The Swan - Roald Dahl Vs Wes Anderson

Sorry it's been a little while since my last upload! Life has been busy, but I'm back with another deep dive into a fascinating story.

In this episode, we're looking at Roald Dahl's short story The Swan and comparing it with Wes Anderson's Netflix adaptation. We'll explore the dark themes hidden beneath Dahl's deceptively simple writing, the shocking cruelty faced by young Peter Watson, and how Anderson's unique visual style transforms the story for a modern audience.

Was Wes Anderson faithful to the original Roald Dahl tale? Does the adaptation capture the tension, fear, and emotional impact of the short story? We'll discuss the key differences, standout performances, symbolism, and what makes The Swan one of Dahl's most disturbing and memorable works.

Whether you're a lifelong Roald Dahl fan, interested in Wes Anderson movies, studying English literature, or just curious about Netflix's Roald Dahl adaptations, there's plenty to unpack here.

Topics covered:

• Roald Dahl's The Swan summary
• Wes Anderson's The Swan adaptation
• Netflix Roald Dahl collection
• Themes and symbolism in The Swan
• Peter Watson character analysis
• Differences between the book and film
• Wes Anderson directing style
• Literary analysis and review

Let me know in the comments: Did you prefer Dahl's original story or Wes Anderson's adaptation?

#RoaldDahl #TheSwan #WesAnderson #Netflix #BookReview #ShortStories #Literature #FilmAnalysis #BookTube #MovieReview #EnglishLiterature #RoaldDahlAdaptation #Podcast #BookDiscussion #NetflixMovies

