Showing papers in "Literature-film Quarterly in 2013"

Rematerializing Adaptation Theory

Abstract: Of all the figurative tropes operating in adaptation studies today, one of the most prevalent is that of film adapters "using the source as raw material" (Hutcheon 7): In Novels into Film, George Bluestone writes that "the film-maker merely treats the novel as raw material and ultimately creates his own unique structure" (ix); Brian McFarlane claims that "[n]ovel and film can share the same story, the same 'raw materials,' but are distinguished by means of different plot strategies" (23); and Thomas Leitch complains that most academic study of adaptation "allows only one creator per project and dismisses other claimants as either the creators of so much raw material... or servile imitators" (65). As per Leitch, Bluestone and McFarlane imagine adaptation as a hierarchical process in which adapters convert crude materials into more refined objects-a process that casts books as natural resources and adapters as drillers, miners, and quarriers employed in the business of natural resource extraction. Some raw materials may be scarce, others abundant; some raw materials may be renewable, others not; and some raw materials may be more malleable and more easily manufactured than others; but for Bluestone, "[t]he moment the film went from the animation of stills to telling a story, it was inevitable that fiction would become the ore to be minted by story departments" (2). Adapters stock and store stories.This enduring trope raises the question of what adapters adapt when they adapt and, when taken to its extreme, suggests its own potentially rich and as yet untapped resource for adaptation scholars: namely, the material culture of the adaptive process. What happens, for instance, if adaptation scholars consider the ways in which filmmakers adapt physical-as well as textual-matter? That is, can we read Bluestone and McFarlane s model of adaptation not as analogical, but as homological ? Considering the raw materiality of adaptations, after all, may offer adaptation scholars one way to partake in the "long-overdue materialising of adaptation theory" that Simone Murray proposes in The Adaptation Industry (12), albeit a far less metaphorical materializing than Murray means. If Murray's intervention in adaptation studies represents an attempt to "rethink adaptation, not as an exercise in comparative textual analysis of individual print works and their screen versions, but as a material phenomenon produced by a system of interlinked interests and actors" (16), then rethinking adaptation in terms of raw materiality would allow for nonhuman actors to take their rightful place alongside the adaptation industry's more literal and literary agents. Rematerializing adaptation theory to account for such actors would recast Murray's adaptation industry as a Latourian collective of humans and nonhumans-hardly a stretch for a field already somewhat hospitable to the "homology between biological and cultural adaptation" (Bortolotti and Hutcheon 444). Such a model of adaptation would follow from Kyle Bishop's notion of "assemblage filmmaking," in which filmic works of art incorporate "raw materials from other art works and artists in the creation of a newly constituted work," as in the syncretic processes of assemblage, collage, and medley (264); while Bishops model is based in "raw materials," however, his line of inquiry is intertextual in the strictest sense of the term, with films drawing from "an assortment of antecedents and combining ideas, images, plot points, characters, motifs, and tropes from multiple books, stories, plays, poems, films, other works of art, and historical events" (269). Films can and do draw from materials, though; intertexts need not be texts at all. Expanding the category of source texts to include different matter makes way for an intermaterial model of adaptation to complement the intertextual and intermedial models already at play in the field of adaptation study.Seismic shifts in film studies over the past decade have arguably precipitated an intermaterial approach to adaptation, particularly film studies' recent "self-examination concerning the persistence of its object, its relation to other time-based spatial media, and its relation to the study of contemporary visual culture" (Rodowick vii). …

Re-Envisioning the Faust Legend: Christopher Marlowe's the Tragical History of Doctor Faustus and Richard Burton and Nevill Coghill's Doctor Faustus

Abstract: On 2 October 2011, an adaptation of Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus closed at the Globe Theatre. The trailer for this play suggests that "[w]e all want what we can't have" and asks the audience to consider the following question: "What would you sell your soul for?" ("Shakespeare's Globe"). Interestingly enough, this trailer highlights the sin of covetousness - wanting what we cannot have - which arguably is the most predominant sin in a postmodern world driven by credit economies. But this has not always been the case: each era grapples with its own major problem, its own "mortal" sin.With roots in both morality plays and medieval legend,1 Marlowe's The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, which I will henceforth refer to as Faustus, purportedly first appeared on the English stage around 1 588 (Deats, Doctor Faustus 5, 1 ). As a controversial blend of history and fiction, Faustus lends itself to debates over which sin causes Faustus's eternal damnation. Although critics have attributed Faustus s fall to every imaginable sin - from gluttony to slotJh2 - the majority of criticism locates pride as the predominant sin in Marlowe's play.3 Alternatively, in The Lefi Hand of God, John P. Cutts contends that Faustus's fall results from his "proneness to lechery," submitting that "Faustus sells his soul not for wealth, power, and empire, the limitless confines of man's mind in his search for the infinite, but for a cheap orgasmic thrill brought on not by coition but by sexy thoughts" (136). Even if they consider lechery a subset of pride, those viewing lechery as Faustus's primary failing pay particular attention to his interactions with Helen of Troy. In his landmark essay "The Damnation of Faustus," W. W. Greg interprets the usage of "spirit" to mean "devil" and therefore views Helen as a succubus, one that literally sucks forrJi Faustus's soul from his body (103, 106). According to Greg, "In making [Helen] his paramour Faustus commits the sin of demoniality, that is, bodily intercourse with demons" (106). Thus, in Greg's reading, though Faustus adopts an "infernal nature" when signing his pact with the devil, he is not truly damned until he commits the sin of demoniality (103, 107).Other scholars have endorsed Greg in their readings of Faustus. In her introduction to the New Mermaid edition of Faustus, Roma Gill maintains that while "[t]he process of damnation begins with the signing of the pact," Faustus ultimately sells his soul for Helen as he partakes in "bodily intercourse with spirits" (xxiii). Gill further conjectures that since dhe Old Man "gives up hope of saving Faustus" after this scene, Faustus's soul has been irrevocably lost (xxvi). In addition, Bruce E. Brandt sees Sara Munson Deats's exclusion of Helen from her list of females in Faustus in Sex, Gender, and Desire in the Phys of Christopher Marlowe as evidence of her belief that "Helen is a demon and not a woman" (30). One can thus see the popularity of Greg's reading - one that, perhaps indirectly, foregrounds lechery as Faustus s mortal sin.Yet while scholars who view lechery as Faustus's mortal sin may interpret it as an offshoot of pride, many critics have reacted negatively to such interpretations' emphasis on lust. Ironically, while David Bevington deems Greg's argument as "plausible enough if we view Faustus as fatally guilty of pride" ("Marlowe and God" 8), J. C. Maxwell decries Greg's argument as masking the true cardinal sin - that of pride (89-92). T. W. Craik also criticizes Greg's analysis: though he agrees that, as Greg suggests, "spirit" can often mean "devil," he adds that "spirit" does not always mean "devil" (190). Thus, although the term "spirit" may rightfully signify Mephistopheles, when Faustus requests to turn into a spirit, he simply desires to possess the power of invisibility - not to adopt an "infernal nature" as Greg proposes (Craik 191; Greg 103). Moreover, Craik attempts to dismantle Greg's argument by reasoning that if intercourse with a demon did, indeed, damn Faustus, dien his damnation would have likely occurred earlier, when Mephistopheles gifts Faustus with a concubine in place of a wife (195). …

