By this point in the semester, we have examined a number of film adaptations from a variety of perspectives. A new approach is required: viewing adaptation through the lens of intertextuality.
Intertextuality
By this point in our study of adaptation, we have successfully examined, dismantled, and moved beyond fidelity as a measure for studying cinematic adaptations. We have also explored a number of different kinds of film adaptations of many works from other mediums, including fiction, poetry, music, non-fiction, and theatre, with careful attention to the different storytelling techniques for each. Most recently, we have examined the role of the author in cinema, exploring the history of the auteur theory and then some criticisms of its limitations. However, we cannot continue to destroy frameworks for studying adaptation without coming to some kind of useful alternative. We have arrived at that alternative: intertextuality.
Intertextuality, in basic terms, means that we pay close attention to the ways in which multiple texts intersect with one another. We began thinking about adaptation from a fidelity perspective with this perspective, that a novel becomes a film:
The arrow in this diagram represents the adaptation process. If we follow the trajectory of the ideas we have studied throughout the semester, our diagram might look more like this:
Now, the novel (or any source material) is just one possible avenue for studying adaptation. We have added the storytelling medium and the role of the auteur. Once you get to this point, you can begin to add anything to the diagram that you think is important to consider. Writer Robert Stam offers a useful framework for thinking about film’s unique position as the ideal intertextual medium: “A composite language by virtue of its diverse matters of expression, the cinema ‘inherits’ all the art forms associated with these matters of expression. It has available to it the visuals of photography and painting, the movement of dance, the décor of architecture, the harmonies of music, and the performance of theater. Adaptation, in this sense, creates an active weave, a relational tissue wrought from these various strands.” Stam is advocating a more open perspective on adaptation, an evolution from the very closed perspective demanded by adherence to fidelity.
So, how does it work? Well, we begin by thinking about the sheer volume of potential sources, whether direct adaptations or not, that could influence the content and form of a film.
We could examine any particular film adaptation in relationship to its source material, focusing on fidelity. Once we inevitably found that approach limiting, we might then move on to exploring the relationship between the adaptation and its medium of origin - whether it came from a novel, a short story, a play, a song, a poem, a historical event, a painting, a photograph, a real person's life, a sporting event, or anything else. Next, we might find value in examining the role of the director, situating analysis in an auteur-driven approach. We might also explore the role of the stars/actors who appear in the film adaptation, and trying to determine how the star's screen persona affects our understanding of the movie in some way. But, we don't have to stop there. What if the film adaptation belongs to a notable genre of movies that merits comparison to other similar films? How does actual lived history shape that film adaptation, especially if it is made in response to a specific moment in time? What formal properties of the movie matter, like black and white photography or use of music? Is it a remake? Is it made by a particular studio? Is it shaped in some way by changes in film technology? There are no limits to the amount of questions we can ask and connections we can make. If we were to categorize all of these approaches, our diagram now looks a lot more like this.
A big, beautiful mess of arrows, ideas, and connections. The ideas in the diagram expose the many fruitful potential links between films and all of their possible sources, not the limited perspective that demands that adaptations adhere to their literary origins. Intertextuality requires that we are not so precious about film adaptations. Remember where we began—we started by thinking about violation, betrayal, infidelity. These words privilege the original text and confer great status upon it, rendering the adaptation a mere copy whose only job is to reproduce the original as faithfully as possible. Well, intertextuality suggests that maybe, there is no original thing after all. Robert Stam argues that “Filmic adaptations, then, are caught up in the ongoing whirl of intertextual reference and transformation, of texts generating other texts in an endless process of recycling, transformation, and transmutation, with no clear point of origin.” Truly studying how film adaptations work demands the messy evidence of multiple sources, especially because films are the product of multiple collaborators. They do not reflect one person’s vision, but the collective efforts of a group of people working towards something together. The diagram above, with all of the mess, is much more appropriate to an honest study of film adaptation.
Stam offers a passionate call to arms for taking this perspective on adaptation. He says, “By adopting an intertextual as opposed to a judgmental approach rooted in assumptions about putative superiority of literature, we have not abandoned all notions of judgment or evaluation. But our discussion will be less moralistic, less implicated in unacknowledged hierarchies. We can still speak of successful or unsuccessful adaptations, but this time oriented not by inchoate notions of ‘fidelity’ but rather by attention to ‘transfers of creative energy,’ or to specific dialogical responses, to ‘readings’ and ‘critiques’ and ‘interpretations’ and ‘rewritings’ of source novels, in analyses which always take into account the gaps between very different media and materials of expression.”
