The Stranger (1967) – movie based on Camus novel

So like every young quasi-suicidal disenfranchised intellectual youth, I loved Albert Camus’s The Stranger when I read it in high school.  I felt like the Meursault character was more or less me – isolated, alone, & unsure how humans were supposed to actually act.  I guess finding out I had Asperger’s Syndrome years later makes feeling like that make more sense.  It makes me wonder if being a disenfranchised white guy is a side effect of Asperger’s or just part of who I am, but it doesn’t matter either way.  Anyhow, I had heard that a movie of this existed & I imagined it was some semi-surreal affair based on the cover of the paperback I read.  But I never managed to track it down nor meet anyone who had actually seen it.

By the time I was in my mid-20s I had forgotten about Camus & all the other existential writers of his era in favor of stuff like the Gen-X writers & the American pulp authors of the first half of the twentieth century.  I mean, I would notice when they mentioned Camus in pop media (you see him being read by angsty teens on sitcoms), but it was no more interesting than seeing someone in a Misfits t-shirt or whatever.  Anyway, YouTube somehow recommended I watch this movie.  So I was like, “Yeah, I should watch this, maybe re-read the book & re-live my childhood!”  This movie is pretty awful.  I’m scared to read the book if it’s anything like this.  It’s slow, boring, & pointless – but I guess a lot of people like movies like that anyway.  It actually kind of reminds me of when they made the American Psycho movie & I felt like their interpretation of the book had little to do with the book I read (scenes in common for sure, but some books are mainly about tone & I think American Psycho the film captures more of the director Mary Harron than it does author Bret Easton Ellis – at the very least more Mary Harron than Brian John Mitchell).  Maybe these people got the movie right & I got the story in my head wrong.  Maybe I’ll re-read the book or maybe re-writing it as I remember it (Kathy Acker style?) would be a better way to spend my time.