Radical Reflexivity in Cinematic Adaptation: Second Thoughts on Reality, Originality, and Authority

Abstract: Though filmmakers and scholars have long celebrated meta-cinema, or reflexivity, as a radical and artistically sophisticated mode of cinema capable of rupturing the bourgeois "realism" of the mainstream or "Hollywood" film, a curious double standard often is applied to reflexive adaptations of literary texts.1 In discussing the reflexivity of such non-adaptations as Godard s Weekend ( 1 967) or Tarantino's Kill Bill (2003), commentators focus on the creators' edgy and knowing playfulness: "By seeing themselves not as nature's slaves but as fiction's masters, reflexive artists cast doubt on the central assumption of mimetic art - the notion of an antecedent reality on which the artistic text is supposedly modeled" (Stam 129). By casting doubt on the elemental assumptions upon which mimesis is based, in other words, these antifoundationalist films shed their secondariness - their derivativeness. Films such as Weekend, or novels such as Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote or Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, are praised for their ability to critique dominant ideological and signifying codes.In most studies of reflexive adaptations of literature, however, the films are said to be secondary to a different category of antecedent "reality," which is the source text and, often, its own superior reflexivity - whether we mean by this a play's metatheatricality, a novel's or poem's narrative reflexivity, or any source text's explicit recognition of its own constructedness. In a brief chapter on cinematic adaptations of reflexive literature, Robert Stam concludes rather simplistically that while the films often "incorporate certain reflexive devices, they do not metalinguistically dissect their own practice or include critical discourse within the text itself" (159). Moreover, reflexivity, when it occurs in cinematic adaptations of literature, is typically said to accommodate, or provide a visual parallel for, the reflexivity of the adapted text. For example, in one of the first and most influential essays on Shakesepearean metacinema, Kenneth Rothwell argues that "In making the means of representation a subject of representation, film-makers have only mimicked their stage forebears" (211). Rothwell's claim reinforces several problematic ideas: first, that modes of reflexivity are identical across such different media as theater and film; second, that the Shakespeare play is always before the Shakespeare film in the sense that the so-called original text manages to anticipate all its potential metamorphoses in later readings, adaptations, and appropriations. The "original" thereby remains always superior.The 1916 Thanhouser film of King Lear, directed by Ernest C. Warde and starring his father Frederick as the king, demonstrates well why what we might call the "accommodation argument" has proven so persuasive. The original opening of the film features the scholarly Warde in a Victorian library-like parlor. Cigar smoke clouding the air around him, he is deeply engaged in a Shakespeare volume, when suddenly - and in anticipation of Oliviers famous opening to Henry ? three decades later - he begins to dissolve into King Lear himself, just seconds before the opening title sequence. In this particular case of reflexive filmmaking, William Shakespeare figures less as the world's most famous playwright and more as the signifier of refined cultural taste in his reading audience. More important, though, is the film's framing argument for the cinema as a natural extension of the book, and for actors as readers of a different sort. The scene demonstrates well why Agnieszka Rasmus views metacinema and "distancing effect[s]" in Shakespeare adaptations as "a kind of bridge between the mysterious world of Shakespeare's plays and the world of a contemporary spectator" (142).2 Rasmus's bridge metaphor functions usefully here as a means of measuring how some adaptations use metacinematic techniques to connect the unique arts of literature and film. …

Where Is the Bawdy? Falstaffian Politics in Gus Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho

Abstract: Let us start, if possible, with a digression; with a look at a sort of filmic vanishing mediator between Shakespeare's two parts of Henry IV and Gus Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho (1991), which is the ostensible focus of this paper. Let us, then, start with Orson Welles s Chimes at Midnight (1965).Orson Welles begins his adaptation of Shakespeare's Henry IV plays by showing Sir John Falstaff and Master Shallow (Fig. 1) walking through a wintery, snow-covered landscape into a, significantly, abandoned tavern, talking of "the days that [they] have seen." "We have heard the chimes at midnight," declares Falstaff with a nostalgic grin on his face as he and Shallow muse upon their days of philandering, when they "lay all night in the windmill in Saint George's field" many years ago (Welles and 2 Henry IV, 3.2.185-207). Infused with a feeling of melancholy, yet with an ever-jovial Falstaff at its center, this short scene establishes Welles s film as a kind of looking-back, a nostalgic perspective on the good old days of sex, food, drink, and bawdy humor, a time when "hours were cups of sack, and minutes capons, and clocks the tongues of bawds, and dials the signs of leaping houses, and the blessed sun himself a fair hot wench in flame-coloured taffeta" (Welles and 1 Henry IV, 1.2.6-10). Indeed, even though the subsequent narrative of Welles s film eventually takes over (in terms of narrative time) this opening dialogue, placing it somewhere in the latter half of the events covered by the film, this scene also functions as a point extrinsic to the narrative, as a transcendental point from which Falstaff s repudiation by the newly crowned Henry V and his subsequent death at the end of the film mark an end of an era and the dawning of a new, tainted, symbolic order.1By doing this, by establishing Falstaff as a voice of the Utopian past speaking from a place outside of time, Welles draws from Shakespeare's figure of Falstaff-a figure who, in Shakespeare's plays, embodies the popular carnivalesque energy in both its politically Utopian and conservative/reactionary dimensions2-exclusively the Bakhtinian/utopian energy with which he imbues his creation in Chimes at Midnight. As Kathy M. Howlett writes,The "aristocrat" in Welles espoused the values of "high culture" and repudiated the values of the marketplace. His response to market exigencies as an artist was the reactive protest of the isolated artist against a system that reduces art to formula and repetition. This attitude is reflected in Welles's conception of Falstaff and his tavern, in which historical and socioeconomic realities are all but eliminated, and replaced with psychological and sexual issues.... Welles [sees] Falstaff as an embodiment of that "lost Maytime" and dismisses the unsavory and compromised characteristics of Falstaff and his tavern world.... For Welles the myth of the tavern was an image of recuperated Utopian fantasy rather than historical reality. (170)Even though Howlett s judgment of Welles is a bit harsh here, she is essentially right. In Chimes at Midnight, Welles taps into what is todays high-or "aristocratic"-art's (and Shakespeare's plays, especially his Histories, are today the epitome of literary high art) engagement with low culture in order to draw upon this culture s Utopian and liberating energies as embodied in the character of Falstaff. But contrary to Howlett s argument, Welles does this as a political gesture not despite but directly as a result of his bracketing of historical and socioeconomic realities, as a result of his act of forgetting.Howlett herself recognizes-if only inadvertently-this fundamentally political gesture by quoting Welles who states in relation to his Falstaff film: "Even if the good old days never existed, the fact that we can conceive of such a world is, in fact, an affirmation of the human spirit." We, continues Welles, "must find a new period, [we] must invent [our] own England, [our] own epoch" (qtd. …

