Adapting The Joy Luck Club: Thematic Emphasis through Form
Wanlin Li
Abstract (E): The paper investigates how the connection between mothers and
daughters gains prominence through specific formal features in the film adaptation of
The Joy Luck Club (1993). Narrative strategies (embedding and framing) and stylistic
choices (size of shots, camera angle, camera movement and film music) are closely analyzed for their thematic function and significance. In the comparison between the novel and film, the essay revisits the historical argument revolving around fidelity. It provides further evidence for the inevitability of changes in the process of adaptation and urges formally oriented readings as a means to understand the relationship (particularly the difference) between literary and cinematic narrative.
Abstract (F): Cet article met en valeur le thème des liens entre mères et filles à travers
une analyse formelle de l‘adaptation cinématographique de The Joy Luck Club (1993). Il se concentre surtout sur certaines stratégies narratives (emboîtement et cadrage) et certains choix stylistiques (nature des plans, choix des angles, mouvements de caméra et musique). En comparant le roman et le film, l‘article réinterroge aussi les débats traditionnels sur la fidélité. Il démontre avec force que toute adaptation implique nécessairement des transformations et souligne la nécessité de pratiquer une lecture formelle afin de mieux comprendre les rapports (mais surtout les différences) entre la narration littéraire et la narration cinématographique.
keywords: adaptation; mother-daughter connection; thematic emphasis; narrative and
stylistic features
Article
The Joy Luck Club (1993) received enormous popular attention since its appearance.
Eleven weeks after its release, the film grossed $32.9 million at the U.S. domestic box office, ranking the seventeenth among all yearly R rated Hollywood movies. The success was phenomenal considering the usually limited appeal of its genre. Surprisingly, The Joy Luck Club remained relatively obscure as a research topic. Except for a number of film reviews, there were only a handful of critical essays written about the film. Even more oddly, scholarly interest in the film concentrated on its ethnic angle. From Alvin Lu to George Tseo to Joel Brouwer to Peter Feng, critical discourse of the film has revolved around either the Chinese American sensibility, or the authenticity of representation, or the politics of cultural identity. Admittedly, ethnicity is a worthy topic of inquiry with relation to The Joy Luck Club, because it represents a major thematic dimension of the film. However, excessive emphasis on the cultural specificity of the film tended to overwhelm its more central concerns – matrilineal connection and heritage. The strong matrilineal bonds are what the film
tries to foreground in its delineation of Chinese American experiences. ―Certainly,‖ argues Amy Tan, author of the source novel and co-screenwriter, ―the movie‘s context is Chinese-American. But the subtext… involves emotions we all have‖ (190). The universal emotions Tan talked about are conveyed by the central themes of the film which transcend the cultural limits.
Matrilineal connection and heritage are represented in the film not just through the interlocking stories of the daughters, mothers, and grandmothers, but through the way these stories are organized and visually presented as well. Form, as part of the signifying system of film, is thoughtfully planned in The Joy Luck Club to reinforce thematic expression. Approaching the film from the perspective of adaptation will provide us with a good understanding of the thematic role form plays. The Joy Luck
Club is unequivocally an adaptation, since it openly acknowledges Tan‘s novel as its
literary source. In the process of transposing the story from novel to screen, the adapters embodied their artistic interests in their treatment of the literary materials. The narrative and stylistic characteristics of the film are not haphazard choices, but are often intended by the adapters to elicit specific thematic effects. A formally oriented comparative approach to The Joy Luck Club brings into focus the thematic function of form in the overall creative design of the film. Besides, a formalistic study of the film has general theoretical implications. The different possibilities of thematic expressiveness available in the signifying systems of novel and film suggest that, despite many similarities, they are fundamentally separated as narrative media. The suggestion in turn attests to the inevitability, and even desirability, of changes in intermedial adaptation and calls into question the emphasis on accuracy in both public and critical assessments of film adaptations of literary works.
