Adaptive Collaboration, Collaborative Adaptation: Filming the Mamet Canon

Adaptation Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 82–98 doi: 10.1093/adaptation/apq004 Advance Access publication 8 April 2010 Adaptive Collaboration, Collaborative Adaptation: Filming the Mamet Canon CHRISTOPHE COLLARD* Downloaded from Abstract Every migration across referential and expressive frameworks entails formal, structural, and cognitive consequences too complex for a ‘traditionalist’ comparative posture. More- over, the intertextuality and intermediality of the ‘transmedial screenplay’ make it incompatible with ‘static’ concepts such as ‘fidelity’ and ‘originality’ precisely on behalf of the film medium’s adaptation.oxfordjournals.org poly-systemic nature. Bringing together the analogous concerns of collaborative creation, adaptation, and authorship, this essay therefore discusses David Mamet’s screen adaptations of personal and other work from a process-based perspective as a means of attaining a more constructive understanding of so-called ‘interaesthetic passages’. Keywords David Mamet, collaborative creation, adaptation, authorship, semiology. at Funda??o Coordena??o de Aperfei?oamento Pessoal N?vel Superior on June 3, 2011 All train compartments smell vaguely of shit. It gets so you don’t mind it. That’s the worst thing that I can confess. (Mamet, Glengarry Glen Ross) INTRODUCTION Every single film producer, Hollywood veteran Art Linson has claimed, knows that at the inception of the movie-making process stands ‘an idea’ derived from ‘A book. A play. A song. A news event. A magazine article. A historic event or character. A personal experience. A remake of an existing movie. Any combination of the above’ (15). From the screenwriter’s perspective, things look slightly different. Like playwright-turned- filmmaker David Mamet so delicately observed, this adaptive authorship in practice translates as ‘Film is a collaborative business: bend over’ (1989: 311).1 Curiously enough, most of Mamet’s own screenplays are acknowledged adaptations, some even of his own plays, as if he masochistically relished the power struggle between ‘source text’, Holly- wood bureaucracy, and his aesthetic first principles. Mamet’s creative journey across media and genres—ranging from experimental theatre over the ‘hardboiled’ film noir to the novel, and from radio plays over children’s literature to television drama—already suggests as much. This essay, in turn, brings together the analogous concerns of adaptation, authorship, and collaborative creation to gain insight into the complex negotiation processes that constitute these very concepts. Excursions into David Mamet’s adaptive *Vrije Universiteit Brussel. E-mail: [email protected]. Christophe Collard is a research fellow at the Language and Literature Department of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Free University of Brussels) where he recently completed a doctoral dissertation on the media and genre crossings in the work of David Mamet. © The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: [email protected] 82 Adaptive Collaboration, Collaborative Adaptation 83 work for stage and screen will thereby serve to support the central thesis that adaptation, authorship, as well as collaboration cannot and should not be treated as indepen- dent from one another. FIDELITY UNDER PRESSURE It seems a truism that adaptations adapt a ‘text’ from one discursive field to another. Simplified to the extreme, a communicative situation involves the presence of a text (text), a series of elements that guarantee the communicative interaction (interactional frame), a series of background discourses (intertextual frame), and a set of personal and collective experiences that operate as a reference (existential frame) (Casetti 84), accord- Downloaded from ing to which the term ‘adaptation’ would denote the explicit transposition of an acknowledged source text. Unfortunately, such a straightforward causality conflicts with the notion of ‘discursive field’ in which it is wont to occur. Moreover, the adaptation adaptation.oxfordjournals.org presented as adaptation loses its referential effect when the receiver is unacquainted with the material transposed. Together both issues—that is, linearity and referentiality—in fact account for most of the misconceptions about the paradoxical phenomenon that is adaptation. A palimpsest, the adaptation effectively stages multiple texts simultaneously. How- at Funda??o Coordena??o de Aperfei?oamento Pessoal N?vel Superior on June 3, 2011 ever, rather than to be lamented for its parasitical ‘impurity’, the ‘double vision’ it stimulates is generative at heart. Put differently, instead of bickering over a ‘lack’ of originality or the ‘failure’ of representativeness at either end of the spectrum, it may be better to account for the popularity and