Literature, Film, and Their Hideous Progeny

Literature, Film, and Their Hideous Progeny
Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture

Series Editors: Julie Grossman, Le Moyne College, USA; R. Barton Palmer,
Clemson University, USA
Advisory Board: Sarah Cardwell, University of Kent; Deborah Cartmell, De
Montfort University; Timothy Corrigan, University of Pennsylvania; Lars
Ellestrom, Linnaeus University; Kamilla Elliott, Lancaster University; Christine
Geraghty, University of Glasgow; Helen Hanson, University of Exeter; Linda
Hutcheon, University of Toronto; Glenn Jellenik, University of Central
Arkansas; Thomas Leitch, University of Delaware; Brian McFarlane, Monash
University; Simone Murray, Monash University; James Naremore, Indiana
University; Kate Newell, Savannah College of Art and Design; Laurence Raw,
Baskent University; Robert Stam, New York University; Constantine Verevis,
Monash University; Imelda Whelehan, University of Tasmania; Shannon
Wells-Lassagne, Universite de Bretagne Sud.
This series addresses how adaptation functions as a principal mode of text
production in visual culture. What makes the series distinctive is its focus on
visual culture as both a target and a source for adaptations, and a vision to
include media forms beyond film and television such as videogames, mobile
applications, interactive fiction and film, print and nonprint media, and the
avant-garde. As such, the series will contribute to an expansive understanding
of adaptation as a central, but only one, form of a larger phenomenon within
visual culture. Adaptations are texts that are not singular but complexly multiple,
connecting them to other pervasive plural forms: sequels, series, genres, trilo-
gies, authorial oeuvres, appropriations, remakes, reboots, cycles, and franchises.
This series especially welcomes studies that, in some form, treat the connection
between adaptation and these other forms of multiplicity.
Titles include:
Julie Grossman
LITERATURE, FILM, AND THEIR HIDEOUS PROGENY
Adaptation and ElasTEXTity
Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture
Series Standing Order ISBN 978–1–137–54205–4 hardcover

Series Standing Order ISBN 978–1–137–54205–2 paperback
(outside North America only)
You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a stand-
ing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at
the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and one of
the ISBNs quoted above.
Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills,

Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England
Literature, Film, and Their
Hideous Progeny
Adaptation and ElasTEXTity
Julie Grossman
Professor, Departments of English and Communication and Film Studies,
Le Moyne College, USA
© Julie Grossman 2015
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this
publication may be made without written permission.
No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted
save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence
permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency,
Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS.
Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this
work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2015 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke,
Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-56523-8 ISBN 978-1-137-39902-1 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781137399021
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully
managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing
processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the
country of origin.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
Typeset by MPS Limited, Chennai, India.

For Phil and Sophie
Contents
List of Figures viii

Acknowledgments x
Introduction 1
Part I Journeys and Authorship
1 “It’s Alive!”: The Monster and the Automaton as Film and
Filmmakers 25
2 Lightening Up: Reappearing Hearts of Darkness 41
3 Hideous Fraternities: The Coen Brothers Hit the Road 62
Part II Textual and Marginal Identities
4 Imitations of Life and Art 83
5 The Quiet Presence of “The Yellow Wallpaper”
in Todd Haynes’s film [Safe] 105
6 Musical Theater and Independent Film 126
Part III Immersive Theater and the Monstrous Avant-Garde
7 Adapting Time and Place: Avant-Garde Storytelling
and Immersive Theater 147
8 Time Will Tell: Adaptation Going Forward and Film at
the Art Museum (Christian Marclay’s The Clock) 167
9 Cape Fear, The Simpsons, and Anne Washburn’s
Post-Apocalyptic Mr. Burns, A Post-Electric Play 177
Epilogue 191
Notes 195
Works Cited 210
Index 219
vii
List of Figures
I.1 Being John Malkovich 4