Stam is urging us to have better, more informed, more critical, more insightful conversations about film adaptation. He offers intertextuality as a valuable approach. We are going to put it to the test for the remainder of the semester.
The Fly: An Intertextual Object
Intertextual analysis works best through the lens of an example. Consider David Cronenberg's 1985 film The Fly, a science fiction story about a scientist named Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) who accidentally fuses his own DNA with a house fly's, and slowly transforms into a human-fly hybrid. Cronenberg's film draws upon a number of other sources an offers an example of intertextuality in action.
Before we consider Cronenberg’s adaptation of The Fly, which is a profoundly complex intertextual object, we need to circle back to director Kurt Neumann’s first version of the film, made in 1958. Neumann’s The Fly is based on a short story by author George Langelaan, but that is only part of the adaptation story. It is important to think about the broader science fiction genre context in which The Fly, and other science fiction stories, appear. It is an adaptation of Langelaan’s short story yes, but it is also an adaptation of what many regard as the first science fiction novel, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, first published in 1818. Shelley’s novel has been adapted for the screen numerous times, most famously in 1931 by director James Whale, starring Boris Karloff as the monster, an image which came to be synonymous with Frankenstein, despite the name belonging to the doctor, not the monster, and transcending Shelley’s own descriptions and characterizations of the monster in the novel. However, Shelley’s novel also provides a template for many subsequence science fiction stories because it established one of the genre’s central concerns: the mad scientist playing god through taking control of life or death. The novel expresses a number of anxieties about technology and science that have been infinitely replicable no matter the era. Neumann’s The Fly is essentially a Frankenstein story about the dangers of tampering with science; Andre (John Hedison) is the Doctor Frankenstein figure, who invents a teleportation machine that can transport matter. However, he pays dearly for his hubris when he transports himself and, unknowingly, a common fly; their DNA becomes scrambled, and Andre is left with a terrible punishment—a monstrous head and claw of a fly attached to his human body, while his head and arm are attached to the tiny fly. Like many science fiction films, it is a warning about the dangers of scientific advancement.
However, those anxieties are not just universal to the science fiction genre, but also tied to the historical context of the 1950s, a decade that saw a massive proliferation of films in the genre that expressed fears about the dawn of the nuclear age. Throughout the 1950s, film audiences flocked to movies like Them (1954, Dir. Gordon Douglas), in which giant ants, fueled by radioactive toxic waste, threaten to take over an Arizona town and must be stopped by the military. The same year saw the release of the original Godzilla (1954, Dir. Ishiro Honda), as the Japanese people reckoned with the aftermath of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the late summer of 1945, literalizing nuclear warfare in the shape of a giant radioactive lizard, summoned from the sea to lay waste to Japanese society. Each of these films contains a warning about the dangers of science, and its human beings are punished for reaching too far beyond their grasp. These films adopt the same general framework as Shelley’s Frankenstein, but apply the anxiety about scientific innovation to their own era. Neumann’s The Fly, though not as directly influenced by the nuclear age as Them, Godzilla, and other films, comes out of this contextual moment.
By the time of Cronenberg’s The Fly, we might consider how his version serves as a supreme intertextual object, an accumulation of several other texts that combine into his own vision. In this way, Shelley’s original creation serves as a valuable point of comparison—Cronenberg’s The Fly is a Frankenstein’s monster, something new and living created out of a collection of other texts.
Like Neumann’s original film, Cronenberg’s version is also a Frankenstein story about the dangers of science gone wrong. He draws upon several sources for his work, including Shelley’s Frankenstein, which offers the archetype of the mad scientist, personified by Seth Brundle, which Cronenberg adapts by fusing the doctor with the monster, making them one in the same. Jonathan Crane argues that the story echoes Shelley’s in some key ways, but also represents Cronenberg’s vision: “the narrative needs Dr. Brundle to engineer the trauma, and Seth Brundle, the inadvertent victim of his own folly, to embody horror. Once the problem of how to re-engineer the body has been dispatched, often cursorily, the attention of the narrative fixes upon the incarnate horror of what Frankenstein’s work has wrought. In short, what is bred in the lab holds no interest until it is out in the flesh.” As a fan of great literature, he also takes inspiration from a famous novella by Austrian writer Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis (published in 1915), during which the protagonist, Gregor Samsa, wakes up and finds himself changed into a gigantic cockroach. Of course, there is the presence of the original Neumann film and the short story upon which it is based, as well as the context of the science fiction monster movies that proliferated in the 1950s. Author Ernest Mathijs points out that “The Kafkaesque element in The Fly, for instance, evident in the reference to The Metamorphosis […] would provoke reviewers to mention the name of Kafka, thus inviting readers and audiences to see the film as not just a run-of-the-mill horror picture, but a smart piece of cinema that was both accessible and fully able to satisfy their intellect.”
