Not Gulliver's Travels

Ted's and Mary's Not-So-Excellent Adventure

Viewing the program the first time it aired, it took only a few minutes to realize that this wasn't going to be the Gulliver's Travels Swift wrote. Mr. Bates, Gulliver's master and mentor (who dies in the first few paragraphs of the book) becomes Dr. Bates, the villian. In the book, Gulliver returned at the end each adventure: on TV he had all four adventures in a single nine-year-long outing and returned insane. In fact, the struggle to prove his sanity and the truth of his story -- not at all part of the book -- was as much the focus of the TV version as the journeys themselves.

I spent that evening clicking between the show and anything else that was on, with fewer and shorter stops on Gulliver until I just turned off the TV altogether. When the second half aired, I didn't watch at all.

You mean you didn't like it?

My central objection is what showed up on the tube wasn't Swift's book. I'm not complaining about differences in the way Swift told his story in a book and how it might be presented on television 250 years later. If they had changed the structure yet presented some of Swift's ideas and words within that framework, they might have done something worthwhile. Unfortunately, they weren't that clever. In my first viewing, I couldn't see that anything of Swift's survived.

In the book, the focus is Swift's finely honed social criticism and satire. What little social commentary the TV crew worked into their story was their own and it was toothless. Swift's writing had teeth: he changed government policies and turned the tide of public opinion with his writings. If the screenwriters had respected that and showed a little courage, they would have used more of Swift's ideas and words and less of their own.

For instance, Swift has Gulliver offer the King of Brobdingnag the secret of gunpowder, explaining it "would not only destroy whole Ranks of an Army at once, but batter the strongest Walls to the Ground, sink down Ships, with a Thousand Men in each, to the Bottom of the Sea." (Book II, Ch. VII) "The King was struck with Horror ... amazed how so impotent and grovelling an Insect as I (these were his Expressions) could entertain such inhuman Ideas, and ... commanded me, as I valued my Life, never to mention any more."

In the TV version, Gulliver arranges a surprise demonstration of gunpowder which blows a hole through the ceiling. When the smoke clears, Gulliver resignedly says to the silent Queen, "I know what you are thinking." Thus one of the most eloquent condemnations of war is rendered as, "Gosh, Mr. Wizard, I guess we used too much!"

On further reflection it struck me that the TV version had only a superficial relationship to Gulliver's Travels. Here's the TV version in a nutshell:

Husband goes off to sea, where he has one strange adventure after another, as he struggles to return home. Meanwhile, back at the homestead, the family has begun to believe he will never return and the presumed widow must fend off an unwanted suitor. Home comes the hero but he is barred by the frustrated suitor from returning to his rightful place as head of his family. However, with the aid of the son he has never known, the hero defeats the suitor and wins his home and family.

Would I reconsider?

It is all so sad because it would not have been that hard to be true to the original. While Gulliver's Travels is a complex work and not everything translates easily to the screen or to our times there is plenty of material from which to choose. Of course it would be important to include the visual aspects that are so much part of the appeal of the story. Select one or two major scenes from each section that both illustrate Swift's overall point and work for television would have been a very reasonable approach. And it would not have hurt the integrity of the show to use more of Swift's own words.

If there is a single point to Swift's Gulliver's Travels (and I know this is an oversimplification, but we're talking television here) it is that humans have no right to be proud about being rational creatures: our lives, our institutions, and our world are corrupt and degenerated: our very nature runs contrary to the qualities we call rational. I'm less clear about the message of the TV version. One theme seems to be that no one is hurt by telling the truth. I wish the producers had heeded their own message.

I'd like to hear other views. (Ted, are you out there?) I may post comments I receive here.