Twelve fallacies in contemporary adaptation theory

Criticism, Spring, 2003 by Thomas Leitch

Novels and movies, to stick with the two media most often contrasted in this regard, typically depend for their effects on different kinds of gaps. Because Jane Austen's novels, for example, though exceptionally precise in revealing the thoughts of each of their fictional heroines, limit themselves to exactly one such heroine per novel, cinematic adaptations of her work typically narrow the gap between the intimacy viewers feel with her heroines and the corresponding lack of intimacy they feel with other characters. Leo Braudy has contended that "the basic nature of character in film is omission.... Film character achieves complexity by its emphasis on incomplete knowledge, by its conscious play with the limits a physical, external medium imposes upon it." (30) But Sam Spade's disturbingly unreadable roiling of a cigarette in Hammett's novel raises the possibility that the basis of all character may well he incompleteness and omission--that characters are by definition figures whose gaps allow readers or viewers to project for them a life that seems more vivid, realistic, and complex than their explicitly specified thoughts and actions. At the very least, it does not follow either that novels and movies are condemned to certain kinds of gaps that are specific to their media, or that one sort of gap is better than another. What determines the success of a given work is neither the decision to withhold nor the decision to specify a character's thoughts, but the subtlety, maturity, and fullness of the pattern that emerges from thoughts and actions specified or inferred. These are not criteria on which any particular medium has a monopoly.

7. Cinema's visual specification usurps its audience's imagination. Perhaps dismayed that television has killed the novel-reading tastes of a generation of students who lack the patience to appreciate psychological fiction or to wait for a slow payoff, commentators like McFarlane have often concluded more generally that "because of its high iconicity, the cinema has left no scope for the imaginative activity necessary to the reader's visualization of what he reads." (31) This assumption amusingly manages to invert the assumption that novels' ability to present thought directly makes their characters potentially deeper and richer than movie characters while still condemning movies as inferior. In fact, the argument often urged against cinema's overspecification would make more sense if it were directed against novelists like Henry James, since the details movies are compelled to specify--the shape of the settee on which two lovers are sitting, the distance between them, the color of the wallpaper behind them--are often inconsequential, whereas the thoughts going through their minds, which novels are much more likely than films to specify with great precision, are crucial.

Despite this logical contradiction, the argument against cinema's overspecification is in important ways consistent with the argument against its lack of direct access to characters' minds. The basis of the charge in both cases is that films are incapable of translating the unique properties of verbal texts without transforming, diminishing, or otherwise betraying them. Hence McFarlane notes the impossibility of translating Dickens's descriptions to the screen despite their apparent wealth of visual detail, as in Pip's first description of Wemmick as