In/Fidelity. Essays on Film Adaptation
David L. Kranz & Nancy C. Mellerski, eds.
Thomas Van Parys
David L. Kranz & Nancy C. Mellerski, eds., In/Fidelity: Essays on Film Adaptation. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008.
ISBN (10): 1-84718-402-2 ISBN (13): 9781847184023
Despite both critical and institutional progress over the past decade, it appears that adaptation studies will never be rid of the fidelity debate. David L. Kranz and Nancy C. Mellerski’s collection, entitled In/
Fidelity: Essays on Film Adaptation, exemplifies why: after the theoretical evolution, fidelity adherents
have adapted to the changing circumstances by positioning their approach as another alternative within the variety that can be found in adaptation theory and practice. And what reasonable critic will oppose healthy critical diversity?
While in this way this volume of essays (which originates from the 2005 Literature/Film Association annual conference) intends to redeem fidelity criticism, it does not set out to undo the field’s progress, but in fact makes a plea for “a plurality of approaches” in adaptation studies, “rather than the infinity of perspectives promoted by relativistic post-structuralism or the reductive and evaluative approach represented by near-absolute fidelity criticism” (Kranz & Mellerski 2008: 5). However, although Kranz and Mellerski provide a terrific succinct enumeration of the main arguments against the fidelity approach, they neglect to give sufficient arguments why it should be reinstated. Furthermore, I feel the editors move too quickly through their argumentation, leaving a couple of questions to be asked. Firstly, Kranz and Mellerski argue that “the inevitable logic of post-structuralism [...] threatens to deny the advantage of the comparative method in analyses of adaptations and to dissolve the field itself into undifferentiated film studies” (5), but in this way the post-structuralist influence on adaptation theory is effectively narrowed down to chaotic relativism. Also, it equates the anti-fidelity standpoint with post-structuralism, while it may simply also be the case that, as Christine Geraghty has demonstrated, “the most important thing about an adaptation might precisely not be its adaptation status” (Geraghty 2008: 193) – which is an observation that strictly speaking the fidelity stance does not allow for. Secondly, fidelity criticism is more or less equated with comparative analysis as a whole, but this camouflages the main problem with fidelity criticism, which is its assumption that every deviation from the source text degrades the adaptation. However, although this book prefers to continue the fidelity approach rather than turn the page, it does so in a straightforward way, by forthrightly lining up proponents as well as opponents on a continuum, which moves from fidelity over infidelity to critique. In that sense, the anthology is indeed an “example of fair-mindedness and a valuable sampling of the ways critics might respond to the peculiar mating practices of literature and film”, as Richard Vela puts it (Vela 2009: 237). Regarding that particular structure, the essays are not divided into different parts in the book, but the
editors do group them in their introduction. The first section is devoted to chapters that “express the desire for fidelity in film adaptation and/or demonstrate the ways in which several films, despite some textual and contextual interference, manage to remain relatively faithful to sources in one way or another” (Kranz & Mellerski 2008: 5). The book starts off with an account by insider Robin Swicord, who represents the most extreme pole on the side of fidelity. Swicord is a screenwriter (and director) whose screen adaptations include Little Women, The Perez Family and Memoirs of a Geisha, which are the works she discusses – engagingly – in this chapter, entitled “Under the Skin: Adapting Novels for the Screen”. It is perhaps telling that she immediately points out that the ideal of fidelity in cinema is often undermined by contextual influences, for the “business of filmmaking shapes material”: “Not everything in a film represents an interpretive artistic choice, including what ends up in the script” (12). Hence Swicord’s plea for a collaboration on the same wavelength: “When adaptation goes well, usually the director and the writer have agreed on the interpretation of the novel” (14). Furthermore, Swicord also points out that despite the wish to stay faithful to the book, “the dramatist’s concerns often differ from the novelist’s” (23). That aspiration to fidelity shines through in a couple of passages in which Swicord offers a glimpse into her writing process, recounting how she “was very far in there”: “In writing the script, I felt a tremendous blurring of my own boundaries. I would sense someone standing in the room, and I would actually turn and look. After enough instances, I started to think, ‘Well, maybe it’s [the author of the adapted novel]; maybe I’m not writing this.’” (19). While Swicord recognizes that fidelity is not always attainable even when desired, the other two essays in this cluster both argue that seemingly radically unfaithful films are very faithful to their sources after all. In “Julie Taymor’s Titus: Visualizing Shakespeare’s Language on Screen”, Karen Williams’s thesis is that for “all of the changes that Taymor makes to bring this sixteenth-century revenge tragedy to the modern