Narrative Restructuring
Amy Tan‘s novel The Joy Luck Club tells the stories of four sets of Chinese American mothers and daughters – Suyuan and June (Jing-mei), Lindo and Waverly, Ying-ying and Lena, and An-mei and Rose. The mothers are all war immigrants. They flee China in wartime with tragic pasts left behind and start anew in America full of hopes for themselves and their daughters. The daughters are all born in America and raised in complete ignorance of all the hopes their mothers have for them. The mothers and daughters finally realize from their struggle for mutual understanding that their lives are inseparably connected.
Structurally, the novel is comprised of sixteen stories told from the perspectives of all mothers and daughters. The narrators tell their stories in interior monologues over individually named chapters, with the only exception of Suyuan. The newly deceased Suyuan speaks through her daughter June in the opening and closing chapters of the novel. The sixteen stories are further grouped into four sections depending on whether they come from the mother‘s or the daughter‘s point of view. The opening and closing chapters, as the framing narratives, deal with the central story of June going back to China to meet her half sisters that her mother abandoned during the war.
Screenwriters Amy Tan and Ronald Bass realized from the very beginning that the raw materials of the novel needed considerable remodeling to become a suitable story for the screen. Generally speaking, film is less tolerant of ambiguities and digressions,
because of its time constraint and the uninterruptible nature of the film viewing experience. This characteristic exerts control over the pacing and structuring of the narrated events (Abbott 114-116).
Amy Tan and Wayne Wang knew that the multiple narrative fragments of the novel could raise a problem for the cohesion of the movie (Tan, ―OOF‖ 181). They responded to the problem by restructuring the story in several ways. The film narrative was constructed around a farewell party for June, which in the course of progression is frequently interrupted by the stories from June and the three surviving Joy Luck mothers. The bon voyage party was used as a framing device to bring together all narrative segments. Although the screenwriters retained most of the stories from the novel, they reshuffled the remaining stories. The mother and the daughter narratives are no longer grouped separately and juxtaposed in the film, but are mixed in a stratified mode of narration. June and the three surviving mothers are the frame narrators in the film. Their recollections are directly triggered by the events at the party. The three other daughters belong to a subordinated level of narration. Their stories grow out of the reminiscence of their mothers. Complicated as the structure sounds, the audience can basically follow the transitions without losing track. All stories from the mothers are strung together by a common motif of loss and hope. The motif emphasizes the commonality of the Joy Luck mothers and draws attention to their shared memory of and experience in China.
A few temporal rearrangements were made to effectuate the framing device. The storytelling in the novel begins with June‘s memory of her newly deceased mother before an upcoming Joy Luck meeting. The news of her long lost sisters having been found is not broken to her until towards the end of the meeting in the novel, and the plan for her trip back to China not discussed until then. The more leisurely story time of the novel is condensed in the screenplay by combining the Joy Luck meeting with the bon voyage party as the starting point of the filmic narration. The news is narrated as a backstory in a flashback. The condensation is made partly out of the practical consideration to save screen time, but is invested with aesthetic and thematic interests as well. The condensation concentrates practically all dramatic events taking place in the enunciative present of the film in the farewell party. It gives the film narrative the appearance, albeit a false one, of being dramatically unified. (The time, space and action of the narrative are not exactly in unity because all flashback stories have different temporal and geographical settings.) More importantly, the family party creates an opportunity to bring the family members in a commonly inhabited cinematic space so as to express a spatial sense of mutual connectedness.
To strengthen the effect, a panning camera movement is chosen to introduce the characters at the very beginning of the film narrative when it follows June across the boisterous house. The conventional need of the camera to follow a moving character masks its thematic suggestiveness. Louis Giannetti observes, ―[p]an shots tend to emphasize the unity of space and the connectedness of people and objects within that space‖ (108). The panning camera moves in an uninterrupted fashion and presents the characters in a spatial continuum, both of which suggest the interconnection of people in the screen space. In the family picture sequence, the camera pans from June across
the three pairs of mothers and daughters for a similar purpose of highlighting their closeness and intimacy.