Silent Hill: Adapting a Video Game

Abstract: IntroductionSeveral adaptation scholars (Brian McFarlane; and Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan, among others) base their approach on structural theories. Even though Roland Barthes's and Gerard Genette's theories are instrumental in discerning what can and what cannot be transferred from the written words of a page to the screen, it is much more fruitful to consider every type of source as a kind of database from which the filmmaking team can draw the ingredients they consider appropriate and then treat them cinematically (Gardies 5-7). Thus, the source and the final cinematic adaptation, or interpretation, should be examined as two distinct instances of narration modalities that can share similarities but can also be different.However, when the discussion turns to video games that are transformed into films, "one of the most immersive forms of adaptation" (MacArthur; Wilkinson and Zaiontz xx), the narrative common ground is not as easy to discern. Video games are interactive and, as such, have to be played in order to be appreciated. In addition, there are theories that oppose the narrative nature of video games in favor of their ludological character.1 Our position lies with the theorists that view video games as narratives because we believe that despite their interactivity, video games allow players to discover facts about the game world, and to reconstruct the narrative on that basis. Due to the fact that players are obliged to wander in the game world and retrieve essential information in order to move the narrative forward, they are capable of shaping their narrative, based, of course, on the limitations of the manufacturer. "In this way, the interpretation of an interactive game fiction can be made to more closely align with the interpretation of a narrative fiction, as the player effectively takes on the position of the first person narrator often seen in traditional narrative fictions" (Tavinor 124).This essay will, therefore, try to offer an interpretative analysis oi Silent Hill (2006) and its video game source. This comparative analysis is intriguing because first, the film is not based on a single video game but on three of the four versions of the same-titled game series that were released prior to the first cinematic adaptation-in total there are nine Silent Hills video games-and second, because the filmmakers chose to narrate the story using female heroines instead of the predominandy male protagonists of the video game series.2Silent Hill'. The GameSilent Hill is a series of games for PC and game consoles (Xbox, PlayStation 3, Wii) produced by the Japanese company Konami? Silent Hill belongs to the survival horror genre and is considered one of the most important and typical paradigms. Chris Pruett (2) and Grant Tavinor use it to define the genre, with the latter writing that a survival horror game is "A game such as Silent Hill with horror and mystery elements and often where the player is placed in a weakened state relative to adversaries, encouraging a pervasive feeling of threat, and cautious gameplay" (207). Similarly, Bernard Perron uses Silent Hill as the main example based on which he proceeds to analyze the whole genre (Silent Hill 10).Survival horror games usually involve a single player whose avatar is a third-person shooter. Players usually have to find their way through unknown and unfriendly places, confront enemies and/or monsters, solve puzzles, discover clues and combine them in order to get out of their threatening situation and achieve their objectives. Killings are not so important, as are the frightening atmosphere and the feeling of suspense the players experience in the game world. All of the above-mentioned characteristics can be encountered in the Silent Hill games (Perron, Horror Video; Tavinor).The first three games of the series take place in the foggy, nightmarish little town of Silent Hill, which has been destroyed by fire in the past and is now the home of a cult that worships a demonic creature called Samuel. …

The medium on trail: Orson welles takes on kafka and cinema

Abstract: Few American directors have been as manifestly preoccupied with the uses and abuses of the media as Orson Welles. He became instandy famous in 1938 when his radio show The War of the Worlds, a simulation of a news broadcast announcing that Martians had just invaded New Jersey, managed to induce mass panic in an audience who took the hoax for an actual event. ' People packed the roads, hid in cellars, loaded guns, and even wrapped their heads in wet towels as protection from Martian poison gas. As recendy as 2005, an FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin article tided "The Future of Officer Safety in an Age of Terrorism" informed that no event provided as reliable a picture of open mass panic as the reception of Welless War of the Wbrleis (Buerger and Levin). His contemporaries did not miss Welless lesson, with commentators pointing out that the broadcast was meant to reveal the way politicians could use the power of mass communications to manipulate the public with empty but dangerous illusions.2 After this dramatic demonstration of the power of the media, specifically radio, to manipulate the public, Welles turned to filmmaking. His debut, Citizen Kane (1941), was immediately recognized as an unflagging critique of the corruption of the media, this time of newspapers. While Welless critique of radio and printed media has been extensively discussed, his critique of his main medium - film - has received little critical attention. In this essay I focus on The Trial (Orson Welles, 1962), which I argue provides Welless most thought-provoking interrogation of film: its aesthetics, politics, ethics, and its relationship to the literature it selfconsciously adapts.Although Orson Welles considered The Trial "the best film [he] ever made," critics have often described it "as the hardest to watch" of all his films (Wheldon; McBride 1 55). Joseph McBride traces "the film's ultimate failure" to the irreconcilable discrepancy between Kafka's and Welless world views: Kafka's penchant for cat-andmouse games, with the omnipotent narrator amusedly orchestrating and watching the confused, panicked struggle of an already doomed hero, is often seen as incompatible with Orson Welless "egocentric visual style."3 I argue that rather than an incidental failure, the conflictual relationship between the movie and the story is carefully played out as one of the film's central investigations. As we will see in detail, Welles self-consciously opens and closes the film on the question of adaptation, which as a result frames the film. However, when it comes to adaptation, there are frames and frames. The frame could delimit the movie from the story and thus present it as an autonomous artifact. Or on the contrary, this frame could turn out to be more of a Procrustean bed, imposing the constraints of the story onto a movie that, try as it may, just does not fit. To frame, the Oxford English Dictionary reminds us, can mean "to give structure, shape," and thus "to benefit." But it can also mean "to pre-arrange (something), esp. surreptitiously and with sinister intent"; "to fabricate"; "to concoct a false charge or accusation"; "to devise a scheme or plot"; "to frame-up."4 Having made Touch of Evil, a film where he played a cop specializing in frame-ups, Welles knew well that in telling a compelling story, in making a case, framing and framing up can become entangled. So how does the adaptation of Kafka's story frame Welles s movie? I propose we start by zooming our critical eye closely onto this frame, paying particular attention to the points of jointure where story and film meet.The Trial opens with Welles's prefatory commentary on the entangled intertwining of different media and art forms such as film, literature, and drawing, and on films potential to offer a solution to impasses arrived at in other media. Welles's voiceover recounts the parable of the Law from Kafka's novel, while a series of black-andwhite drawings are used as a schematic illustration. …

The Heart of the Mystery: Surveillance in Michael Almereyda and Gregory Doran's Films of Hamlet

