Seriously, Where is this Movie Going?

           Although Joyce Carol Oates has praised Smooth Talk, the movie adaptation of her story Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?, for its representation of her story, there are aspects of the medium of movies that detract from the effectiveness of the story and Oates’s message. Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? is a story that keeps certain aspects, such as the identity of the music that Connie perpetually plays, deliberately vague in order to add to the mysterious and uncertain path that Connie takes throughout the story. However, Smooth Talk takes the indirect discourse and the background symbols, such as the music, from Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? and distorts them so that the movie can be marketed, sold, and profited upon. First, the movie takes Oates's description of discussions between Connie and her mom and expands upon them. Although Smooth Talk has much more character development between Connie and her mom, the movie takes what was an unimportant part of the story and makes it important. For instance, I thought that Connie's encounter with Arnold Friend, not the character development between Connie and her family, contains the main part of Oates's message since statements like, "June did this, June did that, she saved money and helped clean the house and cooked and Connie couldn't do a

thing, her mind was all filled with trashy daydreams," demonstrate a quick establishment of relationships between characters (Oates 1). Also, around 75% of the movie is character development between Connie, her friends, and her family, while only 20% (1 and 1/2 out of around 8 pages) of the story contains similar character development. Second, the music is identifiable in Smooth Talk and no longer vague or playing perpetually as it is in the story. Since the music is present, identifiable, and not perpetually playing, the movie loses the symbol of music as 1960’s society and Connie’s religion. Oates makes the connection between music and religious zeal as Connie and her friends sat at the Big Boy and, “listened to the music that made everything so good: the music was always in the background, like music at a church service; it was something to depend upon” (Oates 1). Not only does the connection between music and religion enrich the social circumstances in which the story was written, but it also makes those circumstances relevant to Oates’s message and hints at deeper observations of society present in the story that are absent in the movie. Since Smooth Talk fails to represent these aspects of the story in the movie, it reshapes Oates's message to fit a 1980's rather than 1960's outlook on society.

As Oates used allusions to enrich her story with the social circumstances of the 1960's, Smooth Talk used allusions from the 1980's to recreate the story under different social circumstances. Oates’s choice to dedicate the story to and reference Bob Dylan, a folk singer and hero during the 1960’s, enriched the social setting of the story by giving readers a concrete source of inspiration present in Dylan’s song “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”, which is mainly about letting go of the past and moving on in life. Although Smooth Talk uses some references to Bob Dylan (such as having Arnold say, “My sweet little blue-eyed girl,” to Connie before she leaves with him), the presence of a lot of music by James Taylor, especially the songs “Handy Man” and “Is That the Way You Look?”, significantly detract from any connections that were made to Bob Dylan in the story (Oates 9). Not only was Taylor a whole different breed of musical artist embracing fast paced rock and roll and not folk music, but his music also represented a later generation of youth that characterizes the era in which the movie was made (1980’s) much more than Oates’s story. Smooth Talk further detaches the story’s social message from the actual social circumstances that the message was created during when a new conclusion was created in order to finalize the story. Although it is obvious that the story’s conclusion was not filmable because of its vagueness and lack of closure, the addition of a new ending recast the message in the spirit of the 1980’s. In the ending of Smooth Talk, Connie becomes a resolute woman characteristic of a 1980’s feminist following her experience with Arnold, which opposes Oates’s characterizing of Connie as an uncertain girl who concedes to Arnold as the story ends. As Oates explains in Brenda O. Daly’s critical essay, “Laura Dern’s Connie is no longer ‘my’ Connie at the film’s conclusion; she is very much alive, assertive, strong-willed—a girl, perhaps of the mid 1980s and not of the mid 1960s” (Daly 149). Furthermore, as the story was transformed into a movie, most of the allusions that Oates made with Friend’s appearance, the “Death and the Maiden” title, and allusions to other writers were lost. Brenda O. Daly explains in her critical essay An Unfilmable Conclusion: Joyce Carol Oates at the Movies that the allegorical allusions from, “Friend’s Satanic appearance and Connie’s role as ‘Everyman’…, Oates’s allusion to Dickinson,… Bob Dylan’s ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’,… and Yeat’s ‘Leda and the Swan’… are, understandably, lost in the film” (Daly 147).  Therefore, although Oates approved of Smooth Talk’s adaptation of her story Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?, the movie was not able to repeat some of the effects that Oates was able to create in her written story because of the limits of the movie medium itself.

Daly, Brenda O. "An Unfilmable Conclusion: Joyce Carol Oates at the Movies." The Journal of    Popular Culture 23.3 (1989): 101-14. Print.

Oates, Joyce Carol. “Where are you going, where have you been?” New Brunswick, N.J:             Rutgers University Press, 1994. Print.