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello and welcome back to Is the Book Better with me, Jay Martini. The show where we take a book, find the film or TV adaptation, and figure out which one you should actually spend your time with, which one is more worth your precious time in this mad world. If you're new here, the format's simple. I read the source material, I watch the adaptation, then I give you an honest breakdown of both the good, the bad, and what kind of got lost in translation and ultimately which one's better. Before we get into today's episode, a couple of quick things. If you're enjoying the show, like a few of you are, please do leave a review whether wherever you listen. It genuinely helps kind of push me out to more people. You know how these algorithms are. They only kind of work if you're all feeding into it. So if you could give me five stars, leave a comment. I genuinely read them all. And in your comment, if you suggest a film and book that I should compare and contrast, I will do it. I'm a podcaster, but first and foremost, I'm a people pleaser. So go ahead, pop it in there. And if you want to carry on the conversation after this episode as well, go to my social media, BetterDab Project on TikTok. That is where I'm most active, to be honest. Um I kind of gave up on Instagram a long time ago. So see me on TikTok and come argue with me about my verdict. I make little videos about the podcast episode anyway, so you can comment on those if you can find them. They'll be knocking around. Right, today's episode. I want to start with a content note because this one kind of earns it. We're talking about The Swan by Roll Dole, and it deals with child bullying, threatened violence, and animal harm. So nothing gratuitous in either version, but if that's not where your head's at today, maybe uh pop this one on at a different time because it is far darker than what I was expecting from a roll. Because I hadn't seen the adaptation or read the book before today. So let's get into it. When most people hear Roll Dole, they think China's Chocolate Factory, they think BFG, they think childhood. And Dahl absidently earned that reputation. But if you've ever gone kind of spelunking in his adult and young adult stories in his short fiction, you know this man had a darkness in him that uh makes those children's stories uh look positively cheerful, but you kind of see in his kids' stories and children's stories this dark side of him. And here's where he doesn't really sandwich it with anything. There's no compliment sandwich here, there's no good then bad then good. It's kind of all bad. And the swan comes from his 1977 collection, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, and six more. Now, I'd seen this pop up on Netflix a long time ago, and I'm not gonna lie to you, Wes Anderson for me and Benedict Kumbovac for me are relatively hit and miss. Sometimes I can really go with what Wes Anderson's doing, and sometimes it really doesn't, it doesn't um tickle the pickle, if you will. So I had put it off. However, when I started doing this podcast, I thought, hey, that seems like a pretty divisive one because I haven't really heard much about it. Like there's big names attached to it, but I haven't heard a single person who has watched it or read the book, if I'm honest, because no one really dives into the 1977 collection of Roll Doll, if I'm honest. But these were aimed at older readers, and Dole lets his kind of children's book mass slip a little, and it sits alongside other stories in that collection that are strange and occasionally quite disturbing, which I will also be covering on this podcast. This particular one, it turns out, which makes it even worse, and I tell you at the end of the film, was inspired by a real event. Dole kept the newspaper clipping about it in his so-called ideas book for 30 years before he finally wrote it. He never revealed what the original news story actually was, which I'm I'm quite happy because I would do a deep dive into that and I wouldn't have recorded this episode because I would be looking into that news story. So luckily for Procrastination did not win this time. So you have to use your imagination, but he doesn't really leave that many gaps. On the adaptation side, Wes Anderson in 2023 made these four short films for Netflix based on the Dal stories from this collection. The Swan was the second of those four, and like I said, the other three of those four will be covered on this podcast as well because well you'll see why after I get into the review. It only runs for about 17 minutes, and it stars Rupert Friend as the narrator, who is also in Anderson's framing, an adult version of the story's protagonist. Ralph Hines popped up as Dal himself as he does so throughout this series. So that's the setup. Let's talk about what actually happens. So the story's summary and it doesn't really waver on the two. I know we've had some adaptations that kind of go way away from the source material, but it's about a boy named Ernie gets his rival for his 15th birthday. And I'll stop there because what I always forget to do on this podcast, and people have complained at me before, is I don't tell you that there's going to be spoilers. But try as I might, I cannot find a way to discuss a film and TV adaptation and the book itself without spoiling the book. There might be some smarter people out there that could do that, but hey, that's not me. So I'm sorry there are spoilers throughout this. So if you were just about to start watching The Swan, and you were just about to read that book you've had since 1977, and I'm about to ruin it, stop now, go read it, go watch it. It'll all take you about an hour to do both, and then come back. So Ernie gets his rifle and his dad tells him to go out and shoot some birds and bring back some rabbit for supper. That sentence alone tells you everything you need to know about Ernie's home environment. He heads out with his mate Raymond