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Letter from the Editors:
"Windows onto Disciplines"
By David T. Johnson
Volume 39, Number 3
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Is adaptation studies a discipline? Or might we characterize it a bit more loosely, as a subspecialty that recognizes traditional disciplinal boundaries, even while it frequently crosses them? Or, perhaps, is it something even more mercurial than this—at heart, an impulse that understanding the way meaning, narrative, or otherwise, moves across and through media might have something to contribute to our collective knowledge? In recent years, our field has found itself reaching for self-definition, less stable in this regard than the dynamism at the heart of contemporary cinema studies, traditionally the discipline most closely aligned with adaptation, save literature. As other writers have noted, essays in adaptation studies often begin by trying to articulate some sense of what the field’s central methodologies, if not also its objects of study, should be, and while one finds this tendency in other disciplines, our own seems particularly inclined toward a lack of clarity about what lies within its purview and what might be just beyond it. Perhaps this is in part what attracts us in the first place—a sense of possibility for scholars, both novice and experienced, to take part in conversations about the very foundations of our inquiries.
A new, highly engaging volume in adaptation studies should interest readers of this journal not only for the ways it raises these and other related subjects but also for the quality of its individual readings: True to the Spirit: Film Adaptation and the Question of Fidelity, edited by Colin MacCabe, Kathleen Murray, and Rick Warner. Here is a book on adaptation studies, published by one of the most prestigious academic presses (Oxford UP) and collecting some of the most important voices in cinema studies (in addition to MacCabe, Dudley Andrew, Tom Gunning, James Naremore, Laura Mulvey), critical theory (Fredric Jameson, appearing in an afterword), and several new voices who generally live up to MacCabe’s ample billing in the preface. For these reasons alone, adaptation studies scholars will want to read it, and we hope to provide a review in a future issue of LFQ. A particularly fascinating aspect of the book, in light of the issues described at the outset, is the way that adaptation studies is characterized by these scholars, and given that many of them are known probably more for work in cinema studies rather than adaptation studies (even if both Andrew and Naremore have made important and often cited contributions to the latter), one might consider the book to be a window onto the way cinema studies views what happens in adaptation studies. (If, like me, you consider yourself belonging to both cinema studies and adaptation studies, the window will equally at times feel like a mirror, or one turned upon another, in a mise-en-abyme of one’s own intellectual interests.) Looking into the window (or mirror), one finds a major assumption upended: the call to break free of fidelity, once thought to place a writer at the field’s theoretical forefront, is now, the collection suggests, an ultimately retrograde position, with fidelity now assuming a centrality (and even a novelty) it has not seen in some time. Given that this largely goes against much of what adaptation studies has argued in recent years (with some exceptions, such as David L. Kranz and Nancy C. Mellerski’s collection In/Fidelity), my only wish of this provocative volume would be that it had discussed the history of adaptation studies more than it does. But this, of course, depends in part upon a recognition of adaptation studies as a field—a recognition, as this introduction suggests, I am not at all sure is certain, at least within cinema studies more generally. It would seem True to the Spirit signals that we are more than ever at the crossroads Thomas Leitch identified in his impressive critical survey published three years ago in Adaptation; the terms of our discourse, the collection indicates, are still very much in the process of being defined. But rather than see this as a sign of atrophy, we might view it instead as enabling our entire way of working, so that revisiting the past—whether to put fidelity to rest, reanimate it, or take a different approach entirely—becomes a way of setting up conversations for the future. And we hope, of course, that this journal will continue to serve as one such forum for creating these conversations.
We begin this volume with an article profoundly aware of adaptation and cinema reception as a temporal process. In “Hitchcock’s Terrorists: Sources and Significance,” Merritt Abrash reflects on how viewing Sabotage and The Birds from a post-9/11 context informs, for a contemporary audience, the films’ depictions of terror. Abrash argues, “Only in Sabotage and The Birds does terror have a political dimension, and the difference between its manifestations in those two films can now be seen as bearing greater significance than the director could possibly have anticipated” (165). Following this essay, Kevin Alexander Boon investigates the screenplays of David Mamet and what he sees as “two key elements” of the work. In “Ethics and Capitalism in the Screenplays of David Mamet,” Boon centers his discussion around these elements, including “the ability of rhetoric to mask adolescent desire as mature and rational discourse” and “the ineluctable link between this type of rhetoric and American Business” (174). Drawing on several of Mamet’s films, many of them screen adaptations of his plays (including Glengarry Glen Ross, Oleanna, and American Buffalo), Boon posits a kind of “participation” within the “construction of the ethical narrative” (187), thus revealing the two intertwined concerns.
