Is ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ truly unfilmable?
The first time I read The Catcher in the Rye when I was at school, I didn’t realise I was reading one of the great works of young adult literature. thought that Holden Caulfield was an insufferable little shit who needed nothing more than a slap around the chops.
In my arrogance, I thought this was a flaw in the novel and not JD Salinger being, y’know, one of the most celebrated writers in American fiction, I wanted to give Ol’ Holden a slap because I saw so much of myself in him, and none of that was an accident. He wrote the arrogance, stubbornness and stupidity of youth so perfectly that I didn’t even notice I was recognising it in myself, and I’m far from the only person to notice this.
How can you turn The Catcher in the Rye into a movie? It would certainly help the legions of people who study the book. Although you can get through the book in an afternoon if you try, it’s not exactly long… The book itself doesn’t exactly lend itself to a visual medium – the story is more in the way it’s being told to the reader, rather than the events that Caulfield is talking about, but that hasn’t stopped people from making unadaptable novels into films, though.
After all, people considered The Lord of the Rings and Dune unadaptable for decades, and they’ve both worked out pretty well, all things considered, but that was more to do with the scale of what happens in them than anything else… On the other hand, Naked Lunch and American Psycho are baffling works on the page that were both turned into successful films at the hands of people who understood the story and translated it into a different medium well.
So why couldn’t someone do that with The Catcher in the Rye?
Is ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ unfilmable?
Someone probably could do a decent job with the text. Let me be absolutely clear, if someone took their shot with a novel as beloved and famous as the Salinger masterpiece, it would probably go down like a lead balloon the way that so many other attempts at adapting classic American fiction have (hello, every attempt at The Great Gatsby ever!). However, Steven Spielberg himself has made no bones about the fact that for decades, a version of Catcher was his dream job.
If literal Steven Spielberg couldn’t get a picture off the ground, surely it goes beyond mere respect for the text? Well, it does. Really, the reason that The Catcher in the Rye has never been made into a film is out of respect for the wishes of JD Salinger. Despite Holden Caulfield hating movies so much that his distate for the medium is in the opening paragraph of the novel, Salinger wasn’t Caulfield. He loved movies… as a punter. The one attempt he made at making one, though, meant that he swore off ever working in Hollywood again.
In 1948, Salinger, by then one of the most exciting writers in America, published the short story Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut. After angling for a Hollywood adaptation of one of his stories for years, this was the story finally adapted for the screen, with the slightly better title of My Foolish Heart, one year later in 1949. However, this was an adaptation in name only. Salinger hated the finished work and, honestly, so did the majority of the people who saw it.
This experience made Salinger intensely protective of his work going forward, and this is a tradition kept up by the custodians of his work today. Thus, it seems intensely unlikely that a film version of his masterpiece will ever see the light of day, not because it’s an “unfilmable story”, but because his wishes are still being respected. Here’s hoping that keeps going for many years to come.