FIDELITY
Let's think for a moment about the word “faithful” as it is used in the context of film adaptations. Think about what it means. We often say we are “faithful” to our spouses—we don’t betray them. We are “faithful” to our values and beliefs—we try not to stray from them. In the context of film adaptation, this term often goes by another name—fidelity—which itself has obvious connection to romantic relationships. Infidelity means to cheat on one’s partner. So, when we ask whether film adaptations are faithful to their source material, we are asking about their fidelity. Author Robert Stam offers some helpful insight here: “Fidelity discourse asks important questions about the filmic recreation of the setting, plot, characters, themes, and the style of the novel. When we say an adaptation has been ‘unfaithful’ to the original, the very violence of the term gives expression to the intense sense of betrayal we feel when a film adaptation fails to capture what we see as the fundamental narrative, thematic, or aesthetic features of its literary source.” Stam speaks to the emotional connection we feel to works of literature, and the frustration we feel when the adaptations do not live up to our imagined sense of the story.
Fidelity means adhering to the source material, changing as little as possible. Even the way I’ve just framed this, however, should start to raise some alarms for you. What does “as little as possible” mean? In order to keep fidelity, don’t you have to do it all the way? After all, there’s no such thing as cheating on your partner just a little bit—either you do it or you don’t, right?
Imagine for a moment that such a thing were possible. You could, after securing the rights to a book, adapt it from a novel into a film without changing anything about the story, the characters, the ideas, the dialogue, the setting—everything that appears in the book has to show up in the film. Now, you’d probably end up with a pretty long film. The dialogue is actually the easy part; take every word spoken in the novel and use it as the basis for your screenplay. Get actors to speak the lines, and that’s that. But, you also have to account for every word of description laid down in the book. Every time the author mentions a color, you have to bring that color to life on screen in the exact shade that the novelist described it. Every time the author portrays a character thinking, spending pages and pages inside the character’s mind, telling the reader about that character’s inner life, you have to spend screen time on those words. But how do you bring those to life? Through voice-over narration? Have the actor say all the lines off-camera, telling us what he/she is thinking? If so, what do you show on screen while the actor works through those pages of voice-over? Say you decide not to use voice-over, and instead try to find visual equivalents for the ideas expressed in the characters’ thoughts. A character imagines a feeling he had when he was a boy, for instance—do you cut to a flashback of the character as a child? How do you capture the feeling? Do you use music? But there’s no music specified in the book, because in real life, orchestral score doesn’t play while we think, remember, and feel.
This can drive you crazy. It also illustrates why fidelity, as a concept, is ultimately unworkable. Literature and film are just two different mediums, and they have different requirements. In the pages of a novel, writers have tremendous freedom to spend time exploring a character’s consciousness or describing setting or reveling in ideas and themes suggested through language. On film, you can do those same things, but it works differently. Think about sequences in The Lord of the Rings movies, for example. In the novels, J.R.R. Tolkien spends pages describing what Middle Earth looks like, but Peter Jackson’s film versions can show you that with a few well-placed establishing shots composed out of a combination of miniatures and CGI. It only takes a few seconds in the film. You take in all the information simultaneously through the moving image, rather than sequentially as you do with language on the page, reading one word at a time.
Fidelity discourse dominated discussions of film adaptations for a long time. There are a lot of reasons for this, but one of the big ones is that film has long been seen as an inferior art form to literature. This has class implications—after all, you don’t even need to be able to read to watch a film. Literature is serious, high-minded, and elitist. Cinema is light, popular, and entertaining. So it’s been thought, anyway.
Critics studying adaptation have been working diligently to get away from the dominance of fidelity as a way of thinking about film adaptations, and they’ve come up with several ideas, many of which we’ll explore throughout the semester.
I want to demonstrate through an example from Andrew Dominik’s 2012 gangster film Killing Them Softly that fidelity isn’t a helpful frame for studying film adaptation. The film is based on a novel by crime writer George V. Higgins, and stars Brad Pitt as a hitman named Jackie Cogan, who comes to resolve a dispute among gangsters after a card game is robbed. I want to begin by thinking about the ways in which film is just a different medium from literature, and has different requirements and different capabilities. In order to examine this idea, I want you to take a look att one of the Killing Them Softly’s most memorable scenes, Jackie’s assassination of Markie Trattman (Ray Liotta). Firstly, in the novel, this scene occurs much later in the chronology, coming almost near the end (page 165 out of 218 in my edition). In Dominik’s film, it happens comparatively early. But, leaving that aside for a moment—this is the entirety of the killing in Higgins’s novel, expressed in his characteristically brusque, efficient style:
“Gill stopped the 4-4-2 with the open right rear window even with the driver’s window of the Cadillac. Trattman looked lazily at the car. He looked back at the traffic light.
Cogan ran the 30-06 Savage semi-automatic rifle out the rear window of the 4-4-2 and fired five times. The first bullet grazed Trattman’s window. Trattman lurched forward off to the right and was snubbed up abruptly. Cogan said: “Good for you, Markie, always wear your seat belt.”
