“This Is Not Dickens”: Fidelity, Nostalgia, and Adaptation

“THIS IS NOT DICKENS”: FIDELITY, NOSTALGIA, AND ADAPTATION _______________________________________________________________________ A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School University of Missouri-Columbia _____________________________________________ In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts ____________________________________________ by KRISTIN SPOONER Dr. Nancy West, Thesis Supervisor AUGUST 2006 The undersigned, appointed by the Dean of the Graduate School, have examined the thesis entitled “THIS IS NOT DICKENS”: FIDELITY, NOSTALGIA, AND ADAPTATION Presented by Kristin Spooner A candidate for the degree of Master of Arts And hereby certify that in their opinion it is worthy of acceptance. ____________________________________________ Professor Nancy West ____________________________________________ Professor Joanna Hearne ____________________________________________ Professor Mary Kay Blakely ii To Melis: for your listening ear and ceaseless encouragement. To Scott: for the bag of M&M’s, your patience, and the day trip to Fayette. To Mom and Dad: for being proud of me, ad infinitum. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank Dr. Joanna Hearne and Professor Mary Kay Blakely for their input and their assistance with my research queries, and I am grateful to Dr. Scott Kaukonen for his careful reading and editing of the project at various stages in its development. Most of all, I am indebted to Dr. Nancy West for her invaluable guidance and support throughout this project. Nancy, in the summer of 2005, a bunch of us sat in your backyard, our chairs in a haphazard circle as darkness fell. Our conversation meandered through various topics, including my indecision about whether to write a thesis or take comprehensive exams. As soon as the subject arose, you looked at me from across the patio and said, “Write a thesis and I’ll direct it,” a statement you made sound so obvious and so full of promise that I immediately wondered why I was agonizing over the decision at all. And so I wrote a thesis. You directed it. And, of course, you were right. It was the best decision. Now, I finally believe myself the scholar I never quite thought I could be. I can’t thank you enough. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………....iv Introduction………………………………………………………………………………. 1 Chapter 1…………………………………………………………………………………16 Chapter 2………………………………………………………………………………... 40 Chapter 3………………………………………………………………………………... 58 Coda……………………………………………………………………………………... 76 Works Cited……………………………………………………………………………... 84 v Introduction I never imagined I would spend so much time reading and analyzing the opinions of people who refer to themselves with sobriquets like “Spleen,” “Aimless-46,” “Lizardiharp,” and “Lovebeetree.” But that is precisely what I have done in this project, as these people, strange screen names and all, are among the thousands of “citizen critics”1 who review films on the Internet. Not all reviewers create funky monikers for themselves when they have to post their names with their reviews, but they all apparently share a similar intrinsic motivation that pushes them to electronically publish their opinions of films. In this project, I examine those opinions, specifically the reviews of three Victorian novel film adaptations: Joe Wright’s Pride & Prejudice (2005), Roman Polanski’s Oliver Twist (2005), and Alfonso Cuarón’s Great Expectations (1998). I trace the public reception of these films by considering the reviews of Internet Movie Database citizen critics alongside the reviews of professional critics like Stanley Kauffman, Janet Maslin, David Edelstein, and others. In doing so, I look to see how fidelity discourse, the common language of adaptation studies, manifests itself in these reviews despite its limitations and the repeated calls of academics and scholars for its demise. I also discuss the factors that contribute to reviewers’ reliance on fidelity discourse. Much of the fidelity discourse in these reviews is bound up in nostalgia and in the respondents’ visual conceptions of the Victorian era. In other words, the reviewers’ 1 Here and throughout this project, I use the term “citizen critics” to denote the nonprofessional critics who post film reviews on the Internet Movie Database. I am indebted to Rosa Eberly’s Citizen Critics for the phrase, which Eberly uses to describe the “nonexperts” (2) who have offered public criticism in response to twentieth-century literary controversies. vi sense of what a Victorian film should be like derives not only from their associations with the source novels but also from their persistent nostalgia for an era in which they never lived. Since contemporary reviewers have not personally experienced the Victorian Age, they often regard