Debunking the Fidelity Approach in Film Adaptation
What is film adaptation? It is the process of translating a written text (novel, short story, play, or even a comic) into the visual medium of a film. It is a process that has become financially vital to cinema during the evolution of the film industry. Hollywood is so reliant on adaptation because there’s a story and structure set up to work, plus, assuming the source text is popular, an established fanbase, which means a built-in audience. However, when considering this fanbase, the most pressing issue is the loyalty approach; in other words, how faithful will the adaptation be to the source text? This is certainly a bone of contention for fans waiting for the movie version of their favorite story, who believe or hope that the movie is a faithful translation of the book they know and love. The results are often controversial because the fidelity approach occupies an illogical position of supremacy in adaptation theory; most film adaptations are considered inferior to their literary equivalents as evaluated by fidelity conventions. The following exposes the fidelity approach as outdated, impractical, and at worst, even irrelevant.
The ‘reading’ -or interpretation- of a text is a tenuously personal process. The views of one reader will always differ from those of another, immediately casting doubt on the fidelity approach. What exactly is being suggested by the word ‘fidelity’? A literal translation of a text could refer to the print and the film following the same narrative path, or perhaps a replication of the theme. This is where fidelity becomes a rather vague concept. A film, adapted from, say, a novel may use the same narrative techniques or follow the same structure as the source, yet convey an entirely different theme. Conversely, a movie could duplicate the theme of a text while presenting the story in a whole new way. Which adaptation is the most faithful? Brian McFarlane states that: “The critic who objects to infidelities is really saying no more than: “This reading of the original does not match my own in these and these respects.” (McFarlane, 1996, p. 9).
“Hollywood is going to kill me by remote control.”
(Philip K. Dick, on reading the first draft of Blade Runner in 1980, in Kerman, 1997, p91)
After failed attempts to become a mainstream novelist, Philip K Dick became a maverick science fiction writer, changing both science fiction and film adaptation indelibly. Dick approached the concepts of human existence and morality through LSD-distorted eyes, and most of his works focus on the false dichotomy of codependency versus the conflict between man and machine. As his work became more popular and he began to cross the desks of idea-hungry movie executives, his work was soon labeled ‘unfilmable’. His works include Ubis (1966), A Scanner Darkly (1977), the subject of an unseen ‘spec’ script by Being John Malkovich writer Charlie Kaufman (1999), and later adapted by author Richard Linklater in 2006 as a feature of rotoscope, starring Keanu Reeves and, above all, Do androids dream of electric sheep? (1968), which was the basis for Ridley Scott’s 1982 classic Blade Runner, which starred Harrison Ford.
After only partially reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Scott rejected it as “a brilliant piece that in book form would never make it into a movie” (in Greenberger, 1982, p61). Ironically, the film Scott was scheduled to direct at the time was an adaptation of James Herbert’s sprawling tome Dune (1965), a book that for years was branded ‘unfilmable’, even (or especially?) after David Lynch’s 1984 adaptation. However, after reading a treatment and a first draft of the Blade Runner script, Scott signed on to direct.
“[It is like] Phillip Marlowe meets the Stepford wives.”
(Philip K. Dick, in Bukatman, 1997, p20)
Supported by the quote above, a great deal of anecdotal evidence suggests that Dick hated what Scott and screenwriter Hampton Fancher had done with later drafts of the script. However, the following quote, regarding a rewrite by David Peoples, seems to say otherwise:
“After I finished reading the script, I pulled out the novel and flipped through it. The two reinforce each other, so someone who started with the novel would enjoy the movie and someone who started with the movie would enjoy the novel. I was surprised that Peoples was able to make some of the scenes work. It taught me things about writing that I didn’t know.”
(Philip K. Dick, in Kerman, 1997, p92)
Dick’s assessment implies that the differences between the original text and the script actually strengthen both the adaptation and the original text; that the creation of the latter allows the two mediums to combine in some kind of intertextual coherence. One enhances the existence of the other.
Both the novel and the movie have the following plot in common: a police officer named Rick Deckard is assigned to hunt down and kill a group of fugitive androids in future Los Angeles. However, the film is not considered to be faithful to Dick’s original novel. Science fiction, more than any other genre, is famous for its devoted following, or cult. These fanatical collectives dogmatically defend the fidelity approach and are the most vocal at any sign of divergence from their model; take liberties with the adaptation and prepare to protest. With Blade Runner, this protest was further exasperated by press reports of clashes between Dick and Scott over early drafts of the script, and was not helped by Dick’s death a few months before the film’s release date.
