Adaptation Fidelity: How 'By the Book' Should Literary Adaptations Be?

Cinematic adaptation of the written word is always tricky for the creative team behind it, particularly that of a beloved novel. Running time, censorship, marketability and even purely artistic decisions are among the many problems of transferring the written word onscreen which can easily clash with the fanbases over the whole finished product. What to have, or have not, from the books is not simply a petty case of inclusion and exclusion, nor even necessarily a mark of the film's quality (or lack thereof). A lot of time the whole issue comes down to adaptation fidelity. We like having an idea how an adaptation of our favourite book is going to look like on the silver screen; we want to identify with the characters like we did in the books, be engrossed in every literary details represented onscreen, every nook and cranny of the fictional world created brought to life. One can only begin to imagine the neuroses a filmmaker must endure when adapting any piece of work onscreen; Spike Jonze's terrific 2002 film Adaptation is probably a pretty good reflection of the painstaking process a writer must go through when finding some way, any way to infuse the cinematic into the literary.


Adaptation Distillation
It's a big issue, this whole relationship between novels and their film adaptations, so I think a good starting point would perhaps be with the most recurrent problem most people seem to have with adaptations, adaptation distillation. In layman terms, this is the cutting down of the source material--so to speak, 'distilling' certain aspects of plot and character through the filter of the film lens, screenwriters' hand and directorial choices, usually to make for a reasonable running time. Rarely is there an adaptation of any sort that does not 'distill' its source material, one way or the other. The main exceptions usually being short stories like A Christmas Carol, Brokeback Mountain, and some of Stephen King's adapted work. These require, instead, adaptation expansions, which are additions to the original text to lengthen the running time or add more plot elements (for example the inclusion of new characters into The Hobbit series to stretch one book into three films, any Dr. Seuss film, the excellent thriller Don't Look Now which changes a short but haunting Daphne Du Maurier story into a very in-depth character study of a grieving couple).

Full-length novels, however, would require an incredibly expansive miniseries - which is rarely an option - to fill in every single detail. Even a nearly four-hour long epic like Gone With the Wind required the cutting out of certain subplots and characters to manage it within even that hefty running time. It's not so much an issue of artistic licence as it is of pragmatism. Budgetary constraints aside, most people just wouldn't go out of their way to watch a film that pores over every single detail of its adapted source; this sort of limited scope would probably only appeal to the fandom of the novels. David Lean's two adaptations of Charles Dickens' Great Expectations and Oliver Twist are good examples of striking the balance between faithfulness and marketability of length and style. Elements of the original novel are changed—the latter even goes so far as to entirely remove the Rose Maylie subplot—but this doesn’t matter, it still successfully retain the atmospheric, barely controlled chaos of London presented by his prose and the characters perfectly embodied onscreen, particularly Alec Guiness who is unrecognizable as both Fagin and Herbert Pocket. Lean was a director who always had a firm, visionary outlook for all his films, and in his own class in imbuing his own style into films. I'll get more onto artistic licence in a bit, but Lean's Dickens adaptations, as well as some of his later, larger-scale work, most famously Bridge on the River Kwai, Dr Zhivago and of course, Lawrence of Arabia, show that there is a way to strike the balance between cutting down and adding on your own style and flair.

Not only a masterful actor, Sir Laurence Olivier was also a talent at 'cutting' Shakespeare down into an audience-friendly medium of film, while retaining the original spirit.

Another good example of this are Laurence Olivier and Kenneth Branagh adaptations of Shakespeare's plays, which always make clear 'that it is an can only be, a pale version of the Shakespearean text' (Deborah Cartnell, The Shakespeare on Screen Industry, from 'Adapations: From Text to Screen, Screen to Text', 1999, Routledge: London and New York). They take various creative licenses--for example race-bending casting, increased British propaganda in Olivier's Henry V, stunt casting in Branagh's Hamlet--and cuts here and there to make it more appealing to the silver screen (although it should be noted that Branagh's version of the play is essentially the whole text in all its entirety onscreen), but still retain the Bard's original spirit through their faithful, respectful treatment of the source material.

Retrospective v.s. On-the-go Distillation

Though their characterizations were modified slightly, the general dynamic of the Fellowship remained unchanged post-adaptation.