The framing device reorganizes the fragmented stories into a series of thematically connected flashbacks, and by tying up loose ends in the novel narration, provides the film narrative with more unity and coherence. The other thematically meaningful restructuring strategy is coupling and embedding. The screenwriters paired up the mother and the daughter narratives and embedded them instead of juxtaposing them as the writer did in the novel. The coupling and embedding further integrates the fragmented narratives in a way that reinforces the themes. The coupling gives prominence to the connectedness between the Joy Luck mothers and daughters. It becomes even clearer in this narrative mode how the mothers‘ experiences cast shadows or shed light into the lives of their daughters. The story-within-a-story structure as a result of the embedding strategy also foregrounds maternal protection and influence. The mother narratives overarch the daughter narratives in each pair of stories and they form a visual layer of protection. These restructuring strategies break the autonomous surface of the novel narrative segments to accentuate their inner connection.
Although the novel narrative looks fragmentary because of its juxtaposition of sixteen independent stories, it is far from an additive sum of unconnected components. Actually, the novel writer employs many literary devices to unfold the stories into a narrative gestalt. Narrative gap and complementary perspectives are among the techniques. The characterization of Ying-ying provides a good example. June reports early in the novel narrative that ―[a]untie Ying has always been the weird auntie, someone lost in her own mind‖ (Tan, ―JLC‖ 35). The narration opens up several gaps. Why is Ying-ying weird? Or more exactly, why does she look weird to June? Is June‘s observation an accurate representation of Ying-ying‘s personality? Although it is unknown whether June‘s perspective is reliable or not by now, it tends to make a strong impression on the reader because of its privileged position in the overall narrative (the beginning). The reader‘s impression of Ying-ying is confirmed later when Lena narrates that her mother is chased by ―the unspoken terrors that surrounded [their] house‖ and that she ―[hides] in a secret dark corner of her mind‖ (Tan, ―JLC‖ 103). The overlaps of June‘s and Lena‘s perspectives as pertaining to Ying-ying attest to their reliability as narrators. The first narrative gap is hence partly filled in. Ying-ying appears to be weird because inside she is haunted by horror. However, Lena‘s narration leads to a further gap – Why is Ying-ying haunted? Ying-ying‘s self-narration becomes the final revelation. The horror that haunts Ying-ying is a psychological vestige of her traumatic experience in China. She deliberately keeps her secrets to herself and is therefore burdened by them. In the eyes of others, she becomes a weird old lady constantly lost in her own thoughts.
By far, all narrative gaps are filled in and all knots are undone. In the process of filling in the gaps, the formal boundaries of the stories are broken down to give way to the construction of a narrative gestalt. Stephen Souris coins the term ―inter-monologue dialogicity‖ to conceptualize the possibilities of connection across discontinuous narrative segments in The Joy Luck Club (100). Nonetheless, the
interaction between the formal independence and the internal connection constitutes the subtlety of the novel. The restructuring strategies cause the film narrative to lose a considerable part of its subtlety, but as a compensation they gain the film unity and coherence, which are, generally speaking, more prized goals for cinema. Above all, the strategies bring the film form to bear upon its themes and articulate the themes in a way that has immediate sensorial impacts on the viewers. Wayne Wang said in an interview about the structuring techniques of the screenplay: ―They may not be obvious to the viewers, but subconsciously it will make a difference to them‖ (Tibbetts 3).