The film was, inevitably, butchered by most critics, with the main criticism being that it was not an accurate replica of the book.
“The filmmaker’s most important failure lies…in what he…left out of the book or meaninglessly minimized.”
(Kenneth Jurkiewicz, in Sammon, 1982, p24)
When the finished film was sent to the producer, Michael Deeley, late and over-budgeted, hated it, claiming that audiences would find it ‘too cerebral’, even though the book’s most challenging elements had already been cut, and insisted in which the changes were made. He ordered that the ending, which inferred that Deckard himself was a replicant, be replaced with a less ambiguous and “happier” resolution, which was constructed using leftover footage from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) (another adaptation, this one time from the Stephen King story of the same name). He also requested that a Phillip Marlowe-style internal monologue (voiceover) be added to explain the film to the audience and soften Deckard’s brooding character, despite the vociferous protests of Scott and Harrison Ford, who played Deckard. Apocryphally, so disgusted was he at being forced to record the voiceover, Ford purposely misdelivered his lines in the hope that they would not be used.
The film flopped on its theatrical release, but later achieved cult status on video. This success justified the release of Scott’s original vision for the film, Blade Runner: Director’s Cut, in 1991, which restored the ending and discarded the internal monologue. This is universally regarded as the most complete and successful incarnation of the film, and yet this version strays further from the book than the 1982 film release. In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? it is made clear in the conclusion that Deckard is fully human; Blade Runner: Director’s Cut leads the audience to strongly suspect that he is a replicant. The book and the movie even tackle different themes: that it’s hard to draw a line between ‘real’ and artificial life. In Blade Runner, Rick Deckard, our hero, falls in love with a replicant and then discovers that he himself could be one; In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Deckard and his wife fail to recognize the injustice of artificial animals (pets) being valued above artificial humanoids (slaves).
According to Geoffrey Wagner (1975, p. 223) there are three categories of adaptation: Transposition, “in which a novel is presented directly on the screen with a minimum of apparent interference”; Comment, “where an original is taken and deliberately or inadvertently altered in some respect… where there has been a different intent on the part of the filmmaker, rather than outright infidelity or rape”; and analogy,“which must be quite a departure for the sake of making another work of art”. But can Transposition be used as a synonym for fidelity? Note the phrase, “minimum amount of interference”. Wagner recognizes that a text cannot be transferred to the screen without some degree of manipulation.
So, what degree of manipulation does infidelity generate? Does that need to be decided critically? If so, then there are no rules; there is no binary function to determine fidelity or infidelity. So is each assessment valid in its own right? Can an adaptation have the overlap of being faithful and unfaithful at the same time? Criticism is subjective, while fidelity is rigid; The two are mutually exclusive. This pervades cinema: take the hypothetical example of ten film directors tasked with adapting the same text following the fidelity approach. How would the personal biases of each director and the practical limitations of filmmaking influence the final product? Does intention denote fidelity? How many of these movies would match someone else’s interpretation of the source material, and how would they differ? For the ten directors -without a conference- presenting some kind of uniform translation of the base text would not only be at odds with cinema expressionism, it would be inhumane.
Texts and films are different media and must be treated accordingly. All films are produced from a ‘source text’, adapted or not, in the form of a script. The process demands a level of interpretation, by both the director and the actors, from script to screen, whether called for by budget, practicality, dramatic integrity, or personal bias, to translate between the two mediums. . So, in a sense, fidelity can never exist. Whenever there is a transition from text to film, by the very nature of the visual medium, there is adaptation, and while fidelity means staying true to the original text, adapting means changing to fit. Therefore, the association between adaptation and fidelity is a contradiction in terms. Without change there can be no adaptation.
References
Kerman, J. (1997) Blade Runner Update, Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 2nd Edition
Bukatman, S. (1997) Blade Runner, London: BFI
Sammon, P. (1982) The Making of Blade Runner, Cinefantastique 12 (July-August 1982), pp20-47
Greenberger, R. (1982) Ridley Scott, Starlog (July 1982), pp60-64
McFarlane, B (1996) From novel to film: an introduction to adaptation theory, Oxford: Clarendon Press
Wagner, Geoffrey (1975), The Novel and the Film, New Jersey: Associated University Presses Inc.