So we've established that distillation itself is inevitable. The area requiring a bit more in the way of decision-making is what to distill, what to cut. Sometimes there are obvious things that can be cut, other times, however, it becomes a little less clear, and not just as a matter of fan appeasement, but as a matter of making the whole plot click. A crucial aspect of the cutting resides in determining how important the plot points are as cogs in the machine; whether removing it will remove more than just flavour and style to the novel but in fact, dig the unsuspecting filmmakers into a hole. In these situations, hindsight is crucial. The Lord of the Rings cinematic trilogy was filmed long after the books had been completed, and the parameters of Tolkein's whole fictional universe had been firmly established. With all this effectively set in stone, Peter Jackson and his entourage were thereby given a complete overview of the finished, all-encompassing whole of the trilogy to work with, and from this vast scope to then tinker with minor and major details here or there to make the story manageable for motion picture. Trimming downs and even complete excisions of certain scenes, as well as some significant realignment of plot points (moving the Shelob attack to Return of the King), was all done with the benefit of hindsight.

It's completely subjective whether it all 'works', so to speak, and I would never go so far as to say the trilogy is a completely faithful interpretation of the novels. The relative side-lining of Éomer's role, Tom Bombadil's excision, the removal of some of Gimli's more dramatic heft as a character to make him more of a comic relief character etc. differ from the novel significantly; but one thing Jackson and the scriptwriters did ensure was that even in places where the film and source material varied, they would all be means to a similar ends and conclusion. They took the recipe for a cake and modified it in bits and places, but always ensuring that nothing was missing, and that the final product would be realised in a similar fashion.

Could've been a much more powerful moment had they stuck to the books.

These 'retrospective adaptations' as I call them, have the benefit of hindsight, which the equally (if not even more so) global phenomenon that is J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series, did not have. The escapades of the Boy Who Lived were filmed while Rowling was still working on the second half of her seven-book series. With guidance from Rowling herself and some luck they did manage to dodge some bullets (Matthew Lewis was definitely a stroke of luck for the casting crew, the exclusion of Peeves the Poltergeist didn't hurt them too much, and while they perhaps could've done without Grawp they didn't overuse him either) and didn't miss out too many plot points. However one can't help but think had they waited till the books were completed, how much more time could've perhaps been spent on the backstory of house elves Dobby and Kreacher (especially the latter), setting up Peter Pettigrew as not just a proverbial scoff for levity, but instead a full-fledged character in his own right, and what could've been done to smooth out other scruples fans like myself had with how some plot elements were brushed over, in favour of too much time spent on inconsequential love triangles and Quidditch matches.

It would've been very difficult for the filmmakers to, on the go, discern which and where to cut stuff; most of the time they stayed with playing it safe and focusing all characterization on the central trio, which worked to an extent, but also resulted in many of the more fan esoteric elements of the book being as developed as they could've been. Remus Lupin and Tonk's storyline might not have been as crucial to the plotline as say, the Deathly Hallows, but it would've been nice to have a bit more build-up to the emotional payoff their final scene with Harry requires of us.

The 'Skeleton' Adaptation
Another problem that faces adaptations, is when plot elements are so far removed from the source material that the originals seem to become mere skeletons of the original plot. Some critics argue that the act of transferring a character onscreen intrinsically simplifies him or her; and while that point must be held to a degree of contention, it is true that sometimes the act of going from page to screen must conform with certain 'changes necessary for dramatic effect in another medium, those required to conform to the producer's personal fantasies and his notions of what the public wants, and to meet the taboos of the Production code, and tailors it all to the screen personalities of the actors who will play the star roles' (H. Powdermaker, Hollywood the Dream Factory: An anthropologist looks at the movie makers,1951, London: Secker and Warburg, p. 153). A particular example of this would be the adaptations of the work of Raymond Chandler—or more specifically, Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, who has been portrayed onscreen multiple times in various adaptations, most notably in The Big Sleep (1946).

