Invisible Man Movie

      After watching the movie about Ellison's life and seeing how they adapted some of the scenes from the book into a short movie scene. This raised the question in my mind of what would stand in the way of making a good Invisible Man movie. We have talked about how there isn't one yet and how difficult it would be but not why, so I thought I would try to write down all the reasons I think it would be extremely difficult to do a good job with an Invisible Man movie.
      The most obvious challenge would be dealing with the narrator's thoughts. Something that a book can do that a movie can't is deal with thoughts. This is something I've noticed when watching movies based off of books I like. None of the movies could accomplish the same sense of understanding a character as the book could. The only movie I can think of that did an okay job was The Martian, but that was accomplished because Mark Watney was alone on Mars. The same thing wouldn't work for Invisible Man. The one thing I can think of that seemed to successfully provided a character's thoughts  is The End of the F***ing World. It lets the watcher understand what the main character is thinking by having him narrate over video that doesn't necessarily match with what he is talking about. However, this also wouldn't work for Invisible Man because The End of the F***ing World is a comedy and the narration aspect is designed to add to that and Invisible Man is not a comedy by any means.
      The other big challenge in creating an Invisible Man movie would be dealing with the fact that the narrator is never described and we never learn his name. For one, not having a description means that it would be hard to pick an actor to play him because nobody looks like him. Giving him a face also takes away from the sense of mystery that surrounds him which would make the movie worse. The other problem is that the reader never learns the name of the narrator but there are several times when Ellison writes someone saying his name. For example, "The boy read my name off a card." While it would be possible to simply omit those scenes it would change some aspects of the book.
      I think that along with how difficult it would be to correctly depict the dreamlike portions of this book, these challenges would make it impossible to make an Invisible Man movie that is the same quality as the book.

Different Chains

Early on in the book, Bledsoe pulls out an old leg shackle and calls it a "symbol of our progress". Later in the book, we see a very similar scene except for that time, it is the narrator who has a different leg shackle on his desk. As such, I think it would be interesting to compare the scenes, looking at the chains themselves and what is done with them and considering the implications of those differences.
When looking back over the scene with Bledsoe and his chain, the first thing that jumped out to me was that he kept the chain out of sight. In fact, he keeps it buried under a pile of papers as is shown when Wright writes, "Suddenly he reached for something beneath a pile of paper, an old leg shackle". On the other hand, the narrator leaves the shackle he has out in the open on top of his desk. This, of course, draws connections between the narrator and Bledsoe. Most importantly it highlights a key difference between the two in what they do with the chain. However, despite the fact that Bledsoe hides the chain and the narrator leaves it in the open they seem to believe that it represents the same thing: progress. After all, the narrator says, "But I think it's a good reminder of what our movement is fighting against" which is very similar to Bledsoe calling the shackle a "symbol of our progress". As such I think Bledsoe choosing to hide the chain is just like him choosing to wear his mask around people like Norton. On the other hand, the narrator leaves his shackle on his desk because he still hasn't learned to wear a mask. As a result, we get the reaction from Brother Wrestrum which is a reaction that I would imagine Norton having if he saw the chain of Bledsoe's desk.
Which brings me to another point. The Brotherhood seems to be a different version of the college. For one, they are both focused on educating people but only in the sense that they want people to follow a specific set of ideas. Another reason is they both are mainly run by white men. The college has the founders and the Brotherhood has all of the brothers, most of whom are white.  The final is that both have a Bledsoe character. The college actually has Bledsoe but the Brotherhood has the narrator who fills a similar role. Bledsoe claimed that he was truly the one running the college and we are able to see that it was truly the narrator running the Brotherhood in Harlem because when he leaves it falls apart. As such, while the narrator has made progress, he has still ended up in a situation similar to the one he was in in college, if not just a little higher up in the system. 