I.2 Sandro Miller, “Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich”:
Dorothea Lange/Migrant Mother, Nipomo,
California (1936), 2014 4
Victor Skrebneski/Bette Davis, Actor, November 8 (1971),
Los Angeles Studio, 2014 5
Herb Ritts/Jack Nicholson, London (1988) (B), 2014 6
1.1 Hugo: the approaching train in Hugo’s dream 33
1.2 Hugo: Hugo becomes the Automaton in his dream 35
1.3 Gods and Monsters: Clay walks Whale to his grave in shared
dream 37
1.4 Gods and Monsters: Clay in the rain at the end of the film 38
2.1 Hearts of Darkness: a desperate Coppola 44
2.2 Jamie Abrahams, Hearts of Hot Shots! Part Deux—
A Filmmaker’s Apology 48
2.3 Eleanor Coppola, Hearts of Darkness 49
2.4 Welles during the making of Heart of Darkness 53
2.5 Apocalypse Now: Coppola’s cameo – “Like you’re fighting ….” 60
3.1 O Brother, Where Art Thou? The three boys hiding
from capture 75
3.2 O Brother, Where Art Thou? Stunning cinematography 78
3.3 O Brother, Where Art Thou? The three boys looking at
lynching; The Wizard of Oz. Saving Dorothy 79
4.1 Imitation of Life: cramped hallway 96
4.2 Imitation of Life: publicity poster 97
4.3 Imitation of Life: Sarah Jane pinned among the
masks on the wall at the club 98
4.4 Imitation of Life: Sirk’s mise-en-scène; Annie, trapped 103
viii
List of Figures ix
5.1 [Safe]: Lester at Wrenwood 115

5.2 The Yellow Wallpaper musical 122
6.1 Kinky Boots: watching 137
6.2 Once the musical 143
7.1 West 27th St. sidewalk, New York City, September 2013 148
9.1 Cape Fear; “Cape Feare,” The Simpsons 180
9.2 Mr. Burns, A Post-Electric Play: A pre-production model
rendering of the stage/set 188
Acknowledgments
My greatest thanks go to my friends and colleagues who helped me

considerably with this manuscript, not only in material ways but also
in talking with me these past several years about film, literature, theater,
music, and adaptation: Tom Boland (for his exceptional help with
editing), Maura Brady, Amy Breiger, Deborah Cromley, Kate Costello-
Sullivan, Jim Hannan, Pat Keane, Erin Mooney, Phil Novak, Orlando
Ocampo, Julie Olin-Ammentorp, Dan Roche, Ed Ruchalski, Ann Ryan,
Brent Young, and Kim Waale. Special thanks to the wonderful writers,
artists, and composers who granted me interviews and permissions and
answered my questions throughout—in particular, Peter Duchan, Sarah
Taylor Ellis, Ron Hansen, Dave Malloy, Sandro Miller, Anne Washburn,
and Lane Williamson. Many thanks, also, to others who advised me
or read parts of this book at various stages of its development, espe-
cially Kamilla Elliott, Lester Friedman, Glenn Jellenik, and Tom Leitch.
Special thanks to Barton Palmer for his great insight and generosity
as we launch the Adaptation and Visual Culture series. Thanks, also, to
Chris Penfold at Palgrave, for his support and commitment to studies
in adaptation.
I am very grateful to Le Moyne College: the English and Communication

and Film Studies departments, and, especially, to the Joseph C. Georg
Professorship, without which I would not have been able to do a great
deal of this research.
A brief portion of Chapter 1 was published in the Stone Canoe Journal

5 (2011). Parts of Chapter 2 on Hearts of Darkness were published as
“Fictions of Power: ‘My Movie is Not a Movie’” in the Journal of Popular
Culture 43:2 (2010). An early version of Chapter 5 was published as “The
Trouble with Carol: The Costs of Feeling Good in Todd Haynes’s [Safe]
and the American Cultural Landscape” in Other Voices: The (e)Journal of
Cultural Criticism 2:3 (2005).
x
Introduction
Literature, Film, and Their Hideous Progeny: Adaptation and ElasTEXTity