What John Paul Athansourelis calls the 'inherently cinematic quality of Chandler’s fiction' is ultimately upended by the conformities of the silver screen. The opening silhouettes of the two stars of the film, Bogart and Bacall, smoking during the opening credits of The Big Sleep clearly show that these two are to be the main attractions. The character of 'Silver Wig', a heartbreaking subversion of the typical blonde moll in noir fiction in the novel, is reduced to exactly that in the film adaptation; the final bleak twist of the novel is changed into a 'happy ending' with more resolution. One can argue in fact that Howard Hawks and the production team of The Big Sleep took the plot line from the novel and completely changed the tone from a gritty, downbeatin favour a lot of the deeper complexities of the novel and its darker, more sleazy elements are dropped not just due to the censorship of the times, but also due to the box-office necessity of any Bogart-Bacall coupling to be overflowing with innuendo and sexual tension, far removed from the terser and less savoury relationship between the two in the novel.

Edward Norton's narration in 'Fight Club' strikes the perfect balance with the film's tone

Adapting Narrative Voice
Also, Philip Marlowe being the first-person narrator of Chandler’s fiction poses a significant problem for any adaptation as the detective genre is one in which the first-person narrator, if (s) he is present, must act as a channel between reader and writer. Often the best way to go about adaptating this is the more straightforward route of eschewing the narrative voice and leaving it to the visual to convey the scene; for example, 'I recall it being a dusky dawn evening and mama sitting on the porch knitting', instead of having narration over it, just simply filmed and told without a disembodied voice providing commentary. This sort of 'external' narration is much easier to adapt than the 'internal' narration some novels hinge almost entirely upon; 'The Big Sleep' without Marlowe’s voice runs into a hurdle from the outset as it removes so much of the strong sense of vantage the novel provides with his sardonic yet meticulous narrative voice.

Graham Greene's 'The End of the Affair' is another notable example of the difficulty of adapting the narrative voice. It has twice been adapted to film, and the medium does kind of hurt the source material a bit. Every moment that strays from Maurice Bendrix's narrative voice, which writes 'against the bias because it is my professional pride to prefer the near-truth, even to the expression of my near-hate', kind of reduces the impact of the book's conflict between feigned objectivity and Bendrix's passions, as well as eschewing a whole lot of the whole metanarrative flair to Greene's story. The plot of The End of the Affair itself is strong enough to make a good enough skeleton for your typical melodramatic romance, but the near-impossibility of conveying Bendrix's narrative voice alongside it means that a lot of the novel's original power is lost.
There are ways in which narrative voiceover can work onscreen, whether it be in small portions at crucial moments (i.e. To Kill a Mockingbird) or as an extensive framing device (The Shawshank Redemption, Fight Club), but it is definitely a challenge; these successful adaptations have to not only employ is as an expositionary device, but also make it contingent with the fictional universe they are writing in. The narration in TKAM works so well because it feels so of its time; Morgan Freeman's voice simply just feels right reading Stephen King's words even if he's cast very differently to the Red envisaged in the books; Edward Norton's narration as the unnamed narrator in Fight Club is knowingly snarky, and fits right in with the tone David Fincher sets with the film.

Brody and his companions' plights are all the more soundly felt via adaptation.

Conclusion?
So is straying from the source material always a bad thing? Not necessarily. Sometimes taking the skeleton story and employing artistic license with the text, can bring about a masterpiece. Stanley Kubrick took a very serious, understated political thriller novel called Red Alert and turned it into the classic dark satire Dr Strangelove; Stephen Spielberg basically took just the idea of a giant killer shark from Jaws and turned it from a pulpy piece of horror fiction into a magnificent masterclass in suspense and characterization. David Lean, knowing that he could not possibly encompass all the elements of the epic Dr Zhivago into his adaptation, chose to make it mostly just one magnificent epic love story, and an incredibly compelling one at that; Milos Forman provoked the ire of Ken Kesey when he adapted the latter's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, because he had not kept in Chief Bromden's narrative POV, but Forman did his best to maintain the novel's representation of Jack Nicholson's Randle McMurphy as a sort of Christ figure to the asylum inmates, 'big as a damn mountain' through Nicholson's wonderfully grand performance, while still grounding it with the more objective film lens the flaws of the character.

Books and films, as two different forms of media, do (and rightly so) have different rules and expectations. The adaptation fidelity of a film to its original text should not be what it is measured against; rather the quality of the film should be judged in itself, before factoring its source material.