The restructuring strategies also motivate changes in the original storyline. Since some of the novel stories were not connected closely enough to be paired up under a common motif, the adapters needed to make adjustments. For example, in the novel Rose‘s marital problem does not exactly arise from her ignorance of her own worth, as in the case of her grandmother. It has more to do with her inability to make decisions and take responsibility. In the movie Rose is transformed into an excessively loving and indulgent wife, so much so that her husband Ted takes her for granted. Rose‘s story is changed so as to produce thematic consistency with that of her grandmother. The screenwriters made a couple of other compromises in the storyline to foreground the matrilineal connection. They changed the ending of Rose‘s story even at the cost of plausibility to emphasize her grandmother‘s inspiration to her. In the novel, the story of her grandmother does give Rose the spirits to stand up to her egocentric husband in their divorce negotiation, but it does not save her marriage from falling apart as it does in the movie. The drastic change of situation is contrived to the point of implausibility, but it is designed as such for understandable reasons. Apart from the need to justify the coupling, the screenwriters made the adjustment as the overall narrative structure anticipates. The similarities in the Joy Luck mother/daughter relationship create a parallelism between all the four sets of mother/daughter stories. Although the temporal progression of the party lends the storytelling a bogus sense of linearity, the parallelism is powerful enough to wield influence upon the film narrative. Both June‘s and Waverly‘s stories end in happy resolutions – June‘s in reunification and Waverly‘s in reconciliation. The parallelism would have been seriously compromised if Rose and Lena ended up all alone in their collapsed marriages. That is one of the reasons why the screenwriters gave Lena a thoughtful new husband to redeem her marital failure.
If we think of film as a commodity (as we should), the change is where audience expectation and generic convention come into play. Tom Ryall characterizes genre as a negotiation between producers, film and audiences (qtd. in Lacey 46). Genre creates expectations and delimits the verisimilitude of any genre film (Neale 32). However, the definition of genre has always been a much contested theoretical terrain. The result is an ever-expanding repertoire of generic elements. The elements most relevant to the present analysis are theme and mood. The major themes of The Joy Luck Club center upon familial bond and connection, and the film is charged with emotion and familial warmth in mood. A sad ending in such dramatic contexts would be more or less jarring. Admittedly, both novel and film are subject to the constraints of generic convention, but the commercial dimension of film normally leaves filmmakers more
cautious with transgressions than novel writers.
Whatever the reason(s) for these changes, their thematic effects are indisputable. The change of plot conforms to the aesthetic requirement for consistency and coherence, and contributes to thematic emphasis as the modified plot brings matrilineal connection into structural salience.
The Cinematic “Language”
Although the narrative structure of Amy Tan‘s novel has been declared by many to be utterly uncinematic, the screenwriters managed to transform the novel into an effective and arguably successful filmic code of narration. Moreover, in the process of transformation, the unique narrative grammar of film has been exploited to serve thematic expression. Style is another distinctive formal aspect of film that the adapters have at their disposal for thematic representation. As distinguished from style in a literary sense, film style denotes the systematic use of cinematographic techniques. According to David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, when the use of cinematographic techniques is patterned, it becomes recognizable as the style of the film (389). Many of the cinematographic choices in The Joy Luck Club, if brought under close scrutiny, carry the thematic intentions of the adapters. Interestingly, these stylistic features, usually inconspicuous in nature, deliver thematic messages to the subconscious and even the unconscious of the viewers.
The choice of shot figures importantly in the stylistic representation of the connection between the Joy Luck mothers and daughters. Connection takes different forms with different pairs of mothers and daughters in The Joy Luck Club. In the cases of June and Suyuan and Waverly and Lindo, their connection can be characterized by tension and reconciliation, and is constantly enacted through arguments. A notable stylistic feature of the argument sequences is that the arguing mothers and daughters are framed almost always in separate shots and reverse shots, rather than in over-the-shoulder shots. The visual separation is a metaphor of their mental difference and an allusion to their sense of alienation. The camera angle used in the verbal drama carries meaning as well. Even as little girls, June and Waverly are photographed in eye level shots, not from high angles as children often are in films about adults. The eye-level camera gives equal emphasis to the mother and the daughter and increases the emotional strain of their arguments.
The only exception to the above rule is the argument between Suyuan and June after the crab dinner. The mother and daughter appear in a series of over-the-shoulder shots and two shots (Film stills 1-3). The over-the-shoulder shots are substituted for
the more usual shot/reverse shot pairs for contextual reasons. Unlike other
confrontation scenes, this time the mother/daughter confrontation concludes with reconciliation – Suyuan and June dispose of their misunderstandings after an outpouring of true feelings. The argument offers an opportunity of communication for them to clear away the barriers that estrange them emotionally. The over-the-shoulder shot allows Wayne Wang and his cinematographer Amir Mokri to keep both of their
subjects in view before they finally unite them with the two-shot (Still 3). It marks the narrative transition from alienation to understanding and prepares for the visual as well as symbolic union of June and Suyuan in the concluding shot.