argues on behalf of creative adaptations that reread and rewrite prior
works of art, forging new perspectives and variant ways of looking not
simply at source texts as their origins but at the creative means by which
adaptations come to be. My hope is that the analyses that follow can
model for students, readers, and viewers a way of engaging cultural pro-
duction that promotes greater openness to the ingenious if challenging
conversations that can take place among creative works across time and
medium. Because of their potential for promoting cross-textual conver-
sations and observing connections among sometimes very dissimilar
works, studies in adaptation, when construed broadly, invite a kind of
critical thinking that moves viewers and readers beyond their comfort
with inherited boundaries and preexisting patterns.1
I join other scholars working in a field that has moved beyond fidelity
criticism, approaches that focus mainly on how closely an adaptation
follows, re-presents, or is faithful to its source text. As Robin Wood
observed with simple clarity, “There is no such thing as a faithful adap-
tation” (7). Following the groundbreaking work of scholars examining
dialogic intertextual, intermedial, and interart models of adaptation,2
I employ several critical and metaphorical lenses for reevaluating our
ways of reading source texts and their adaptations, all of which work
against a popular affinity for films and works of art and literature that
are easily digestible. The central metaphor I explore is borrowed from
Mary Shelley’s figure for her novel Frankenstein, “hideous progeny,”
“monsters” birthed with difficulty. Adaptations conceived as “hideous
progeny” change not only the way we view but also our ideas about
what we are viewing. They “destroy” other texts, even as they create
new ones, revealing new perspectives on human identity and culture.
1
2 Literature, Film, and Their Hideous Progeny
The horror genre has itself been explored as “monstrous” in its

“adaptation” of the theme of change and mutation. In Richard J. Hand
and Jay McRoy’s 2007 anthology Monstrous Adaptations: Generic and
Thematic Mutations in Horror Film, a number of writers explore what the
editors call the horror genre’s “obsession with corporeal transformation”
(3).3 However, I want to argue that any adaptation might be considered
“monstrous,” that is, isolated from its predecessors because it is born of
new concerns, new desires to express ideas in a different medium, with
a changed-up narrative reflecting shifting cultural priorities. Because of
these altered contexts, adaptations are often born resisting the original
desires of their sources. A provoking figure for reanimations of earlier
source texts, “monstrous” describes the shocking violation of original
and organically pure matter when adapted or reshaped in new contexts.
Adaptations conceived as “monstrous” subvert the stereotype that they
are unoriginal; instead, these “hideous progeny” are, at least potentially,
original, asking new questions about fundamental issues of human and
textual identities, just as Mary Shelley’s Creature leads us to rethink our
understanding of what is human.
If “hideous progeny” describes adaptations that force us to shift our
perspective in sometimes radical ways, the elastextity in this book’s title
refers to the state of being for sources and adaptations that are indivis-
ibly connected. I am interested in texts that are elastic, sources and
adaptations whose flexibility “implies a process of change,” as Peter
Brooker has observed, “and not an alignment of two fixed objects”
(Brooker 118).4 Indeed, elastextity follows the non-teleological studies
in adaptation of Robert Stam, Thomas Leitch, and Linda Hutcheon,
among others, with a marked shift in focus on the process of and myr-
iad contexts for adaptation—their “modes of engagement,” to quote
Hutcheon—and the “subversive potential” of adaptation that may “be
part of the appeal of adapting for adapters and audiences alike” in the
first place (A Theory of Adaptation 174). Elastextity is a way of thinking
about texts as extended beyond themselves, merging their identities
with other works of art that follow and precede them. In their elastex-
tity, adaptations invite in-depth investigation and close reading that are
part of the more general critical frame of intertextuality.
The idea of elastextity conceives of sources and adaptations as part
of a vastly stretched tarp or canvas. As the metaphor implies, the state
of being pulled beyond an initial form to encompass other objects,
texts, and identities can have monstrous results, as texts appear to be
misshapen or distorted. Adaptations are thus “hideous,” at least until
we grow accustomed to looking at their new forms. This is a version of
Introduction 3
how the avant-garde functions, reorienting our viewing practices and

