A film based on the novel Blood Meridian will never work, and this is why.

Films about deliberate incoherence exist - see the "works" of superhack Matthew Barney, for example - but celluloid masturbation for the sake of beating its methamphetamine-injected penis to Oingo Boingo and ejaculating swizzle sauce, can only be done on a small scale. The film must be representative of something intensely-personal to its creator, in order for it to "succeed" - for lack of a better word.

Cormac McCarthy's novels are largely-unfilmable because in a sense they are the opposite of this. They are incoherent tales of masturbatory grandeur, but on a very large scale. No Country For Old Men and The Road - both of which were heavily-flawed - still worked to some extent because the respective directors of the films understood the thinnest amount of cohesion with regard to a "plot" - and I use that term loosely - and worked strongly around that.

Blood Meridian is an altogether different kind of beast. It signifies all the grotesque excesses of Cormac McCarthy's other works, but piles on Grand Guignol-levels of wankery and a pathetic attempt at "introspection" over an enormous, sweeping design that, in the hands of other, ACTUAL authors might have worked - but instead forms an extraordinarily-boring yarn of impossible, incomprehensible excess. Almost as though the novel itself was penned from McCarthy's own ink-tainted semen.

Such an "adaptation" - and I use THAT term laughably - would cost in excess of hundreds of millions of dollars, be six+ hours long, and leave you simultaneously disgusted at its attempts of sophomoric edginess, and yet unrelentingly-confused as to what the creators of the film were actually attempting to signify. It's The Stand, but re-written by an eighth grader with Down's Syndrome, high on meth and smearing himself frequently with Vaseline as he typed, giggled and blew spit-bubbles.

Not necessarily in that order.

A film based on the novel Blood Meridian will never work, and this is why.

Films about deliberate incoherence exist - see the "works" of superhack Matthew Barney, for example - but celluloid masturbation for the sake of beating its methamphetamine-injected penis to Oingo Boingo and ejaculating swizzle sauce, can only be done on a small scale. The film must be representative of something intensely-personal to its creator, in order for it to "succeed" - for lack of a better word.

Cormac McCarthy's novels are largely-unfilmable because in a sense they are the opposite of this. They are incoherent tales of masturbatory grandeur, but on a very large scale. No Country For Old Men and The Road - both of which were heavily-flawed - still worked to some extent because the respective directors of the films understood the thinnest amount of cohesion with regard to a "plot" - and I use that term loosely - and worked strongly around that.

Blood Meridian is an altogether different kind of beast. It signifies all the grotesque excesses of Cormac McCarthy's other works, but piles on Grand Guignol-levels of wankery and a pathetic attempt at "introspection" over an enormous, sweeping design that, in the hands of other, ACTUAL authors might have worked - but instead forms an extraordinarily-boring yarn of impossible, incomprehensible excess. Almost as though the novel itself was penned from McCarthy's own ink-tainted semen.

Such an "adaptation" - and I use THAT term laughably - would cost in excess of hundreds of millions of dollars, be six+ hours long, and leave you simultaneously disgusted at its attempts of sophomoric edginess, and yet unrelentingly-confused as to what the creators of the film were actually attempting to signify. It's The Stand, but re-written by an eighth grader with Down's Syndrome, high on meth and smearing himself frequently with Vaseline as he typed, giggled and blew spit-bubbles.

Not necessarily in that order.

A film based on the novel Blood Meridian will never work, and this is why.

Films about deliberate incoherence exist - see the "works" of superhack Matthew Barney, for example - but celluloid masturbation for the sake of beating its methamphetamine-injected penis to Oingo Boingo and ejaculating swizzle sauce, can only be done on a small scale. The film must be representative of something intensely-personal to its creator, in order for it to "succeed" - for lack of a better word.

Cormac McCarthy's novels are largely-unfilmable because in a sense they are the opposite of this. They are incoherent tales of masturbatory grandeur, but on a very large scale. No Country For Old Men and The Road - both of which were heavily-flawed - still worked to some extent because the respective directors of the films understood the thinnest amount of cohesion with regard to a "plot" - and I use that term loosely - and worked strongly around that.

Blood Meridian is an altogether different kind of beast. It signifies all the grotesque excesses of Cormac McCarthy's other works, but piles on Grand Guignol-levels of wankery and a pathetic attempt at "introspection" over an enormous, sweeping design that, in the hands of other, ACTUAL authors might have worked - but instead forms an extraordinarily-boring yarn of impossible, incomprehensible excess. Almost as though the novel itself was penned from McCarthy's own ink-tainted semen.

Such an "adaptation" - and I use THAT term laughably - would cost in excess of hundreds of millions of dollars, be six+ hours long, and leave you simultaneously disgusted at its attempts of sophomoric edginess, and yet unrelentingly-confused as to what the creators of the film were actually attempting to signify. It's The Stand, but re-written by an eighth grader with Down's Syndrome, high on meth and smearing himself frequently with Vaseline as he typed, giggled and blew spit-bubbles.

Not necessarily in that order.