Abstract: Shakespeare's Hamlet is a text replete with surveillance; nearly every character plays the roles of watcher and watched at some point in the play. To cite a partial list of examples: in 1.1, Horatio and die guards watch for the appearance of the Ghost and in 1.4 are joined by Hamlet; Polonius instructs Reynaldo to spy on Laertes in 2.1; Claudius and Gertrude send for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to spy on Hamlet in 2.2; Hamlet stages the play in order to "catch the conscience of the King" (2.2.582) with the aid of the watching Horatio in 3.2; Polonius and Claudius eavesdrop on Hamlet and Ophelia in 3.1; Hamlet covertly observes Claudius at prayer in 3.3; Polonius's eavesdropping on Gertrude and Hamlet in 3.4 results in his death; Claudius orders Horatio to "give [Ophelia] good watch" (4.5.71), as her madness poses a potential threat; Gertrudes description of Ophelias death (4.7.136-54) implies that she (or someone) watched Ophelia drown; and Hamlet and Horatio "couch ... a while, and mark" the funeral procession (5.1.204). The play therefore diematizes surveillance, raising questions about its nature and purpose. The opening line, "Who's there?" immediately foregrounds the ambiguity inherent in watching and being watched. Barnardo (and Francisco, who repeats the line at 1.1.11) knows he is being observed, but is unsure by whom or what. Francisco's reply emphasizes both the power relations inherent in die observer/observed relationship and the conviction that observation can reveal die truth about identity: "Nay, answer me. Stand and unfold yourself" (1.1.2). Francisco refuses to answer the question, instead forcing Barnardo to identify himself. The play continually returns to the idea that this kind of surveillance - in which the watched subject will presumably "unfold" his true identity - is justifiable. Polonius, in particular, appears convinced that surveillance can lead to absolute and final knowledge: he tells die King and Queen that he "will find / Where truth is hid, though it were hid indeed / Within the centre" (2.2.158-60). He acknowledges the paradox inherent in his methodology in telling Reynaldo that he must lie to discover the truth: "By indirections find directions out" (2.1.65). Claudius likewise feels their eavesdropping is justifiable; he refers to himself and Polonius as "lawful espials" (3.1.34) and concludes his observation of Hamlet and Ophelia by noting, "Madness in great ones must not unwatched go" (3.1.187). While it is perhaps unsurprising that politicians might justify their uses of surveillance, the play complicates the issue by revealing Hamlet's own investment in similar techniques. His use of The Mousetrap to find "grounds / More relative" (2.2.580-81) on which to base his revenge culminates in his instructions to Horatio on how to watch Claudius during the play: "Even with the very comment of thy soul / Observe mine uncle ... Give him heedful note, / For I mine eyes will rivet to his face" (3.2.72-73, 77-78).Aldiough Hamlet, like Polonius and Claudius, believes diat surveillance can help him "find where truth is hid," he is enraged when odiers attempt to get at die truth behind his own actions. He disavows the knowledge that can be gained by merely looking at his exterior displays of mourning and proudly claims, "I have that within which passeth show" (1.2.85). He also scorns Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's attempts to "pluck out the heart of my mystery" and proclaims that "there is much music, excellent voice in this little organ, yet cannot you make it speak" (3.2.336, 338-39). Although Hamlet is under almost constant surveillance from die beginning of the play, he manages to remain a mystery to those around him, and even, to some extent, to the reader and spectator. The play therefore calls into question the efficacy of surveillance to exercise authoritative control over its subjects, or to bring unqualified truths to light.Film versions of Hamlet are particularly well-equipped to explore the uses of surveillance in the text. …

The Blake Syndrome : The Case of “Jerusalem"

Abstract: An essay is presented which examines the use of William Blake's poem "And did those feet" ("Jerusalem"), in various contexts. The author explores the process by which Blake's poem has become a symb ...

Orson Welles's Macbeth: Allegory of Anticommunism

Abstract: Orson Welles's Macbeth (1948) holds a peculiar place in both film history and the canon of Shakespearean films. Critics skewered it during its initial release, insistently comparing it to Laurence Olivier s more accessible Hamlet, also released in late 1948. Michael Anderegg contrasts how differently the two films were received by analyzing how Life and other publications covered each (74-78). Yet the film continues to command attention more than sixty years later, thanks to Welles's stature and to a "restored" cut of the film released in 1979 that improves on the original and rereleased versions.1 The resurgence in Shakespearean adaptations has also motivated scholars to reconsider less commercially successful films like Macbeth. Then there is the film itself, which is mysteriously compelling despite its flaws. One of the most interesting aspects of the film is Welles's blatantly allegorical adaptation. Wendy Rogers Harper writes, "No longer an internal psychological battle, the struggle becomes a war between God and Satan" (207). Macbeth (Welles) strives not to subdue his own ambition, but to resist the manipulations of the pagan Weird Sisters. Macduff (Dan O'Herlihy) and Malcolm (Roddy McDowall) oppose Macbeth in the name of Christianity, but they are similarly coerced. The three men are reduced to pawns in what appears to be a battle of religious ideologies.Many have criticized Welles for his reductive adaptation of Shakespeare's text, but to date no one has fully considered the relationship between the film and its political context. E. Pearlman hints that Macbeth "was influenced by the bleak events of the 1930s and 40s" (239). Pearlman does not clarify the reference, but it is not difficult to infer. Three months after Welles finished principal photography on Macbeth, the Hollywood Ten were seated before the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities (HUAC). In November of that year, the Waldorf Agreement instituted blacklists at all major studios. The film premiered in October 1948, weeks after Alger Hiss was branded a communist before HUAC. Citing the films ideologically polarized diegesis, similarities between its dialogue and anticommunist rhetoric, and its puppet master witches and Holy Man, the analysis that follows will demonstrate that Welles's Macbeth can be read as an allegorical comment on the manipulation of the American consciousness during the Anticommunist Era.The extent to which Welles consciously used the film to address contemporary political movements is unclear, but his work and associations had brought him into conflict with anticommunists for years prior to making Macbeth. He first clashed with conservative political forces in 1937, when he and John Houseman managed a theater funded by the Federal Theater Project (FTP). Welles prospered there until rehearsals began for The Cradle Will Rock, a socialist musical about the unionization of the steel industry that Houseman described as "guaranteed, in the circumstances, to land [both himself and Welles] in the most serious possible trouble" (245). The industry's conversion to unions had provoked several riots, some of which resulted in the deaths of protesting workers. For steel company owners, government funding for "a bunch of radical New Yorkers to stage a pro-union extravaganza was intolerable" (Learning 133). FTP productions were frequently left-wing, and in the early stages of the backlash against President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal, conservative politicians suspected the FTP had "been designed expressly as a medium of propaganda for the radical social and economic ideas of the Roosevelt administration" (Learning 133). The steel industry found enough political support to halt any new FTP productions, including The Cradle Will Rock.Welles and Houseman soon left the FTP and formed the Mercury Theatre. Their first production, in 1937, was an anti-fascist Julius Caesar. Houseman writes, "To emphasize the similarity between the last days of the Roman republic and the political climate of Europe in the mid-thirties, our Roman aristocrats wore military uniforms with black belts that suggested but did not exactly reproduce the current fashion of the Fascist ruling class; our crowd wore the dark, nondescript street clothes of the big-city proletariat" (298-99). …