After this, Robert J. Cardullo’s “Death Wish, Child’s Whim, Auteurist Will: Boyer and Clément’s Forbidden Games Replayed” expounds upon the many merits of Clément’s adaptation, one unfairly ignored, according to Cardullo, partly due to François Truffaut’s “blistering polemic” (198) on French cinema, his “Certain Tendency” essay, which famously critiqued the film’s screenwriters Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost. Those familiar with Cardullo’s translations of André Bazin will find it no surprise that the writing here echoes Bazin in the best possible way, as when he notes that “most films repress the knowledge that they are destined to become graveyards teeming with ghosts” (198). Within the piece Cardullo provides a detailed production history as well as a consideration of the ways the film operates within generic concerns—specifically, in the children’s film. Next, Walter C. Metz lays the groundwork for what may yet be a new “subfield” within adaptation studies: the critical investigation of avant-garde cinema as adaptation. As his “With Eyes Upside Down, Can We Still Read?” points out, almost no critical work has been done in this area; here, he “explore[s] three possibilities for thinking differently about the relationship between literature and experimental cinema” (202), methodically working his way through three different avant-garde films (The Sin of Jesus, Egg, and Reflections on Black) as examples of each. Metz’s lucid, engaging style invites other scholars to take up his call and perhaps even adopt his phrase for this new subfield: “experimental adaptation studies” (201).
Following that, Gregory Robinson focuses on what amounts to perhaps two seconds of screen time: the final intertitles of an early film, both cited in the article’s title, “Oh! Mother Will Be Pleased: Cinema Writes Back in Hepworth’s How It Feels to Be Run Over.” Robinson here reflects on past interpretations of the intertitle sequence and he notes how, because it “fails to privilege any single reading, it inherits a level of critical malleability, allowing it to serve as a functional example for any number of larger (and competing) claims” (219). Moreover, what Robinson continually returns to is the intertitles’ “essential strangeness,” both to defamiliarize them for those who have seen the film and generate curiosity for those who have not. And in the last full-length essay of this issue, Martin Rogers also revisits a critical history, this time the one surrounding Bret Easton Ellis’s novel American Psycho and the intertexts informing it (as well as, to some extent, its film adaptation). “Video Nasties and the Monstrous Bodies of American Psycho” sets out, in Rogers’s words, “to restore to American Psycho the presence of cinematic monstrosity as a destabilizing force, one that disrupts Patrick’s social agenda instead of affirming it, and one that restores to Patrick’s relentless first-person narrative the possibility of interruption and subversion” (231). Drawing on horror films, punk rock, the “video nasty” phenomenon, and other concerns, Rogers builds his case through close attention to the original novel and an ongoing dialogue with previous work on the text. Lastly, we end this issue with a book review: Kathryn Barrett-Gaines’s “Timely Topic, Important Argument, Tough Read” has high praise for Michael F. O’Riley’s Cinema in an Age of Terror: North Africa, Victimization, and Colonial History. “[O’Riley] argues,” Barrett-Gaines notes at the review’s opening, “that in this age of terror, we use North Africa as the setting for our fears, perpetuating a dichotomy honed for millennia. He recommends that we rethink this automatic response, and he points to work that suggests a new way out of this old trap” (245). Her succinct, clear survey of O’Riley’s major points will undoubtedly encourage readers to seek out the book, the subject of which returns us to the first essay of this issue.
As a final note, I remind readers of this year’s upcoming Literature and Film Association (LFA) conference, to be held at Central Connecticut State University in New Britain, Connecticut, October 12-14 of this year. Among the exciting events planned will be an address from Laurence Raw on adaptation and the humanities. Although the abstract deadline has passed, more information on the conference, for those who would like to attend, is available on our website.