{"id":11799,"date":"2011-02-25T14:52:03","date_gmt":"2011-02-25T19:52:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=11799"},"modified":"2011-03-04T13:15:02","modified_gmt":"2011-03-04T18:15:02","slug":"on-%e2%80%98barney%e2%80%99s-version%e2%80%99-the-great-taboo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2011\/02\/25\/on-%e2%80%98barney%e2%80%99s-version%e2%80%99-the-great-taboo\/","title":{"rendered":"On \u2018Barney\u2019s Version\u2019: The Great Taboo"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><script type=\"text\/javascript\"><!--\nvar firsttext='<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=11783\">A Confession<\/a><br \/>David Bezmozgis | February 23, 2011'\nvar secondtext='<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=11789\">The Canadian Jewish Experience<\/a><br \/>Richard J. Lewis | February 23, 2011'\nvar thirdtext='<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=11796\">The Elasticity of Cinema<\/a><br \/>David Bezmozgis | February 24, 2011'\nvar fourthtext='<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=11797\">Paul Giamatti Is Barney Panofsky<\/a><br \/>Richard J. Lewis | February 24, 2011'\nvar fifthtext='<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=11799\">The Great Taboo<\/a><br \/>David Bezmozgis | February 25, 2011'\nvar sixthtext='<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=11801\">Barney's Voice<\/a><br \/>Richard J. Lewis | February 25, 2011'\nfunction writetext(what){\ndocument.getElementById('textarea').innerHTML=''+what+'';\n}\n\/\/-->\n<\/script><\/p>\n<table width=500 border=0px cellpadding=5px cellspacing=0px>\n<tr>\n<td valign=middle width=175><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=11783\" ><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/02\/box1roll.jpg\" onmouseover=\"writetext(firsttext)\"><\/a>  <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=11789\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/02\/box2roll.jpg\" onmouseover=\"writetext(secondtext)\"><\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=11796\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/02\/box3roll.jpg\" onmouseover=\"writetext(thirdtext)\"><\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=11797\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/02\/box4roll.jpg\" onmouseover=\"writetext(fourthtext)\"><\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=11799\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/02\/box5roll.jpg\" onmouseover=\"writetext(fifthtext)\"><\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=11801\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/02\/box6roll.jpg\" onmouseover=\"writetext(sixthtext)\"><\/a>\n<\/td>\n<td>\n<div id=\"textarea\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=11783\">A Confession<\/a> <br \/> David Bezmozgis | February 23, 2011<\/div>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n<p><div id=\"attachment_12140\" style=\"width: 285px\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-12140\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/02\/Mordecai-Richler.jpg\" alt=\"\" title=\"Mordecai Richler\" width=\"275\" height=\"415\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12140\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/02\/Mordecai-Richler.jpg 275w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/02\/Mordecai-Richler-198x300.jpg 198w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-12140\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Mordecai Richler.<\/p><\/div>Hi Richard,<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s interesting to hear you say that you still miss Barney\u2019s voice. The book is driven to a great extent by Barney\u2019s strong, idiosyncratic voice. (I, too, remember very well his riff about the colander.) That\u2019s a tough thing to transfer to the screen. How to do that without weighing the film down and without making the audience too conscious of some kind of device\u2014that is, the technical justification for how we are able to hear him? (One example from a relatively recent American film is Alexander Payne\u2019s <em>About Schmidt<\/em>, in which we hear Schmidt\u2019s voice through the inappropriate letters he writes to the child he is sponsoring in Africa.) What did you have in mind for Barney in that nursing home?<\/p>\n<p>For what it\u2019s worth\u2014and not knowing what solution you had in mind\u2014I was glad not to have Barney\u2019s voice. I appreciated how fluidly the action unfolded and didn\u2019t feel like I missed anything about Barney\u2019s character. He still seemed to me like the Barney I remembered. I admired how, even without the voice-over, you managed to create a film that seemed very faithful to the book. I suspect Richler would have approved. (In my mind, when I tried to conceive of how I might adapt it, it became a road movie.)<\/p>\n<p>On the subject of Richler and his voice, there\u2019s something I\u2019ve often found curious about him. Or if not curious, let\u2019s say surprising. For a man who was a renowned curmudgeon, contrarian, and even cynic, he was also an extraordinary romantic. In his public life and in his books, Richler skewered seemingly every institution except the institution of marriage. The guy really believed in true love and in marital fidelity. You see it in the novel, and you were consistent about it in the movie. Cheating on your spouse, in Richler&#8217;s moral universe, brings ruin. For Barney, and for Miriam, his beloved third wife, infidelity is unforgivable, irredeemable. In our hip, irreverent world this seems a very uncool position to take.<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ve rarely heard this aspect of Richler\u2019s work spoken about, and yet I think it\u2019s present in all of his novels. In all of his \u201cmature novels,\u201d the hero\u2014who is increasingly an alter-ego for Richler\u2014behaves badly in any number of ways (he may profane God and country), but he never cheats on his wife. That is the great taboo. Not that I disapprove, mind you, but it seems a much stricter article of his faith than it is of mine. Was this something you thought about when making the film? It factors so heavily into the plot that I wonder what you made of it.<\/p>\n<p>Faithfully yours,<\/p>\n<p>db<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A Confession David Bezmozgis | February 23, 2011 Hi Richard, It\u2019s interesting to hear you say that you still miss Barney\u2019s voice. The book is driven to a great extent by Barney\u2019s strong, idiosyncratic voice. (I, too, remember very well his riff about the colander.) That\u2019s a tough thing to transfer to the screen. How [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":124,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1900],"tags":[1084,1905,1906,1901,1904,1903,202,1902],"class_list":["post-11799","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-correspondence","tag-adaptation","tag-barneys-version","tag-book","tag-david-bezmozgis","tag-e-mail","tag-epistolary-exchange","tag-movie","tag-richard-j-lewis"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast SEO v25.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>On \u2018Barney\u2019s Version\u2019: The Great Taboo by David Bezmozgis<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"February 25, 2011 \u2013 A Confession David Bezmozgis | February 23, 2011 Hi Richard, It\u2019s interesting to hear you say that you still miss Barney\u2019s voice. 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