Another problem with most writing on adaptation as translation is that it deals of necessity with sexually charged materials and can’t avoid gendered language associated with the notion of “fidelity.” George Bluestone tries to defend certain movies against the accusation that they “violate” their sources; Seymour Chatman spends almost half of his essay analyzing the way Renoir adapts a description of a flirtatious young woman on a swing; and in a New York Times essay that is far less systematic and far more judgmental than Chatman’s, “What Only Words, Not Film, Can Portray,” novelist and critic Cynthia Ozick derides Jane Campion’s 1997 adaptation of A Portrait of a Lady because it “perverts” Henry James, replacing his “gossamer vibrations of the interior life” and “philosophy of the soul” with “crudity,” “self-oriented eroticism,” and “voluptuous gazing” (January 5, 1997). Ozick reverses the standard imagery of high-cultural disdain, making the movies seem less like an ignorant shopgirl and more like a crude, lascivious male bent on despoiling a loved object. I’m reminded of the first sentence of Fredric Jameson’s Signatures of the Visible (1990), a book about film by the most distinguished contemporary proponent of the modernist tradition: “The visual is essentially pornographic,” Jameson declares, as if the very act of translating words into photographic images involves a move toward something bodily and nasty.
Brian McFarlane’s extremely useful and well-informed study of adaptation as translation, Novel to Film (1996), is aware of some of the problems I’ve been describing. It begins with an attack on “fidelity criticism” and contains analysis of an interesting variety of adaptations, including MGM’s Random Harvest (1942), which is based on a best seller, and Martin Scorsese’s Cape Fear (1991), which is a remake of a film based on a pulp novel. And yet McFarlane himself is obsessively concerned with problems of fidelity—necessarily so, because his major purpose is to settle the issue of just how faithful an adaptation can be. He gives us a scrupulous demonstration of the degree to which the “cardinal” features of narrative, most of them exemplified by canonical nineteenth-century novels from British and American authors, can be transposed intact to movies. As he puts it, he sets up a distinction between “those novelistic elements which can be transferred and those which require adaptation proper, the former essentially concerned with narrative, which functions irrespective of medium, and the latter with enunciation, which calls for a consideration of two different signifying systems” (195).
Here as in most other places, the study of adaptation stops at the water’s edge, as if hesitant to move beyond important formalist concerns and ask other, equally interesting questions. Writing about adaptation should be a flexible, animating discourse because it can address such a wide variety of things. As Dudley Andrew pointed out in 1984 in a seminal essay, every representational film (and every representational artifact) could be regarded as an adaptation—hence the very word “representation” (Andrew, “Adaptation,” 96–106). Andrew estimates that more than half of all commercial movies have derived from novels, a figure that may be high but isn’t wildly exaggerated. In 1985 the New York Times reported that one in fifty novels published in this country were optioned by Hollywood (July 14, 1985), and if we extend the idea of adaptation beyond novels, the number of “derivative” films is quite large. In 1998, Variety published statistics indicating that 20 percent of the movies produced that year had their sources in books of one kind or another (authors included John Grisham, Stephen King, Michael Crichton, Howard Stern, James Ellroy, and Leo Tolstoy), and another 20 percent was based upon plays, sequels, remakes, TV shows, and magazine or newspaper articles—meaning that only about half of the pictures that year were “originals” (February 2–8, 1998). Academics have limited the issues at stake, not only by focusing largely on novels but also by insisting on what Andrew calls the “cultural status” of a prior model. “In the case of those texts explicitly termed ‘adaptations,’” Andrew writes, “the cultural model which the cinema represents is already treasured as a representation in another sign system” (97). Precisely; one could hardly expect to find a better definition of what adaptation means to most critics and historians. But the definition reveals that adaptation study in the limited sense is only partly about enunciative techniques or the “cardinal” features of narrative; it’s also about the interpretation of canonical literature in more or less traditional fashion, a system of critical writing that tends to reproduce cultural orthodoxies.
To his credit, Andrew argues that “It is time for adaptation stud[y] to take a sociological turn” (104), although the things he recommends for investigation, while valid, are conventionally literary—for example, the changing history of naturalism in Zola, Gorky, and Renoir. What we need is a broader definition of adaptation and a sociology that takes into account the commercial apparatus, the audience, and the academic wing of the culture industry. Academics need to move the discussion of adaptation slightly away from the great-novels-into-great-films theme and give more attention to economic, political, and broadly cultural issues. For example, we need more analysis of the relation between TV and theatrical film. Postmodern Hollywood has created a virtual genre out of big-screen adaptations of old TV shows (The Fugitive, The Mod Squad, Charlie’s Angels), while, in an ironic reversal, TV has become increasingly interested in the literary canon. Until quite recently, Masterpiece Theater was the major producer of filmed adaptations of “respectable” literature in America, reaching audiences as large as Hollywood in its heyday and probably helping to identify a niche market for the successful Merchant Ivory adaptations of E. M. Forster that played in theaters. By the end of the twentieth century, cable TV was producing a good deal of similar material. In the United States in 1999, the A&E network aired a miniseries based on C. S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower, the USA network produced Moby Dick, and Bravo broadcast a new version of the much-adapted The Count of Monte Cristo. During the 1999–2000 season, TNT produced adaptations of Animal Farm, A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, and Don Quixote. As this list suggests, Edwardian and nineteenth-century classics are the favored sources for “prestige” TV movies, just as they were for classic Hollywood, in part because they have a presold audience and are comparatively easy to adapt. Along similar lines, the literature most frequently adapted for twenty-first-century prestige TV is the popular mystery or melodrama, as in 2011, when Masterpiece Mystery adapted Michael Dibdin’s novels about police detective Aurelio Zen and HBO produced Todd Haynes’s adaptation of James M. Cain’s Mildred Pierce.
The current economic environment, which is characterized by enormous mergers in the communications industry and the growth of home theater systems, makes it especially important for us to understand the purely commercial relations between publishing, cinematic, and broadcast media. We need to ask why certain books (or comic books) become of interest to Hollywood in specific periods, and we need more investigations into the historical relation between movies and book publishing. We also need to ask what conditions of the marketplace govern the desire for fidelity. As one example, an audience survey conducted by David O. Selznick in the 1940s determined that relatively few people had read Jane Eyre and that a movie based on the novel did not need to be especially faithful; on the other hand, Selznick had been a fanatic about maintaining fidelity in Gone with the Wind (1939) and Rebecca (1940) because he knew that a substantial part of the audience had read Margaret Mitchell’s and Daphne du Maurier’s best-selling books (Sconce, 140–62).
In