Dan's Interpretive Essay
From English 194 Wiki
Beyond the Rye
An Interpretive Essay by Dan Hawley
In Spring 2007, students of English 194 were given an open ended assignment of re-modeling a literary text of their choosing in the form of a new medium. First, groups were formed, one of which – initially called the Red Team – consisted of three people. After weeks of reading and open theoretical discussion, the students began to formulate hazy concepts as to the nature of their group projects.
In the case of the Red Team, the first conceptual protrusion was the choice of the literary work the team planned to revamp. Around five weeks into the term, the Red Team were found on a Saturday night, at a house party on Del Playa Drive. Leaning against a white fence and overlooking the pacific ocean, it was discussed that the literary work the team would choose would preferably be one that the surrounding group of their peers could relate to. Soon after, the Red Team chose the work Catcher in the Rye, and renamed itself “The Catcher Team”. The Catcher Team selected J.D. Salinger’s classic due to it’s likable quasi-adolescent protagonist Holden Caulfield, and it’s status as a widely read classic novel.
The next step for the team was to refine the scope of their project. The novel, which follows Holden Caulfield through his post-modernist trek through New York City would be too large to rework with any kind of accuracy in a five week time frame. First, the team refreshed itself on Holden Caulfield’s story.
Catcher in the Rye begins when Holden’s schooling career abruptly ends at the age of sixteen years old. He gets himself kicked out of school for bad grades a few days before the last day of his classes. He then proceeds to remove himself from the school and wander the streets of Manhattan for sixty hours or so. His adventures are mostly internal, although there is a focus on a few external occurrences that happen in the present. One such external occurrence occurs between chapters 12 and 17. During these chapters, Holden sneaks into a performance bar called ‘Ernie’s’. On the way there, in a cab, Holden asks the driver where the ducks go in the winter. The cab driver is short with Holden, and very irritable. Holden exits the cab and once inside Ernie’s, he is seated at a horrific table where he can barely see Ernie (the piano player), at which point he runs into a phony friend of his older brother D.B. Her name is Lillian Simmons and she is with her sailor boyfriend. He quickly grows tired of their company and decides to head back to his hotel. As he steps into the hotel lobby, Holden is approached for sex by an elevator boy turned pimp named Maurice. Holden is too yellow to say no, and out of fear allows a hooker to be sent up to his room. There is a disagreement on the hooker’s (Sonny) wage, and a fight between Maurice and Holden ensues. These are the plot elements the Catcher team decided to hone in on for their group project.
This passage in the text was chosen for multiple reasons. First, it is one of the more external passages in the novel, and would lend itself well to replication for that reason. The second reason that this passage was chosen as the focal point of the Catcher project was that it speaks loudly to their group of peers. Today’s norm for the content of pop movies also reflects this view. In the words of one of the top film studies professors in the department here at UCSB, “You need to sex it up, you need to drug it up. It’s sad and unfortunate these days, but in Hollywood, and even in the artsy fartsy independent arena, sex, drugs, and rock and roll are still what people want to see”. Finally, this passage was selected for transfusion because of it’s bitter reality and emotion. This is one of the scariest moments in the novel for Holden, and is one of the first times that he cries. This is the moment where Holden begins his descent and begins to come unglued.
As a group, the Catcher Team now had it’s focus, but the question still remained, “ok, so now what are we going to do with this?”
Just as with it’s selection of the literary work, the Catcher Team approached this question by slowly conceptualizing the bigger ideas and through discussion and brainstorming sessions, allowed the more intricate ideas take shape organically. It was first posited that the Catcher project be an interactive one, in which the reader would be able to concretely interact with the text. This concept opened the flood gates for a sea of issues and concerns.
One of the main issues the team faced was how to make the text interactive. J.D. Salinger’s work is linear. It starts at one point and ends in another. At times the text would jump around during flashback scenes, but these jumps would take place along the same time line. Instead of presenting a one dimensional time line of occurrence that is present in Salinger’s novel, the Catcher team planned to add a second dimension whereby many different time lines could exist simultaneously. These lines would shoot off the original time line created by Salinger, and would take upon a web shape. The goal of the game would be to allow the player to start along the original timeline, and navigate themselves through the web as they saw fit. The construct of this web gave rise to another big issue. The story boarding web would have one singular beginning point. But would it also stay true to Salinger’s one singular ending point?
On the one hand, giving the player control over Holden’s actions and his ability to make decisions ought to warrant an ability of the player to change Holden’s fate. Seeing as how one’s destiny (destination) can be seen as the result of the free choices he or she makes, it would make logical sense that to allow a player freedom of choice over Holden’s actions would allow for alternate destinations or endings for Holden. But on the other hand, in two dimensions, there are an infinite number of ways to connect two points.
The positive element of having many ending points is that it would give the project a more natural feel, as the storylines would be smooth and firmly aimed in a specific direction. The negative element of having many ending points is that many choices would lead Holden to stray in a direction entirely unrelated to the novel, and thus stray away from the very storyline we were planning on replicating.
The positive element of having a singular ending point is that it would allow us to stay very close to the text. But on the flip side, the negative element of doing this would be that our story lines would end up branching jaggedly and unnaturally as a result of their final destination back at a single point in the middle.
The Catcher Team never really planned how to work around this issue, although they discussed it quite a bit. Instead, each member of the team kept this dilemma in mind and got to work writing out a storyboard that broke naturally from the events in the text. The mentality was that the Catcher Team would take their storylines in the directions that felt the most natural, and would see where those lines ended up in practice, rather than trying to decide in theory first.