Film stills 1, 2 and 3 (upper left, upper right and bottom)
Similarly, the two-shot functions to create a shared space for the mother and daughter in the barber shop sequence when Lindo and Waverly fix their problem over an argument. The two-shot is used consistently for the sequence, but with significant variations to create a sense of narrative progression (Film stills 4-7). At the beginning of the sequence, we see Lindo and Waverly sitting way apart from each other on the opposite sides of the barber shop (Still 4). Lindo is covered in a black towel, waiting for her hair to be done. Waverly has a white dress on and is absent-mindedly flipping through a magazine. Neither of them speaks. Lindo is photographed in the profile position, looking off screen to the right, and Waverly in the quarter turn slightly facing the left of the frame, which means they are almost back-to-back to each other. The formal oppositions (right and left, foreground and background, and black and white), in collaboration with their physical distance and silence, characterize the brooding tension between them. The two-shot then brings the mother and the daughter into physical proximity as the tension quickly climbs to a bursting point (Stills 5 & 6). It finally juxtaposes the mother and daughter when all the tension and antagonism drain away because of their candid confession of the innermost feelings (Still 7). The stylistic treatment of their confrontation and reconciliation through a series of subtly varied two-shots has increased the expressiveness of the scene.
Noticeably, mirror feature s prominently as a symbolic image in the scene. The camera frames Waverly looking into a wall mirror in the barber shop, when she starts narrating her experience as a child chess champion and her recent relationship with Rich, both of which are characterized by Lindo‘s powerful influence over her. The entire confrontation between Waverly and Lindo takes place before a mirror. The mirror reappears in Lindo‘s memory of her mother on the eve of their separation. The recurrent mirror image has narrative functions to fulfill, for example, eliciting a moment of self-consciousness to provide motivation for the memories of the pasts. However, the more important function of the mirror image is its symbolism. On the symbolic level, the mirror testifies to the fact that the matrilineal ties have permeated not only the lives, but also the consciousness of the mothers and daughters. When the daughters search through their personal histories for their own selves, they find their mothers to be an inseparable part of them. Symbolism increases the expressional capacity and the emotional power of the mise-en-scènes in this scene. The film image, observes the French semiotician Jean Mitry, ―[f]ar from limiting what is represented to its representation,‖ ―suggests a vista beyond the representation but originating in it exclusively‖ (45, italics original).
Film stills 4, 5, 6 and 7 (upper left, upper right, bottom left and bottom right)
To enhance the psychological drama of the arguing scenes, close-ups and medium shots are used predominantly in the film. Because of their ability to capture all details in the facial expression and body language, they make thoughts and feelings of the characters ―visible.‖ Compared with a literary narrator, the camera has very limited means to penetrate feelings and thoughts due to its tendency to record events from without. The limitation poses a challenge for the adapters of The Joy Luck Club. There are a great number of mental activities in the novel which lack the visual qualities to be properly translated into the cinematic language. The psychological activities
command serious attention from the adapters also because they serve multiple narrative functions. They bridge the shifts in narration, motivate plot development, and above all, cue the interpretation of the themes. For example, at the Joy Luck Club meeting soon after her mother‘s death June disappointedly feels that her mother‘s life has been ―shelved for new business‖ (Tan, ―JLC‖ 29). She corrects her impression later on when she learns that her Joy Luck aunties have written for her mother to find her long lost sisters and even donated a generous sum of money to sponsor her trip to China. The incident shows how a personal perspective can err and foreshadows the misinterpretation between mothers and daughters.
