A minor but charmingly clever example of a film that reflects this protean, highly allusive environment is Richard Kwietniowski’s Love and Death on Long Island (1998), which tells the story of a sheltered British novelist who goes to see an E. M. Forster adaptation at the local Cineplex and wanders by mistake into Hot Pants College II. The novelist develops a crush on a young actor he sees on the screen, who reminds him of a Pre-Raphaelite painting of the death of Chatterton that he has seen in the Tate Gallery. I won’t describe the plot any further, except to note that it’s based on a novel by Gilbert Adair, which offers a rewriting of Mann’s Death in Venice and Nabokov’s Lolita. The film complicates things still more by introducing full-scale parodies of Hollywood B movies and TV sitcoms; it brings high culture and low culture, the literary and the cinematic, into ludic juxtaposition. Notice also that Hot Pants College II, the film that stimulates the lonely novelist’s desire, is a sequel. On a theoretical level, sequels, remakes, parodies, and pastiches are quite similar to adaptations; they seldom if ever involve questions of media-specific form, but all are derivative or imitative, in danger of eliciting critical opprobrium because in one sense or another they copy “culturally treasured” originals. We need only compare the critical discourse surrounding Hitchcock’s Psycho, a film adaptation that some American critics once regarded as a tasteless horror movie but that nearly everyone now acknowledges as a masterpiece, with the discourse surrounding both its sequels/prequel and its 1998 remake, which encountered nearly universal derision.
Viewed from the larger perspective of the engines of modernity, every movie tends to problematize originality and autonomy, if only because its photographs or digital images of the living world are taken out of their initial contexts. Walter Benjamin was aware of this phenomenon in his famous essay on mechanical reproduction, where he quotes Abel Gance’s enthusiastic 1927 pronouncement, “Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Beethoven will make films.” “Presumably without intending it,” Benjamin remarks, Gance was issuing “a far-reaching liquidation” (151). André Bazin was aware of much the same issues in his 1948 essay on adaptation, to which I alluded at the beginning. In this remarkable essay, Bazin discusses adaptation mostly in terms of remediation (one of his examples is a concert orchestra broadcast over a radio) and asks us to think of film adaptations as similar to engravings that make the so-called original “readily accessible to all.” Most discussion of such films, he notes, has been conducted on the level of formalist aesthetics, which is preoccupied with the nature of the “cinematic.” But “one must first know,” he writes, “to what end the adaptation is designed: for the cinema or its audience. One must also realize that most adaptors care far more about the latter than about the former” (Bazin, “Adaptation, or the Cinema as Digest,” 44).
Bazin attacks the “clichéd bias according to which culture is inseparable from intellectual effort,” and the “classical modes of cultural communication, which are at once a defense of culture and a secreting of it behind high walls” (45). He notes that adaptation has a number of important social functions, one of which, not always involving remediation, is directly pedagogical, taking the form of “digests” such as the “abridged” editions of classic literature used in classrooms. (Most film adaptations of novels are in fact digests or condensations of their sources, but one could add such things as Classics Illustrated comics, Reader’s Digest condensed books, and plot summaries in Cliff Notes. Where the pedagogical uses of the digest are concerned, an interesting study could be written about the long and complex relationship between educational institutions and Hollywood. As one instance, Guerric DeBona has pointed out that David O. Selznick’s 1935 adaptation of David Copperfield was marketed to high school English teachers by means of a free illustrated monograph on the art of cinematic adaptation, complete with study questions for students.) Still another function of adaptation, Bazin suggests, is in the creation of national imaginaries. How many of us have actually read Moby Dick, and how many of us have seen one of the comic-book, theatrical, TV, or film adaptations that give it a kind of mythic or folkloric significance for U.S. culture? Some of the most highly adaptable authors—Twain and Shakespeare are preeminent examples in the Anglo-American world—have been especially important to the formation of national identity, and for this reason it would be interesting to have more analysis of the ways books, plays, movies, and TV shows have been subject not only to remediation and remaking but also to cross-cultural or cross-national adaptation. Such uses are sometimes overlooked because of what Bazin refers to as “a rather modern notion for which the critics are in large part responsible: that of the untouchability of the work of art.” The nineteenth century, he says, “firmly established an idolatry of form, mainly literary, that is still with us” (45). And the idolatry of form blinds us to the fact that all great novels—even the ones by Flaubert or Joyce—create characters that can be appropriated for many uses.
At this juncture and many others in his essay, Bazin sounds like a populist and a postmodernist. “The ferocious defense of literary works,” he says, “is to a certain extent aesthetically justified; but we must also be aware that it rests on a rather recent, individualistic conception of the ‘author’ and the ‘work,’ a conception that was far from being ethically rigorous in the seventeenth century and that started to become legally defined only at the end of the eighteenth. . . . All things considered, it is possible to imagine that we are moving toward a reign of adaptation in which the notion of the unity of the work of art, if not the very notion of the author himself, will be destroyed” (49). Some people today believe we have already arrived at that point. I hope not, but it’s time that writers on adaptation recognize what Bazin saw in 1948. The study of adaptation needs to be joined with the study of recycling, remaking, and every other form of retelling in the age of mechanical reproduction and electronic communication. By this means, adaptation will become part of a general theory of repetition and will move from the margins to the center of media studies.
POSTSCRIPT
The argument above is a revised version of an introduction I wrote for Film Adaptation, published in 2000. Several books on adaptation were published in the wake of that volume, and I should mention a few particularly good ones here.
Robert Stam’s Literature through Film: Realism, Magic, and the Art of Adaptation (2005) elaborates further on the theme of dialogism and intertextuality, in the process making significant contributions to the poetics of cinema and prose fiction. With Alessandra Raengo, Stam has also edited two large anthologies, Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Adaptation (2005) and A Companion to Literature and Film (2005), both of which treat adaptation as what one of the writers, Dudley Andrew, calls “the life principle” of cultural production. Guerric DeBona’s Film Adaptation in the Hollywood Studio Era (2010) is an incisive, well-researched account of “prestige” adaptations in classic Hollywood and is especially good at showing how the films in question were shaped not simply by their sources but by industrial and sociopolitical factors. Colin McCabe, Kathleen Murray, and Rick Warner are the editors of True to the Spirit: Film Adaptation and the Question of Fidelity (2011), which ends with an afterword by Fredric Jameson. In modernist fashion, and in contrast with most contemporary writers, Jameson argues that at some level all the individual media and their artists “seek each other’s death, in the sense in which they brook no other gods besides themselves.” The most productive course to follow in thinking about adaptation, he concludes, is to emphasize the “antagonism and incompatibility” between the media, at the same time