By Recently, my algorithm, as if privy to every aspect of my personality and life and the stereotype those data points lend themselves to, has been flooding me with the news that Billie Eilish is going to star as Esther Greenwood in an upcoming movie adaptation of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. The film, directed by Sarah Polley, is currently in production.
Though usually I would be excited at the idea of one of my favorite books of all time being adapted into a movie (as, for example, I was seriously hyped about the Project Hail Mary adaptation), I reacted to this particular news with trepidation.
The Bell Jar
The Bell Jar is one of my favorite books.
It has its shortcomings and, let’s face it, some pretty significant issues as well (I plan to write a post soon about “problematic faves” and racism/sexism/etc. in “classic” books)— but I can’t deny that it has shaped me, and has had an impact on many other people.
The first time I read the book, it was December of my senior year of high school. I was the cursed age of 17 and the sun was setting at 4:30 PM. Adulthood was an approaching precipice and I was dealing with several severe and as-of-then undiagnosed mental health problems. At the time I imagined going to live as a hermit so that I would not harm society with my presence because I believed that I was evil (I was too scared to consider the other idea)
When I read The Bell Jar, I felt that special thing every reader yearns for when reading a book: connection. I could understand Esther and felt understood by her. The dread of growing up, of falling into the societal expectations of womanhood, of the choices for a future that seemed slowly and then all too quickly to be slipping away. The “fig tree passage” is my favorite passage from any book, ever.
“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
I remember too, stopping at the line “To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream.” It seemed to encapsulate my situation unbelievably succinctly. At the time, the world seemed to manifest new terrors every day.
Over four years, several shrinks, countless therapies with suspicious acronyms and pharmaceuticals with notorious tradeoffs later I still remember the feeling, and the bell jar quote features as the epigraph in one of my WIPs, which is, wouldn’t you know, heavily inspired by The Bell Jar (and by Elif Batuman’s The Idiot)
Of course, this is not the first film adaptation of Sylvia Plath’s novel. In 1979, a movie adaptation of The Bell Jar was released to middling reviews. Honestly, I hadn’t even heard of it until I started looking up information about the upcoming adaptation.
It makes sense why a film studio would jump at the chance to adapt a novel with such a cult following.
What kind of makes me laugh as well is the casting choice of Billie Eilish; this is not a judge of her acting ability, which I’m sure is good, but I just keep imagining some executive somewhere strategically targeting the depressed teenage girl demographic. (I, too, used to cry to “when the party’s over”)
Why am I skeptical about this movie?
Most of my trepidation comes from my view of The Bell Jar as a very introspective novel and one that I’m not sure would transfer well to film. There’s not a lot of action or sequences to make visually interesting, and the most compelling parts of the book, in my opinion, are how Esther describes her internal experiences. It is a book that makes clear the pain of mental suffering through its use of language.
Sylvia Plath was primarily a poet, and honestly, that’s why I think her prose in The Bell Jar ended up being so resonant.
While film is an art medium in its own right, I somewhat doubt the feasibility of translating this particular novel to the screen while keeping its identity.
However, there’s always a chance that I’ll eat my words when the movie comes out. I certainly plan to watch it when it does.
(The image used in the banner for this post is from the IMDB listing of the upcoming film)
Will you be watching the Bell Jar movie? Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comment section below.
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