Greetings, blogorium readers! I, your humble Cap'n, have defected from the world of Rupert Murdoch and Myspace in order to keep my intellectual property "in house", so to speak. Otherwise, you can expect very much the same content: all things film and film related ephemera, with a dash of tv mixed in*.
From here on out, this will be the home of all blogorium operations. Non-Myspacers will not be able to join in on the conversation and to peruse entries, including older ones if I can find a way to import them.
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When we last met, the Cap'n was digging under the surface of film adaptations, trying to understand the complicated ways that transferring one medium to another changes the way we perceive both versions.
The side effect with the greatest impact, I feel, is how a successful adaptation can not only undermine the source material, but it can at times totally replace it. During a conversation with a professor today, it became abundantly clear that reading is not something students are putting stock into. Unless information is displayed in a strictly visual sense (powerpoint, film, or the curious shift from book to computer screen), many college freshmen and sophomores simply tune out. I've been noticing it quite a bit lately, and within the film department this becomes increasingly evident.
Hearing classmates groan audibly when they learned that reading Patrick Suskind's Perfume was a prerequisite in order to study Tom Tykwer's adaptation was disappointing. The reason you might not hear much about Tykwer's version of the story is because the film is a disaster; not merely in adapting the source material but as a film itself. However, among students who never read the book, the film is described as "artful", "unconventional", and "brilliant", among other hyperbole.
On the other hand, ask the average cinephile about Blade Runner and they'll chat your ear off about the symbolism, its artistic merit, and how the film was simply "misunderstood" when released in 1982. Fair enough. Chances are they've also never read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.
I'm getting into very tricky territory here, because I'm about to use the same argument to the opposite effect. I don't like the film of Perfume at all. I do love Blade Runner. That being said, neither of them are particularly "good" adaptations. Both make serious changes, deletions, insertions, and at times reflect a tone different from the source material. (For one thing, you're going to have some trouble finding the term "Blade Runner" in the novel.) I would be surprised if Perfume ends up with the kind of following that developed around Blade Runner, but I can't rule it out however much I might disagree.
For the moment, Blade Runner has effectively replaced Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep in discourse. The film is more "essential" than the book it was based on, however loosely. I used a similar anecdote yesterday about The Lord of the Rings books although it may take more time to determine how strongly the films come to replace the novels in popular imagination.
This applies, as I suggested yesterday, to remakes as well. We may be more acutely aware of it today as more recognizable titles are being re-created for new audiences, but that doesn't mean we notice it all the time. After all, in addition to the novel The Maltese Falcon, there were two other versions of the film before John Huston's. The version with Bogart just happens to be the one that everyone remembers.
Remaking The Last House on the Left provided an interesting space in discourse for some writers to wax philosophic about the latest iterations connection to the original and to Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring. Not everyone who went to see this version of The Last House on the Left read those musings but they do represent some degree of reclaiming the power of "new" to replace "old", even if The Virgin Spring remains (criminally) underseen.
Is the value of comparative studies in adaptation and remakes limited to academia and film criticism? Does the average filmgoer - even the noveau-cinephile - care about the relationship between versions of the same story? Should intertextuality be important to them in any way?
Thoughts?
* The Cap'n reserves the right to include or exclude snark as it applies.
1 comment:
The average viewer should care.
The average listener with at least a modicum of musical knowledge, formal or anecdotal, can tell the difference (usually) and can make distinctions -- both in critiques of taste and production -- between remakes of songs. The rub here is the popularity/immediacy and/or recentness of the originality. On one hand, most folks think Jeff Buckley wrote "Hallelujah," which isn't true at all, of course. On the other hand, tunes like "I Will Survive," "Respect," or "Love Rollercoaster" have been remade over and over again, and at least with Aretha or Gloria, most audience members will know the difference and be able to put their mark on the success of the sonic, genre, or lyrical jump.
People should at least care that films like Insomnia, The Ring, and and countless others come from earlier, often foreign, and far superior films that embrace such cinematic novelties like pacing, subtlety, composition, etc.
As far as adaptations go, you anticipate and almost solve your own problems. Much of the book-to-movie (or vice versa) crowd is well-versed enough in the urtext that they will immediately distinguish what is missing, if only after repeat viewings. Again, though, is the popularity and immediacy of the original. I give you The Reader versus Harry Potter. The film of The Reader caused the book in translation to start flying off the shelves yet the appearance of the film -first- in their media-consciousness will cause them to write off the extended subplots that may have reshaped or cast different views upon the film adaptation.
Whether it's all a question of whether they recognise differences versus recognition and application, I don't know.
As far as intertextuality and self-reference are concerned, though, I think of Arrested Development and various other sitcoms that reference previous events and such ad nauseum. It's blatant, but most audiences seem to pick up on the intertext-lite.
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