and they embark on a morning of casually murdering wildlife. Small birds mostly, working their way up to bigger things, as you'll see. They come across Peter Watson. Peter is younger, he's quiet, he's sensitive, and he's the kind of boy that enjoys education and is clever. And so these two boys aren't a fan of that. He's different to them and he talked like this, and he's different to that. He's a smart boy, his head screwed on, and they hate that. So he is, yeah, he's the opposite of Ernie and Raymond, and so naturally they make his life hell. What follows is an escalating sequence of cruelty. They tie Peter's arms and legs and lay him across an active railway track. A train passes over him, he survives by pressing himself flat and digging the back of his head into the ground. Then, because that apparently wasn't enough, they take him to a lake where Ernie kills a swan in his own nest while Peter begs him not to. It's awful. It is awful. They cut off the swan's wings and they tie those wings to Peter's arms. Then they take him to a tall willow tree and force him up to the branches and tell him to jump. Now, Peter. Peter's clever and he knows well what I could do really is just kind of get to a skinny branch, they're not going to be able to get me, and I can just get down when they get bored of the torment. However, let's remember they have a gun and they've been killing small birds, so it won't be that hard for them to shoot a full grown boy. And this where Dal, being Dal, does something you don't fully expect. Peter jumps. And for a moment, in his mind, in some bright and dreamlike way, he flies. Um, three people in the village later say they saw a large white bird circling over the lake that morning. Peter crashes into his mother's garden, he's not dead. He tell her, he tells her his legs hurt, and that's how the story ends. Now, my main note when reading this book were very much, what is this? Eden Lake. The film as well, it feels like Eden Lake, just boys tormenting, and obviously there's been a lot of stories in the past about young boys doing heinous shit to even younger boys, and that's what it conjured up in me. It was I genuinely found this terrifying as a story. I've read books that are meant to be horror books and they haven't really touched the sides, but this two stupid boys, you know, pushing each other on to do some horrible stuff, that seems far more likely to happen than a lot of this horror story bollocks. So that's what really got me about this book. I was like, fuck this. I was expecting a little, you know, whimsical puff piece from Wes Anderson, but no, how wrong I was. So we talk about the positive to the book. The first thing I want to say is that Dahl is doing something really precise here with his characterization of Ernie. He's not a cartoonish villain, he's a product. His house has made him who he is. You get these small clinical details, the rifle is a birthday present from his father and the instructions to go kill things. And Dole gives you just enough to understand that Ernie was made this way. It's not an excuse, but it's an explanation, and it's what makes the horror feel grounded and real. And the fact that this is taken from something that actually happened, I just I just don't know. The tension in the railway track sequence is something extraordinary on the page. Dahl draws it out, and you see Watson as the hero because he, being smart, doesn't just panic. He fixes himself, works out what he needs to do to get as low to the ground as possible. And him being better than these boys is the only reason he stops them from catching a case. Him being smarter. But it gets really drawn out and tense. And because you know it's a short story, you're like, is this boy gonna die on these tracks today? Is that what I'm about to hear? And you hear about the vibration on the tracks, Peter working out with desperate logical precision, yeah. And the train might just clear him, and it's unbearable in the best, in if I put it unbearable in the best way, but I don't know. I don't know. It's it's just unbearable. There's also something powerful about the way Doll uses Peter's thoughts. We're in his head. We are with him as he tries to navigate this impossible situation of dealing with two idiots that somehow have his life in their hands. He's just an innocent boy that's bobbing along doing a hobby, and he's now at the mercy of two fucking idiots with a gun. It's heavy. It's heavy. You feel the indignity as much as the danger. It's and the ending, the moment of magical transcendence, the wings, the light on the water, the image of the white bird over the village. It's earned Dahl puts Peter through enough that you want him to succeed, even if it's just in his head, even if it's a dissociation or shark, the story earns that image. But what doesn't work well is the ending is also a little undercooked. You build the dread and tension, but then they kind of just rush it to the end, and we get this kind of this transcendent level. You don't know, it leaves it open-ended, you don't know whether that is true, what's happened, or which obviously, if you think about it for a second, he hasn't flown out of the tree, he's fallen into the river from a great height, so he's probably not doing well, and these boys will probably just walk off and get away with it, and that would be the proper ending to it. There's also a question of Ernie and Raymond's fate, which is nothing, they just walk away. The story isn't interested in the consequence or justice, which makes sense because all they're doing is things that they keep getting away with. So if they keep getting away with it, they're gonna keep doing it, aren't they? You don't just walk up to a boy one day and do this without having done some heinous shit before. This isn't the first thing you do. You don't see a young boy as a piece of shit and go, hmm, I'm gonna tie into the tracks. You've done some horrible stuff before, you've thrown rocks at him, you've kicked him