Metamorphasis

The start of chapter fifteen is eerily similar to the start of The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka. The Metamorphosis starts with, "One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug." Looking at the start of chapter fifteen the reader can draw several similarities. For one, chapter fifteen starts with the narrator being woken up suddenly by a loud noise. While Gregor wasn't woken upon by a loud noise, he was woken up by "anxious dreams", which seems to mean a nightmare. And in my experience, a nightmare wakes you up suddenly as well. 
Another similarity is that they both wake up and have an itch. Gregor had an itch on his abdomen that was caused by some white spots and the narrator has the old grey skin that's making him itch. Yet another similarity is that they are both in a hurry. Gregor slept past him alarm and is going to be late for work and the narrator says, "I'd have to hurry. There was a lot of shopping to do". The last sort of connection is that Mary and the narrator see and try to kill some cockroaches. While it isn't positive that Gregor turned into a cockroach, the implications in The Metamorphosis makes me believe that Gregor did become a cockroach. As such, the scene where they try to kill the cockroaches made me think of when Gregor's dad tried to kill him.
While many of these similarities could be pure coincidence, chapter fifteen still has its own metamorphosis of sorts. Even though it isn't nearly as drastic as turning into a giant cockroach, the narrator has made a sudden change overnight. The reason we can tell is because the narrator notices the racist statue for the first time. While this might not seem like much, it shows definite change since the narrator hadn't noticed the statue before, not even that night before he went to sleep. The other metamorphosis sort of thing in the chapter is the scratching away the old skin part. That part made me think of a something like a snake that sheds its old skin. So in a way, the start of chapter fifteen showed the narrator shedding at least a part of his old self.

Invisible Bigger

The narrator of The Invisible Man is clearly "invisible", seeing as he states so himself at the very start of the book by saying, "I am an invisible man". And he clearly doesn't mean it in the sense he is unable to be seen because he clarifies by saying, "No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms". So the question is why is he invisible? As he puts it, "they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination -- indeed, everything and anything except me." What this means is that when people look at him they see a generalization of someone who is African-American, instead of an actual individual person. So what he means by being invisible is actually just hiding behind the fact that people see him as a generalization and therefore don't identify him in their minds as a person. This is shown when the narrator is taking to Norton and Norton refers to the narrator as a cog, showing him he thinks of him as no different from the rest of the students.
Bigger is invisible in the same way. With the exception of Max and Jan, most white people in the book fail to see him as his own person. For example. Dalton sees Bigger as just another African-American he's helped just like how Norton views the narrator. Another example is how during the search for Bigger the mob rounds up lots of other people like him even though they have a picture of him. This is similar to when the narrator beats the man up and the man claims he was mugged just because it fit convention. Another thing to consider about Bigger is that he is written to be invisible. An important part of Native Son was how Bigger was defined by environment more than he was by his actions. So in a way Bigger is meant to be invisible to the reader so that we can look past his character and more at the environment which Wright is trying to criticize.

Powerful Paranoia

Something core to most conspiracy theories is questioning he normality of an event. That being, is something that happened just a coincidence that isn't very unlikely, or does it have some aspect of abnormality to it and as such is of more importance. DeLillo plays around with this idea in several situations. The first time DeLillo brings something like this up is during a Nicholas Branch scene where he is looking at the deaths among those associated with Lee Harvey Oswald or Jack Ruby. DeLillo starts out the scene by writing, "Somewhere in his room of theories, in some notebook or folder, Nicholas Branch has a roster of the dead. A printout of the names of witnesses, informers, investigators, people linked to Lee H. Oswald, people linked to Jack Ruby, all conveniently and suggestively dead. In 1979 a House select committee determined there was nothing statistically abnormal about the death rate among those who were connected in some way to the events of November 22. Branch accepts this as an actuarial fact. He is writing a history, not a study of the ways in which people succumb to paranoia. There is endless suggestiveness." What this does is try to shut down the idea that there was anything strange about the death rates. I find that interesting because Libra is a conspiracy novel, so it shutting down something like that seems counter-intuitive. Still, DeLillo goes on supporting the fact that they weren't anything special by talking about the methods of killing and how they were completely unconnected. My question is, why would DeLillo, after showing how these killing are normal, go on to give details about each one, in a say similar to someone trying to make something of them would? And I think the reason he does so is to show how easily the human mind makes patterns and jumps into paranoia about certain things. Even after he explained that there wasn't anything statistically off, when I read the part where he describes several of the deaths, I can't help by be suspicious. My mind automatically makes the connections and says that there is something going on even though I know there isn't really.
DeLillo also brings up some coincidences during a scene with Lee and Ferries. During that scene he portrays the coincidences as exactly that, just coincidences, and shows how David Ferrie uses them to manipulate Lee. By doing this he is once again saying that these coincidences people point to aren't really all that odd, but at the same time is pointing out the coincidences as if to say, "still it seems like there us something strange about that doesn't it?" This once again shows how we really can't help connecting certain things.