However, the film is also characterized by Cronenberg as an auteur, a filmmaker who is obsessed with what has come to be called “body horror.” Many of his movies are preoccupied with the physical transformation of the body. He has discussed his interest in the subject: “if your mind goes, then you are somebody else immediately; you have been transformed, more than in the body sense. That’s part of the mystery; we’re used to our bodies changing. First we go up, then we grow down. There’s only a moment where there are a few years of the illusion of stability. It doesn’t last long.” Below are a collection of images from Cronenberg’s body horror films, including The Brood (1979), Scanners (1980), Videodrome (1983), and Dead Ringers (1989).
According to Murray Smith, The Fly is typical of Cronenberg’s themes: “The physical horror of deformed and dysfunctional materiality is related to another bodily fear upon which Cronenberg consistently plays in The Fly and elsewhere: the loss of bodily integrity (wholeness, oneness, unity).” This is where his film departs from Neumann’s and reveals Cronenberg’s interest in bodily transformation and instability. Neumann’s scientist transforms once, in error, after the fly joins him in the teleportation machine; Cronenberg’s Brundle transforms progressively over the course of the film, a manifestation of the heights the body is capable of (when Seth is able to have sex and swing on the ceiling bars in his apartment), but also its inevitable decline (as he begins to decay). This transformation is also a showcase for the special effects team, working practically before the age of CGI to achieve the bodily progression of Seth into Brundlefly.
Watch the commentary at right, which focuses on a sequence of special effects usage in The Fly, which captures not only Seth’s transformation, but also demonstrates Cronenberg’s interest in body horror and catalogues his intertextual references to the original film and other sources.
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There are a number of different ways to read Cronenberg’s The Fly, which demonstrates how useful intertextuality is as a framework for studying film adaptations. An examination of a specific moment helps illustrate how certain films depend on a collection of texts and are ultimately enriched by our seeing them in conversation with one another. In the commentary scene above, Cronenberg repurposes the original film’s signature line, the tiny-sounding “Help me!” shouted by Andre the Fly as he is trapped in the spider’s web. In Cronenberg’s version, he takes the line, which might seem laughable (especially to today’s audiences), and reinterprets its meaning. In Goldblum’s delivery, the cry for help becomes a legitimate, confused, emotional plea for Veronica to help him as he struggles to understand his terrible transformation.
However, the line’s intertextual life does not end with a simple one-to-one analysis of the way Neumann and Cronenberg infuse the words with different meanings through interpretation. The line might be seen as an evolution of the cries of the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz (1939, Dir. Victor Fleming), who shouts for help as she melts into nothing when doused with water. However, it might also be compared to another director’s overt reference to the 1958 version of The Fly, Tim Burton (who loves the original film and its star, Vincent Price). In his 1988 comedy Beetlejuice, the ghost-with-the-most played by Michael Keaton lures a helpless fly to its death (he’s going to eat it), a deft repurposing of the original film’s conclusion, with the fly as victim and Beetlejuice as the spider. As Beetlejuice drags the insect beneath the artificial ground of the model town where he lives (it’s a weird, wonderful movie), the fly’s tiny voice screams “Help me! Help me!” in the tradition of Neumann’s original.
Not only have two directors, Cronenberg and Burton, made reference to the iconic line from the 1958 version of The Fly, they have shown its malleability. These films, The Fly (1958), The Fly (1986), and Beetlejuice, are all in conversation with one another. Neumann intends horror, Cronenberg intends pathos, and Burton intends humor. Intertextuality allows us to see these areas of overlap and to participate in the ongoing conversation among filmmakers working throughout different periods and in different film genres. For the remainder of the semester, intertextuality will guide us as we study adaptation from a variety of perspectives.
clip quiz - intertextuality
Review the following clips and answer the questions in Blackboard.
