Tintin gets pummeled by British lit crit

How could they do this to Tintin?

Hergé's comic-book hero is one of the great creations of the 20th century. Which makes Spielberg's film version little more than murder, says Guardian boy reporter Nicholas Lezard, a lifelong Tintin fan


Mr Lezard opines on Tuesday 18 October 2011 :

Coming out of the new Tintin film directed by Steven Spielberg, I found myself, for a few seconds, too stunned and sickened to speak; for I had been obliged to watch two hours of literally senseless violence being perpetrated on something I loved dearly. In fact, the sense of violation was so strong that it felt as though I had witnessed a rape. I use this comparison not as a provocation or to cause unnecessary offence: I am using it in honour of a very good joke made by an episode of South Park, in which the cartoon's children watch the final Indiana Jones film and are so traumatised by what they have seen that they go round to the police station and try to get Spielberg and his colleagues charged with the crime. "What they did to poor Indy. They made him squeal like a pig." The tragic irony of this is that it was Hergé himself, Tintin's creator, who, a few weeks before his death in 1983, anointed Spielberg as his preferred director to make a Tintin film; and this after he had seen, and loved, as we all do and did, the first Indiana Jones film.

The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn
Production year: 2011Country: Rest of the worldCert (UK): PGRuntime: 106 minsDirectors: Steven SpielbergCast: Andy Serkis, Cary Elwes, Daniel Craig, Jamie Bell, Nick Frost, Simon Pegg, Toby JonesMore on this filmThe sense of outrage is palpable, and even after two days I find myself moved to pity; to pick up my shuddering, weeping copy of Hergé's The Secret of the Unicorn, cradle it in my arms, and whisper soothingly to it that everything will be all right; but all the time knowing that, after this, it won't be; nothing will be the same again. The forces of marketing, and of global idiocy, will see to that. But I will try to make things better as well as I can and remind you of some of the things that made Hergé's original one of the consistently great works of art of the 20th century.

The elements are simple: a boy, or boy/man; his dog Snowy; and, in later books, his gruff sidekick, a quick-tempered alcoholic old seadog called Haddock; and a deaf, absent-minded professor called Calculus. Tintin, with or without the others, rights wrongs, rescues the innocent, uncovers dastardly plots, goes on mind-boggling adventures; even, in one book, to the moon (a scientifically accurate adventure conceived some 15 years before people actually walked there). All executed in cartoon form, but in a style grounded in meticulous attention to detail and respect for veracity.

The books grew in sophistication: Tintin's first appearance in 1929-30 was a black-and-white rudimentary anti-Soviet potboiler, little more than propaganda; there then followed a trip to the Belgian Congo, which is childishly but still blush-makingly racist (yet still hugely popular in the post-colonial country); yet by the final completed work, Tintin and the Picaros (1976), Tintin is sporting a CND symbol, and helping, albeit with reservations and only on condition of non-violence, a group of not-quite-explicitly leftish guerillas gain power in a despotic Latin American country. It's a long learning curve.

My love of Tintin began, as almost everyone's does, in childhood. The books were translated into English not in the order written, so for a while the chronology of the series was somewhat jumbled: in one book the cars and other urban furniture are all 1940s; in the next, technology has advanced enough to build a nuclear-powered rocket capable of reaching the moon; in the next we were back to what looks like the 1930s, except that – in The Cigars of the Pharaoh – a desert sheikh is able to proclaim himself a fan of Tintin, even getting a servant to hold up a copy of Destination Moon as testament to his devotion. No matter: any child with the Alice books (or, say, The Wind in the Willows, with its car-driving Toad) under his or her belt is not going to be too fazed by the dream-logic of what we may loosely call postmodernism – that is, a work of art that draws attention to its own artifice.

For the adventures of Tintin, although they might have messed around with the conventions a little, such as with the fourth-wall-breaking direct address to readers at the end of The Secret of the Unicorn, in which Tintin tells everyone to pursue the book's follow-up adventures in Red Rackham's Treasure, never left the realm of possibility. The adventures might have been implausible – Tintin's escapes from capture or near-certain death might have often been on the unlikely side – but there was nothing in them that was flat-out impossible. (Except, perhaps, for the brief sequence in which he learns the language of elephants in The Cigars of the Pharaoh, but that kind of mistake was never repeated, and besides, the book itself is, appropriately enough given its MacGuffin, an opium dream of a story.) There is certainly none of the CGI garbage of the film – its flying galleons, its impossibly-well trained falcon etc etc etc.

There is a truism which states that the very appearance of a comic strip is virtually the same thing as the storyboard of a film – the sequence of images which is the intermediate stage between the script and the final product. This is certainly why comic books do, according to the film-makers who use them as basis for their next franchise, scream "Take me! Take me!". But this is very misleading; a faux-ami, as we call a word that is not the same in French as it is in English (eg sensible in French means sensitive, not sensible). The experience of reading a cartoon is not the same as that of watching a film. It is slow, quiet and intimate, and in childhood would be most typically undertaken while lying front down on the floor, the book in front of one, one's legs raised perpendicularly at the knee, ankles crossed; the classic childhood pose of absorption in a text. The images may contain stories of chase and speed; but the frames can move as slowly as one wishes. And Hergé, who was as happy to have a frame crammed with words as he was to have one with no words at all, allowed the reader to be complicit with him in the speed at which the story was taken.