Translating all of the psychological activities is a daunting task, if not an altogether impossible one. Apart from resorting from time to time to the telling mode of representation, for example, voice-overs, the film adapters manipulated the shot size to compensate for the loss of internal drama. Since close-ups have the power to offer ―the microdrama of the human countenance,‖ they allow the viewers to make inferences about the psyche of the characters through its focalized external expression (Bluestone 27). The same could be said of medium shots and the part of external expression they call into attention – the body language. The audience knows that June has butterflies in her stomach about taking her mother‘s place at the Joy Luck Club mah jong table even without being told. The visual effects of her nervously rubbing hands and sluggish movement are tantamount to the verbal presentation of her secret doubts: ―How can I be my mother at Joy Luck?‖ (Tan, ―JLC‖ 27)
The shots, camera angle and movement jointly convey a visual sense of connection that saturates the film with familial warmth. The soundtrack, as part of the film‘s stylistic design to shape meaning, enacts the connection aurally.
The score of The Joy Luck Club is by the talented British composer Rachel Portman. It is composed with both Chinese and western instruments, a deliberate decision to echo the theme of cultural and generational clash and reconciliation. The flute and erhu solos in the overture give the score a strong ethnic flavor, summoning to mind the mysterious Chinese pasts of the Joy Luck mothers. As more western instrumentations join the performance, the ensemble crescendos into a resonant climax. The coexistence of contrasting sounds represents the conflicting values and traditions the Joy Luck mothers and daughters have to cope with. The harmonized ending recalls the reunification of June and her sisters and symbolizes the final resolution of the conflicts between mothers and daughters. As regarding style, the score flows fluently and peacefully from the beginning to the end. The tone is pleasant on the whole, although tinged with sadness at points to embody the sense of loss and hope.
Although novel and film are different ―modes of engagement,‖ according to Linda Hutcheon, the stylistic devices of the film can find literary counterparts that approximate their effects in shaping thematic expression (22). At the Joy Luck Club meeting, June makes small talk with her aunties over the mah jong table. The talking is not really much, but whenever a surviving mother brings up a comment or a question, June seems always to be able to provide a long back story attached to that remark. Lindo‘s bragging about her Chinese family elicits from June the story of An-mei‘s unpleasant experience with her Chinese relatives. Lindo‘s question about her going
back to school reminds June of her argument with Suyuan on the same topic and makes her realize how Suyuan has possibly communicated the matter to Lindo. Associating every casual remark from the mothers with a background story from June helps the reader envision the Joy Luck mothers and daughters as closely connected in a community where people have intimate knowledge of the histories of each other.
Amy Tan regards The Joy Luck Club as ―a movie that was personal and intimate, that had more to do with universal emotions than specific cultural concerns‖ (―OOF‖ 190). The narrative and stylistic choices of the adapters play an indispensable role in endowing the film with a sense of universality. The film adopts a narrative structure that foregrounds its major theme of universal relevance–matrilineal connection–in an ethnic background and employs various cinematographic techniques to bring the connection into audio-visual relief. Form in The Joy Luck Club is encompassed into the thematic construction of the film.
In their process of exploring film form for its potentiality in reproducing the central theme of the novel, the adapters have shown us the difference between the signifying systems of novel and film. The textual analysis of The Joy Luck Club adaptation demonstrates that transposing a story from print to screen entails changes because of the existence of these differences. Theoretical discussions on the inevitability of change in adaptation can be found in the works of leading film critics such as Brian McFarlane and Robert Stam. McFarlane maintains that the different codes of narration differentiate film and novel (19). Stam argues that the automatic difference of the media leaves fidelity neither likely nor desirable in adaptation (17). When fidelity is becoming an increasingly vexed topic in adaptation studies, thematically oriented readings of novel and film from a formal perspective suggest an alternative direction that may help settle existing controversies.
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Wanlin Li is finishing her MA at the Department of English of Peking University and will begin the PhD program at The Ohio State University in September 2010. Her main areas of interest include Chinese American literature, the relationship between literature and film (with a special focus on adaptation studies), and narrative theory.