nineteenth-century novels as authentic representations of a long-gone period, and thus measure the authenticity of the film’s portrayal of the period by the film’s faithfulness to the novel. The language of fidelity discourse reflects the reviewers’ expectation that the novels’ film adaptations also should serve as authentic representations of both the novels and the Victorian past, as the visual nature of film allows them to conceptualize the period more clearly. In short, this project explores the responses of critics as they assess whether the filmic adaptations of Victorian novels adequately fulfill their great expectations. There has never been a better time to be a critic, in part because it has never been easier to be one. Thanks to the tremendous growth of the Internet, it is no longer difficult for people to distribute their opinions to a wide audience, whether they do so by writing blogs, creating personal homepages, posting on message boards and listservs, or offering their opinions on websites with spaces for user comments or customer reviews. Anyone with access to the Internet can become a film reviewer, and in a format more formal and substantive than a fleeting coffee-and-biscotti conversation with friends about the latest Jerry Bruckheimer blockbuster. Before the Internet became so accessible, there were essentially no opportunities for everyday filmgoers to publish their written reviews, save for occasional pieces in local newspapers. But, as P. David Marshall and Robert Burnett explain in their book Web Theory: An Introduction, the notion of “cultural production” is 2 “central to the meaning and use of the Web” (70). The authors explain that the standard term for someone who engages with the Web—an Internet “user”—is indicative of the technology’s interactive and productive nature. Words like “surfer” and “browser” are not fully accurate, as they imply a sense of limited and often casual engagement with the Web. According to Marshall and Burnett, the term “user” is much more fitting, as it denotes “a kind of active exchange that is central to the Web experience” (73). More significantly, the label of “user” designates “another clear defining characteristic of the Web: it is as much about looking, reading, observing, and browsing as it is about a kind of empowerment to produce” (73). With this “empowerment to produce,” the Internet allows for a shift: people are no longer a “passive public” but rather an “active audience” (3), citizens who are as interested in creating cultural products on the Web as they are in consuming them. The evidence of such active Internet cultural production can be found on any website that provides “Customer Reviews” or “User Comments”; these days, people can electronically publish their opinions about everything from sports cars to vacuum cleaners to the latest DVD special edition of The Wild Bunch. Generally, the most widespread reviewing websites are those that deal in popular culture, and one such site is the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), which proclaims itself “Earth’s Biggest Movie Database.” While IMDb is perhaps best known for its extensive archive of film-related information, it also boasts an active “User Comments” feature, in which anyone with an e-mail address can post a review of any of IMDb’s 787,797 titles, nearly 350,000 of 3 which are theatrically-released films.2 Casey McKittrick, who examines the presence of taboo themes in the IMDb User Comments of Happiness (1998) and American Beauty (1999), notes that IMDb “fosters an environment of recognizing online users as potential citizen-critics by providing a ‘platform’ for them to speak to other users,” which makes IMDb a “register of discretely posted critical pieces” (4). Other review-centered websites that promote the publishing of citizen critics’ film responses include Rotten Tomatoes (rottentomatoes.com), Film Freak Central (filmfreakcentral.net), and Metacritic (metacritic.com), but here, I focus only on the IMDb citizen reviews, in part to place reasonable parameters on my Internet research but also because of IMDb’s solid reputation and long-running presence as a popular and reputable source of film information. As I explore the critical reception of three film adaptations of Victorian novels, I look to IMDb reviewers and to professional critics for insights. Although the two groups have their differences and are typically regarded as distinct categories of reviewers, the body of citizen critics’ reviews is too prolific and too rich to disregard in favor of the reviewers whose professional status gives them instant authority and cultural prestige. Plus, the Internet reviewers are not constrained by time or space limitations, and they are wholly internally motivated to offer their

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