John Steinbeck, "The Forgotten Village"
I�m in a shitty mood. The last hour of work today was just more annoying that I would have thought possible in such a short time. One lady came in with her six kids, all of which decided to chase the cats and each other around the store, screaming as loud as they could, while the mother kept asking where the bibles were.
Not that I mind showing anybody where the bibles are, but she asked me five times. Five! Each time I would bring her over to the section, whereupon she would look at the shelves for five seconds, then ask where another section was, which I would show her, and then she would ask where we kept all the bibles.
Meanwhile, while I was obviously fairly busy, one guy who thought he was very funny would stop me from what I was doing to ask incredibly stupid questions that he really didn�t expect an answer to. Stuff like, �Hey, I�m looking for a copy of the Gutenburg Bible, but I don�t want to pay more than fifteen dollars for a copy. You have any of those? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!�
Yes, you are a very funny motherfucker. A very funny motherfucker who apparently didn�t notice that I�m holding a stack of 15 engineering books that weigh about 5 pounds each when you stopped me by grabbing onto my arm. And why is it that the people who aren�t funny are the ones who take the most of your time by telling stupid fucking so-called jokes? Don�t they notice nobody is laughing?
This Steinbeck book didn�t help my mood any either. This is a rare book that is out of print, so I elected not to take my normal discount when I picked it up, seeing how it was a specialty item and all. What this means is that this is most likely THE highest amount that I�ve paid for a book at Recycle, either before I got the job or since.
And what did I get for my $19.99? A recreation of the film The Forgotten Village, which I�ve never seen. The book has 136 still photographs from the film. I guess that�s cool in itself, except for one thing � from what I can tell, this movie is fucking awful.
The story line is fairly basic, almost following the same style as �The Pearl� where the �simple� villagers cling onto outdated old-fashioned rituals. Illness strikes the village, but they refuse to try medicine from the hospital out of distrust of the foreigners. Redemption, of course, comes in the hands of a child, one who hasn�t closed his mind from exposure to dogmatic rituals.
I don�t mean to be a member of the PC police, but I bristle at these kinds of stories. I think they�re condescending. I also think they�re simplistic at looking at a culture � even more so then the characters they create. I know that�s not what Steinbeck meant to do. He was constrained by a chickenshit film board and the fact that they filmed in a small village in Mexico using the people of the area instead of actors, which meant having to keep dialogue to a minimum (if at all � it says they used a narrator for the movie, meaning you had to be even more simplistic). All of these factors served to dumb the story down even more that it was during the conception stage.
I remember learning about this film in my Steinbeck course � he was trying to tell a fable while respecting the people of the area. But he also didn�t know much about film, and it shows. There is not much to advance the action, and there is only a smattering of tension for plot development. The result is a mess.
As for the book itself, I�m not even convinced that it should qualify as a Steinbeck book. Two people, Rosa Harvan Kline and Alexander Hackensmid apparently just transcribed the �dialogue� from the film, slapped the words next to the appropriate photograph, and released it under his name.
Nice work if you can get it. Somebody let me know if I can do this for the Evil Dead movies.