Few Random Thoughts on the New 'Star Wars: The Force Awakens' Trailer

 

From what it seems so far, based on the screen time/focus devoted in the trailers and all, I think Daisy Ridley's Rey is going to be our 'lead' lead for The Force Awakens. Her reply of 'I'm no one' to queries about her identity just smacks of good old Luke Skywalker in the original trilogy to me: stuck in a rut on a desert planet, handy with gadgets, little droid by her side to accompany her on her travels (love that shot by the way).

And yeah, why not? I have yet to see Daisy Ridley in anything outside of these select Star Wars teasers I've perused on repeat for many, many hours on end, but she seems like a new talent on the rise, which can only mean good things.

Couple things I learnt about John Boyega's Finn. One, he's going to be played with an American accent by the British-born John Boyega. Two, there is some serious potential with this character, a whole new perspective never before explored in the films of an individual caught between the dark side, and the light, but not in the higher echelons, but instead the lowly level of Storm Trooper to...where, indeed?

I just love the voice the filmmakers/Adam Driver have opted for Kylo Ren. It's the right degree of guttural menace, but nicely differentiated from the legendary character the villain is emulating. Other than his obsession with Vader, much remains unknown, and I'd like it to be kept that way till December.

Oscar Isaac is awesome.

The first-billing placement, it seems, was no mere coincidence; it does seem like Han Solo's going to be playing the most vital role out of the original trio, in The Force Awakens. Can I just say how great it is to have Harrison Ford back as Solo? Already in a few brief snippets I get no sense of phoning it in for the paycheck, nor sense of character fatigue. No, Ford looks like he's ready to rumble.

Some of these shots are just BEAUTIFUL. Also is anyone getting ensemble dark horse vibes from Captain Phasma?

CHEWIE

Again, Daisy Ridley, it seems, will make or break this film. And here she's making a very strong case to root for her.

 

Nothing new here, just some more footage of Boyega taking up the lightsaber against Kylo Ren. I CAN'T WAIT.

Head-to-Head: Satan's First Speech v.s. God's First Speech in 'Paradise Lost'

Milton employs his grand style in both Satan and God’s first speeches with their rhetorical forcefulness; there is however, a significant difference to how it is conveyed through their respective styles. Satan’s ‘bold words’, as Milton describes it, employ heightened language and imagery (‘eternal war’, ‘high disdain’, ‘excess of joy’, ‘glorious enterprise’, ‘transcendent brightness didst outshine myriads though bright’) to convey his heightened emotions of ‘high disdain’ for empyreal heaven he has been banished from. He combats the highest heavens by building up the stature of his language to match the ‘dire arms’ of God with his ‘glorious enterprise’. His power and supremacy is asserted through language, there is however also a hint of excessiveness to his raging rhetoric. God almost seems to be commenting on Satan’s excessive forcefulness of language when he muses on how Satan’s hate is that which ‘the main abyss wide interrupt can hold’; his hateful ramblings have rhetorical force but none of God’s intellect to back it up.

God, speaking from his ‘prospect high’ in Heaven, uses equally forceful rhetoric as Satan does in describing how his hateful phrases will ‘redound upon his own rebellious head’, and how he ‘created all th’ethereal Powers and Spirits’ as ‘sufficient to have stood, though free to fall’. However unlike Satan whose language is that which God describes as having ‘all restraint broke loose’, God’s foreknowledge, with which ‘past, present, future he beholds’, allows him to moderate his rhetoric so as to make it both forceful, and intelligent. Satan’s overly emotional state of being does not allow him such moderation. His hatred overflowing the ‘abyss’ is conveyed through his language overflowing the boundaries of syntax. He is aware that he lacks the ‘foresight much advanced’ that God has and bemoans it; he is aware that he has to rely upon the resilience of his ‘unconquerable will…revenge, immortal hate’, as well as deceit and trickery, to combat the ‘adverse power’ of God and the heavens.