I would often linger over the pictures as I admired Hergé's famous ligne claire, the style in which caricature and realism superimpose themselves on each other. No one's face may look like Tintin's, with its rudimentary ellipsis for a head and its dots for eyes, like a teach-yourself-cartooning book's first instructions on how to draw a face ("Tintin", incidentally, means "nothing" in French); but when Tintin is chloroformed on page 35 of The Secret of the Unicorn, his right foot lifts off the ground in just the way yours would, were you too to be chloroformed by a pair of vicious thugs. Incidentally, look at the strips again: see how many of them have a character whose feet are standing directly on the bottom line of the frame. A huge number. They are, so to speak, grounded – another subliminal stratum of plausibility, which helps us give our assent to the adventures depicted.

A scene from Steven Spielberg's The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn. Photograph: Sportsphoto/Allstar Being as familiar as I am with the books in English, I thought I'd better have another look at The Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackham's Treasure in French: to slow me down, for my French is not perfect, back to childhood reading speed. This allowed me to appreciate better the art, which, after 40-odd years of reading the books, I had been beginning to take for granted. Hence I finally noticed the impeccable triumph of comic timing in which the Thomsons, putting their bowler hats back on with the dignity which slapstick always subverts, are about to be brained by the enormous files of bogus genealogy that Haddock has just thrown down the stairs (Red Rackham's Treasure, page 4); and finally noticed the little joke at the beginning of the first book, in which, in panels four, six and nine of the first page, we see Snowy scratching himself. Why? Because he's at a flea market! A joke whose corniness is obliterated by the fact that we have to work out the punchline, and even the fact that it is a joke, for ourselves.

But there are other, deeper, darker signals embedded within the books themselves, and for noticing these I have to thank the novelist Tom McCarthy, whose book Tintin and the Secret of Literature, using the astonishing findings of Hergé's biographers (and subsequent interpretations by the French writer Serge Tisseron), touches on an almost incredible story: that the whole Tintin series is a consistent, creative, psychological working-out of Hergé's family secret: that he may well be related to the King of Belgium. A visiting VIP – maybe the king, he did visit – would often pass by the chateau where Hergé's grandmother worked as a maid; one such visit resulted in her pregnancy, the results being his uncles (twins who, dressed identically in bowler hats, suits, and carrying canes, are so obviously the Thomson Twins that no doubt as to the link with them is possible). His grandmother was quickly paired off with the gardener; his subsequent grandfather. McCarthy can give a better account of this, and the subsequent coded resurfacings of this story himself than I can in precis; suffice it to say that his book is one of the few critical works that can truly be called "mind-blowing", and that no adult interpretation and indeed appreciation of the books can now be considered complete without having read it.

For example: I pointed out to McCarthy before we saw the film together that there were an awful lot of beds in the Tintin books. A great deal many more than you would expect in a series carrying the words "The Adventures of …" Tintin has a hospital-like bed in his flat at 26 Labrador Road; we see him in it while Snowy brings him the phone. The Bird brothers, the real villains of the story (not the originally innocent Sakharine, who is the film's baddie), may be nasty pieces of work, but they are considerate enough to provide Tintin with a nicely made-up set of sheets and blankets in which he can recover consciousness; Calculus has made himself a bed in a lifeboat in Red Rackham's Treasure (character and story completely jettisoned from film); and in The Seven Crystal Balls, the next book to be ravished and broken by Spielberg and his cronies, there are beds galore, in which the cursed professors writhe with tormented nightmares. And so on and so on: make your own list of the beds in Tintin. It's fun. (On a personal note, I would often, when feigning or even occasionally genuinely suffering from illness, read all my Tintin books in bed, matching drink for drink, in Lucozade, what Haddock in the books was doing with whisky.) So. What's that all about, I asked McCarthy. Easy, he said: it's because of what happened in bed between his grandmother and the unidentified nobleman.

Interestingly, it becomes clear, from a couple of quite clear references, that at least one of the screenwriters, Stephen Moffat, Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish, have read McCarthy's book. (McCarthy knows Cornish slightly, I gather.) Alas, they have not understood it. There is a great deal about Captain Haddock's genealogy in the film – he is the character who secretly "carries" the Hergé family story in the books – and there is even a bit when he says to Tintin that "you transmit your own signals", an unambiguous lift of one of McCarthy's own riffs. But there then follows a speech, which Hergé's Haddock would never have made in a million years, full of sub-Alcoholics Anonymous self-empowerment rubbish about breaking through walls and finding your true self, which would have made any self-respecting screenwriter insist on having his or her name taken off the credits.

As it is, the film has turned a subtle, intricate and beautiful work of art into the typical bombast of the modern blockbuster, Tintin for morons, and the nicest things one can say about it are that there's a pleasing cameo of Hergé himself in the opening scene, the cars look lovely, indeed it is as a whole visually sumptuous, and (after 20 minutes or so of more or less acceptable fidelity; and the 3D motion-capturing transference of the original drawings is by far the least of the film's problems) it usefully places in plain view all the cretinous arrogance of modern mass-market, script-conference-driven film-making, confirming in passing that, as a director, Spielberg is a burned-out sun. A duel between dockyard cranes? Give me a break. Oh, and the opening credits are nice and witty. But this only confirms a maxim that I have recently formulated: that the closer in spirit the title sequence is to the original from which the subsequent film has been stolen, the more of a travesty of that original it will be.

There may be those who think that to quibble about the traducement of what might be considered a work of one of the lesser arts is to waste everyone's time. But it is not. Something of great subtlety, beauty and artfully deceptive complexity, resonance and depth has been betrayed, and it is time to make a stand.

And Mr Lezard just made his stand! Comments from the Tintin gallery?

Dish!