omnipresence of adaptations. William Shakespeare, one of the Western literary canon’s towering figures, did not write a single ‘original’ play in the purist sense of the term, just as nowadays roughly 90% of all Oscar-winning Best pictures and award-winning television series are adaptations (Hutcheon 4). This appeal itself relates to another truism: successful adaptations are adaptive. Historically adaptation-criticism has been plagued by the doctrine of ‘fidelity’ and its baffling references to a source text’s presumed ‘spirit’ which in Kamilla Elliott’s seemly words ‘always retains an element of je ne sais quoi’ (137). To a certain extent this is un- derstandable, since the cultural prestige of the acknowledged original is often used as legitimation for the new text and the medium in which it is produced. Films such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Francis Ford Coppola, 1992), Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (Peter Kosminsky, 1992), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (Kenneth Branagh, 1994), or William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet (Baz Luhrmann, 1996) all claim literary ‘author-ity’ and ‘improvement’ through technological repurposing. It is a phenomenon that caused Linda Hutcheon to relabel the ‘Based on. .’ label ‘a ruse’ (18). Incidentally, their narrow comparative posture accounts for most adaptation studies’ general lack of the- oretical sophistication. Precisely their solipsistic character causes the few critical principles deployed to ossify into ‘binary oppositions that poststructuralist theory has taught us to deconstruct: literature versus cinema, high culture versus mass culture, original versus copy’ (Naremore 2). ‘Originals’ are unavoidably ‘superior’ to their negatively connoted derivatives, but only in the apodictic sense of yet another truism that ‘source texts will always be better at being themselves’ (Leitch 161). Robert Stam thereby rightly noted that ‘The question of fidelity ignores the wider question: Fidelity to what?’ (2000: 57). 84 CHRISTOPHE COLLARD The migration across referential and expressive frameworks entails formal, structural, and cognitive consequences. And whereas a certain core of meaning may indeed travel, it can never be captured without its techno-cultural mediation. Thus, the so-called spirit of the so-called source text is destined to remain an arbitrary construction, and a reductive one at that. Studies of interaesthetic passages pertaining to the performing arts traditionally tend to disregard the socio-semiological processes in favour of a static comparative approach. Paradoxically, it is precisely their dynamic character that fuels these complex transfers of creative energy. Because distinctions emerge wherever perception takes us, failures in communication are always possible where denotations, connotations, and interpreta- Downloaded from tions meet. However, the tension the negotiation produces unmistakably carries generative potential. Varun Begley, for example, rightly remarked that ‘it is an uncomfortable position to write in one breath about Mamet’s plays, the films he has written and di- adaptation.oxfordjournals.org rected, and the films he has merely written’ because, the argument goes, ‘To assume a univocal identity, merely for the sake of simplicity, is to ignore the questions of medium, mediation, and authority which the phenomenon of David Mamet has thrown into relief ’ (165). Indeed, Mamet debuted as screenwriter with the remake of an adaptation 2 (The Postman Always Rings Twice, 1981—director Bob Rafelson ), just as his subsequent at Funda??o Coordena??o de Aperfei?oamento Pessoal N?vel Superior on June 3, 2011 films followed in the wake of stage adaptations of canonical plays or were quite simply adaptations in their own right. Because adaptations are fundamentally intertextual systems, referential frameworks paradoxically must be self-relativising in order to be meaningful. In keeping with Patrick Cattrysse’s formulation, ‘The functioning of norms explains why communicative behaviour shows system(at)ic characteristics. Norms and systems can therefore be seen as two sides of the same coin’ (253). In this regard he noted a number of recurring fallacies in translation and adaptation studies, two of which are particularly relevant to the argument developed in this essay: • The contradiction between a descriptive attitude with respect to translation as a final product and the normative attitude regarding translation as process. • The confusion resulting from terminology used once on the level of the object of study (e.g., translation as a final product), and then on the meta-level (e.g., translation as a process). (257) Instead of formulating misguided fidelity-frameworks based on static conceptions of ‘proto-’

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