TRANSFIGURATION MAXIMA!: HARRY POTTER AND THE COMPLEXITIES OF FILMIC ADAPTATION by Philip M. Shafer A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Middle Tennessee State University May 2016 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Martha Hixon, Dissertation Director Dr. Jennifer Marchant, Reader Dr. David Lavery, Reader To my wife, Tracie, and my two children, Annabeth and Ella: Your love, support, and understanding enabled me to survive grad school. This dissertation is as much yours as it is mine. ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my two youngest siblings, Jennifer and Mandy, for introducing me to the third Harry Potter film, Alfonso Cuarón’s masterful adaptation of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. I had all but ignored the Harry Potter novels and films prior to seeing Cuarón’s film, but after seeing what he did with Rowling’s text I was hooked. And, after I wrote my first paper on Harry Potter in grad school a year later, the rest—as they say—is history. I would also like to thank those fellow grad students who have challenged me, argued with me, and laughed with me as we studied language, literature, and theory together. I will always appreciate the time we shared. One student in particular, a fellow children’s literature scholar who was a couple of years ahead of me, taught me so much about what it really means to be a PhD student. I wish Agapi Theodorou only the best. I would like to thank my professors for asking me to increase my awareness of the world, its cultures, its languages, and its literary forms. Dr. Ellen Donovan, Dr. Jennifer Marchant, and Dr. Martha Hixon helped me develop my lifelong love of children’s texts into a viable career. I hope I can someday be the wonderful teacher for others that each of them has been for me. Dr. Mohammed Albakry helped me understand so many of the ways in which language operates. I will continue to use linguistic concepts in every course I teach for the rest of my life. Dr. David Lavery helped me maintain my interest in theory and made me believe that I could make a career out of analyzing children’s and young adult films. I would like to thank my colleagues in the Language, Literature, and Philosophy department at Tennessee State University for the support they have shown me over the past five years as I taught my classes and worked through my Ph.D. program. I will always be particularly indebted to Dr. Helen Houston, who believed in me long before I was ready to believe in myself. iii ABSTRACT This dissertation is divided into three major sections. The first section identifies eleven of the major concerns that adaptation studies needs to address as it matures into a more cohesive field of inquiry. These concerns include issues of objective methodology, the fallacy of fidelity, properties of medium specificity, equality of artistic forms, and narrative translation. The second section constructs a working formalist topology of seven major adaptation practice categories developed in response to these adaptation studies issues (INCLUSION, EXCLUSION, COMPRESSION, EXTENSION, SUBSTITUTION, RE-SEQUENCING, INVENTION). These seven categories represent many of the most significant procedures of literary adaptation that recur across all eight of the Harry Potter films as they (re)cast J. K. Rowling’s novels into the medium of film. The third section examines how the first two directors of the Harry Potter films, Christopher Columbus and Alfonso Cuarón, use these seven adaptation strategies similarly and differently as part of their concurrent operations as tellings and retellings of Rowling’s first three novels in the series, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Indeed, the Potter film adaptations are not just reworkings of the stories found in the novels, but also of the narratives and the storyworld as well. Therefore, this study explores the paradoxical relationships that simultaneously bind an adaptation to its source materials (through the related texts’ similarities) while also enabling the adaptation to (re)engender its own version of its source materials (through the related texts’ differences). Across all three of these major sections this dissertation constructs a model of some of the most frequent ways a film, as a multimodal form (visual, auditory, verbal), might (re)express the meanings constructed in a novel, a single-mode form of communication (verbal). Rather than merely an ad hoc framework for the analysis of the first iv three Potter films, then, this approach is being offered as a more objective alternative to the heavily value-laden analyses that tend to dominate so much of contemporary adaptation studies. v TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Figures ix Introduction: Savages Watching Pictures of Wizards? 