Sandman 1 - enough, but no more
Where I come from, line drawings and speech bubbles mean comic strips in newspapers—‘funnies’. But cartoon didn’t start like this—the form was serious and, in many places in the world, is. And so The Sandman.
Even with what I know, I never thought Sandman‐the‐book was what you’ll find in reviews—”grounbreaking”, ”seminal” and so forth. I’ve read enough to be sure of that. But the collected books of Sandman brought a new audience to comics, a literate audience who liked things that are ‘clever’… and I guess it also appealed to reviewers who wouldn’t or couldn’t review such crap without librarian references. Anyway, given the success of comic adaptation to feature film, and the industry need to scrounge for material, Sandman would become film. Sandman was the first DC Comic ever to be collected into books, it has a unique if not film‐size audience and the ‘serious’ coverage was an opportunity to scrounge credit. Though in the end it took fourty years, adaption was inevitable.
Perhaps I’d better start with a little of what the Sandman is as story. It follows a clutch of characters, Eternals, who are aspects of human existence. Eternal they may be, but they can change, and must change, as men evolve. In the stories, these characters are not always central. The Sandman books are constructed from short stories. Often, a reader only discovers a main character through incidents involving other characters, or a short drama that hints at what has gone, or is to come… and sometimes the story lies elsewhere.
The main character is a guy variously called Dream, Morpheus or Sandman. He curates dreams, which seem here to be connected with human imagination. If there’s any one character in the books, it is Dream who is followed closely. In this Sandman is a little unusual, but not alone. This is a kind of fantasy writing, if I were to squeeze it into my scheme, I might call as ‘MythFi’—it takes mythologies and rewrites then to various extents and ends. Which idea has gained a small popularity with writers and readers in the last decade, and Sandman was indisputably a prelude.
One writer that comes to mind is Jose Farmer, who wrote a whole series of books about a river that was a place of resurrection for humans, which river contained the ages of the world. Never had access to it, but would probably appeal to readers of Sandman because it’s ‘clever’ and arcane. Ither writers such as Wyndham Lewis, Melvyn Peake, Michael Moorcock and J.R.R. Tolkien created books that, though they did not address existing myths, created eternal or archetypal landscapes and characters. So I’d say Sandman is open to normal criticism such as consideration of character, drama, original ideas, and so forth—it’s not the only thing out there, though ‘MythFi’ may explain why, for example, a review by The Guardian complained that the series is pretentious (much repeated elsewhere).
Why this talk of the original? Start here, the film industry has a bad record with text adaptions. Thrillers, written like film scripts, will pass, but soon as a text starts with anything in it’s own form, people will queue up with the word ‘unfilmable’. Best I can tell, ‘unfilmable’ means something essential is lost in translation. It also means the makers telling us “how hard it is to do” and and how they ‘love’ the source. Hedging bets from the off. The writer of Sandman, Neil Gaiman was likely aware of these issues. so at one time asked film company executives not to attempt a feature film. After recent efforts including the legendary ‘fantasy’ outing Artemis Fowl and the dismal (my opinion) Northern Lights he had justification (the industry were likely pitching for Game of Thrones or at least to recoup their cash).
As a result, when this series emerged, it was with the heavy involvement of the writer. This has an advantage, the TV series is the original stories on film. Some of the gore and story is skipped—I don’t think this can be argued with—otherwise, these are the stories as published. This is worth the time because the writer, Neil Gaiman, has a way with fantasy writing. Take the ancient idea of a magic circle, long turned into a horror movie trope, but what if it was seen as imprisonment, with some moral ambiguity? Or what about eternals making mistakes, or being a bit crummily vengeful, like they used to be? In the original Sandman, you’ll find idea after idea like these emerging in the stories.
The film industry form of scripts would always suggest a story like this is ’unfilmable’ so rewrites endings and contents at will. That’s not true, and this TV series proves it. On the other hand, there may be downsides to unusual progress, as there will always be adverse criticism of the unusual. Several reviews talk about how the Sandman TV series is badly ‘paced’. If I try to figure out what ‘pacing’ means… As I said, the original bande‐dessinée is made of stories of many lengths, many of which only obliquely refer to central characters. I suppose the film‐culture term would be ‘story arc’, but Sandman’s longer stories are more of background tidal changes—larger, more defined and subtle than an ‘arc’. In this adaption, this comes through. To complain then that a resulting adaption is ‘badly paced’ may be only to say that the storytelling progresses along varied paths that may hold greater or lesser interest for a viewer. This is, of course, unusual in moving pictures—in fact I struggle to think of an example, even compendium films usually adhere to the industrial scheme of pulverising, conclusive progress. But to not conform is not a comment on art, it is only to note that the progress of this series at times may defy audience common expectation.
Then there is the translation from one medium to another. It was in the episode ‘Sound of her Wings’ that for me other issues surfaced. It took a while to shape them up. The book/episode is made of two stories. In one, The Dream character has escaped from earlier difficulties, recouped his own, but feels anti‐climax… he meets his sister, who tells him he could stop moping by realising it is humans who enable him to exist, and he could take an interest. In the second story, Dream hears an odd conversation, and with his sister grants a man immortality on condition the man and Dream meet every century—but after many centuries the man challenges Dream that he is not trying to understand mortality, but seeks a friend.
The original book is one of the most beloved in the series. Both stories have unusual psychological premises—‐I defy you find similar. Both episodes take off when the drama surfaces. However, Neil Gaiman likes references like a kid of privilege who regurgitates teacher’s opinion. So of course the Hob Gabin immortality story references William Shakespeare, and of course William Shakespeare is the greatest playwright, and of course William Shakespeare’s power of ‘dream’ was gifted by the Sandman—cute, and about as much drama or insight in a tourist guide.
In the bande‐dessinée, this kind of work plays out in passing, in an image, almost visual metaphor. But the medium of film, as André Bazin suggested, has a power of creating reality. So the Hob Gabin story switches through the backgrounds of many centuries—an effect made for film— but lumbers, as you realise nothing is happening but a tourist guide. This drag surfaces again and again in the series, seems to originates in the act of translation from the source text. The translation is exposing and re stressing the stories, and not to advantage. It’s no surprise to me that the earlier story, ‘24/7’,’ with drama‐driven dialogue and single setting, has stuck better with viewers and reviewers.
What is needed here is some rewriting, to fly from the original ideas, to maybe rid Gaiman’s work of it’s cute elements, and maybe to introduce material geared to film. But a production this sincere will never go there. This is a potential limitation of the involvement of source writers in film translation. Think of films connected to the writer Stephen King. King prefers the film adaptions Dr. Sleep and It, even Cujo. These films have something in common, they preserve the writer’s work through the adaption. But these films do not stand alone, and do not have the intensity of Stephen King adaptions such as The Shining, Carrie, Christine or The Shawshank Redemption. Stephen King and Neil Gaiman are authors who know how a script is made and what it should look like. But, same problem here, the Sandman TV series keeps a strength of source, but never walks it’s own path.