Twelve fallacies in contemporary adaptation theory

Criticism, Spring, 2003 by Thomas Leitch

But it would be impossible to maintain such a distinction today in view not only of novels like Robbe-Grillet's own, which seeks to restore the "reality" to objects and gestures by frustrating any definitive account of their significations, but of the digitized dinosaurs of Jurassic Park and the impossible acrobatics of Spider-Man and Minority Report, which depend not on their intimacy with the pre-existing physical reality they misleadingly imply but on producing a reality effect quite as loaded as Robbe-Grillet's empty chair.

Even though "concept" versus 'percept,'" as James Griffith has pointed out, "offers critical certainty and shuts off discussion," (22) the dichotomy has proved lamentably tenacious. Brian McFarlane, in the most acute recent general study of adaptation, follows Bluestone in arguing that "the verbal sign, with its low iconicity and high symbolic function, works conceptually, whereas the cinematic sign, with its high iconicity and uncertain symbolic function, works directly, sensuously, perceptually." (23) The implication McFarlane draws from this contrast is that adaptation study should not rest content with "impressionistic" comparisons that emphasize films' alleged "fail[ure] to find satisfactory visual representations of key verbal signs," but should "consider to what extent the film-maker has picked up visual suggestions from the novel in his representations of key verbal signs--and how the visual representation affects one's 'reading' of the film text." (24) McFarlane goes on to argue that at several crucial points in the 1946 Great Expectations, David Lean succeeds not only in capturing a sense of Pip's first-person narrative voice but in grounding symbolic functions in a realistic mise-en-scene rather than imposing them by fiat. The result is that "the realistic meaning of the action seems to me to melt into the symbolic.... The symbolic is a function of the mise-en-scene, inextricably interwoven into the realist texture." (25) McFarlane acknowledges, however, that "as one very familiar with the film, I find it hard to be sure how far on a single or first viewing a spectator might be aware of the symbolic functions I now discern" (26) in Magwitch's floundering in the mud, Jagger's towering over Pip and Estella, and the stormy night sky that heralds Magwitch's return. The difference between percept and concept may well be more properly a function of rereading, and of a specifically analytical kind of rereading, than of a difference between movies, which are commonly assumed against mounting evidence to be watched only once, and novels, which are assumed to be endlessly rereadable, with each rereading converting more percepts to concepts.

6. Novels create more complex characters than movies because they offer more immediate and complete access to characters' psychological states. The ability to enter the minds of fictional characters directly is of course one of the glories, as it is one of the constitutive distinctions, of prose fiction--the only medium whose conventions allow third-person sentences beginning "she thought"--and it is indeed hard for movies to compete with novels in this regard. But it is just as hard for other media whose representation of complex characters has long been accepted. Since most novels take longer to read than two hours, it stands to reason that they have more leisure to develop characters who change over time. But I have never read an argument that long novels create more compelling characters than shorter novels, or even than short stories. The stricture against brevity seems to condemn movies alone.