It is always an interesting experience to finally get around to seeing some famous, acclaimed, and beloved film and discover in the process how smug, awful, complacent, and dishonest it actually is. So it was with me turning for the first time to Blake Edwards' 1961 classic movie adaptation of the Truman Capote novella, with Audrey Hepburn, and with its heart-stabbing original musical number that brings unwilling tears to the eyes no matter how much one dislikes the rest of the film, and with very little else to recommend it.
I'm not just talking here about the unwatchable racist and unfunny Mickey Rooney yellow-face scenes. Those are there, and they are just as terrible as one has heard, and they have already been justly criticized at length elsewhere; and anyways one might be able to suffer through them if there were something else in this movie that was tolerable to make up for them—as I fully thought and had been told there would be. There is not, as far as I can tell, apart perhaps from the inimitable transatlantic accent and rapid-fire diction of its heroine.
What I found most objectionable and what I most want to call attention to here is how profoundly and bizarrely the film misconstrued its source material. The first and most elementary mistake is that the film seems to have thought that Breakfast at Tiffany's—in terms of the actual story Capote wrote—was somehow about a romance between the narrator and Holly Golightly. No mistake could more perfectly subvert the themes of Capote's story and send it off galloping in the wrong direction, like the two main characters' unruly horses (in one of many pivotal scenes dropped from the film version).
Because it is plain upon reading it that the narrator of the novella, of course, has a friendship with Holly that is anything but a heterosexual romantic attraction. Whether we read the author's identity and sexuality into his unnamed narrator or not, the fact is the original story is full of knowing and frank references to gay and lesbian subcultures (all of which are papered over in Edwards' film).
And whatever the orientation of Capote's protagonist, his relationship with Holly is not about sex. If it were about sex, Holly would hardly have crawled into his bed and slumbered on his shoulder in the course of one of their first interactions. (The Edwards/Axelrod film has this same scene play out, though it is now impossible to reconcile with the diffidence the pair immediately manifest toward one another in subsequent scenes.) If it were about sex, Holly would not so frequently relate to the narrator as a platonic friend and confessor.
If it were about sex, Holly and the narrator's falling-out over her insufficient appreciation of his writerly abilities would hardly have taken place while he was in the process of rubbing suntan lotion onto her nude back. The falling-out would have been about something else, in such circumstances, and the application of the sunscreen would have led to a different scene. Capote's protagonist can be read as gay, much as Rusty Trawler is frankly acknowledged to be in the novella (as is the tenant who replaces Holly at the story's conclusion), but even if he is not—I repeat—he has a relationship with his neighbor that is something other than a heterosexual attraction.
Did our filmmakers really not understand this? We know they read Capote's novella, because they joylessly incorporate many of its best lines, while somehow managing to stick them into the wrong context in a way that deprives them of meaning. Scene by scene, they borrow whole stretches of Capote's original dialogue, while shifting the scene around just enough to deprive it of emotional content or else entirely subvert its meaning. Most fundamentally, we must ask: How could they have missed the obvious queer overtones in the two main characters' relationship?
The answer of course is that they didn't. Which is what makes Edwards'/Axelrods' handiwork dishonest as well as misguided. They know that Capote's protagonist is Capote's protagonist, but they don't want him to be; so they go out of their way to butch him up. They invent a wholly new subplot involving an older woman to whom the author-protagonist is indirectly pimping himself in order to make some cash on the side (an unhappy-gigolo storyline that worked for Sunset Boulevard because it was actually the plot of that film, not an evasion of the real plot of this one).
The filmmakers add a pointless scene in which the protagonist (Paul, in the film) and Holly find their way into a topless bar to watch a strip tease, just so we can beat it into the audience's head that our buff hero is a normal hetero kind of man who salivates on cue. Rusty Trawler is still a nincompoop, just as he is in the book, but now he is one whose homosexual proclivities are never mentioned. There are no more mentions of "dykes," no more references to Holly's successor in her apartment (because in the film, of course, she never even leaves for Brazil, instead just kissing our manly Paul in the rain so we can get our irrelevant Hollywood ending.)
Everywhere, the filmmakers have substituted their judgment and values for what appears in the original story; and the result is always something less genuine and touching than what it was in Capote's hands.
