The Politics of Adaptation

Media Convergence and Ideology

D. Hassler-Forest, P. Nicklas, D. Hassler-Forest, P. Nicklas

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137443854
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique

In the age of globalization, digitization, and media convergence, traditional hierarchies between media are breaking down. This book offers new approaches to understanding the politics and their underlying ideologies that are reshaping our global media landscape, including questions of audience participation and transmedia storytelling.

Part I

Adapting the Past: Politics and History

1

History as Adaptation

Thomas Leitch

When we consider the politics of adaptation, it is only natural that we should gravitate toward the political motives in adaptations of different kinds. In accord with Fredric Jameson’s ‘“transhistorical” imperative,’ ‘Always historicize!’ (Jameson, 1982, p. 9), most of the contributors to this volume focus on placing different adaptations in historical contexts in order to unmask these political motives. Before I yield the floor to my distinguished colleagues, however, I would like to approach this subject from more or less the opposite direction. Instead of discussing the historical contexts of adaptations, I propose to discuss the status of history itself as a series of adaptations. My goal is to establish a context that foregrounds not only the historical determination of adaptation, but the adaptive nature of historiography.

It is only fair to note that historians themselves see their own project as quite distinct from the adaptations to which they occasionally turn their attention. In Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies, for example, a glittering array of historians anatomize cinematic presentations of historical events, from the lives of the dinosaurs to the Watergate break-in. Their verdicts are remarkably predictable. Stuart Lake’s Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal, which ‘became the authority for nearly all the film portraits of Earp,’ was ‘an imaginative hoax’ (Faragher, 1995, p. 154). Strategic omissions make Patton ‘a simplification that supports the always popular folk theme of the redemption of the bad boy’ (Fussell, 1995, p. 244). ‘If the historical Houdini does indeed come back from the dead, he might make his first visit a vengeful one to Paramount Studios’ (Kasson, 1995, p. 215). Almost without exception, the commentators endorse editor Mark C. Carnes’s assertion that although ‘sometimes filmmakers, wholly smitten by their creations, proclaim them to be historically “accurate” or “truthful,”’ movies ‘do not provide a substitute for history that has been painstakingly assembled from the best available evidence and analysis’ (Carnes, 1995, pp. 9–10). In chapter after chapter, contributors compare History to Hollywood, to the invariable detriment of the latter.

Each of Past Imperfect’s sixty chapters includes a page-long sidebar labeled ‘History/Hollywood.’ In these sidebars we learn, for example, that although ‘producer John Houseman and director Joseph L. Mankiewicz surprised no one when they cast the distinguished British actors James Mason and John Gielgud as Brutus and Cassius’ in their 1953 production of Julius Caesar, ‘they shocked everyone when they chose Marlon Brando for the part of Mark Antony’ (Grant, 1995, p. 45). This statement is unexceptionable, but its implication in the context of History/Hollywood – that Mason and Gielgud are somehow historically appropriate choices for their roles in a way that Brando is not – is dubious. In fact, sidebar after sidebar undermines the neat division between Hollywood and history by the selection of historical illustrations obviously created after the fact, from the uncredited painting illustrating the Battle of Balaklava, which forms the climax of The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936) (Slotkin, 1995, p. 121), to Michelangelo’s sculpture of Moses, which reportedly inspired the casting of Charlton Heston in the 1956 version of The Ten Commandments (Segal, 1995, p. 37). In holding Hollywood up to history as a benchmark whose claims to accuracy are generically privileged, historians pretend to forget what they know perfectly well: that history itself is a construction, not an observation, because ‘language is not transparent and cannot mirror the past as it really was; rather than reflecting it, language creates and structures history and imbues it with meaning’ (Rosenstone, 2009, p. 37). Documentary filmmaker Errol Morris notes further that it is invidious to distinguish between photographs posed and shot in a studio and photographs made on location that presumably have a more authentic documentary value: ‘every photograph is posed because every photograph excludes something’ (Morris, 2011, p. 65).