"Rounded with A Sleep": Prospero's Dream in Derek Jarman's the Tempest

Abstract: The cinematic history of William Shakespeare's The Tempest (1611) has been varied. The very theatrical nature of the Bard's final play is difficult to translate to the screen, which has prompted a variety of transformations when this romance has been adapted for film. "Traditional" representations of the play have been made,1 but cinematically, The Tempest's film tradition has been one of transformations that reset and reconsider the play in different lights. One film that deconstructs Shakespeare's text, suggesting unique possibilities in its interpretation, is Derek Jarman's The Tempest (1979), ,2 a lowbudget film that has not received the scholarship it fully deserves.Derek Jarman's vision for a Tempest film appears to be linked to a long-standing fascination with the Renaissance in general and this play in particular. His personal film canon, which is comprised often feature films (Coppedge 12), includes several that are concerned with the Renaissance:/«^//^ (1978), in which Queen Elizabeth I is transported 400 years in the future; In The Shadow of the Sun (1980), a film about Dr. John Dee; The Angelic Conversation (1985), which focused on Shakespeare's sonnets; Caravaggio (1986), about die Renaissance painter; and Edward II (1991), based on Marlowe's play.3 Jarman's interest in the period seems to relate to his own interrogation of English culture, and in particular his fascination with die enigmatic and powerful figure of John Dee (O'Pray 101, 1 12; Zabus and Dwyer 185-86).However, the draw of The Tempest appears to have been particularly strong on Jarman. He has said that The Tempest obsesses him (Jarman 2O3), for he is attracted to "the concept of forgiveness" found in the drama (202). As Jarman revealed in an interview, he first envisioned a Tempest production for the stage in 1969, with "the Round House [Theatre] flooded all the way round the outside, with rocks - big inflatable rocks - in the centre, and the audience on this island"; "trampolines and tightrope walks" were to fill the space of the theater (14).4In the 1970s, however, Jarman began to see greater potential in films than in staged plays. Feeling that most theatrical productions lacked "a sense of fun" (Jarman 203), the director, who believes "Shakespeare would have loved the cinema" ( 1 94), sought to avoid the stuffiness he found in The Tempest on stage, hoping instead to make a version that was accessible and enjoyable to all audiences. Jarman thought part of the answer was that he did not need merely to reproduce the play, so he attempted to create a balance, with a production that was, at once, part film and part play ("Interview" 14). Jarman's first attempt to find this balance was a 1975 cut-up of Shakespeare's text, "in which a mad Prospero, righdy imprisoned by his brother, played all the parts" (Jarman 183); obviously, as others have noted, this earlier version bears a fascinating similarity to Prosperos Books, Peter Greenaway's film, made fifteen years later (Harris and Jackson 91; Lanier 195). Jarman abandoned this plan for Prospero in Bedlam and opted for a less-experimental script, although his version does still restructure Shakespeare ("Interview" 14).5This restructuringof Shakespeare is obvious from the start of the film, which begins with a rhythmic, deep breathing that runs over a bluetinted storm scene at sea. Shots then alternate between a sleeping Prospero, tossing in his sleep and muttering lines to himself, and a ship strugglingin the storm. The breathingcontinues throughout this prologue, muffling Prosperos already whispered words as "the tempest itself emanates from Prosperos nightmare, with the mariners' cries ... echoing through Prosperos disturbed soul" (Crowl 5). Jarman explained that this dream format "enabled [him] to take the greatest possible freedom with the text" (188), and this format allowed his interpretation to take shape. The final sequence, in which Prospero in voice-over speaks the epilogue over a shot of the stillsleeping mage, reveals that the entire film has been his dream, as the "film conceives of the play as a product of Prosperos nightmare/dream vision" (Crowl 5); indeed, the films action appears to be a manifestation of the wizard's vision (Wheale 54). …

Epstein's the Fall of the House of Usher: Research on Altered States of Consciousness

Abstract: Luis Bunuel left the shooting of 7be Fall of the House of Usher [La chute de la maison Usher, 1928], where he worked as an assistant to director Jean Epstein, because he thought the French cinema avant-garde and the way it worked were pretentious. The ongoing disagreements regarding the adaptation, and about how new cinema was meant to be, made him leave Epsteins project. But what Epstein intended by adapting The Fall ofthe House of Usher to film went beyond a mere translation of Romantic or crepuscular themes. Epstein combined a series of resources for creating a story from Edgar Allan Poe with a set of film images so that the resulting aesthetics adapted to the changes modernity had produced in the perceptive human system. With its background of poetic, pseudo-scientific, and philosophical influences, Poe s story helped Epstein build a film focused on the altered states of consciousness caused by modernity. Poe's influence also reveals something that surpasses adaptation, which is that his theoretical and sensitive universe became essential in nurturing Epstein s moving image philosophy.This adaptation of The Fall of the House of Usher transcends the purpose of formulating an argument in another artistic language. The reference work becomes structure and substance of the artistic conception, the image and the environment of its by-product. Epstein thought literature and film were closer to each other than theater and film because they both allowed the development of subjectivity in a similar way. This tendency seems paradoxical if we consider the nature of film itself, which is mechanical and reproducible, but it is also completely understandable if we realize that, for Epstein, this medium became an instrument to reveal something beyond the image and the reproduced object through extreme close-ups and changes in the speed of movement, especially through slow motion. And it is also understandable if we comprehend that, due to its nature, film generated for Epstein a stronger impact on the nervous system.The following discussion will show how Epstein not only collected specific themes from Poe, but also ways to build his films. The director analyzed the changes modernity produced in human perception, such as the mechanization of life, the overcrowding in cities, the acceleration of several means of transportation and communication, the excessive stimuli like noise or traffic that caused weary nerves and many mental diseases, and new time perception theories.1 These ideas prompted Epsteins development of an aesthetic theory called "photogenic neurasthenia."2The elements that we will study to examine Epsteins proposal are the use of sickness (melancholy, hypochondria, and catalepsy), the landscape, mesmerism, and animistic aesthetics.Epstein secured a slow-motion cameraman, Hebert, to film The Fall of the House of Usher. This slow-motion technique generated a morbid ambiance in the film; the characters wander in stupor around an old mansion full of ruins, dry leaves, and curtains, moving slowly and animated by a mysterious wind. Epstein explored a movement that did not comply with the physical duration of events and was based on a dismal slowed-down or even petrified perception of time that was reflected in the psychomotor slowing down of the characters and revealed Henri Bergsons influence, which is analyzed below.Psychiatrists researching melancholia in Epsteins time wrote about people suffering from depression who described similar time experiences. Emil Kraepelin (1856-1926) wrote about time slowness, stopped or eternal time, in a seminal work of modern psychiatry, Compendium der Psychiatrie, which was reprinted eight times between 1883 and 1915. The basic descriptive psychopathology of depression in our time still indicates a kind of temporal anesthesia, a dramatic cessation of time (Blewett 195-200) or a psychomotor and reactive slowing down.The perception of the passing of time intensifies in the melancholic type; for this person, "the present loses clarity, the future is diminished and change seems increasingly harder" (Blewett 195-200). …

