait but the message is intercepted
by the Invisible Man.
A police inspector friend of Kemp’s has the bad luck to check in on him just before
Griffin starts the siege of his house and gets shot trying to go for help.
Two younger policemen show up and manage to hold Griffin off just long enough for Kemp
to cheese it into town with Griffin hard on his heels.
He appeals to a crowd of townsfolk for help who attempt to subdue the transparent assailant.
Griffin fights so hard things get nasty and the mob ends up kicking him to death.
In the film it's a police chief’s idea to use Kemp as bait but he refuses in a fit of
cowardice so instead they just try to make it look like he’s going to hide at headquarters
but smuggle him out dressed as a constable and take him home.
He gets in his car and tries to bail but it turns out Griffin was hiding in his backseat
the whole time and murders him by tying him up and sending the car over a cliff.
Griffin is then forced to take shelter from a snowstorm in a barn and the local farmer
discovers him while he’s sleeping and leads the police to him.
They completely surround the building and then set it on fire. When he comes out they
fatally shoot him… Which I’m pretty sure is exactly how they did for John Wilkes Booth
in the end. I’m not sure if that was an intentional reference.
So yeah I would say that with the exception of poor Kemp, the endings were pretty much
different paths to the same destination.
The single biggest change to occur in the film, the one that I believe had a knock on
effect and necessitated several others was to Griffin, the Invisible Man’s nature.
Early on in the film they establish that a key part of Griffin’s invisibility drug
cocktail was an extract from a rare macguffin flower that could drain the colour out of
the things it was injected into, but unknown to Griffin had recently been discovered to
also drive its test subjects utterly mad.
They also created an entirely new character to be his love interest, the daughter of Griffin’s
former boss who spends the entire movie talking about what a nice guy he was before he turned
invisible.
To be completely blunt, in the book Griffin was always a complete arsehole.
Long before he turned invisible he lived and worked in isolation as much as possible so
he wouldn’t have to share the possible fruits of his labour with anyone else.
He was needlessly violent, he experimented on other people's kitties, and he was incredibly
antisemitic.
The power of invisibility stoked his selfish and murderous nature, ironically making it
more apparent for the world to see but it certainly wasn’t the cause of it.
Blaming it all on a magic flower seems… I dunno, more tragic yes but maybe also a
little shallow compared to having to face Well’s point about great power potentially
revealing a man's true dark nature. It's often more horrifying to have to acknowledge that
the potential to be a monster lies within the heart of man without any external influences.
The fact that he wasn’t mad in the book makes it more amusing to me that he just assumed
that Kemp would be onboard with the whole reign of terror thing.
Griffin kills a lot more people in the film. I think his bodycount was one confirmed murder
and one very probable killing at the end of the book.
Just like he explained to Kemp, the vicious bugger in the film goes on a bit of a killing
spree, smashing heads in, pushing men off cliffs and derailing a train killing hundreds.
Kemp is done somewhat dirty by the film. He’s a pretty reasonable man in the book who understandably
wasn’t down for Griffin’s plan for world domination via mass murder.
He’s portrayed as a sneaky, selfish coward in the film with the poor taste to try to
hit on Griffin's girlfriend while he was missing.
Even the stuff pertaining to him that's loyal to the book is presented in a very different
light.
For example: In the book informing the police that Griffin was with him was shown as an
act of doing the right thing despite the danger it put him in but in the film it makes it
clear that the more honorable thing to have done would have been to listen to his friends
and try to help Griffin in secret.
You know, for the record, it is SO much easier using a cloak than drugs.
Get out of here you, this isn’t your genre! HARR!
Wooop woop woop!
The novella goes into more depth regarding the science behind Griffin’s discovery.
As in there actually IS some as opposed to “Hey look a wonder drug from a magic flower.”
Griffin was an albino in the book which was actually quite lucky for him because the invisibility
drug he invented could only make very pale things transparent.
A huge theme of the book that I think wasn’t as fully embraced into the film as it could
have been was Griffin recounting just how much it suuucked to be permanently invisible.
While he could in principle get away with a lot of things because of it he couldn’t
enjoy any of the rewards.
If he stole money he could barely spend it without giving himself away, he couldn’t
eat in public, he couldn’t have a relationship with anyone and trust me Britain is NOT a
climate you want to be naked in for any length of time, even in summer.
There's a significant chunk of the middle of the book left out in which Griffin press
gangs a homeless man by the name of Marvel into being his helper. Aiding him under duress
in retrieving his research journals from the inn he just vacated in a hurry and then holding
the money after Griffin robs an entire town.
Marvel eventually makes a break for it with the cash and the books. He hides in a pub
that happens to have a gun toting American in it, who wounds Griffin when he attempts
to exact revenge.
In the epilogue it's revealed that Marvel bought the bar with the money that Griffin
had him carry, and he also kept the research journals in secret, reading them every night
in the hope that someday he’ll be able to figure out Griffin's secrets.
With the exception of that ending most of Marvel’s role in the story is absorbed into
douchebag Kemp. I couldn’t quite figure out exactly what happened to his research
and the future of invisibility in this version of the story.
Final thoughts.
So a rather short conclusion this time I suspect. Good book, good film, both worthy of the impact
that they had on the world at the time of their release though I also understand why
the Invisible Man is one of the less often rebooted Universal Monsters. He is just not
as sexy as Dracula or as loveable as Frankenstein.
And not a bad adaptation all in all. The one serious umbridge I have is the change in Griffin’s
motivation but I think I can live with it. While it is somewhat its own take on the story
it is still H.G. Wells’ story.
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Thank you for joining me my Beautiful Watchers, until we meet again please keep in mind that
while H.G. Wells might have believed that man holds within him the unaided capacity
to become a monster, I’m somewhat of the opinion that the true monster of my story
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Much love and appreciation to my patrons of honor: Shelby Hotz and Sam Cucinotta.
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Calluna offscreen: Do you want me to close the door?
Nope, it’s all good.
Calluna offscreen: And kitty?
Uhh, I think it’s all good.
The Invisible Man was written by an author who’s featured on this show once alre-AH!
Sir Terry, get off me foot! Get off me foot, cat! You little bugger.
Oh, my glasses are fogged up. Alright.
Calluna offscreen: Fogged up? Or fucked up?
Fogged up.
Calluna offscreen: Do you want me to clean them?
No, it’s okay.
Calluna offscreen: Okay.
I can’t see anyway.
No, if you’re going to bother me, you’re going to appear on camera to please the audience.
And the bloopers are always more funny.
Okay.
:Calluna laughing offscreen:
How did I look? Oh, I couldn’t get this thing off, so I just pulled it down.
Calluna offscreen: Sorry.
No, it’s okay.
Floof floof floof, so much floof, you are made of floof!
:Audible sponsor audio playing off screen:
And now I’m covered in floof.