In the film version of the aforementioned early scene, when Holly climbs through Paul's window, she finds him lying shirtless in bed, with his older mistress bustling around him. Everything that follows therefore takes on a salacious cast. Compare this with the scene in the novel, in which she discovers him in the act of reading a Simenon detective novel and nursing a bourbon. The fact that they sexlessly fall asleep in bed together later in the scene suddenly makes so much more sense.
Even the innocuous conversations between our two leads about the main character's writing career are stripped of much of their charm. In the film, both have been aged up. "Paul" is now a published author, rather than a struggling neophyte who considers it a great victory to land a print publication in a university magazine even though they are unable to pay him. Holly no longer becomes distracted during the narrator's reading of his story (the incident in the novella that leads eventually to their only major disagreement).
Not just here but elsewhere, anything that might be described as an edge to Holly has been sanded off, in our filmmakers' hands.
I guess it shouldn't surprise us that the 1961 film version of Holly doesn't say "fuck off" to her cat in the closing scene. Fair enough. There are ratings to consider. But did the film really have to delete the fact of her pregnancy—a key plot point in the novella? The fact of her miscarriage? The fact—most importantly—that the man she is planning to run off to Brazil with is not just someone she wishes to marry for his money, and who can therefore be cast aside at last in preference for the main character, but is someone she actually loves and is sorry to lose?
The result of all these alterations between film and novel is that the former seems to us now like it comes from an unrecognizably distant time, whereas the latter feels astonishingly contemporary. For gods' sake, Capote's Holly even uses the term "preggers"!
Of course, the protagonist of Capote's novella does love Holly—he tells us so. And he goes on to tell us exactly what kind of love he means: "I was in love with her," he says, before explaining: "Just as I'd once been in love with my mother's elderly coloured cook and a postman who let me follow him on his rounds and a whole family named McKendrick. That category of love generated jealousy, too."
Hear that? It is another category of love—the kind of consuming friend-crush one gets—especially when one is young—that is equal parts admiration and self-identification and has nothing at all to do with romance. As a character memorably remarks of Angela and Rayanne's friendship in My So-Called Life: "Oh, you know kids. They find one person and they just can't get enough of them! It's like being in love, only they're not allowed to have sex."
This Angela and Rayanne type of friendship is—I take it—what Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's is actually about—what it is actually trying to chronicle.
Of course, the narrator does feel irritation and a sense of abandonment as Holly makes plans to flee the country with her Brazilian lover. But this is fully compatible with the platonic-friend theory of the case. The narrator does in fact experience FOMO, but it stems not from sexual jealousy, but from the paradoxical and self-divided position he occupies in the tale.
Capote's novella is about a writer. And this character behaves as writers do—he observes the lives of others with just enough intimacy and sympathy to see into their depths, and just enough distance to feel that he is never quite part of the main stream of events himself. "If you participate in life," as Flaubert once remarked (in Julian Barnes' citation), "you don't see it clearly."
It is precisely this distance that lends the novella its poignancy. The narrator is involved in Holly's life-story but not really as its protagonist (though I have used that term above as shorthand); certainly not, shall we say, as its leading man. This is the source of the story's wistful tone. He loves Holly as a friend, and it is his fate and his privilege as the platonic friend to stand further from the center of her emotional whirlwind. As Capote's narrator touchingly remarks, after being mistaken in one scene for Holly's lover, "I was flattered: proud that anyone should think Holly cared for me."
He is both doomed and blessed to be the Flaubert of Holly's story. Like Henry James excavating the emotional depths of others' relationships from his own position as a lifelong bachelor; like the French master seeking to keep a safe distance from the pageant of life, the better to see it unfold—Capote's narrator suffers the crucifixion and the beatitude of every writer/observer. As Holly says of him at one point early in the story: "He wants awfully to be on the inside staring out: anybody with their nose pressed against glass is liable to look stupid."
This outside-looking-in dynamic is what is really happening throughout Capote's story—what the novel is really about. Our filmmakers completely failed to understand this—or else, they understood it, decided it wouldn't sell, and discarded it in favor of their own clichés.
And so the queer relationship between Capote's stand-in and his heroine is swapped out for a straightforward girl-meets-guy rom-com. The outsider-looking-in story is replaced with the tale of two insiders meeting and falling in love. And I can't think of anything less interesting than that.
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