introducing us to new forms of artistic being.
Adaptations can change our ways of determining where individual
works of art begin and end, and shift our ideas about what constitutes
art in general. Indeed, while it may seem as if adaptation marks the end
of the avant-garde in its reprocessing of familiar source texts, I argue
that creative works that are in dialogue with previous texts and self-
conscious about the multitudinous influences on any one work of art
may be seen as the new avant-garde. 5 The most provocative adaptations
not only create initial dissonance for us as viewers/readers, just as avant-
garde works do, but they also train our critical eye on cultural progeny
rather than on origins. The works treated in the final chapters of this
study are adaptations and avant-garde meditations on culture and story-
telling, suggesting the powerful link between re-visioning texts and the
groundbreaking attributes of experimental art.
The metaphors I employ to discuss adaptation link to the issue of
perspective that is at the core of this project. I want to endorse a way of
thinking about adaptation that emphasizes its power to “slant” (create
a different viewpoint on) a source text, to shift our way of filing known
literary works in our mental cabinets. I think an important byproduct
of theoretical arguments for intertextuality (in both the practice and the
reading of adaptation) is its enhanced focus on scholarship and peda-
gogy themselves—the way we reimagine the relations among texts—as
fundamentally creative activity.6
Many of the adaptations addressed in this study are not interested in
re-presenting other works but in engaging them in conversation from a
new viewpoint and, often, a surprising context. By way of illustration,
there is the recent photo-series by photographer Sandro Miller, Malkovich,
Malkovich, Malkovich: Homage to Photographic Masters, which adapts not
only famous works of photography and art but also the most memorable
scene in Spike Jonze’s millennial postmodern film Being John Malkovich
(1999). At one point in the film, Malkovich (playing himself) enters a
portal into his own self, which is rendered as a nightmare landscape
of multiplied Malkoviches (everyone in a crowded restaurant scene, for
example, is Malkovich [Figure I.1]). The menu is filled with his name.
Nothing is spoken except “Malkovich.” As in that strange and ingenious
scene, all 35 photographic images in Miller’s exhibition restage famous
portraits by inserting Malkovich into them.
The daring image below (Figure I.2), as it adapts Dorothea Lange’s
“Migrant Mother” (1936), exemplifies the creative potential of adapta-
tion conceived of as experimental and innovative,7 igniting our sense
Figure I.1 Being John Malkovich
Figure I.2 Sandro Miller, “Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich”: Dorothea Lange/

Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California (1936), 2014
Source: Courtesy of Sandro Miller.
Introduction 5
“that art,” to quote Robert Hughes writing about the avant-garde of the
late 19th century, “in the most disinterested and noble way, could find
the necessary metaphors by which a radically changing culture could be
explained to its inhabitants” (9). Two other of Miller’s photographs in
the series (see Figures 1.3 and 1.4), adapting film icons Bette Davis and
Jack Nicholson (as the Joker), are similarly uncanny.
Resituating a familiar work of art in a new context not only provides
a unique perspective on its topic or theme but also models a way of
recombining intellectual matter that sparks further creativity.
Conceiving of adaptation as newly creative art leads the way, I think,
for more flexible discussions of the ways in which the arts depend on
what has been made before. Hitchcock’s oft-quoted comment about
adaptation builds a path toward a widened definition of adaptation as
Figure I.3 “Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich”: Victor Skrebneski/Bette Davis,

Actor, November 8 (1971), Los Angeles Studio, 2014
Figure I.4 Sandro Miller, “Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich”: Herb Ritts/Jack

Nicholson, London (1988) (B), 2014
creative but also fundamentally disorienting in its dispatch of sources:

“What I do is to read a story only once, and if I like the basic idea,
I just forget all about the book and start to create cinema” (Truffaut 71).
The director suggests an unconscious reworking, a forging of creative
space cleared as a result of sublimating an earlier text. Here, adaptation
becomes a recasting or reanimation that is connected to the preceding
work, but not chained to it as a representation. In his turn, writer Julio
Cortázar said of Blow-Up (1966), Michelangelo Antonioni’s adaptation of
Cortázar’s short story of the same title, “I left Antonioni absolutely free
to depart from my story and follow his own ghosts; and in search for
them, he met with some of mine” (292). In a 2010 National Public Radio
interview about Mark Romanek’s screen adaptation of his novel Never
Let Me Go (2005), Kazuo Ishiguro commented on the importance of see-
ing film adaptation as its own artistic activity. The adaptation, Ishiguro
Introduction 7
insists, “absolutely has its own authority—to the extent that even I as
the author almost forgot the story.” All three of these artists’ comments
suggest a distinct value in an amnesiac relation to earlier texts.8
In a 2004 article in The Guardian about Edward Hopper and cinema,
Philip French refers to Hopper’s paintings as “stills from a movie we
can’t quite remember,” another instance of adaptation’s amnesiac ele-
ments. While many may recognize a visual and thematic continuity
between the urban alienation and chiaroscuro in Hopper’s paintings
and film noir, fewer may know that when Abraham Polonsky made the
noir classic Force of Evil in 1948, he apparently took his cinematogra-
pher George Barnes to a Hopper exhibit and said, “‘That’s what I want
this picture to look like.” Hopper was inspired to paint his most famous
work “Nighthawks” (1942) after reading Ernest Hemingway’s 1927 short
story “The Killers.” The relation between painting and cinema in this
instance was mutually enhancing when, four years later, Hemingway’s
story was adapted to film. Citing Hopper’s biographer Gail Levin,
French observes that
[in] the classic 1946 movie version, Robert Siodmak, German-born

