(In)Fidelity Criticism and the Sexual Politics Oí Adaptation

(In)fidelity Criticism and the Sexual Politics oí Adaptation Undfer the heading "Adaptation In Theor)'," James Naremore gathers a group of essays whose authors help to move the discussion of literature and film beyond the fldelit)' cridcism that once held sway in the academy and that still prevails in the popular imagination. From the embourgoisement ot movies to the insdtudonal biases of English departments, the authors shed light on why crides and audiences expect a movie to faithfully adhere to a literary original. In addidon, they provide new ways to conceive tlie relationship betu'een literature and film. Wliile their terms deri^|e from different critical vocabularies, they all recognize the need to dethrone the llterar)- text's pri\ileged position in the relationsliip and, more broadly, promote what Dudley Andrew calls "a sociological turn"(35) in adaptation studies. I ruUy endorse this theoretical turn and hope my reading of Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman's Adaptation (2002) is faithful to the sociological spirit, if not the letter, of the writers in Naremore's book. However, in moving beyond fidelity critiijism, these scholars leave litde room for the concept of "infidelity" as a means to assess the relationship between film and literature. Robert Stam, for example, while giving it some legitimacy, sees the concept as evincing a "Victorian prudery" (54).! Similarly, Andrew sees concerns about (in)fidelit)' arising out of a hierarchical literary culture that blocks the "fertitit)^"(30) of adaptation found in earlier popular culture forms. For Naremore, the establishment of fidelit)' criticism in film studies can be traced back to stodgy English departments imbued with "a mixture of Kandan aesthedcs and Arnoldian ideas about societ)'" (2). For all of these scholars, fidelit)' cridcism is inextricably ded to an academicism and literary- ideolog)' that at least:implicidy privilege and essendalize the verbal over the visual and the literary over the cinematic. Jqnze and Kaufman's Adaptation is a stunning cinemadc realization of the principles Naremore's volume champi- ons, revealing filmmaking to be a hap- hazard and heterogeneous process that would make problematic any attempt to judge a film by its (in)fideUt)' to any particular "source." In adapting Susan Orlean's novel The Orchid Thief—a far- reaching meditadon on orchids and the (!)eople who pursue them that started out as a profile in The New Yorker about the renegade hordculturalist John Laroche—the movie unveils complex layers of intertextual reality: with appearances by Spike Jonze, John Malkovich, John Cusack, and Catherine Keener playing themselves; with real people played by ac- tors, Orlean (Meryl Streep), Laroche (Chris Cooper), Robert McKee (Brian Cox), and Charlie Kaufhian (Nicholas Cage); and with a fictional character, Charlie's 299 300/(ln)fidelity Criticism and the Sexual Politics of Adaptation twin brother Donald Kaufman (also played by Nicholas Cage), listed in both the movie's and screenplay's credits as though he were a real per- son. To use the overworked metaphor of the movie critics who endorse it as a literary film that succeeds both with the crides and at the box office. Adaptation''^ meta-narradve makes it a rare Hollywood flower. Of course, not everyone is im- pressed by the film's complex self-reflexivit)-: Wridng for Slate, David Edelstein is irritated by the movie's attempt "to have it both ways: to be swooningly romantic and brusquely cynical." Stanley Kauffimann, with a condescension befitting TheNew Republics fossilized leftism, proclaims, "XHrtually everything that happens in ^¿¿^Ä7- tionh almost juvenile showing off," not the least of which is the movie's impudent premise—"a film that is in search of a script." Stephanie Zacharek, wridng for Salon, also slams the movie for being "[s]elf-referential to tlie extreme," but unlike most reviewers she detects an element of machismo in Kaufman's metafiction that she characterizes as "meta-macho." Further, she seems attuned to the gender roles at work when she describes Orlean's stor)' as "melting away by the end of the movie subsumed by [Kaufman's] own neuroses." Instead of developing this gender cri- tique, however, she keeps the movie in an aesthedc context comparing it to other films that, uv^Q Adaptation., "show an awareness on the filmmaker's part of what it means to turn words into mo\des." But any critical framework is obscured by the invective she heaps upon the film: "cowardly," "a cheap in-joke," "completely self- indulgent," "a faux-grand concept," and so forth. Citing Robin Wood's insistence that "there is no such thing as a faithful adaptation," she acknowledges the need to rethink adaptation and the rights of the adaptor, but then inexplicably criticizes Adaptation for "exercis[ing] those rights to the breaking point." No less than the screenwriter Kaufman, it would appear, Zacharek