screen, [...] she stays faithful to the ideas and theatrical experience of her source” (24). Many of her arguments, however, remain subjectively vague: Taymor’s filmic additions “are in keeping with the ‘original’ ideas, strategies, and structures of the play” (25); the “rapport between the film and audience” is “very much in keeping with the play’s likely relationship to a sixteenth-century audience” (26); her “visual representation [...] is utterly faithful to Shakespeare’s metaphors” (29); “the graphic nature of the film is faithful to the essence of its source” (35). In sum, according to Williams it “should be clear that Taymor’s goal is to visualize and make tangible the language, emotional experience, and thematic essence of Shakespeare’s play with utmost fidelity” (31). But since “Taymor’s Titus adapts the play to a new medium without changing either its nature or its ideas very much at all” (34), one is almost left wondering whether there are in fact any significant differences in interpretation or experience. Similarly, in “Celluloid Satire, or the Moviemaker as Moralist: Mira Nair’s Adaptation of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair”, Micael M. Clarke makes the assumption that the same meaning can be conveyed through very different means, media and contexts. In Clarke’s words, it “is the purpose of this essay to argue that many of the changes that seem at first sight to make Nair’s film ‘untrue’ to the original novel are motivated by a deeper ‘fidelity’ and reflect Nair’s conscious choices regarding how to adapt a novel to the new medium, using its new ‘language’ to communicate to very different audiences in altered cultural contexts” (39). Basically, Clarke irons out all semiotic, aesthetic and historical specificities (which are in fact adequately summarised in her theoretical part), by arguing that the adaptation “captures the essentials” (39) of the source: “many of us have learned to see how ‘true’ it actually is to Thackeray’s vision, and have learned more about what cinematic fidelity
can really mean” (56). Again, there seems to be no anchor for the critic’s own capturing of the truth and essence of a given work; again, an adaptation is “done well” when done “with fidelity” (39). By bringing unfaithful adaptations back into the realm of fidelity, fidelity criticism now presents itself as being able to deal with adaptations that are not only divergent but also critically accepted because of their creativity; in this way, fidelity criticism not only becomes legitimate, but medium specificity also becomes subordinated to fidelity.
The next section, according to the introduction, shows “how textual and contextual influences draw film adaptations into infidelities of various kinds” (5). However, Robert E. Meyer’s chapter, “‘Like an Angel in a Jungle’: God’s Angry Woman in Ron Howard’s The Missing”, is a traditional comparative case study, which is not written from an adaptation theory perspective at all, but from the angle of genre (more specifically, the portrayal of women in Westerns). Describing how Howard’s film shifts “the stance of Eidson’s novel [The Last Ride] in some subtle and some not-so-subtle ways to a more – albeit still moderate – feminist position” (62), the chapter emphasises in this way the film’s own context, approach and specificity. In “Outside the Source: Credit Sequences in Spike Lee’s Malcolm X and 25th
Hour”, Sarah Keller focuses on two opening credits sequences, describing how they diverge from the
main narratives of her case studies, which “as adaptations [...] make a concerted effort to remain faithful to the sources from which they are derived” (75), in two respects: Keller argues that in form, they are “poetic” (73), and in content, they open up the themes of the films to a larger cultural context and in this way explore them more broadly and universally. In his highly interesting account of “Kubrick, Douglas, and the Authorship of Paths of Glory”, James Naremore takes an in-depth look at the production history of Kubrick’s film and its various screenplay versions, detailing how the ideological tensions in the film mirror the struggle between director and star actor. Here the politics of film production have a much more substantial impact on the final film than the degree of fidelity to the source novel. In “The Small-Town Scarlet Letter (1934)”, Laurence Raw reconsiders this 1934 version “as the product of a complex and often contradictory coincidence of forces operating in and around the American movie industry in the mid-1930s” (110), rather than as genre film or even as adaptation. As Raw concludes, “the circumstances of its production are important in that they show how the process of adapting a literary classic for the cinema – especially in the 1930s – had very little to do with fidelity and everything to do with the constraints placed upon it” (119), as well as with audience expectations at the time. What is striking in this section of chapters is that the deviation to strict faithfulness in the film adaptations under discussion is not essentially different from the case studies in the first section – only the author’s method or interpretation is. What is more, here, the unfaithful aspects (where the film departs from the source) are not only not reintegrated into the sphere of fidelity, the authors largely (or even completely) abandon ‘fidelity’ as a framework (or a concept to understand adaptation).