Milton organises the intensities of God’s rhetoric into bouts of inductive reasoning where he muses over the ‘sole command, sole pledge’ of man’s ‘obedience’, and explores the themes of free will defences (‘sufficient to have stood, though free to fall’ man was with autonomy to choose between right and wrong), displaying an ability to reason with his analysis of will and reason, predestination, and defending his own foreknowledge for ‘their will, disposed by absolute decree or high foreknowledge’. God is also depicted by Milton as assuredly aware of the seeming contradictions between his foreknowledge, and the ‘unforeknown’ aspect of the Fall as an acquittal of his foreknowledge; thus he focuses upon ‘they’ almost exclusively in the second half of his first speech to remove himself from the picture, focusing on how man ‘decreed their own revolt’ and ‘ordained their fall’.

David Reid sees this act of keeping oneself ‘out of the picture as long as possible’ as being  ‘noble emotion’, which Satan embraces in IV, 366-373, sustaining a noble sympathy for the ‘gentle pair’ and their/’your’ predicaments. However in Satan’s first speech he is more extremely preoccupied with himself and shows it through his language, through his repeated use of ‘I’, ‘me’, and interlinking the other inhabitants of hell with him (they experience ‘equal ruin’ as him, they are ‘joined with me’, he and his fellow mates are in ‘mutual league’ and are ‘united thoughts and counsels, equal hope and hazard in the glorious enterprise’). He frequently sees himself in others, but this is due more to narcissism than equivocation with the people. Satan’s self-absorption is palatably felt, possibly to compensate for the ‘horrid silence’ of Hell by loudly, extravagantly making his presence felt to fill out the empty spaces. He is ‘vaunting aloud, but racked with deep despair’, raising his rhetoric in order to film the emptiness his powerlessness leaves him with.

Adapting the Narrative Voice Onscreen: Initial Thoughts on the V.O.

Strange, isn't it, the whole concept of a narrative voice in fiction? A mode of storytelling that's strictly speaking one of the most attuned to the human mind, the basis of all thought-processes: how often do we find ourselves internally going over what we've done over the past few minutes, hours, days, months, years...? And yet it's also one of the hardest things to convey onscreen. What a character can internalize with pages and pages of authorial control is immensely difficult to portray onscreen. Often the best way to go about adaptating this is the more straightforward route of eschewing the narrative voice and leaving it to the visual to convey the scene; for example, 'I recall it being a dusky dawn evening and mama sitting on the porch knitting', instead of having narration over it, just simply filmed and told without a disembodied voice providing commentary. This sort of 'external' narration is much easier to adapt than the 'internal' narration some novels hinge almost entirely upon; Graham Greene's 'The End of the Affair' being a notable example. I've always been a firm believer in the perfect medium for this masterpiece to be adapted would be a radio play, and indeed I feel the medium of film, through which it has twice been adapted, does kind of hurt the source material a bit in that every moment that strays from Maurice Bendrix's narrative voice, which writes 'against the bias because it is my professional pride to prefer the near-truth, even to the expression of my near-hate', kind of reduces the impact of the book's conflict between feigned objectivity and Bendrix's passions, as well as eschewing a whole lot of the whole metanarrative flair to Greene's story. The plot of 'The End of the Affair' itself is strong enough to make a good enough skeleton for your typical melodramatic romance, but the near-impossibility of conveying Bendrix's narrative voice alongside it means that a lot of the novel's original power is lost.

It doesn't always have to be like that. 'To Kill a Mockingbird', despite the excision of several subplots and characters from the original source material, is in my view one of the greatest film adaptations of a novel ever, in large part due to how it retains that narrative voice even in very small snippets of voiceover, and maintaining this tone for the rest of the film. For example, in the scene where she comes face to face with Boo the narrative voice in the novel, tinged with love and excitement, is conveyed almost silently and perfectly by Mary Badham and Robert Duvall. In 'The Shawshank Redemption' it seems almost cheating to have Morgan Freeman as Red as he damn well near steals the film away from everyone through his narration. Each and every beat of the film is matched perfectly with his voiceover and it is marvellous; and on the opposite end of the spectrum, the beauty of Kazuo Ishiguro's butler Steven's narration in 'The Remains of the Day' is retained by Anthony Hopkins' beautifully nuanced performance which, despite the lack of a narrative voice to guide him along, successfully manages to convey the exact tone of his narrative voice in the novel through his physical performance.

