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.
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