Smooth Talk was not so Smooth

So after watching roughly 15 minutes of the movie Smooth Talk, I decided it was a movie that completely mutilated Joyce Carol Oates wonderfully crafted short story of "Where are You Going, Where Have You Been?". I think one of her main intentions for ending her story the way she did was to leave the readers hanging and filling in the gaps on their own. Smooth Talk not only extended the story, but they changed the Connie character completely. Only an idiot Hollywood producer would expect us to believe that the fifteen-year-old girl, that just got raped, would be soothed by the melodies of James Taylor and the companionship of her sister. Sexual assault is not a matter that can be treated lightly and a real life Connie would need serious counseling for the rest of her life.

The viewing of this movie also brought to mind other film adaptations of the stories similar to the story of Connie. Almost all movies that retell the stories of the 'Monsters and Heroes' section of our book end happily. How can a story about MONSTERS end well EVERY SINGLE TIME. Films like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Little Red Riding Hood, Alice in Wonderland, and the Wizard of Oz all end on a happy note for each fortunate heroine. In real life and in some literature the monsters end up killing the girls. There is no "whew, it was just a dream" realizations, but instead a nightmare from which they will never return. The girls in the 'Pied Piper of Tucson' never awoke from their nightmare. In Emily Dickinson's Because I Could Not Stop For Death, she confronted the fact that, although people may not like it, death is always around the corner. Ultimately, dark and gruesome movies entailing a young girl's death with no happy resolution is not what sells in Hollywood, but for many poets death is an endless canvas to draw from.