"Just Call It": Identifying Competing Narratives in the Coens' No Country for Old Men

Abstract: On the surface, the Coens' No Country for Old Men (2007) adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel by the same name is all McCarthy's, a point reviewers have been quick to celebrate. A. O. Scott, for instance, praises "how well matched their methods turn out to be with the novelist's." Their camera finds a word-perfect way, writes Scott, "to disclose what the book describes." James Berardinelli declares that the Coens have done what many doubted could be done by providing the world "a coherent and reasonably faithful adaptation of a Cormac McCarthy novel." Even when a reviewer notes a moment of perceived originality, as Roger Ebert does, he does so with as much appreciation for what the source text inspires as for what that inspiration yielded. Ebert's synopsis of the exchange between Chigurh (Javier Bardem) and an inconspicuous gas station owner (Gene Jones) illustrates as much. The dialogue in the gas station is firstrate, claims Ebert, in part, because it runs true to the novel. "You want to applaud the writing," Ebert writes, "which comes from the Coen brothers, out o^McCardiy." The italicized portion succinctly captures the consensus of most reviewers: the Coens make a great film, in part, because they remain true to a great book.There are sure to be critics within adaptation studies who are just as quick to venerate the Coens' No Country for Old Men for how closely it matches McCarthy s novel. Robert Stam observes that even critics within adaptation studies can get caught measuring a film's worth through a sort of matching game between the original and the adaptation. One sees this most clearly in the "conventional language of adaptation criticism," writes Stam, which is wrought with charges of "ethical perfidy ... illegitimacy ... aesthetic disgust and monstrosity ... [and] religious sacrilege and blasphemy" (3). An unfaithful adaptation, it seems, exposes the still lingering belief in what Stam calls "the axiomatic superiority of literature to film" (4). So, on the rare instance that one succeeds in bringing a novel to screen in such a way that the former is preserved, there is reason to celebrate and for good reason. As Stam reasons, no matter how much one theoretically discredits the matter of fidelity, one must always admit that it "does retain a grain of experiential truth" (14). Many spectators arrive at the showing of an adapted text with the novel in mind. When the film departs from the original, the audience member aware of the original cannot help but be a little dissatisfied. One cannot escape this truth or theorize it out of existence. Therefore, a film like the Coens' No Country for Old Men that preserves its source text becomes something of a welcome relief for audience members, reviewers, and critics alike.At the same time, the Coens' No Country for Old Men rewards those interested in other aspects of adaptation, too, especially those fascinated by the ways in which intertextuality or transtextuality engage a cinematic audience. The idea of textuality as it is employed here is most tersely "all that sets the text, whether obvious or concealed, with other texts" (Gennette 1). Linda Hutcheon explains the reason why these sorts of textualities are of interest within adaptation studies: adaptations, it seems, are "haunted at all times by their adapted texts" (6). Others in the field have begun to argue for a more expansive notion of intertextuality, one that considers unannounced or even unintended utilization or influence. Walter Metz, for instance, pushes for "a broader, more dialogic conception of intertextuality, one that pursues how a film can be seen as politically meaningful in relationship to a wide range of other texts ... [and to] bring into view unseen resonances in those films' structures, imageries, and meanings" (6). This paper determines to satisfy Metz's charge by demonstrating the ways in which the Coens' No Country for Old Men depends on an unacknowledged source. That source is Flannery O'Connor's short story, "A Good Man is Hard to Find" (1953), which, by film's end, establishes itself as important a source of inspiration as McCarthy's novel proves to be. …

Some Translucid Vessel": Ambiguity and the Literary-Cinematic Symbol in Nabokov's Despair and Fassbinder's eine Reise Ins Licht (Despair)

Abstract: "I was absolutely empty and thus comparable to some translucid vessel doomed to receive contents as yet unknown."-Hermann in Nabokov's Despair (8)"[A]mbiguity is richness."-Jorge Luis Borges, "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" (42)Vladimir Nabokov's Despair was written in Berlin in 1932, during the first significant phase of the author's lifelong exile from post-Revolutionary Russia. The novel-a disjointed, tragicomic narrative of murder and madness that functions, self-consciously, as a parody of Poe's madmen, Dostoevsky's philosopher-criminals, and practically the whole literary tradition of "the double" theme-first appeared in serialized form in 1934 and was finally published as a book by a German-based Russian-emigre press two years later. Within a year of Despairs 1936 publication, however, Nabokov-already a full-fledged exile in Berlin-had decided that he and his family must flee Germany as well, where, as he would later put it, "another beastliness had started to megaphone" (Nabokov, Despair xi).1 Some thirty years later-after earning worldwide recognition as the author of Lolita and other major works-Nabokov revisited his earlier text Despair (Russian title, Otchayanie), translating it into English and revising it significantly.2 This revised 1965 version of the novel served as the basis for an elegantly achieved 1978 film adaptation-arguably the finest, most artistically successful film treatment to date of any of Nabokov s challenging fictional works. The film debuted at Cannes in May 1978, ten months after the authors death in early July of the previous year.Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, from a screenplay by Tom Stoppard, the film version of Despair is notable for its rather arch verbal wit and playfulness; for its evocations of the disastrous end of the Weimar era; for its lush, imposing, and occasionally bizarre Art-Deco, glass-pane-and-mirror set design (matched perfectly, it should be noted, by Michael Ballhaus's highly sophisticated cinematography [see Fig. 2]); and for its remarkable acting performances, several ofwhich, throughout the film, maintain a tightrope-walkers balance between a heightened, even outlandish, mannerism and the more naturalistic inflections of genuine human emotion. The combined result of these striking elements is a highly stylized blend of hallucinatory fantasy scenes, absurdist-realist narrative, and a compelling socio-historical, political context- a context which, in its specifics (i.e., the early rise of Nazism), is not evidenced at all in the original Nabokov novel but is addressed only briefly in the authors autobiographical Foreword to the 1965 edition. Despairs particular success as an adaptation, therefore, does not reside in a narrow fidelity to its literary source text-which, as Fassbinder scholar Thomas Elsaesser astutely put it, "is treated both faithfully and very liberally" by the film (40); rather, its success emerges from the filmmakers' deeply informed and radically diffused transposition of certain, distinctively Nabokovian elements-including shimmers drawn from other novels, from front matter, from interviews, and from his autobiography-into cinematic discourse. This is to say that the film is quite faithful to the "spirit" of the text-or, at least, to the spirit of its author-while nevertheless presenting a good deal of new dialogue, an altered characterization of its protagonist, an abbreviated plot, and so forth. Better yet, it might be said that the film's deepest fidelities are to Nabokov's manner, his high style, his narrative techniques, and his devilish wit. Indeed, with its clever, risible (but deadpan) dialogue, its seriocomic tonal ambiguities, and its innovative visual style, the film, at most moments, proves itself equal to the daunting task of translating-and even occasionally improving upon-Nabokov's own brilliantly mannered and mischievous literary work. Fittingly, the tricky novel's subtle verbal cues, its recurring motifs, its narrative false paths, and its literary selfreflexiveness give way, in the film version, to an intricately staged mise-en-scene, to unmistakable (though understated) visual refrains and echoes, to unannounced and often misleading fantasy sequences, and to self-reflexive dialogue about cinema itself, including the discussion of a perfectly rendered film-within-the-film that takes place in a scene set in a Weimar-era movie theater. …