1 Chapter 1: Key Issues in Adaptation Studies Moving Forward 12 Chapter 2: Towards a Structural Adaptation Practices Topology 53 Chapter 3: Chris Columbus’ Filmic Adaptations of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (2001) and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002) 71 Columbus’ Sorcerer’s Stone Film Adaptation 77 Inclusion 77 Exclusion 84 Compression 91 Extension 97 Substitution 103 Re-Sequencing 106 Invention 110 Columbus’ Chamber of Secrets Film Adaptation 113 Inclusion 113 Exclusion 117 Compression 119 Extension 122 Substitution 125 Re-Sequencing 126 Invention 129 vi Chapter 4: Alfonso Cuarón’s Filmic Adaptation of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004) 132 Inclusion 134 Exclusion 140 Compression 141 Extension 147 Substitution 149 Re-Sequencing 153 Invention 158 Conclusion: The Uses of Adaptation Theory and/in the Potter Films 162 Works Cited 193 Works Consulted 203 Appendices 207 Appendix A: Narrative Segmentation of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone Film 208 Appendix B: Narrative Segmentation of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets Film 215 Appendix C: Narrative Segmentation of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban Film 223 Appendix D: Narrative Segmentation of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire Film 230 Appendix E: Narrative Segmentation of Harry Potter and Order of the Phoenix Film 239 Appendix F: Narrative Segmentation of Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince Film 249 Appendix G: Narrative Segmentation of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 Film 259 vii Appendix H: Narrative Segmentation of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 Film 268 viii LIST OF FIGURES Fig. 1. Charlie and the other children enter the Chocolate Factory. Frame from Mel Stuart’s Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. 33 Fig 2. Charlie and the other children enter the Chocolate Factory. Frame from Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. 33 Fig. 3. Eleven prominent issues to be addressed in adaptation studies. 52 Fig. 4. Harry and his classmates enter the Great Hall for the first time. Frame from Columbus’ Sorcerer’s Stone. 83 Fig. 5. The exterior of Privet Drive. Frame from Columbus’ Sorcerer’s Stone. 87 Fig. 6. The interior of the Dursleys’ home. Frame from Columbus’ Sorcerer’s Stone. 88 Fig. 7. Dudley’s pile of birthday presents. Frame from Columbus’ Sorcerer’s Stone. 88 Fig. 8. Harry enters Diagon Alley for the first time. Frame from Columbus’ Sorcerer’s Stone. 93 Fig. 9. Harry walks through Diagon Alley. Frame from Columbus’ Sorcerer’s Stone. 94 Fig. 10. Harry walks through Diagon Alley. Frame from Columbus’ Sorcerer’s Stone. 94 Fig. 11. Visual proof of Harry’s shopping trip. Frame from Columbus’ Sorcerer’s Stone. 95 Fig. 12. An owl sits atop the Privet street sign. Frame from Columbus’ Sorcerer’s Stone. 111 Fig. 13. The trio’s different look. Frame from Cuarón’s Prisoner of Azkaban. 135 Fig. 14. Richard Harris as Dumbledore. Frame from Columbus’ Chamber of Secrets. 136 Fig. 15. Michael Gambon as Dumbledore. Frame from Columbus’ Chamber of Secrets. 136 Fig. 16. Harry finds joy in his flight on Buckbeak. Frame from Cuarón’s Prisoner of Azkaban. 149 ix Fig. 17. Harry’s first flight on his new Firebolt. Frame from Cuarón’s Prisoner of Azkaban. 158 Fig. 18. Harry’s hairstyle in the first film. Frame from Columbus’ Sorcerer’s Stone. 167 Fig. 19. Harry’s hairstyle in the second film. Frame from Columbus’ Chamber of Secrets. 168 Fig. 20. Harry’s hairstyle in the third film. Frame from Cuarón’s Prisoner of Azkaban. 168 Fig. 21. Anthony Perkins looks crazed. Frame from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. 169 Fig. 22. Harry spews magical steam from his ears. Frame from Cuarón’s Prisoner of Azkaban. 169 x 1 INTRODUCTION: SAVAGES WATCHING PICTURES OF WIZARDS? Whatever there be of progress in life comes not through adaptation but through daring, through obeying the blind urge. ~ Henry Miller A film is a ribbon of dreams. The camera is much more than a recording apparatus; it is a medium via which messages reach us from another world that is not ours and that brings us to the heart of a great secret. Here magic begins. ~ Orson Welles Ever since J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels were first published, beginning with Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Sorcerer’s Stone in the United States) in 1997, scholars and lay readers alike have argued both for and against their literary, theoretical, and ideological merits. Indeed, Rowling’s books have been read as examples of school story, mystery, popular culture, Gothic romance, Arthurian legend, fantasy, fairy tale, and Bildungsroman genres. They have been analyzed through such theoretical frameworks as archetypal, biographical, feminist, formalist, postmodernist, poststructuralist, postcolonial, and stylistic criticism. They have been examined for their recurrent themes of family, friendship, love, sacrifice, race, class, rule breaking, governmental corruption, war, evil, and death.