master of the film noir, recreates Hopper’s painting in black and
white. The film used two typical Hopper loci for the ex-boxer’s
squalid lodging and humble workplace, i.e. the dark room in a hotel
or boarding house where a single person broods, and the desolate
roadside filling station as in Gas and Four Lane Road. (French)
More than simply a study of influences or consideration of muse-like

inspiration, this kind of analysis reminds us that written and visual
texts, as well as other media and cultural matter, are always convers-
ing, and, ideally, listening well to one another. Such conversations go
on indeterminately, since the best conversations never conclude, even
when they reach difficult terrain. As Edward Scissorhands, another
adapted figure of the Frankenstein Creature, says in his first encounter
with Peg Boggs in Edward Scissorhands, “I’m not finished.”
Adaptation studies root out the multiple relationships among inter-
textual sources and adaptations: relationships that can confound
viewers and readers. To anticipate examples I later describe in detail,
the narratives about passing in Chapter 4—Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel
Passing; Fannie Hurst’s 1933 novel Imitation of Life and its 1934 and
1959 film adaptations by John M. Stahl and Douglas Sirk respectively;
and Toni Morrison’s 1970 novel The Bluest Eye—stage a difficult con-
versation among film and literary texts about the painful choices made
when social-psychological survival requires shifting notions of identity

that may be necessary but can also be deeply controversial. Similarly, as
I discuss in Chapter 5, Todd Haynes’s [Safe] (1995) explores the attempts
of a desperate woman, Carol White, to survive a disease that defies
diagnosis and treatment. Like the grotesque figure of long-time resident
Lester haunting the margins of the desert retreat she moves to, the film
itself is a “monstrous” scion of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 short
story “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Lester, a “hideous” version of the woman
in the wallpaper, forces the female protagonist, as well as the reader/
viewer, to confront the traumatic maladies these stories explore. The
musicals discussed in Chapter 6 are also about marginalized figures, but
their stories are given new expression on the musical stage. While the
analysis in Chapters 5 and 6 (on [Safe] and “The Yellow Wallpaper” and
musical theater adaptations of independent films) is more straightfor-
wardly comparative than the more collage-like dialogical approach used
in other chapters, the discussion remains committed to drawing out
multiple perspectives on sources. The immersive theatrical productions
Sleep No More, Then She Fell, and Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of
1812 discussed in Chapter 7 force radically different perspectives on
their sources. They also enact beautiful recombinations of their textual
sources using music, visual images, creative sets, and dance. In Chapter
8, I address Christian Marclay’s 24-hour video installation, The Clock
(2010), which “hideously” carves up films and television episodes in
order to rematerialize them in a stunning montage of thousands of
scenes. In Anne Washburn’s Mr. Burns, A Post-Electric Play (2012), the
focus of Chapter 9, the post-apocalyptic performances of episodes of
the Fox television show The Simpsons are untethered from (have utterly
“forgotten”) their sources, as well as the civilization that produced
them, and yet they provide artistic rituals that allow their audiences
to look forward despite living in a ravaged world. Adaptations can illu-
minate a creativity or hopefulness often tied to devastation, as is sug-
gested by the image on this book’s cover. In Victor Erice’s El Espíritu de
la Colmena (The Spirit of the Beehive, 1973), Ana (Ana Torrents) is a figure
of traumatized innocence directly linked to Frankenstein’s Creature.
***
I borrow the metaphor of “hideous progeny” that inspired this study
from Mary Shelley: adaptations can very usefully be understood as dif-
ficult offspring, or as a creation tied at the same time to obliterating
a univocal view of the source(s). Because of the agonistic relationship
Introduction 9
between an adaptation and its sources, other canonic figures of horror,