It is not simply historians who maintain different criteria for presentational genres as different as cinema, still photography, and history. Susan Bordo (2012), observing that ‘screen depictions are more likely than novels to be criticized for historical inaccuracy,’ sees this distinction as arising from ‘the post-Oliver Stone, postmodern problem: in our media-dominated, digitally enhanced era, people are arguably being culturally trained to have greater difficulty distinguishing between fact and fiction,’ especially in movies that are specifically designed to be more compelling than novels, much less histories, could ever be. Bordo’s solution is for historical novelists and filmmakers to be more scrupulous in using their ideas about history to justify their imaginative inventions. Taking history as a benchmark for historical fiction in any presentational mode seems like an obvious move. Yet when Stephen Jay Gould – granted, a scientist rather than an historian – observes of Jurassic Park, ‘We cannot hope for even a vaguely accurate portrayal of the nub of history in film so long as movies must obey the literary conventions of ordinary plotting’ (Gould, 1995, p. 35), he overlooks the considerable extent to which his remark is true of all histories that cast their accounts of the past in the form of formally intelligible and thematically illuminating narratives – that is, of history as such.

Contemporary historiographers from Hayden White to Simon Schama agree that history is constructed according to the narrative conventions of causality, cogency, and plausibility, rather than observed; that history is hypothetical and therefore arguable; and that the contingent nature of all history means that it is always subject to further revision, for no historian ever has the last word. It is only when they deal with the cinema that they hold up earlier print histories, along with photographs, paintings, sculptures, and other post-facto illustrations, as unquestioned factual models from which filmmakers should never deviate. Even White, in his even-handed summary ‘Historiography and Historiophoty,’ seems not to notice that ‘historiophoty,’ the term he coins to describe ‘the representation of history and our thought about it in visual images and filmic discourse,’ is not truly parallel to the apparently analogous term ‘historiography’ (‘the representation of history in verbal images and written discourse’), for in practice historiography refers explicitly to meta-historical writings about history, whereas White defines historiophoty in a way that conflates cinematic history and meta-history as if they were the same (White, 2009, p. 53).

But historiophoty’s apparently fallacious conflation of history and meta-history might well offer guidance for historians who are increasingly tempted to conflate lexical history and historiography. Hence Dudley Andrew asks, ‘Why not treat historical films as adaptations, particularly now that so many historians, following on Hayden White’s Metahistory, consider their work to be largely that of re-creation, re-presentation, and textual elaboration?’ (Andrew, 2004, p. 191). In the final chapter of Film Adaptation and Its Discontents, I argued that films that identified themselves as based on a true story were positioning themselves as adaptations of hitherto nonexistent texts – not the historical record as such, but some subset of history identified only as ‘a true story’ – called into existence by the very act of adapting them. But these arguments, which have had even less impact on adaptation studies than on historians, now seem to me altogether too timid. In this chapter I therefore want to examine a different relation between adaptation and history: an analogous relation based on the fact that history is itself always an adaptation of some earlier history.

This is most obvious in successive revisions of history textbooks, which are strictly speaking updates of their earlier editions, adding new events that bring them up to date and revising earlier judgments about, for example, the Iraq War and the Middle East to bring them in line with the latest developments in the Arab Spring and the winding down of the war. History textbooks that draw on academic histories rather than original research, as most such textbooks do, are also clearly adaptations that seek to clarify and simplify history, cutting footnotes and adding illustrations, in order to make history more palatable to a contemporary young audience, in the manner of Franco Zeffirelli and Baz Luhrmann’s respective film adaptations of Romeo and Juliet. Even revisionist academic histories that take sharp exception to earlier histories are programmatically drawing on these earlier histories as sources in order to establish the originality of their own approach, and are therefore engaged just as much with adaptation processes.

It could hardly be otherwise. Most people who are not professional historians think that what historians try to do is to tell the truth about what happened. But historians know that what they actually do is look for new evidence about the past and better ways to interpret existing evidence. The primary kind of evidence they examine, unless the events are very recent indeed, is documents: letters, diaries, memorandums, memoirs, biographies, and of course earlier histories. Since not even the most conscientious historian has direct access to the minds of the founders of the American republic or the Roman emperors who fought Christianity for so long before making it the official religion of the empire, historians are inevitably reduced to reading and reinterpreting earlier documents. Even if those are primary documents, they are all united in trying to make sense of what seem to the observers to be important events. Therefore, all history involves rewriting and ideally improving earlier histories. Because historians’ reinterpretations of the historical record amount to reinterpretations of earlier interpretations, the writing of history amounts to the adaptation of earlier histories.