THE SEARCHERS (1956, Ford)
What connections do you see between the characterization of Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) in this scene from The Searchers and Tom Cody in Streets of Fire? |
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99 RIVER STREET (1953, Karlson)
Describe the relationship between the environment in this scene from the noir film 99 River Street and the setting of Streets of Fire. How do the settings relate to one another? |
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THE BAND WAGON (1953, Minnelli)
The musical The Band Wagon borrows from film noir in this concluding song and dance number; where do you see connections to Streets of Fire? |
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STOP MAKING SENSE (1984, Demme)
Musical performances in rock and roll shows obviously influence aspects of Streets of Fire. What visual and auditory approaches do you see in this clip from Stop Making Sense, featuring the Talking Heads, that also appear in Streets of Fire? |
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Intertextuality - streets of fire
Basically all films, whether they are direct adaptations or not, can be considered in light of their intertextual relationships to other sources of any medium; however, in some cases, the intertextual connections are more overt than others. Consider director Walter Hill’s Streets of Fire (1984), a rock and roll action musical that blends images of the 1950s motorcycle youth culture with a 1980s neon pop star aesthetic. It’s all built on top of allusions to classic Hollywood genres like Westerns and film noir, but even deeper than that, it retells the story of Homer’s Iliad, reaching for mythology as well. There’s intertextuality in just about everything, but in Streets of Fire, there’s more than enough to go around.
Streets of Fire is set in “Another Time, Another Place,” as the opening titles inform us. It’s not quite reality, not quite fantasy; right away, the film encourages its audience to see it as a kind of myth, with larger than life characters and setting. The streets under the elevated train tracks that run through the neighborhood are grimy and beat up.
At the center of the film is Tom Cody (Michael Pare), an alienated anti-hero in the mode of the classic Western gunslinger who is a social outcast, but useful when there’s a job that needs doing. That job is rescuing rock and roll singer Ellen Aim (Diane Lane), his former flame, who is kidnapped in the film’s opening sequence by Raven Shadduck (Willem Dafoe), the leader of an outlaw motorcycle gang that roars into town like an invading army.
The film takes its title from the song “Streets of Fire” by Bruce Springsteen; though it doesn’t appear anywhere in the film (that had been the original plan, but things changed during production); Springsteen’s song provides the thematic engine to the film, its lyrics speaking to the alienation and isolation of the film’s central character, Tom Cody, who does what he’s asked without being able to integrate into the society himself.
The kidnapping of Ellen that ignites the action is exponentially interesting from an intertextual point of view. The film’s mythic point of view obviously creates a narrative association with The Iliad, in which a war is launched when the beautiful Helen is kidnapped and taken to the city of Troy; an army of Greeks led by the mercenary Achilles, a fearsome fighter, lay siege to Troy in an attempt to get her back. In Streets of Fire, Ellen is that beautiful woman, and Cody is the Achilles figure.
The film also draws on an especially important American Western called The Searchers (1956), directed by John Ford and starring John Wayne as Ethan Edwards, a mysterious man who follows the trail of his kidnapped niece for seven years in a quest to bring her back to what remains of her family after she is abducted by Comanches in post-Civil War Texas. The Searchers ends with Ethan, having accomplished his mission, walking away from the homestead where his niece is now safely ensconced; having committed some unspeakable acts of violence in her pursuit, he is no longer comfortable among ordinary people, and is condemned to wander off on his own.
The end of Streets of Fire is not quite so dark; Cody does refuse to be a part of Ellen’s life after she is returned to the stage to complete the concert she had started at the beginning of the film before her kidnapping, but he isn’t quite alone. Instead, he rides off into the sunset with his friend McCoy (Amy Madigan), the queer-coded mechanic who helped rescue Ellen. At the same time, he doesn’t get to be a part of the world he helped to secure, which is in clear dialogue with The Searchers.
This series of references and allusions increases the number of sources that Streets of Fire is in dialogue with; it knowingly positions itself among these larger, grander stories like classic myths and Westerns because it finds kinship with their themes of love and sacrifice, adventure and heroism. This conversation exists, but one need not really be aware of these as literal references in order to understand or enjoy Streets of Fire; for intertextuality to really work, it doesn’t need to be on purpose, or even present at the surface to an audience. You don’t need to know anything about John Wayne or Helen of Troy to get what Streets of Fire is trying to do. But if you do know about those things, then what it’s trying to do might get a lot more interesting.
The other thing is—this is just scratching the surface of the intertextual connections one might make when considering Streets of Fire. There are other potential areas of conversation that the film is engaged in, as well. These are just a few of them. Consider the images below from the film; how do they connect to some other films or stories or pieces of culture you are familiar with?
Intertextuality offers a way to consider a number of factors in the shaping of a film adaptation. It demonstrates that multiple factors influence the creation of any film and ultimately make our understanding of those films richer. Rather than the limiting principle of fidelity, intertextuality accommodates a number of different readings and intersecting points of meaning that can be derived from a film adaptation.