George de Mohrenschildt

Of all of the characters in the book, the strange and interesting ones seem to be the people that DeLillo isn't making up. So I thought I would do a little research on George de Mohrenschildt who seemed to be the most interesting of all of the real characters. As DeLillo describes him he is an international man of intrigue like Lawrence Parmenter but is real. As DeLillo writes George de Mohrenschildt was
A charming and worldly man able to converse fluently in Russian, English, French, Spanish, probably Togo as well, or whatever they spoke in Togoland.  Larry liked the man. He’d known him for some years and was aware that George had been debriefed by the Agency after several trips abroad. But even though their business interests had overlapped once or twice, he wasn’t sure quite what George’s racket was.
This leaves this air of mystery around him because we don't actually find out what he really does for a living. DelLillo also writes,
But his marriages didn’t explain his apparent association with Nazis in World War II, his apparent ties to Polish and French intelligence, his expulsion from Mexico, his apparent communist leanings when he was at the University of Texas, his Soviet contacts in Venezuela, the discrepancies in his stated history, his travels in West Africa, Central America, Yugoslavia and Cuba.
While I was reading this I wondered how much was true, so I did some research. I found that there were in fact rumors that he had ties to foreign intelligence and that he admitted he had ties to French intelligence. I also found that he was born in Mozyr, Russia and was part of the Dallas Russian community that had shunned Lee because of his background. I also found that there were, in fact, allegations of Nazi activity on his part. Crazily enough he also did get kicked out of Mexico. According to him it was might have been because General Maxino Camacho of the Mexican Army, was jealous of his relationship with Lilia Larin, a Mexican citizen he met and fell in love with.
I found various other things that match with DeLillo's short summary of what he has done and I must say I was expecting at least some of it to be made up.

Playing a Character?

In Kindred, Dana has talked about how she and Kevin are just playing characters and aren't actually a part of what is going on many times. In class, we also talked about how she is pretending to be someone she isn't and that she understands that. An example of this is when Dana says, "we humored the people around us by pretending to be like them. But we were poor actors. We never really got into our roles.We never forgot that we were acting" (Butler 98).  This shows that while they are playing characters they are still separate from their characters. This becomes apparent in this scene that followed when Dana talks to Kevin about what is wrong with the game the children are playing and even says that she breaks character herself. But at the same time, the understanding that she is playing a character enough to separate her from her character. This is true both mentally and physically. Take, for example, the scene where Tom Weylin sees Dana leaving Kevin's room in the morning. Even though Dana knows that there is nothing shameful about what happened in her time, Weylin is able to make her feel ashamed because of the character she is playing. But on the other hand, Dana is still susceptible to physical threats and pain because even though she is acting, the consequences are all too real. This becomes apparent at the start when the patroller tries to rape her and continues through the book. These difference to Dana just being an actor made me think of a book I read several years ago. It was about a detective who went undercover as a girl who had been murdered (because she looked very similar) to try to find out who murdered the girl. During the book, the detective knew she was playing a role but was still in danger. I think that that is a better analogy to Dana's situation. She isn't an actor as much as she is an undercover detective.