A Cross-Cultural Scandal: Adapting Les Liaisons Dangereuses for South Korean Cinema

Abstract: "I often listen to Bach's music, and at one point an image came into my mind-the image of people wearing hanbok [traditional Korean clothing] combined with Bach's music," recalls ? J-yong, director of the 2003 South Korean film Untold Scandal} He continues,I was curious about how it would look on the screen.... I was curious to combine Western classical music with a Korean traditional drama. At the same time I was trying to think of a story, and I suddenly remembered the costumes and acting in the film Dangerous Liaisons. I bought the book then and read it, and it is really a great novel. ... I also enjoy adapting things into different cultural contexts, so I decided to use this story for my film. (qtd. in Paquet)Es remarks are very interesting because they challenge the commonly perceived process of adaptation. An adaptation is generally understood as a reading or an interpretation of an existing text-often referred to as a "source" or an "original." An adapter experiences the "source" text first and interprets it through his/her chosen medium. E's experience suggests a reversed process. He had an artistic vision to create on the screen first, and then searched through his memories of other artistic experiences to find an appropriate story material. The text he found was itself an adaptation of a novel, which finally led him to read the original novel. Any notion of priority often given to the source text is denied here; the novel exists not as an authoritative text to which the adaptation should stay faithful, but merely as one of multiple sources for the film.What is offered here is an opportunity to redirect the study of adaptation beyond the problematic notion of fidelity. In his 1957 book, Novels into Film, George Bluestone emphasized the essential difference between literature and film as the most important premise on which discussions of adaptations from novel to film should be based. Following studies of adaptation have been focused on comparing and contrasting the source novel and its adapted film. What seems on the surface a debate over the essential and "inevitable" difference between the two media belies hierarchical thinking that literature is a higher art form than film because word, rather than image, makes for the superior medium. Such hierarchical thinking consequendy leads to the question of fidelity-the question of how faithful a film remains to its source novel in terms of conveying the novelist's intention both thematically and aesthetically.While the notion of fidelity retains its place in adaptation studies, in practice if not in principle, many recent scholars of adaptation have attempted to transcend fidelity analysis to broaden the scope of adaptation study by suggesting alternative terms to explain creative exchanges between novel and film. Good examples are Geoffrey Wagner's three modes of adaptation (transposition, commentary, and analogy) proposed in his 1975 book, The Novel and Cinema, followed by Dudley Andrew's more developed and complicated categorization (transforming, intersecting, and borrowing) suggested in his 1984 book, Concepts in Film Theory? While Wagner and Andrew were still concerned mostly with the textual features and aesthetic problems of the novel and the film, other scholars turned to sociological/historical contexts to understand the complex nature of adaptation. One such attempt is adopting intertextuality theory. First introduced by Julia Kristeva in her reading of Mikhail Bakhtin in 1967, intertextuality refers to the condition that "any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another. In place of the notion of intersubjectivity that of intertextuality affirms itself and poetic language is read, at the very least, as a double" (66).3 The significance of intertextuality theory in adaptation study lies in its emphasis on the relationship of individual texts to other texts and to the world around it. …

Stages of Revision: Textuality, Performance, and History in Anonymous

Abstract: The 2011 film Anonymous, directed and financed by Roland Emmerich, dramatizes die thoroughly discredited theory that William Shakespeare did not write the work that bears his name. Some of the most prominent members of the so-called "anti-Stratfordians" endorsed and collaborated on the film, which adopts dieir thesis as its central story: the Earl of Oxford, it contends, secretly authored the entire Shakespearean canon by using the illiterate actor William Shakespeare as a proxy and the playwright Ben Jonson as an accomplice.1 While this absurd tale has been ably and repeatedly disproven,2 Anonymous remains an overlooked and, I believe, theoretically fruitful object of serious critical attention. Shakespearean film studies has increasingly found value in analyzing seemingly insubstantial and popular works, and while Anonymous is markedly different than, say, the teen-drama Twelfth Night adaptation She's the Man or the critically lauded Shakespeare in Love - each of those films, in its own way, winks at its audience as an admission of historical infelicity - it still deserves examination despite the clear falsehoods of its premise. In fact, the inadvertent profundity of Anonymous is inextricable from its blatant revisionism. In attempting to answer the question "Did Shakespeare write diose plays ? Anonymous ends up answering the much more provocative "Did Shakespeare write those plays ?" In other words, by forcing itself to reckon with the identity of the author, the film must also portray what, exactly, authorship is.By doing so, it wades into one of the more prominent debates in literary studies. Questioning the idea of "the author," after all, has provided a persistent mission for many salient schools of theory; the concept of a singular progenitor of distinct narrative has been killed, questioned, and politicized - and recently, like so many other once out-of-fashion terms, revived - but it refuses to disappear.3 Even when demolished, as with most poststructuralist thought, the figure of the author provides enormous explanatory power by insisting on its own impossibility: in the indelible phrase of Michel Foucault, the author has become "reduced to nothing more than the singularity of his absence" (378). Somehow both absent and singular, the author looms over - or, following Jacques Derrida, we might say "haunts" - the production of texts as an unrealizable, but potent, byproduct.4 New Historicism has followed Foucault s lead by de-essentializing the authorial construct, focusing instead on networks of social energies that reify the illusion of a unified and culturally distanced artistic product.5 But the specific - and timely -authorial discussion into which Anonymous inadvertently plunges itself centers on the question of interpreting Shakespeare's work as primarily textual or performancebased. Critics such as John Russell Brown, Peter Holland, and William Worthen have challenged traditionally textual forms of reception, locating interpretive primacy instead in theatrical embodiment. Shakespeare's meaning-making capacity, in this view, becomes negotiated by the countless factors that collide in the moment of performance: the pauses, gestures, and enunciations of the actors; the broader economic and cultural conditions of the producing company; even the habits and makeup of the audience.6 The plays become "authored" in their collaborative theatricalization, rather than by a singular enunciative figure.Anonymous attempts to avoid such conclusions in its depiction of artistic production, but ends up augmenting them instead. In its zeal to deify Oxford as a transcendent genius and vilify Shakespeare as a bawdy imposter, it attempts to show a model of authorship so absolute that the human body is almost entirely removed from the process. And yet by phobically asserting such a non-performative, purely textual model of literary creation, Anonymous ends up tacitly recruiting the very elements of theatricality it disdains in its own construction. …