This process is inevitable for all historians who do not restrict themselves to primary sources. Classic histories from Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to Burckhardt’s Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy cannot help drawing on earlier histories, not only as a source for baseline historical facts on which everyone is presumed to agree, but for a generic sense of what counts as history and what generic norms, conventions, and protocols govern historical writing, from chronological sequence to the management of citations. Even if history were nothing more than a selection and arrangement of facts, every selection and arrangement would already promote an interpretive agenda. And every such agenda arises because it is invited by earlier agendas that it endorses, qualifies, complements, or undermines. Every historical agenda acquires its meaning, its salience, and its apparent necessity from its dialogue with other, earlier agendas that it adapts in one way or the other.

Even journalism, which has so often been called history’s first draft, depends on earlier sources and agendas. Op-ed columns and feature stories borrow from hard news in order to find, as their authors constantly claim to have found, ‘the story beneath the story.’ Hard-news stories are in ceaseless dialogue with other such stories. Sometimes these stories are drawn from the new story’s own venue, as in the echo chamber of Fox News; sometimes they are drawn from sharply conflicting venues, as when MSNBC presumes to set Fox News straight. In either case, however, they are adaptations of earlier stories that aim to develop or correct them in order to provide the definitive story that will pass as the truth for at least one news cycle. Even news stories that draw on primary sources – observations, interviews, discoveries of new evidence – are interpretations of earlier texts, from interview notes to long-undiscovered documents to photographs that have been posed or staged, like the Abu Ghraib photos Morris examines, or manipulated in processing, like Ansel Adams’s landscapes, or selected from among other possible shots of the same subject, or necessarily framed in a way that excludes some items in the visual field as less salient than others. Historians, journalists, and their audiences consider photographs conclusive evidence, as Morris points out, only to the extent that they have already committed themselves to the hypothesis the photos seem to illustrate.

In practice, historians are as dependent on secondary as on primary sources. Without demonstrating a thorough knowledge of earlier histories of women’s suffrage or World War II, no historian could possibly get a hearing among the professional peers who provide unofficial accreditation, through reviews and citations and coursebook orders, for new histories. Literary biographers, for example, are expected to display their familiarity not only with the facts of Dickens’ life, but with his novels and stories and journalism and letters, the principal commentaries on his literary output, and of course the theories about his life set forth by earlier biographers from John Forster to Peter Ackroyd. The failure to present due evidence of familiarity with any of these earlier texts not only deprives the historian of a priceless opportunity to contextualize his or her work, but offers self-aggrandizing reviewers an opening for the sort of academic bloodletting best calculated to establish their own reputations. Even one’s own autobiographical memoirs are shaped by generic imperatives that allow them to be made publicly available, accessible, and appealing.

Hayden White’s discussion of the relation between historical annals, which simply list and date events in chronological sequence, and history as we understand it, which imputes agency and causality to events and establishes some events as more important than others, indicates the ways history is always an interpretation, even if the interpretation is limited to the proposition that ‘great crops’ constituted the most important event of 722 CE (White, 1980, p. 11). Because every history is an adaptation of earlier histories, the dream of grasping historical truth by getting back to the primary sources is chimerical if only because no texts are capable of interpreting themselves, and therefore no texts are primary in the sense of not requiring interpretation. Since every history depends on earlier histories, all history, like it or not, is historiography.

Consider one example: the students in my graduate seminars in literary theory who thought they would get greater clarity from reading Lacan instead of commentaries on Lacan were the same students who begged me for a glossary of Bakhtinian terminology so that they could read Bakhtin without getting confused by funny-sounding words like ‘heteroglossia’ and ‘dialogized.’ When it became clear that they saw no contradiction between regarding secondary sources as necessary clarifications and as unfortunate obfuscations, I reminded them of the story with which Stendhal opens The Charterhouse of Parma (2000): Fabrice del Dongo, sent off to war, rides from one place in an enormous, vaguely defined battlefield to another with no sense of how the different skirmishes he sees are related, what the larger military goals are, or even sometimes who is fighting whom – only to have his author pull back, at the very end of his misadventures, to identify the battle in which he has been participating in such a clueless fashion as Waterloo. Stendhal’s comic, ironic skepticism of eyewitness testimony, shared in a different register by po...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• Part I Adapting the Past: Politics and History
• Part II  Adapting Authorship: Politics and Convergence
• Part III  Adapting Postcolonialism: Politics and Race
• Part IV  Adapting Nationality: Politics and Globalization
• Part V  Adapting Genre: Politics and Popular Culture
• Part VI  Adapting the Body: Politics and Gender
• Index