The Tip of the Iceberg

It takes a talented mind to translate anything. Movie to film. Or vice versa. in the modern age, this is to me a common translation. Over the last decade classic works of literature have been adapted and readapted into their film versions. Some of them good. Some of them not so much.(Not "Life of Pi" or anything) All translations are unique, and one director could take an approach completely void from another. That is one of the beautiful things behind literature, film, and other works of art; everyone has a radically different perspective.

      Recently a modern film adaption to "The Great Gatsby" was released. I have been dissecting and analyzing this book in my english class since the first week of school. When reading Gatsby you have to think of it like an iceberg. F. Scott Fitzgerald relies so much on the reader being able to infer things about the characters without the passage directly informing you about them. You see whats on the surface of these characters or "the tip of the iceberg." After reading and re-reading the text, you find out much more about the characters that changes the meaning of the book altogether. I dig deep and try to see the rest of the iceberg before moving on. To give reference through examples of text, the main character Nick Carraway says 

                   "Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known." 

                     Reading this on the surface it makes Nick seem like a pretty honest guy correct? WRONG. With careful inspection of other areas throughout the book, and an examination of the text we can deduce that Nick Carraway is not actually an honest man. And that the rest of his iceberg is a compulsive liar. 

                 Now to relate this all back to film...Translating a book to movie can happen multiple ways. The translator could look only at the tip of the iceberg, and write an entire movie about people who only have the density of their first layer of skin, without really giving the characters virtues and vices, and heart and soul. The translator could instead dig as deep as possible into the literature, and they could discover that the author really did mean more by that sentence than what shows. They would then be able to take that and compose a story and build characters that have life. Characters that make you feel for their emotions. Their happiness, sadness, love, and pain. To make an amazing translation of text to film, the first step is to look beyond the tip of the iceberg.