The Case of the Wandering Uterus: Coma, the Medical Thriller, and the Woman Doctor-Detective

Abstract: "Obviously, I'm not managing... too well these days, Spiro.""Why?"I suspected he knew very well but he wanted me to say it. "Maybe because LoriPetersen was a physician. I relate to her. Maybe I'm projecting. I was her age once.""In a sense, you were her once."In a sense.Dr. Kay Scarpetta to Dr. Spiro Fortosis in Post-Mortem (Patricia Cornwell, 1990)Within mainstream film reception and feminist film criticism of the last thirty years, the heroine of Michael Crichtons 1978 Hollywood medical thriller Coma has been perennially described as a "pretty," "plucky" but ineffectual sleuth victimized by the patriarchal villainy and organized criminality of that film's narrative world. To date, however, critical attention has solely focused on Coma in its filmic form and little considered the popular novel-a New York Times bestseller and the book that began Robin Cook's now thirty-year medical thriller enterprise-as, in fact, central to the film's representational work and, in particular, to its construction of heroine and doctor-detective, Susan Wheeler. It is my suggestion here that the two Comas are, in fact, contiguous popular texts. Each informs the generic terrain and capital prospects of the other as seminal contributions to not only the burgeoning American medical thriller market of the 1970s, but to contemporaneous mainstream debates surrounding second-wave feminism. In this paper, I examine both Comas in light of form (the popular novel, the Hollywood film) and genre (the medical thriller, the detective story, the medical and psychiatric case history) in order to offer a recuperative reading of Susans central role in Coma as a doctor and a detective. At the broadest level, I argue that novel and film mutually deploy the discourses of1970s liberal feminist politics in order to construct a model heroine-white, educated, independent, and just-to undertake the medical thriller s cautionary ethical quest: speaking truth to the abuses of institutional power and the dangers of unchecked scientific innovation in the name of the rights of the individual (Pethes 171; Harper and Moor 3-5).Critical PrecedentPlaced side by side, Cook's 1977 novel Coma and Crichtons film adaptation of that text prove remarkably similar in story and narrative structure. Here I refer to Elizabeth Cowie and understand "story" as the central, driving events that appear in both Coma the novel and Coma the film, while "narrative structure" refers to "the way [the] film" or the literary text "works" and "comes together [as] a system of meaning" and representation (67-68). In Crichtons adapted screenplay, the reformulations from print to screen are remarkably few, and testify to the fact that Cook was able to exert something of his authorial influence over the screen version. As both physicians and mainstream novelists, Cook and Crichton mutually partake in the production of a popular discursive complex in which novel and film are made functionally companionate, the latter form re-inscribing "the current cultural images of science" and the collective fears of medicine initially articulated by the former (Pethes 169-71). Yet critics have consistently overlooked the ways in which Cook's novel informs Crichtons construction of a strong, independent Hollywood detective heroine and, arguably, the immediate predecessor of Jonathan Demme's Clarice Starling. Cowie, for example, in the (as of yet) most comprehensive scholarly feminist examination of Crichtons Coma, published the year after the films release, refers to Cook's novel only in passing (68).1 Christine Geraghty, writing on the film in 1986, fails to even mention its literary precursor, as does Philippa Gates in her brief (and the most recent) discussion of the film's detective heroine (258-60).Susans appearance here, in the late 1970s, signals a precedent in American popular culture; not only is she the protagonist of Cook's first medical thriller, she is a woman and a doctor with the abilities and initiative to detect organized criminality at the highest levels of Boston Memorial Hospital's workplace hierarchy. …

Adaptation as Re-Reading, Line by Line

Abstract: A pivotal scene of the recent film Margaret (201 1) revolves around the interpretation of two well-known lines from King Lear. Like a haiku, the seventeen syllables represent extreme poetic density:As flies to wanton boys are we to th' gods;They kill us for their sport. (4.1.37-38)The lines are delivered by Gloucester after he has been blinded by Cornwall and Regan. In his despair, he perceives injustice on a macrocosmic scale. Later, with the death of Cordelia, the play seems to bear out Gloucester's understanding of the gods as delighting in misery. Such is the extreme cruelty oi Lear that Jan Kott read it as a precursor to the absurd nihilism of Samuel Beckett's Endgame, an interpretation that inspired Peter Brook's film adaptation of the play in 1971.Along with understanding Gloucester's despair, however, we might also consider that the above lines are thrown into relief by what he experiences with his son Edgar. Despite his father having failed him, Edgar takes care of the blinded Gloucester when he is most in need. So, at the precise point when Gloucester is most doubting of divine benevolence, he has yet to experience the greatest human compassion. Gloucester's lines can therefore be read in at least two ways: as reflective of the wide applicability of his despair, and/or as reflective of the limitations within how he perceives the world.Gloucester's lines resonate throughout Margaret, especially in relation to the central character (Lisa) who must acknowledge her limited understanding of the world. Lisa (Anna Paquin) is an adolescent who believes herself older than she is. She projects self-entitlement and, at times, over-confidence. However, her involvement in a tragic accident forces her to understand her own limitations, as well as that which is irreconcilable within the world. The experience is traumatic, but it also prompts her to become part of humanity in the biggest sense. In turn, the film ultimately prompts us to see that our own lives can always be bigger tJian ourselves.About midway through the film, an entire scene focuses on Gloucester's two lines. The scene begins with a high school teacher named John (Matthew Broderick) reading them aloud before asking his class "what do you make of that?" (We come to learn this is a disingenuous invitation for contributions since he has already made his mind up about what the lines can mean.) Lisa refuses to contribute an interpretation because the meaning is "self-evident," and another student supports her assessment by simply paraphrasing the lines as "human beings don't mean anymore to the Gods than flies do to litde boys who like to torture them for fun." Another student points out that Gloucester, rather than Shakespeare, speaks the lines - a point that John calls "valid," although he later speaks of the lines reflecting the playwright's beliefs about human suffering. Then another, more assured student named David (Jake O'Connor) chimes in: "maybe Shakespeare isn't saying the gods don't care about us. Maybe he's saying there's a higher consciousness that we can't see, that the gods' perception of reality is so much more developed than ours that compared to their perception our perceptions are like comparing flies to boys." This interpretation works if we perceive the limitations of Gloucester's perspective, especially if we understand his interpreting the world through his own pain. But John immediately rejects this reading, and reverts back to an idea of authorial intention: "I really don't think that that is what [Shakespeare's] getting at - what I think he's getting at here is a very dark view of the arbitrary nature of human suffering."What follows is an escalating argument between John and David, a kind of tennis match followed by other students' eyes moving back and forth between them. David expands on his reading by another suggestive formulation: "maybe [Shakespeare's] comparing human consciousness to divine consciousness and [stating] that even though it seems to us that human suffering is just arbitrary that's just because we are limitedby our own viewpoint. …