Abstract
This chapter investigates the content of the concept of adaptation, as it is seen on analogy to linguistic translation and as it is seen as itself a representation of the process of human self-definition and self-composition. Word-to-word translation is uncovered as a misleading analogy, but larger frames of translation are shown to be illuminating. Quine’s work on the indeterminacy of translation is intertwined with Charlie Kaufman’s script for his film Adaptation, and the simple notion of the matching of the adaptation to the original is called into question—as is the very idea of a static original against which the verisimilitude of an adaptation would be measured. The chapter concludes with an inventory of the elements that fill the creative space that is opened between an originating text and its adaptation.
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Notes
- 1.
There are of course far too many exemplary cases of film adaptation to list, but a few can be mentioned along the way of the development of this evolving artform. (This is also the background of the artform within which Kaufman’s analysis resonates.) Such a list (both disputable and extendable by anyone) might include Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet of the Western Front of 1930; Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps of 1935; David O. Selznick’s Gone With the Wind of 1939; William Wyler’s Wuthering Heights of 1939; John Huston’s TheMaltese Falcon of 1941; David Lean’s Great Expectations of 1946; John Boulting’s Brighton Rock of 1947; Sir Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet of 1948; John Huston’s Moby Dick of 1956; Robert Mulligan’s To Kill a Mockingbird of 1962; Howard Hawk’s The Big Sleep of 1946; Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita of 1962; David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago of 1965; Ronald Neame’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie of 1969; Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather of 1972; Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now of 1973; Milos Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest of 1975; Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner of 1982; Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs of 1991; James Ivory’s The Remains of the Day of 1993; Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence of 1993; Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility of 1995; Curtis Hanson’s L. A. Confidential of 1997; David Fincher’s Fight Club of 1999; Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain of 2005; The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men of 2007; and Thomas Alfredson’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy of 2011.
- 2.
See W. V. Quine, Pursuit of Truth, Revised Edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).
- 3.
See especially Quine, Pursuit of Truth, Chapter II, Section 18.
- 4.
This concept has been insightfully and powerfully discussed in a way directly relevant to the issues here in Donald Davidson, “Radical Interpretation”, in his Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: 1984), pp. 125–139.
- 5.
Studies that have pursued and developed a theory of film adaptation include Brian McFarlane’s Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996) and Linda Hutcheon’s A Theory of Adaptation (London: Routledge, 2012); studies and collections that have discussed various aspects of adaptation include Thomas M. Leitch’s Film Adaptation and Its Discontents (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), Hester Bradley and Imelda Whelehan’s Screen Adaptation: Impure Cinema (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), and works by Imelda Whelehan and Deborah Cartmell, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), James Naremore, ed., Film Adaptation (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000), and Jack Boozer, ed. Authorship in Film Adaptation (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008).
In this chapter, rather than presenting and critiquing the available theoretical views, I am following the long-established precedent (a precedent beginning with no less than Aristotle using Sophocles’ OedipusRex as his case study in Poetics) of examining a subject in philosophical aesthetics in close connection with one of the defining achievements in that genre, drawing out a comprehensive philosophical view of the subject from that. Adaptation won very many major awards around the world as the best screenplay of its year, has been included on the list of the best screenplays of all time, was nominated for many more awards, and has taken its place as a modern classic of the genre of a kind (as we shall see) that, like much of the deepest and most self-aware philosophical work (e.g., Wittgenstein), investigates its own internal method as a sub-theme of its primary project. For an explanation and detailed examination of how films can themselves seem to philosophize, see Stephen Mulhall, On Film, 3rd ed. (London: Routledge, 2015).
- 6.
I am using here the published script of Adaptation, by Charlie Kaufman and Donald Kaufman, adapted from the book The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean, Second Draft, September 24, 1999, in The Internet Movie Script Database. I should mention that there were (as there ordinarily are) a number of changes made to the script in shooting: in the film the ending is altered so that Charlie and Donald, fleeing, drive away, collide with a ranger’s truck, and Donald dies there. Charlie then tells his former love interest Amelia that he still loves her and shortly thereafter finishes the script (this differs from what I discuss below). But the great majority of the film stays true to this second draft, and it is in this second draft (and its conclusion, changed in shooting) that the issues of selfhood and the analogy between the process of composing an adaptation and the process of self-composition in life are most pronounced; one could argue that the script version does more philosophical work than does the finished film. Uncredited cameos include Spike Jonze, (the actual) Charlie Kaufman, John Malkovich, and others in a scene where they are seen working on the set of Being John Malkovich.
- 7.
I have referred throughout to the “life” of a film adaptation and how (as Kaufman has shown, on a Darwinian model) it adapts the original content in order to give it new or extended life for a new generation or audience. That distinctive “life” is I think analogous to what is often seen as the “life” of language on a broadly Wittgensteinian model. (see, e.g., Wittgenstein and the Creativity of Language, ed. S. Greve and J. Macha, London: Palgrave, 2015). And I referred to Stephen Mulhall’s discussion of the way a film itself can be seen as a thinking or creative agent. It is perhaps not as fanciful as one might initially think to suggest that within the intentional world of the character Charlie, and the intentional world of Kaufman, these variations on the stereotypical Hollywood “chase scenes” are included ironically. If so, the film transforms them into integral parts of the whole; it is as if the movie itself subverts the ironic intentions of Charlie and Kaufman, and so, within the world of the film’s intentions—within the life of the project—it fully and genuinely integrates these scenes into the whole as essential parts. But if that is too fanciful, let us say that it is probably Kaufman who is knowingly doing this against the intentional world of Charlie—and in doing so he is showing something deep about the necessity of this kind of “life” for a successful adaptation.
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Hagberg, G.L. (2019). Adaptation, Translation, and Philosophical Investigation in Adaptation. In: Carroll, N., Di Summa, L.T., Loht, S. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19601-1_35
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