namely the vampire and the zombie, might also represent an “undead”
story that transcends mortality and scares its viewers or readers by
bringing a familiar tale back to life. Ken Gelder captures the abiding
fascination with the vampire, for example, as a cultural touchstone. As
Gelder observes, “this creature may be highly adaptable. Thus it can
be made to appeal to or generate fundamental urges located somehow
‘beyond’ culture (desire, anxiety, fear), while simultaneously, it can
stand for a range of meanings and positions in culture” (141). Similarly,
the zombie figure ignites thinking about the assault of adaptations that
are paradoxically living and dead, like the stories we seek to adapt (or,
for that matter, like the celluloid image, which records mortality even as
it insists on an eternal afterlife for its source). In Pride and Prejudice and
Zombies, Seth Grahame-Smith’s 2009 parody novel soon to be released
as a film, a famous literary introduction is creatively refigured as “mon-
strously” adaptive predation: “It is a truth universally acknowledged
that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains”
(Grahame-Smith 13).
While such appetitive drive in the zombie figure can serve nicely for
adaptation, the draw of “hideous progeny” has to do with its complex
evocation not only of stories that don’t, won’t, or cannot die, but also
of figures that “feed”—as the vampire and zombie do in particular—
on past stories in order to survive. More than this, however, it is the
poignancy of the paradoxical creativity that is often received or seen
as destructive that is privileged in the idea of “hideous progeny,” tied
as the notion is to an historical author, Mary Shelley, whose imagina-
tion and life experience saw creation and destruction as uncannily and
traumatically linked. As a woman writing among men at the beginning
of the 19th century, Shelley is herself an icon of adaptability. Writing
from the margins, she assimilated early modern feminism, scientific
experimentation, and the influence of literary Romanticism into a story
that has continually reasserted itself over time.
In the preface to Frankenstein, Shelley calls the novel her “hideous
progeny” in part because of the horror of the story of the Creature
and his creator, Victor Frankenstein, and in part, as critics have noted,
because of her own anxiety about authorship.9 I want to draw an anal-
ogy between this structure of relations and the difficult birthing of
adaptations from originary texts. In his 2005 essay “Beyond Adaptation:
Frankenstein’s Postmodern Progeny,” Pedro Javier Pardo García points
toward a methodology derived from Shelley’s “hideous progeny.”
In saying that Shelley “could not be aware of how her statement
[my hideous progeny] would be prophetic of the cinematic afterlife of