The Cadillac started to creep forward as Cogan finished firing, Trattman bent forward at an angle over the passenger seat. When Gill swung the 4-4-2 left on Chestnut Hill Avenue, the Cadillac was halfway across; it ran up against the curbstone as the lights in the apartments at the intersection started to come on.”
Cogan ran the 30-06 Savage semi-automatic rifle out the rear window of the 4-4-2 and fired five times. The first bullet grazed Trattman’s window. Trattman lurched forward off to the right and was snubbed up abruptly. Cogan said: “Good for you, Markie, always wear your seat belt.”
The Cadillac started to creep forward as Cogan finished firing, Trattman bent forward at an angle over the passenger seat. When Gill swung the 4-4-2 left on Chestnut Hill Avenue, the Cadillac was halfway across; it ran up against the curbstone as the lights in the apartments at the intersection started to come on.”
That’s it. Three paragraphs of quick, simple description that tells you what happened. Note Cogan “fired five times.” In three words, Higgins covers the gunshots. The killing is basically over as quickly as it begins.
In the film adaptation Killing Them Softly, director Andrew Dominik’s approach is quite different. Let’s examine how he uses music and slow motion to embellish the moment through the elements of cinema. Watch the video at right, which articulates how Dominik stretches out the moment for maximum impact.
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In using slow motion effects, Dominik draws attention to our awareness of time, slowing down events visually. Novel writers can do this too, stretching out moments over pages, paying attention to every conceivable detail of perception or thought. However, film does it simultaneously with images, sound, and music, overlaying these areas of perception on top of one another. During a narrative event in a novel, that event takes as long to play out as it takes you to read the words on the page. In a film, the event takes as long as the filmmaker wants it to take.
Look back at Higgins’s brevity in describing Markie’s killing—the three simple paragraphs. If Dominik had wanted to adhere more to Higgins’s approach, he surely could have done so, avoiding slow motion, eliminating music, and even taking away the rain. A no-nonsense, all-business method of staging this scene was available to Dominik, but he chose to do the exact opposite thing, staging it for maximum emphasis on cinema’s specific characteristics. It illustrates the degree to which film is a different medium with different demands and capabilities from literature, but also emphasizes the importance of the presence of an individual artist with ideas who wants to express them. For Higgins, the killing of Markie Trattman is cold and business-like. For Dominik, it is an opportunity to explore how to portray violence on screen in a way that creates a disconnect between the beauty of the images and the brutality of what they show.
Viewing Killing Them Softly from the perspective of its fidelity to Cogan’s Trade is ultimately not a useful framework; the mediums are different and have different capabilities. Is Dominik faithful to Higgins’s rendering of this moment of violence in the novel? In some ways yes, in some ways no. Focusing on fidelity restricts the number of interesting things we can see at work in Dominik’s adaptation.
clip quiz - fidelity
Review the following clips and answer the questions in Blackboard.
THE MALTESE FALCON (1941, Huston)
In Dashiell Hammett’s novel The Maltese Falcon, anti-hero detective Sam Spade is described as looking like a “blond Satan.” Does Humphrey Bogart, who plays Spade in the film version, differ from that description? How so? What sense do you get of the character from the way Bogart plays him in this clip? |
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FROM HERE TO ETERNITY (1953, Zinnemann)
The beach scene in From Here To Eternity is the most famous moment from the film; it does not appear in the book upon which the movie is based. What emotions are present in the scene? How do they communicate them visually? Why is a scene like this so effective in a film? |
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LITTLE WOMEN (2019, Gerwig)
While the novel Little Women has been adapted many times for the screen, the 2019 version directed by Greta Gerwig is alone in telling the story in a non-linear way, radically altering the structure of the original story. In looking at the clip (which represents two different times in the film), what is the impact of that alteration? Why use flashbacks/flashforwards? |
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INTO THE WILD (2007, Penn)
The film Into the Wild is based on a non-fiction account of the life and death in the wilderness of Chris McCandless, who died alone in the mountains. The film version portrays McCandless’s final moments in this clip. Though informed speculation in author Jon Krakauer’s original book, it’s still speculation. No one really knows for sure what this person’s final moments were like. Does fidelity matter in a case like this? How can the filmmakers be faithful to events they know nothing about? |
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nightmare alley (2021) and fidelity
When co-writer and director Guillermo Del Toro revived the novel Nightmare Alley, by William Lindsay Gresham, for a new adaptation in 2021, he had several choices to make. One, he could decide whether to shoot the noir-infused story in black and white, as the original adaptation from 1947, directed by Edmund Goulding, had been, or he could shoot it in color. He opted for the latter. Beyond that, he also had to decide whether to deviate from the novel’s story or restore some of the plot points that the 1947 had been excised for a variety of reasons. Ultimately, he had to confront the ending; would he offer his Stan Carlisle (Bradley Cooper) a way out of his despair, or would he condemn him to it as the novel had done?