wants to have it both ways. In my attempt to follow the "sociological turn" Andrew calls for in film smdies, my reading of Adaptation develops Zacharek's nascent gender cHdque; however, before doing that, it is necessary to fully acknowledge the movie's success in taking the rights of the adaptor "to the breaking point," as she terms it. Oa^n^ Adapta- tion "a wonderful essay on the creadve process," Kenneth Turan of the Los Angles Times extends the theorj' of k camera stylo to put the adaptor on the level of an essayist, in Sight <& Sound, Henry Bean says it more forcefull)', calling the movie's screenplay nothing less than "the revenge of the writer"—a point of v-iew that is also shared by Kaufman's colleagues. Robert McKee, the real-life screenwriter and teacher played by Brian Cox in the movie. (In)6delity Critidsm and the Sexual Politics of Adaptation describes Kaufhian as "an old-fashioned Modernist" (131), wridng in the"palaeo- avant'garde tradidon" of Strindberg, Proust, Pirandello, and Kafka, among other "luminaries of the Modern" (131). And screenwriter Stephen Schiff {Ijilita, 1997; The Deep End of the Ocean, 1999), embracing the film as a manifesto, asserts that Kaufman's work offers "redemption" to himself and his fellow screenwriters who have been "struggling to adapt to the world's dismissive view of adaptation," while taking the opportunit)- to disabuse moviegoers of the illusion that there is any such thing as "a truly faithful adaptadon." The comments by these reviewers and Kaufman's colleagues are consonant with the views expressed by Naremore and the other scholars who wish to banish fidelit)' cridcism because of its Victorian prudery and literary elidsm. Long o\'er- shadowed by the director—^whom auteur theory, the New Wave, and film schools helped to establish as the primary creadve agent beliind a film—Kaufman's success as a screenwriter reflects a new sensibilit): Indeed, a new respect for the work of adaptadon and the role of the screenwriter go hand in hand. Provoked in part b)' Adaptation'?, screenplay, along with other Oscar notninees, this new sensibilit)- was illuspated by the controversy among Academy Award voters in 2002. The)' found that year's nominees unsettling the Academy's tradidonal distincdon between "original screenplay" and "adapted screenplay"—debating whether a nominee for best original screenplay, such as Mj Rig hat Greek Wedding (Joel Zwik) was more like an adaptadon, while Adaptation, a nominee for best adapted screenplay, was more like an original screenplay. The Academy's confusion on this score is not without precedents; nonetheless, as Rick Lyman of The New York Times reports, it led some to wbnder, "in an age of narradve deconstrucdon and 'reality television,'" whether the disdnction between original and adaptation was still valid. Viliile Kaufman's screenplay helps one to ap- preqiate adaptadon as an intertextual process that transcends, in the words of Stam, "the apodas of 'fidelity'" (64), one also needs to avoid what ihe orchid thief might be called the "apodas of adaptation." One such aporia shared by most movie reviewers and Kaitfman's colleagues is the gendered social context informing Kaufman's adaptadon of Orlean's novel The Orchid Thief. Although Orlean is an enthusiasdc supporter of the movie, she suggests the terms of fidelit)' cridcism may still be useful when she describes Kaufman's adaptadon of her novel as going "from faithful to crazUy unfaithful" (Boxer). The notion of Kaufman's "crazily unfaithful" screenplay opens the movie, as well as Orlean's novel, to an ideological reading that has been ignored by both its many supporters and few o R L detractors—that is, the movie's sexual politics. More generally, it suggests that in the effort to recognize the creative value of adaptadon, one still needs to be wary of replacing one sort of formalist framework with another, obscuring a fuller ac- coutldng of a given text's sodal and poUdcal environment. 302/(In) fidelity Critidsm and the Sexual Politics of Adi^tation It is worth keeping in mind that the view of the screenwriter as the Rodney Dangerfield of filmmaking is understood, like so much in filmmaking, on a sexual level. In Richard Corliss's path-breaking rejoinder to auteur theory. The Holljnmd Screenwriters, Carl Foreman {High Noon, 1952; The Guns of Navarom^ 1961) attempts to explain the screenwriter's misunderstood and undervalued place within the film industry with an old-fashioned chauvinism that is almost touching in its unselfcon- sciousness. Describing the screenwriter's relationship to the director and producer of a film, he says: If you are a man [as a screenwriter] you suddenly find yourself in an unaccus- tomedly feminine posidon, simultaneously wooed by two lovers, and you begin to suspect (correcdy) that when you have given birth to your child, one or the other of these swains is going to take it away firom you and raise it his way.

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