Holden is an incredibly introverted character. This can be seen through his dealings with virtually every “phony” he comes across in the novel. But in specific, with D.B’s ex girlfriend, and her current sailor boyfriend. He quickly loses interest in people who do not have points of view that line up nearly directly with his own. Don’t get me wrong, I'm right there with Holden. Lillian and her sailor boyfriend are incredibly obnoxious, and no one in their right mind would wish to talk with them for very long, but at the same time how do I know? This perception of the couple is completely filtered through Holden before it gets to us. In the final project, this concept is alluded to by the visual fade placed on these characters as they continue to blab in this scene.
This scene was the first to be created conceptually, and as it began to form as an idea, the digital medium of warped photography was discussed and decided upon. The photographs were taken with multiple digital cameras and later warped and doctored using Adobe Photoshop. The visual theme of the photography attempted to mimic the psychological theme of Salinger’s work. There is very little shape given to the external, nearly all of the focus is on the internalization of Holden’s surroundings. Thus, the pictures are all taken from Holden’s point of view. In this way, the visual representation still has a first person feel to it. In addition, all of the frames are blatantly and violently distorted, as are Holden’s descriptions of nearly every person, place, or thing he comes across in the novel. The color scheme is predominately yellow, as Holden is. The yellow only dissipates when Holden does, when he is either aroused, or angry. This is a reference to his cowardly nature when it comes to standing up for himself. These colors intensify as he gets more nervous; for example, when he is waiting for Sonny to arrive in his hotel room. Many of the photographs are also shaded black around the edges to give the player the feeling of tunnel vision, which is also an element of Holden’s psyche that the Catcher Team deemed to be extremely important. Holden is often very narrow minded, as is referenced by his dealings with his teachers throughout the book. He is clearly aware that they are trying to help him, yet he doesn’t listen to any of them anyway. This is the case with old Spencer, and also with Mr. Antollini, who warns a deaf eared Holden of the fate that lies ahead for him.
The actual rendering of images would begin always with an oversaturation, bringing out all the exotic colors from the mix. Next, the brightness would be turned up, and the contrast down. These two effects, when used together purposely bring out bright colors, and dull everything else to a near black. Finally the sumi-e effect would be added, in differing degrees, depending on the desired mood of the photograph, and yielded a distorted hand drawn effect.
Specific pictures were overly exaggerated and tampered with as well. For example, the cab driver was inserted as a separate layer into the cab and appears to the reader almost like a genie. This is because the conversation between Holden and this cab driver is an extremely important one. The two are discussing what the ducks do in the winter. Holden is of the mind that they fly away. The cabbie Horowitz believes they stick around and die. There are so many ways to interpret this scene. We chose to interpret it as little as possible and merely highlight Horowitz, so that hopefully, his overexaggerated face will be conjured up in your mind the next time you read Catcher, and you think about it for a bit. My personal belief is that the ducks represent both Holden and the cabbie. Holden believes that when the conditions get unbearable, the ducks get up and fly away. This statement is certainly backed up by his actions throughout the novel. His expulsion from a school he doesn’t like, his flee from the house of Antollini when that becomes uncomfortable, his secret exit when his parents come home. The cabbie meets tons of phony people every day. Single serving friends, as they are called in Fight Club. As a cabbie, he is not personable, he does not really care to speak with Holden. He is cold. His reaction to the duck issue mirrors his life choices. But again, this is just my interpretation. There are many other photographs in the graphic novel that elementally stand out in this way. They were crafted that way on purpose, predominately to get you thinking about that element of the text and draw your attention to it.
The end product of the Catcher Team is an interactive graphic novel. It is comprised of roughly 20% of our outlined story board, which includes choices of fighting or not fighting Maurice, running out of Antollini’s or staying, having sex with Sonny or not having sex with Sonny, going to look at the ducks in the park or not, and visiting Phoebe. This section of the game only deals with one such choice: Sex or no sex?
And how does your choice determine Holden’s fate? Does the graphic novel have a set ending? It does. But it is fairly natural. How did this happen?
Consider Salinger’s text as occurring along a one dimensional time line. In this time line, it doesn’t matter if Holden has sex with Sonny or not. He still underpays and gets roughed up for the money. No matter what. On a two dimensional time line, Holden could chose to either pay up first and not fight, or follow the original time line and get beat up. But what if we storyboarded in three dimensions? Wouldn’t it be conceivably possible then, that Holden can make a choice that branches him off in a separate, but parallel direction, that would appear to be the same, but have a completely different set of textual undertones and perspective? In this way, he would appear to be ending up in the same point, but actually be headed in a completely different direction altogether.
In this way, the reader of our novel is traveling along a two dimensional story board that waves up and down only slightly over Salinger’s original timeline. These waves depend heavily on huge, but chronically brief third dimensional leaps in and out of the original text. This sexual leap was selected because it capable of adding a huge dimension to the storyline, while not actually changing it very much in the end.
At this point in conceptualization, the function of this project became clear. This finished model should not attempt to recreate the text, or even focus on any part of it. Instead, it should aim to add dimensional layers to a story that has already withstood the sands of time and proven itself as natural.
The fruit of our labor in this digital medium is great, but immeasurable by any member of the Catcher Team individually in this moment in time.
