Adapted Idealogical View of: To Kill a Mockingbird

So, why did I chose a film that's on more top ten list's than Britney Spear's shaved...head? Well because it's well know and simply because I feel it fits both blog requirements. "To Kill a Mockingbird," written by Harper Lee and directed by Robert Mulligan is an adapted film with social influences that reverberate even today. I myself credit it as a major inspiration since my friends will all tell you, all I write are legal, racial, dramas.

I'm not going to waste time going into a summary of one of the most famous novels and films in American history. To Kill a Mockingbird as a film, captured many of the themes displayed in the novel. Certainly it's hard to appease both audiences, which makes adaptations so hard to make. You have the Potter series and the die-hards who want every aspect of the novel in the film so we can sit there all day learning why hitting a ball while flying around on a broom is so damn important. (Run-on sentence, I know. Sorry) But with Mockingbird, the novel was so easily adapted because the social construct the novel courageously attempts to deconstruct is so visual. Social and racial injustice and it's place in the blanketed Christian south of the 50's. What also made it so easy to adapt such a novel was Harper's visual style of writing. The novel so vividly dipicts what Scout sees, hears, feels and even smells, you feel like you're back in the dirty, slow, depression-ridden south. It's almost like she did the set design for them in the book.

The script, penned by Horton Foote was written with the author in mind. In the DVD special features, the director talks about how he and the entire production felt not only a responsibility to Harper but to the audience in which this adaptation was meant for. The novel does a great job of telling the story through the eyes of a young girl while at the same time a young woman looking back on her past. The film follows young Scout and is narrated by older Scout -- an element that in most adapted films, would have been abandoned but here, it was left intact. Seeing social injustice through the eyes of a child and hearing it being reflected on by the woman adds to the storytelling of this particular film.

All of the adults in the film, to a certain extend where following social constructs they set up and follow blindly. Black stays with black and white stays with white. Never between shall the two ever meet. That's the racist balance set up in the film. And when an innocent Black man breaks this fine balance with nothing more than naive ness, it throws the entire world on it's axis. People's true colors start to come out and real courage is tested. One of the more powerfully stories the film carried over brilliantly from the novel is Atticus and Scout's relationship. Scout sees her father as a man who doesn't stand up for himself or have the fire that she has. Finch tells Scout not to come down to the courthouse when Tom Robinson's trial begins. She disobeys him and subsequently witnesses her father's truth strength. She watches him fight a losing battle not simply against a lying woman and not just against a town, but against an entire social ideology that the townspeople have followed for years. Telling the story through Scout's eyes and witnessing Atticus fight so courageously for Tom's freedom, gives it so much more impact than it being about a white man fighting injustice against a black man. It was about a daughter discovering her father is a hero, even if no one else thinks so.

So why is To Kill a Mockingbird on AFI's top...everything list? Well because race is and unfortunately will always be an issue. Watching the film for the second time, that's what I got from it. But more importantly, as long as race is always an issue, there always needs to be that hero who thinks it isn't an attempts to fight for equality no matter the cost. Gay, Arab whatever it is, there will always be a Tom Robinson. What the novel and the film try to bestow on the audience is, there always needs to be an Atticus Finch as well...and that maybe we all should be an Atticus Finch.