Twelve fallacies in contemporary adaptation theory

Criticism, Spring, 2003 by Thomas Leitch

Chatman, for instance, dismisses explicitly descriptive voiceover commentary in movies as uncinematic on the grounds that "it is not cinematic description but merely description by literary assertion transferred to film." (8) Would anybody writing today argue that the highly assertive and descriptive voiceover commentary by the murdered Joe Gillis in Sunset Boulevard, a film not adapted from a literary source, was inessential to the film's effect because, as McFarlane notes, voiceover narration by its nature "cannot be more than intermittent as distinct from the continuing nature of the novelistic first-person narration"--or, in Chatman's terms, that it was uncinematic because it was literary? (9) Chatman argues that such "arguably descriptive" closeups as Professor Jordan's amputated finger in The 39 Steps, the poisoned coffee cup in Notorious, and Marion Crane's staring dead eye in Psycho are actually hermeneutic rather than descriptive because "for all their capacity to arrest our attention, these close-ups in no way invite aesthetic contemplation." (10) But a generation of Hitchcock commentary has disagreed. These shots do invite aesthetic contemplation because they are descriptive and assertive.

In arguing from the other side that the camera's essential function of depicting without describing is confirmed by the use of terms like "the camera eye style" (11) to characterize passages of neutral, Hemingwayesque detail in novels that approach the condition of cinema, Chatman is again beguiled by his essentialism into mistaking how both novels and films work.

Consider one the most famous "camera eye" passages in fiction, this description of Sam Spade awakened in The Maltese Falcon by the news that Miles Archer, his partner, has been shot to death:

   Spade's thick fingers made a cigarette with deliberate care,
   sifting a measured quantity of tan flakes down into curved paper,
   spreading the flakes so that they lay equal at the ends with a
   slight depression in the middle, thumbs rolling the paper's inner
   edge down and up under the outer edge as forefingers pressed it
   over, thumbs and fingers sliding to the paper cylinder's ends to
   hold it even while tongue licked the flap, left forefinger and
   thumb pinching their end while right forefinger and thumb smoothed
   the damp seam, right forefinger and thumb twisting their end and
   lifting the other to Spade's mouth. (12)

According to Chatman, this depiction of Spade rolling a cigarette should be utterly neutral rather than assertive. But it is not only not neutral; it is much less neutral, much more assertive, than it would be if it had been included, for instance, in John Huston's 1941 film version of The Maltese Falcon, which substitutes a brief but highly revealing telephone call Spade makes to his secretary Effie Perrine ("You'll have to break the news to Iva. I'd fry first") before dissolving to Spade's arrival at Bush and Stockton Streets. The perspective of aesthetic history has offered several ways to read this passage. It is first of all a stylistic tour de force, an imitation of the dogged routines Nick Adams follows in pitching camp and making pancakes in Hemingway's "Big Two-Hearted River." In addition, its apparent neutrality can be read as a commentary on Spade's mechanical coldness, the emotional detachment from his partner's murder that will make him Archer's ironically perfect avenger. What it figures most powerfully, however, is Spade's remoteness, not from Archer, but from us. Like Nick Adams, Spade is presumably in the grip of powerful emotions during this scene. Not only are the emotions not described; the resolute eschewing of psychological description makes the suppression of these emotions, whether it is Spade's or Dashiell Hammett's, the scene's leading issue. Pauline Kael once remarked that "Huston was a good enough screenwriter to see that Hammett had already written the scenario." (13) But Hammett's novel, though it suppresses any explicit indication of Spade's thoughts or feelings as completely as Huston's film, is much more disturbing, and most disturbing in its most apparently 'cinematic' passages, because readers of novels, unlike viewers of movies, expect a certain amount of psychological description and are troubled, even if they do not know why, if it is suppressed.