Last night I watched Hitchcock’s Rope (1948) and, not done with it yet, this morning I listened to the 1983 BBC radio version of the original 1929 play. The differences between the two are fascinating.

They both follow the same basic plot, opening on the murder of a young man by two of his friends, who then hide the body in a chest in their living room, waiting until after a party they’re throwing to dump the body in a lake. The story takes place more or less in real time: we follow them throughout the party, which includes both the victim’s father and a kindred spirit of theirs, Rupert Cadell. One of the murderers is unrepentant, the other coming undone with fear and guilt.

As much as anything else, it’s an exercise in how different two works can be while sharing identical plots and a good chunk of dialogue.

 

( Spoilers for Rope, I suppose )

 

There's an idea that I've seen from time to time about Nie Huaisang and his secret talents and how he might lead the Nie to a gentler cultivation path, usually involving fan cultivation as opposed to sabre cultivation. This is a really cool idea and if anyone has recs I'll take 'em, but...

...one thing that I find gives a lot of depth to MDZS is that the strength of a character's golden core has very little to do with their talent. Wei Wuxian is a genius with or without his core and indeed is forced to greater heights of innovation by losing it. Jin Guangyao has a weak core and thus supplements his cultivation with versatility; his meteoric rise has very little to do with his cultivation one way or another. I'm not even sure Xue Yang has a golden core, but he's nevertheless one of the most dangerous people in the novel. And Nie Huaisang, who was always a late bloomer at best and didn't even form a golden core until Sunshot, destroys his enemy without ever drawing a sword or humming a note.

On the flipside, the great and terrible Wen Ruohan, the most powerful cultivator of his generation, isn't defeated by the rising bull Nie Mingjue, or even one of the Jades of Lan, but his unassuming lieutenant, so weak in his cultivation that he needs Wen Ruohan's help to beat a shackled prisoner, but who has the brains and the cunning to get the drop on him.

Thus I don't love secretly powerful Nie Huaisang. It's more interesting to me if he's exactly as low in cultivation as he appears, because it strengthens the parallel with Jin Guangyao, who also faced an enemy who was much stronger than him (two, in fact) and destroyed him with guile and not power.

Time to dust off the old Dreamwidth and see how it goes.