As in the novel and the 1947 version, the character of The Geek looms large over the film. Unlike in the earlier film, which had kept The Geek largely off-screen, Del Toro, whose films are always about the blurry lines between men and monsters, openly embraced the most graphic and pathetic aspects of The Geek character. First, he shows the violence of the chicken-head-biting act in all of its bloody, graphic brutality; then, he offers lingering shots of The Geek in the cage where he is kept like an animal. He even includes the backstory that was left out of the Goulding version, where circus manager Clem Hoatley (Willem Dafoe) explains how a boss like him can create a Geek by getting him hooked on drugs, putting him in a desperate, vulnerable position in which he can be totally controlled. Under his power, The Geek will do anything.
Del Toro’s version of Stan is also much darker than in the original film version; he was played there by dashing leading man Tyrone Power, who was one of the studio 20th Century Fox’s biggest stars, who usually played romantic heroes. Actor Bradley Cooper, who also produced Nightmare Alley alongside Del Toro, conspires with his director to make his Stan much more troubled. The original film’s Stan grew up in an orphanage, which makes him at least somewhat sympathetic; this Stan is introduced dragging the dead body of his father who, it is later revealed, he has murdered by leaving a window open on a freezing cold day, into the middle of the house they shared before setting it ablaze. When the 1947 film begins, Stan is already working at the circus; this Stan joins it as a means of escaping the law.
Del Toro also imports a variety of specific setting details that situate his film version in a particular historical moment at the end of the 1930s and into the early 1940s. Del Toro’s films are frequently interested in the terrible consequences of fascist power, as in his nightmarish fantasy Pan’s Labyrinth (2006). Here, the rise of Hitler in Europe, who Clem mentions as invading Poland, offers a menacing historical backdrop for the rise of Stanton himself, who becomes a demagogic figure who preys on the vulnerabilities of people who just want to connect with their departed loved ones. These significant details are quite different from the decided ambiguity of the first version of the film.
The 2021 version of Nightmare Alley is far more interested in the relationship between Stan and various father figures, which it signals with its opening scene. These themes are potentially present in the novel, of course, but Del Toro emphasizes them by continually placing paternal figures in Stan’s path. First, there is the father he kills, who we presume was a violent alcoholic from narrative context. Second, there is Pete (David Strathairn), the warm, genteel drunk who teaches Stan the verbal code that he will use to begin his career as a swindler, and who Stan also kills by giving him a bottle of wood alcohol instead of booze—possibly this is an accident, but Del Toro keeps that deliberately ambiguous. Then, there is circus owner Clem, played by the older Dafoe with a certain matter-of-fact “a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do” attitude towards exploiting his employees. And finally, there is the tyrannical Ezra Grindle (Richard Jenkins), the target of Stan’s longest and potentially most lucrative con; Grindle is alternately pathetic, as he grieves the unresolved loss of a lover from his youth who died from an illegal abortion that he forced her to get (a plot point censors demanded removed from the 1947 version), and horrifying, using his wealth and power to subject Stan to interrogation to determine his authenticity and eventually, threatening to emotionally and physically destroy him should he turn out to be a con man—which he is, of course.
Is Del Toro’s emphasis on the father figures in Nightmare Alley a deviation in fidelity from the original novel? In its heavy exploration of that theme, yes, it is. His version of Nightmare Alley is different because it sees the importance of those father figures to the moral degradation of Stan, who is caught between a variety of different images of them. In almost every case, he cannot live up to their expectations of him, which turns him into an embittered, resentful, vengeful man.
In this approach, though, Del Toro gets free license to restore the ending. Unlike Tyrone Power’s Stan, Cooper’s is hardly deserving of redemption. In 1947, Stan gets a break, saved from his fate as The Geek by the love of a good woman after declaring his enthusiastic embrace of the new job in the previous scene. Del Toro’s more cynical film plays out like destiny being fulfilled. As Cooper’s Stan wanders into a new circus, he sits down across from an unfamiliar new manager (played by Tim Blake Nelson). After a moment, Nelson’s manager is running the old Geek-recruiting routine earlier outlined by Clem; and Stan, amused by the universe’s cruelly ironic sense of humor, has no choice but to laugh. He smiles and buys in: “I was born for it.” This time, the movie cuts to black—there will be no release for Stan.
In the case of two film versions based on the same novel, as is Nightmare Alley (1947 and 2021), questions of fidelity and its viability are essential. In some ways, the 1947 version is more faithful, and in others, the 2021 remake is. Ultimately, though, we have to ask if these questions are the right ones. Yes, both films make different choices from the novel on which they were based, but that’s inevitable as the novel’s ideas go through the process of adaptation. Seeing two attempts at the same material reveals that change is going to happen as a novel is brought to the screen.
Fidelity is ultimately a limited way of viewing film adaptations. It leads to a number of dead ends and blind alleys—there is only so much one can say about the differences between source material and the films drawn from it. Moving beyond fidelity, and considering the reasons why some filmmakers change their original stories when bringing them to the screen, is much more fruitful.