about a bit, you build to this. I mean, if this is the first thing you do, you sure fire a psychopath. However, I want to be honest, it's not an excessive length for a short story, and I think it packs a punch in what it does in that time. I was I was hooked, and yeah, the ending didn't fully satisfy me, but I this made me feel enough for it to feel worth my time for sure. But let's get into the film. The main note I made besides the Eden Eden Lake one was that this film is Wes Anderson, and I'm glad it was. I'm glad this isn't a film that is realistic because it gets rid of all the horrendous stuff. Because I I don't want to see a young boy going through this. They you still obviously see him tied to the train track, but it's still it's filled with whimsy, and you it takes you to a place where you don't think danger can happen. And I know Wes Anderson has made lots of films where danger does happen and people do die, but when they die, they like get blown up and they turn into a puff of smoke. Like it takes a lot of the blood and gore out of things. So I'm glad he made this. Because if someone had made a straight realistic adaptation to this story with handheld cameras and gritty natural, I just it would be like Eden Lake. It would be it'd be fucking awful. And those rural horror things do exist. I mean, I live in the countryside and I still won't go for a run um out in the in the woods, partly because I don't want to. I'm a I'm a tad unfit, but also because I don't want to be a victim of this horror that I've made up. Saying that I've I've I've walked through the woods before and seen people making those little wicker statues, and that's fucked me up enough. No thank you. No thank you. It would be unwatchable though if they made it that gritty realism. And it's not because the story doesn't deserve to be taken seriously, but because the story is already so brutal, it doesn't need that around it. It really doesn't. It does enough. Like I still found the Wes Anderson one horrible. I still found it horror-inducing, to be honest. And it's but however, it is also beautiful, Wes Anderson, and the the staging is fucking brilliant. My favourite part is when he walks down from he walks along the horror uh the horror tracks, walks from the train tracks, and they and he ends up at some stairs and he goes down these stairs, but the stairs have still got the railings on the side from the from the train. I thought that from the tracks, I thought that was pretty cool. But that's just me uh enjoying the cinematography, which was done by the DOP was um a coppola, so I assume he's got some some of those genes in him. So, but the whole thing obviously is a very bleak, dark diorama, and it creates a layer of distance that makes the cruelty bearable to sit with, and like I said, I I just wouldn't want it any other way, really. Um it gives it the fairy tale quality that the ending is hoping for. However, what's strange is the ending is different. The ending ends with the ending ends with, of course, um Watson crashing into his mum's garden and then the mum coming out and be like, my boy, what's happened to my boy, my boy? And he doesn't say anything. Which is fucking horrible. And I didn't like it. No matter no matter what whimsy and diorama bleak back look we put on this, no, don't like it. And I know obviously I always say this because I have kids myself, anything happening to kids is a big fucking no-no. Um, so like I said, I I think I just walked into this one too innocently. So if you do hear this before going into it, understand it may not affect you in the same way because you may be expecting something dark and scarring. But I wasn't, I was expecting Rolldol. And I yes, I know that he can be dark and scarring, but usually with a little bit of playfulness around it, but no, no playfulness here. What doesn't work well about the film though is that it does cut a lot. It goes like, which on one hand is a positive because I do feel that us hearing about his home life does give us it's not meant to be an excuse, but it does feel like that. And I don't want to get into the psyche of a piece of shit, to be honest. I think he is a prick, could have stopped at any time. We didn't hear about the the home life of the other guy who also could have stepped in and stopped it at any time. And I don't really want to hear it. I don't really want to hear about how bad his upbringing is, if I'm honest. He's doing some heinous shit. But hurt people hurt people, as we know. So, but yeah, they do cut a lot out, and you that is cut out from the film. You he gets given a gun by his dad, go kill something. That's all you hear about it. You don't hear about the fact that his mum's like, don't go shoot the birds because it's nesting season, and the dad's like, shut up. So you don't hear any of that. Um the railway track sequence um is quite compressed in the film, but it's still I mean you we could have dragged it out for longer, but I don't know, it was it was tense enough. I felt it was tense, and then obviously there's the Wes Addison styling, um, which I think is divisive for some people. Like I said, if it was more real, I don't think this would be watchable. Um, it would be very this is England, and the mannered theatrical quality that I like may turn some people off from it, and I think that's why not a lot of people watch this. I am gonna watch the Henry Sugar ones and all the other ones as well, the I think the Poison's another one. So I will watch those and I'll come back to them. And shit, I might make this role Dalmont, if I'm honest. Um but yeah, I will come round to the fact that when I'm looking at who is better, which one is better, I have to weigh up a few things. But first we'll do a deeper dive. Dole kept the source news clipping for 30 years. We don't know what happened in the original story, we don't know whether it was a real boy, real bullies, real cruelty of some kind, but the fact that Dole held on to it for that long before writing