were “originals” (February 2–8, 1998). Academics have limited the issues at stake, not only by focusing largely on novels but also by insisting on what Andrew calls the “cultural status” of a prior model. “In the case of those texts explicitly termed ‘adaptations,’” Andrew writes, “the cultural model which the cinema represents is already treasured as a representation in another sign system” (97). Precisely; one could hardly expect to find a better definition of what adaptation means to most critics and historians. But the definition reveals that adaptation study in the limited sense is only partly about enunciative techniques or the “cardinal” features of narrative; it’s also about the interpretation of canonical literature in more or less traditional fashion, a system of critical writing that tends to reproduce cultural orthodoxies.
To his credit, Andrew argues that “It is time for adaptation stud[y] to take a sociological turn” (104), although the things he recommends for investigation, while valid, are conventionally literary—for example, the changing history of naturalism in Zola, Gorky, and Renoir. What we need is a broader definition of adaptation and a sociology that takes into account the commercial apparatus, the audience, and the academic wing of the culture industry. Academics need to move the discussion of adaptation slightly away from the great-novels-into-great-films theme and give more attention to economic, political, and broadly cultural issues. For example, we need more analysis of the relation between TV and theatrical film. Postmodern Hollywood has created a virtual genre out of big-screen adaptations of old TV shows (The Fugitive, The Mod Squad, Charlie’s Angels), while, in an ironic reversal, TV has become increasingly interested in the literary canon. Until quite recently, Masterpiece Theater was the major producer of filmed adaptations of “respectable” literature in America, reaching audiences as large as Hollywood in its heyday and probably helping to identify a niche market for the successful Merchant Ivory adaptations of E. M. Forster that played in theaters. By the end of the twentieth century, cable TV was producing a good deal of similar material. In the United States in 1999, the A&E network aired a miniseries based on C. S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower, the USA network produced Moby Dick, and Bravo broadcast a new version of the much-adapted The Count of Monte Cristo. During the 1999–2000 season, TNT produced adaptations of Animal Farm, A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, and Don Quixote. As this list suggests, Edwardian and nineteenth-century classics are the favored sources for “prestige” TV movies, just as they were for classic Hollywood, in part because they have a presold audience and are comparatively easy to adapt. Along similar lines, the literature most frequently adapted for twenty-first-century prestige TV is the popular mystery or melodrama, as in 2011, when Masterpiece Mystery adapted Michael Dibdin’s novels about police detective Aurelio Zen and HBO produced Todd Haynes’s adaptation of James M. Cain’s Mildred Pierce.
The current economic environment, which is characterized by enormous mergers in the communications industry and the growth of home theater systems, makes it especially important for us to understand the purely commercial relations between publishing, cinematic, and broadcast media. We need to ask why certain books (or comic books) become of interest to Hollywood in specific periods, and we need more investigations into the historical relation between movies and book publishing. We also need to ask what conditions of the marketplace govern the desire for fidelity. As one example, an audience survey conducted by David O. Selznick in the 1940s determined that relatively few people had read Jane Eyre and that a movie based on the novel did not need to be especially faithful; on the other hand, Selznick had been a fanatic about maintaining fidelity in Gone with the Wind (1939) and Rebecca (1940) because he knew that a substantial part of the audience had read Margaret Mitchell’s and Daphne du Maurier’s best-selling books (Sconce, 140–62).
In addition to expanding the questions we ask, we need to augment the metaphors of translation and performance with the metaphor of intertextuality, or with what Mikhail Bakhtin called dialogics. This approach to adaptation is best demonstrated by Robert Stam, who emphasizes “the infinite and open-ended possibilities generated by all the discursive practices of a culture” and the “entire matrix of communicative utterances within which the artistic text is situated” (Stam, “Beyond Fidelity,” 64). Stam takes us beyond simple attempts to compare “originals” with “transformations.” If we followed his advice, adaptation study would be brought more into line with both contemporary theory and contemporary filmmaking. We now live in a media-saturated environment dense with cross-references and filled with borrowings from movies, books, video games, and every other form of representation. High modernism resisted adaptation and emphasized media-specific form, but postmodernism and the entertainment industry are bent on a busy crossbreeding between the media (thus satisfying the aims of late capitalism). Books can become movies, but movies themselves can also become novels, published screenplays, Broadway musicals, television shows, or remakes.
A minor but charmingly clever example of a film that reflects this protean, highly allusive environment is Richard Kwietniowski’s Love and Death on Long Island (1998), which tells the story of a sheltered British novelist who goes to see an E. M. Forster adaptation at the local Cineplex and wanders by mistake into Hot Pants College II. The novelist develops a crush on a young actor he sees on the screen, who reminds him of a Pre-Raphaelite painting of the death of Chatterton that he has seen in the Tate Gallery. I won’t describe the plot any further, except to note that it’s based on a novel by Gilbert Adair, which offers a rewriting of Mann’s Death in Venice and Nabokov’s Lolita. The film complicates things still more by introducing full-scale parodies of Hollywood B movies and TV sitcoms; it brings high culture and low culture, the literary and the cinematic, into ludic juxtaposition. Notice also that Hot Pants College II, the film that stimulates the lonely novelist’s desire, is a sequel. On a theoretical level, sequels, remakes, parodies, and pastiches are quite similar to adaptations; they seldom if ever involve questions of media-specific form, but all are derivative or imitative, in danger of eliciting critical opprobrium because in one sense or another they copy “culturally treasured” originals. We need only compare the critical discourse surrounding Hitchcock’s Psycho, a film adaptation that some American critics once regarded as a tasteless horror movie but that nearly everyone now acknowledges as a masterpiece, with the discourse surrounding both its sequels/prequel and its 1998 remake, which encountered nearly universal derision.
Viewed from the larger perspective of the engines of modernity, every movie tends to problematize originality and autonomy, if only because its photographs or digital images of the living world are taken out of their initial contexts. Walter Benjamin was aware of this phenomenon in his famous essay on mechanical reproduction, where he quotes Abel Gance’s enthusiastic 1927 pronouncement, “Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Beethoven will make films.” “Presumably without intending it,” Benjamin remarks, Gance was issuing “a far-reaching liquidation” (151). André Bazin was aware of much the same issues in his 1948 essay on adaptation, to which I alluded at the beginning. In this remarkable essay, Bazin discusses adaptation mostly in terms of remediation (one of his examples is a concert orchestra broadcast over a radio) and asks us to think of film adaptations as similar to engravings that make the so-called original “readily accessible to all.” Most discussion of such films, he notes, has been conducted on the level of formalist aesthetics, which is preoccupied with the nature of the “cinematic.” But “one must first know,” he writes, “to what end the adaptation is designed: for the cinema or its audience. One must also realize that most adaptors care far more about the latter than about the former” (Bazin, “Adaptation, or the Cinema as Digest,” 44).
Bazin attacks the “clichéd bias according to which culture is inseparable from intellectual effort,” and the “classical modes of cultural communication, which are at once a defense of culture and a secreting of it behind high walls” (45). He notes that adaptation has a number of important social functions, one of which, not always involving remediation, is directly pedagogical, taking the form of “digests” such as the “abridged” editions of classic literature used in classrooms. (Most film adaptations of novels are in fact digests or condensations of their sources, but one could add such things as Classics Illustrated comics, Reader’s Digest condensed books, and plot summaries in Cliff Notes. Where the pedagogical uses of the digest are concerned, an interesting study could be written about the long