her masterpiece” (223), Pardo García suggests a link between the idea
of “hideous progeny” and the spate of works that adapt the myth of
Frankenstein as much as they adapt Shelley’s novel itself. Focusing his
analysis on Kenneth Branagh’s 1994 film Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as
intertextually related to other adaptations of Frankenstein (as well as
the novel), Pardo García’s analysis suggests a further use of the notion of
“hideous progeny” for adaptation studies: “Adaptation, Branagh’s adap-
tation and the creature featuring in it, are all patchwork quilts made out
of fragments, texts or body parts” (240). While Pardo García concludes,
“Branagh’s creature is a perfect emblem of the composite nature of
artistic creation in postmodern times” (240), I suggest that Shelley’s idea
of “hideous progeny” does something else for adaptation studies. In its
insistence on the penchant for adaptations to create and reconstitute,
the idea of “hideous progeny” suggests the radical or paradoxical shifts
in perspective presented by adaptations birthed with difficulty.10 Like a
pregnant body, the relationship between sources and their progeny can
be strange to behold.
And like the Creature—both the character in Shelley’s novel and the
book itself as her ambivalent creation—the most powerful adaptations
are “hideous progeny” that threaten an interpretive status quo, such as
Joel and Ethan Coen’s O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), an adaptation
of Homer’s ancient Greek epic poem The Odyssey by way of Preston
Sturges’s classic comedy Sullivan’s Travels (1941), discussed in Chapter 3.
These films are not passive conduits of the source text, but agents in
their own right, perverse yet active deliveries that seek to propel think-
ing about a set of ideas or character patterns. In the case of these triplet
texts, the Coen brothers trouble Homer’s exploration of the journey
home at the same time as they transpose Sturges’s message about the
palliative value of film comedy into a quirky celebration of music as a
means of transcendence.
The choice of works to be explored in this book has been determined
in part by a recognition that some of the most interesting adaptations
seem to focus on the recurring themes of the journey to find mean-
ing and the role of the outcast. That these two themes predominate in
visitations of earlier texts should not surprise us, since both preoccupa-
tions are theoretically bound to the process of adaptation. Adaptation
attempts to dialectically revisit a source text recognizing that it cannot
go “home” again; that there is, as Elisabeth Bronfen has argued, “no
place like it.” The journey, as treated in Chapters 2 and 3, thus becomes
a particularly ripe way for adaptations to explore the loss and gain of
Introduction 11
circuitous traveling toward and away from a source text that has in
part given rise to it.11 If the journey’s end lacks closure, as it does in
many of the works to be discussed in these pages, such indeterminacy
productively destabilizes the identification one seeks in experiencing
an adaptation as a re-presentation of a familiar source text, the pattern-
seeking drive to be comfortable with what I call the “home” text. The
often zealous desire to relate to adaptations via an internalized text—
what Barbara Hodgdon calls “a particular reader’s ideology of the text”
(v)—can be very limiting. As Brian McFarlane observes, “[Viewers] are
too often not interested in something new being made in the film
[adaptation] but only in assessing how far their own conception of the
novel has been transposed from one medium to the other” (“It Wasn’t
Like That in the Book” 6).
If the journey suits adaptation as a topic that helps the latter to find
an artistic destination via a vehicle that may already be known, the
road from sources to adaptations is a haunted landscape, full of creation
and destruction, as Shelley foretold.12 Adaptations disorient us, but also
compel us, the way Hitchcock or Martin Scorsese have used the dolly
zoom technique, or “Vertigo zoom”—zooming in a zoom lens while the
camera dollies away from the subject—to suggest an idea of paradoxical
movement. So, too, adaptations travel toward and away from a source
text, creating a new “slanted” perspective, an unheimlich or uncanny
re-viewing of a work, that, happily, appears to be dynamic.13 Such
uncanniness can be seen in Danny Boyle’s 2011 Royal National Theatre
production of Frankenstein, adapted by Nick Dear, in which actors Jonny
Lee Miller and Benedict Cumberbatch alternated the roles of Victor
and the Creature. Of course, this is a way to mirror a thematic point
about the doppelganger relationship between the two central figures
of the story. In the play, the Creature says at the end, “You and I, we
are one.”14 In a short documentary that precedes the film broadcast of
the production, Miller suggests a theatrical rendering of this idea when
he says that “bits of my Creature go into Victor.” The instability of the
form—blending the actors and their roles—foregrounds the idea that
adaptation is by its nature about shifting perspectives. Literalizing this
notion in the performance strategy, Boyle’s Frankenstein is inherently
multiple and textually irresolvable.15
In Boyle’s Frankenstein, the stage sets (done by Mark Tildesley) imagi-
natively draw out the contradictory Romantic and industrial contexts
for a 19th-century Frankenstein. We see resonances of William Blake
in the visual imagery, Ben Brantley rightly observes, which evokes
the natural innocence of the Creature as he experiences the burnt
orange-painted sun and smothers himself in a strip of green grass (“It’s