something suggests it genuinely disturbing him and he wanted to do it justice. And I don't know if there was some cult-like aspect to it with the swan wings, so it may have been something so dark. Let's face this, it's written in 77, so this is taken from 1947, post-war England. A boy is found, I assume, dead with some animal's wings totach to him. That's dark, that's a lot to deal with. And then there's the symbolic work of the swans on the surface, dropping dead wings to a boy and forcing him to jump is sadism. It's just pure sadism, but Darl and Anson after him understand that the image has a second life. The bullies mean it as humiliation. They're saying, you think you're better than us, let's see you fly. And yet Peter takes the image and makes it into something else. He actually flies in his mind. He turns their cruelty into transcendence. That's the whole story, really, in one image. How I've put that, and yes, but obviously we know that the bullies will learn nothing from what happens in Peter's mind. So it is lose, lose. It's a it's a little slither of a win there. And I did like the fact that Anderson added the framing device where Rupert Friend explicitly states he is Peter. So at the start of the film, um Rupert Friend says, and I'm I'm Peter Watson, you know, 20 years on. And I think the reason they do that is to let us know that, hey, no matter what you're about to see, I'm okay. Mentally, probably not, but physically I survived this, which obviously takes weight out of every single scene, but I think makes it more watchable. And at the end of the day, like I said, this is a story about the creation of cruelty. However, I do like the fact that the film admits that. Because I do hate giving excuses to bad people. I do, and I understand there's a whole psychology behind it, and maybe that's me being smooth-brained, but sometimes I wish that we could just be like, that's a horrible person, let's not give them any more time. But hey, if everyone thought like that, we wouldn't have Mindhunter and we wouldn't have solved as much as we did. So, time to pick a winner. They're genuinely different experiences, and I think both versions succeed at what they're trying to do. The book gives you a depth, interiority, and an unbearable drawn-out tension. However, I'm surprised that the film wins for me. Not because it's technically superior to the source material. It isn't. There's some lost nuance, and the inner monologue of Peter is lost a bit. And so is some of the tension. But Anderson's approach does something that I think is genuinely right for the story. It takes a piece of work that in realistic form would be almost two different. Difficult to engage with. And it finds a way to make you see it clearly. The aesthetic distance isn't avoidance, it's the frame that makes the picture visible. That's what got me. I found the book a lot harder to read because it felt a bit too black and white for me. But this film took the edge off. And hey, maybe that's me being soft. But when I see films like Kill List and when I see films like This Is England, and oh what is that other film that was on the tip of my tongue just then? There's a a very I think it's called the the gi the oh gosh. It's about two boys collecting copper wire and something bad happens and it's brutal, and it's a film you only need to see once, if at all. The the calmist giant. Oh, that's gonna bug me. Anyway, you there aren't many films set in northern England where kids are searching for copper wire and it's really sad. So um the film also adds something the book doesn't have in its Dalles thesis stated plainly: the idea that these there are people who get crushed by what happens to them and people who somehow mysteriously, stubbornly don't. Peter Watson is one of the second kind. The film wants you to know that before the credits roll. And the 17 minutes is lean, precise, and a genuinely affecting piece of cinema that doesn't waste a single shot. And I was very impressed. I walked into this blindly, and so for that I will give the book seven and a half out of ten and the film eight and a half out of ten. The adaption just wins. Because at the end of the day, it's half the length of listening to the audiobook. So hey, you've saved some time there. And that's it for this episode of Is the Book Better? Thank you so much for listening. I hope this one gave you something to think about, or at least made you want to either dig out the Dow collection or find the Wes Anderson shorts on Netflix because both are absolutely worth your time. If you enjoyed this episode, please do subscribe, leave a review, and tell a friend. All the things make a difference. Next week, we are tackling Bridge to Terra Bithia. It's a film I haven't seen, and it's a book I have not read. And I was someone who thought I'd watched a lot of films and read a lot of books, but as I've been doing this, I've realized nope, there's a lot I haven't seen, a lot I haven't read. And this one I've done as purely a vetting process because too many times now my daughter has watched films, she should not have seen, and we've had to turn them off. Um, we watched the Sandlock the other day, and yeah, it's a lot more adult than I thought it was going to be. Also, I am going to be back now more regularly. So if you've made it this far, I'm hoping you'll enjoy the fact that I will be coming back more regularly. I will be going back to doing it every two weeks. I'm sorry I've been off. There have been a few personal things going on, as well as that heat wave that wrote off me ever coming up to the attic to film anything because it gets so hot up here you can't stomach it. And I can't open a window up here because obviously you'd just get a load of background sound. So bi-weekly, is that right? It's bi-weekly to a week. I mean the bi-weekly where it's every other week. Um, fortnightly, I will be back in your ears. And until then, I am Jay Martini, and you've been listening to Is the Book Better? Take care.