A Pop Star Enters the Bell Jar

News arrived this week that Billie Eilish may star in a film adaptation of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar.

The Book

I first read The Bell Jar during my freshman year of college. It astounded me. I loved it—and I was haunted by it. The strength behind the sardonic, brilliant voice of the author was endlessly fascinating. I remember that during one particularly shocking and tragic scene, I was alone in my dorm room and my heart felt as if it might leap out of my body.

So it is with great joy, but also some suspicion, that I have just learned that Billie Eilish is reportedly set to star in a film version of this classic autobiographical novel.

Joy—because I am delighted that this book may reenter the cultural conversation again, as it once dominated a large portion of literary discussion.

Suspicion—because many films being made today seem to lack effective, or even decent, writing.

The Actor

It is also interesting that Eilish will star. I did not know that she is an actor. I think she is a great performer and songwriter, but I do hope she has taken some acting classes. Anyone who attempts to portray Sylvia Plath must understand her deeply idiosyncratic personality.

In some ways, the melancholic intensity that runs through much of Billie Eilish’s music does not feel entirely foreign to the emotional world Sylvia Plath inhabited. The history of women in music is filled with artists whose emotional intensity unsettled audiences at first—only to later be recognized as the very source of their power.

First—and most obviously—everyone involved in the film must read the book.

Poems

But they should also read the poems.

During my years teaching high school English, I often introduced students to Sylvia Plath through her poems rather than The Bell Jar. Poems like “Daddy,” “Lady Lazarus,” “Mirror,” and “Metaphors” startled them with their intensity. Even students who rarely responded emotionally to literature would suddenly sit up and listen. Plath’s voice had that effect in a classroom.

Biographical

Sylvia Plath was not consciously a feminist, but she has certainly become a feminist icon. Her ideas and perceptions were far ahead of their time, and her marriage to the British poet Ted Hughes was one of the tragedies of her life.

The knowledge of her suicide shortly after the publication of The Bell Jar deepens and amplifies the troubled perspective she expressed about existing as a woman with a powerful voice in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Make It Good, Please

Therefore, I hope—against hope—that this film becomes a thoughtful and well-made adaptation, one that might shed modern insight on the life and cultural world Plath described in both America and England.

Godspeed to Ms. Eilish and the ensemble working on this project.

And perhaps, somewhere, another college freshman will sit alone in a dorm room someday watching this film, feeling that same jolt of recognition I felt when I first encountered Plath’s voice on the page.

Do Ms. Plath’s memory justice, I beg of you.