As described in the introduction, the next three chapters are about “cinematic adaptations which have tenuous connections to their alleged sources or critique central elements of those sources” (5). In “Play Is the Thing: Shakespearean Improvisation in The Salton Sea”, Noel Sloboda interestingly discusses the film as “an unintentional adaptation” of Hamlet (132) through “jazz as a critical lens” (123), but perhaps overanalyses the intertextual connection, unintentionally affirming that intertextuality just does not share the same critical framework with adaptation. The problem with this chapter, though,
is not Sloboda’s confusion of the film’s director, Daniel J. Caruso, with David Caruso (the one from
CSI: Miami recognisable by the sunglasses and the one-liners), but the U-turn in this book’s move
from fidelity to infidelity, as Sloboda reinterprets this pastiche of a variety of sources and genres (“from Biblical to cinematic archetypes, literary to cult-film classics” (122)) as not only an adaptation but a faithful adaptation: “in The Salton Sea’s efforts to depart (or ‘drift’) from the play, the film actually draws closer to it, composing a vibrant adaptation that is at once ‘fresh and ... new,’ and that at the same time highlights the dynamic interplay between performance and composition in Shakespeare’s tragedy” (128). Again correcting the course of the book, Alison Patterson, in “Imaging Subjects and Imagining Bodies: T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom and David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia”, investigates not “the film’s historical authenticity and attention (or inattention) to fact and detail” but “the dynamic between literary and cinematic bodies and human subjects and [...] literary landscape, and cinematic scope” (139). By balancing “Lawrence’s own construction of himself [...] as an aesthetic project” (140) and the relationship between text and images in his autobiographical account against Lean’s film, she explains how both deliver complicatedly different representations, yet are equally concerned with “the problems and possibilities of vision: seeing, showing, and knowing” (150). Significantly, to the fidelity discussion, Patterson adds that “more important than a ‘faithful’ adaptation of a text to the screen is a film text’s ability to perform or produce interesting, viable, and useful readings of the preceding text”, and that this “is perhaps why an unfaithful text may seem faithful, why a faithful text may be uninteresting, and why an adaptation that is not quite an adaptation may revitalize a source text in another valence” (151), which might well function as a comment on some of the previous chapters. Very similarly, in “À la recherche d’une femme perdue: Proust through the Lens of Chantal Akerman’s La Captive”, Ian Olney reacts against suggestions “that Akerman is able to be faithful to La Prisonnière in La Captive by being unfaithful to La Prisonnière” precisely because she captures “the ‘essence’ of Proust’s writing in a cinematic idiom” and avoids “the deadening effect of slavish imitation” (158). Rather than seeing it as a faithful adaptation, he convincingly argues that the film sets out “to interrogate” La Prisonnière (158), for Akerman “launches a post-structuralist critique of the patriarchal discourse of ownership it embodies” (160), using “specifically cinematic devices and references to communicate her feminist allegory of ambivalence” (162). As the editors have introduced this section as one that offers “studies of films from a post-structuralist perspective, highlighting what we might term problematic adaptations: those that either interrogate the assumptions of the source text or otherwise range far afield in their connections to their sources” (8), it seems to link the post-structuralist frame to problematic case studies, but the tenuous connection between adaptation and source text had perhaps better be separated from both the post-structuralist critical perspective and the fidelity issue. While the adaptations in this section have indeed been more tenuous, again the degree of infidelity in the case studies has stayed more or less the same throughout the book; it is mostly the authors’ readings (and more importantly perhaps, their definitions of fidelity) that are changing.