It's tricky to convey the sense of narration on the silver screen largely because it seems almost clumsy to have to rely upon the auditory, when the visual is all yours for the taking. But before people begin to chastitise the narrative voiceover as an inherently flawed storytelling technique, think about how it can add to a film, and not just in a Morgan Freeman, eloquent sort of way. Think about how it can add layers of ambiguity if fitted in accordance with the off-kilter nature of the rest of the film. 'Fight Club' comes to mind as a film which, without Edward Norton's terrific voiceover, would certainly lose a lot of its pop cultural power. In the basest sense it can help you keep track of where the story's headed; it can also nod towards the story itself in a cheeky sort of way, acknowledging its fictionality ('The Princess Bride') in a fun way, or adding layers of poignancy ('Titanic'). It's true that some films are better off without it than others (Stanley Kubrick's 'The Killing' comes to mind), but largely I think if done in the right way, the voiceover narrative voice onscreen can provide boundless utility for the filmmaker to go beyond just exposition and explanation, and really add layers to the story at hand simply by picking the right sort of voice to go along with it.

'Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want'

The wish-fulfilment themes of 'Ferris Buellers' Day Off' and 'Vertigo' examined head-to-head

Buying the above two posters earlier on this week at a posters' fair subconsciously initiated a train of thought within me: why these two? Well, one, they were one of the few that really interested me (there were some awfully cool Breaking Bad posters but having never seen a single episode of the series it would've been blasphemous to purchase one, as for the 'Star Wars' fare on sale I could've done with a lot more Yoda), but also as your humble author is constantly on the outlook for, there are more similarities between the two films than one would expect. One an excellent Hitchcockian thriller which explores perhaps the darkest territories of all his filmography, ranging from psychology, personal identity, and obsession; the other a (deceptively) lighthearted John Hughes teen comedy, also one of his very best, which starts off as upbeat and sprightly as any 80's Brat Pack flick before delving into some serious waters. Both have always been particular favourites of mine, and I think one linking factor between the two, the exploration of certain characters' wants and desires, is maybe one of the attractions of both films for me. They explore, in different yet not entirely dissimilar ways, how we employ images and fantasies of 'wish-fulfilment' onto others in order to fulfil our own desires, or assuage our ongoing neuroses.

Matthew Broderick's Ferris Bueller is, naturally the domineering presence of 'Ferris Bueller's Day Off', and Hughes' direction and script is well aware of this. It's wonderful to see Broderick's talents for lighthearted wisecracking and fourth-wall breaking being put to great use as he lights up every moments he's onscreen. His narrative voice and screen presence is what practically holds the film together and which makes it as memorable as it is, as it is never in doubt who's telling the story. But if Ferris is our guide into the story, then Alan Ruck's Cameron Frye is arguably the centre of it all. While Ferris remains a constant throughout (and it's testament to Broderick's talents that he never becomes off-putting even with some of Ferris' more selfish antics), Cameron is the one who gets the meaty dramatic scenes of the film. Comparisons have oft been made with 'Fight Club' and the listless Narrator's fictional conception of Tyler Durden in order to assert his masculinity, to Cameron and Ferris his outlet for his dreams and wishes. I don't entirely buy into the whole concept but I do feel that Cameron's friendship with Ferris is to an extent, an example of wish-fulfilment on the former's behalf. Ferris, with his excess of confidence, popularity, beautiful girlfriend and just general winning-ness in life, represents to Cameron everything he THINKS he wants in life, only to finally understand at the film's conclusion that what he really wants in life is to be able to stand by himself, and have Ferris as not a friend to be idolised, but just a best friend. It's a lesson I think Jimmy Stewart's Scottie would've done well to learn in 'Vertigo'. Kim Novak's dual identities in the film represent to him the pinnacle of wish-fulfilment, and his arc goes in stark contrast to Cameron Frye's. It's an incredibly unhealthy and bleakly dark relationship, whereby his obsession does not bring him out of himself like Cameron, but instead gradually eats him up from within till we are left with a shattered remnant of Stewart's 'aw shucks' persona. Charmless, vile, selfish, wish-fulfilment becomes the downwards spiral of a man torn apart by worshipping a fictionalised idol. He cannot get what he wants, but unlike Cameron who accepts this and learns to stand apart from his fantasies, he continues his futile pursuit till it results in him destroying the reality behind the fiction, and forever entrapping himself within the errors of his ways.