The last essay, “Adaptation as an Undecidable: Fidelity and Binarity from Bluestone to Derrida” by Rochelle Hurst, is treated as a section on its own, and appropriately so, as it is a theoretical reflection on fidelity as a persistent paradigm in adaptation theory, which “is characterized by a strange contradiction where, on the one hand, an awareness of the dangers of fidelity is apparent, but on the other hand, there
exists an often-unconscious unwillingness to move beyond the issue of fidelity” (173). In trying to dismantle the novel/film binary, she proposes to regard adaptation as a Derridean “undecidable” (186): “as an undecidable, the adaptation – situated somewhere between the categories of novel and film, simultaneously recognized as both and as neither – challenges the novel/film binary, thereby refuting the hierarchy that situates the novel as innately superior to the film” (187). The hybridity of adaptation (“at once a cinematized novel and a literary film, [...] both insisting upon and occupying the overlap” (187)) can indeed be one part of the solution to the deadlock in adaptation studies, but at the same time its weakness is immediately visible, namely that a film adaptation is not “both a film and a novel, neither a film nor a novel”, but simply a film and not a novel. In my opinion, a critical model that would dynamically combine hybridity and medium specificity could perhaps be fruitful in this respect.
The last chapter contains a round-table panel discussion on “The Persistence of Fidelity” by four of the bigger names in the field, and is actually the most interesting part of the book, in that, in Thomas Leitch’s words, “the most fun to be had at conferences like this one is not listening to yet another paper but having an extended discussion” (197). Each of the speakers, again organized along a continuum from fidelity to infidelity, first presents his or her position in the debate, with Linda Costanzo Cahir writing about “The Nature of Film Translation: Literal, Traditional, and Radical”, David L. Kranz about “The Golden Continuum of Probability”, Thomas Leitch about “Fidelity Discourse: Its Cause and Cure” and Walter Metz about “A Tale of Two Potters”. On the one hand, Cahir wants to establish an impartial method to evaluate the merits of a film adaptation (in terms of fidelity), and Kranz defends the “comparative textual method” at “the heart of fidelity criticism” (203) because “it is probable that the source will yield more persuasive interpretation via comparative analysis of textual and filmic evidence than through other kinds of salient evidence” (204). On the other hand, Leitch outlines clearly and inspiringly “why otherwise reasonable people insist that film adaptations have a moral responsibility to be faithful to their originals; and what recources are available to adaptation theorists who are suspicious of fidelity discourse” (205), and Metz contends the irrelevance of the argument over fidelity by showing that faithful adaptations “just as much as deconstructive ones hold interpretive secrets” (212). The ensuing discussion is as fluctuating, intriguing and engrossing as many of such conference discussions are in real life, tackling issues at the very heart of the adaptation studies enterprise.
Why does fidelity persist “as a value despite the post-structuralist onslaught” (4), as the editors note? The crucial problem for adaptation studies is perhaps that “the majority of filmgoers nationwide and perhaps worldwide, when they know a film is an adaptation, will compare it to its source and find it at least partly wanting if it lacks a good measure of fidelity” (2); in other words, as Metz puts it, “fidelity, not in the literary scholar’s but in a more general reader’s sense, is the lifeblood of the contemporary globalized Hollywood film industry” (211). However, this presents only one side of the picture, for infidelity is probably as much part of the discourse of filmmakers, reviewers and filmgoers, even if it is not phrased in such terms. In this respect, discourse analysis (rather than fidelity evaluation) would make up an essential part of the “pathology” of fidelity (208) Leitch proposes in his short presentation, which is incidentally a contribution that could perhaps be seen as key to the reading of this whole book on fidelity and infidelity.
References
Geraghty, Christine (2008). Now a Major Motion Picture: Film Adaptations of Literature and Drama. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield.
Vela, Richard (2009). “Of Films and Philandering in Theory and Practice”, Literature/Film Quarterly 37 (3): 237-240.
Thomas Van Parys is postdoctoral researcher at KU Leuven. Email: thomas.vanparys@arts.kuleuven.be