[Gasp] Alive”).16 In an earlier scene, however, the production depicts
the horrors of industrial machinery. A figure for dehumanization and
the dangers of technology gone amok, a cacophonous locomotive full
of sparks of electricity and spitting steam lurches across the stage as the
Creature tries to find safety.17
But the most striking element of this production is its opening scene,
which exploits a birthing metaphor to introduce the Creature on stage.
The beginning of the play features a drum-like structure with canvas
sides that hold the creature within the tarp waiting to be “born.” The
figure within pushes against the interior of the canvas, distending its
material and emulating an image of a dynamically pregnant body.
When the Creature finally emerges, he begins an extended sequence
of contorted dance movements that eventually result in his autodi-
dactically learning to stand and to walk. At the end of this scene, the
Creature nevertheless tries to find his way back to the tarp, from which
a rope extends (the umbilical cord), representing this hideous progeny’s
link to his sources at the same time as he must make an arduous journey
in a different direction.
The outcast or marginalized figures in this book—Mary Shelley and
her Creature; Carol White in [Safe]; the women in Imitation of Life,
Passing, and The Bluest Eye, for example—cannot find a place of comfort,
although, like Boyle’s Frankenstein, their stories reveal grim perspectives
on the societies and conventions that cause their suffering. Thus, in the
content as well as the form of many of these works, meaning is pursued
through the figure of an outsider defined from some perspectives as a
monster. This figure is the one, however, that illuminates new ways of
reading and viewing what we thought we knew, and when adaptations
revisit these outsider themes, such themes are redoubled, multiplied,
enriched. Max Cady, discussed in Chapter 9, whether played with the
dangerous insouciance of Robert Mitchum or threatening violence of
Robert De Niro in the film versions of Cape Fear, or even with the mis-
hap energy of Sideshow Bob in The Simpsons, represents the monster’s
vengeance not only on an illusory notion of home but also, in the field
of adaptation studies, on the “home text.” Exiled from the “home text”
and any faithful relationship to it, adaptations make their own way.
With his/her/its instinct for survival, this “hideous progeny” will carry
familiar stories into the future, even as that journey is uncomfortable
to witness.
I begin this study with analysis of adaptations of canonical sources—
Frankenstein, The Odyssey, Heart of Darkness—and the book as a whole
Introduction 13
takes the shape of elastextity, moving from familiar texts to more

challenging forms of adaptation, such as immersive theater, Marclay’s
The Clock, and Washburn’s Mr Burns. I end this study with a brief dis-
cussion of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s brilliant musical theater adaptation
of Ron Chernow’s biography of an American founding father, Hamilton
(2015). The project seeks to demonstrate how adaptation studies can
stretch from exploration of familiar literature and film to new or newly
imagined art forms and media. At their most daring, adaptations reflect
an avant-garde experimentation with form and content, reshaping and
transforming stories for new ages and new audiences. Video games,
comic books, and mobile apps are not addressed in these pages, and
I only briefly address television adaptations, interactive technologies,
and other new media. While these are important areas of future research
in adaptation studies, they are too far afield of my interests here to
explore in this book. I am also aware of the gaps created by my central
focus on American films (and theater). Despite my necessarily limited
purview within this expansive and global field, I have tried to include a
wide array of media and diversity of texts and genres. My hope is that in
modeling conversations across a wide range of texts under the umbrella
of the metaphor of “hideous progeny,” the analyses here will reenergize
our ties to the works themselves and reorient our relation to the value-
laden patterns that often guide or can influence our reading, viewing,
and theater-going practices, and our experience of art in general.
Adaptations need not deliver a prefabricated “home text”; they can
invite us to come along for the ride, taking us on journeys that are
disturbing, whose ends are indeterminate, and whose landscape and
climates are deeply imaginative. In this spirit, Henry Jenkins describes
much contemporary storytelling as “world-making.” Transmedia adap-
tations follow the Wachowski Brothers’ efforts, as Jenkins observes, in
making The Matrix (1999) a “trigger [for] a search for meaning; they
did not determine where the audience would go to find their answers”
(419). The immersive theater adaptations discussed in Chapter 7
exemplify these intermedial crossings, which push us to change our
perception of previous works, as well as of the media and the role of
various agents within and outside of the works, such as audience/
viewers. Even in mainstream media, as in the ABC television series
Once Upon a Time that premiered in 2011, adaptation has enhanced
what is on offer.18
A recent example of a thoroughly creative television adaptation that
exemplifies Jenkins’s “world-making” is the FX series Fargo, which
premiered in 2014 and, much more than a strict adaptation of the
1996 film of the same name by the Coen brothers, creates a world
of Fargo-icity, in which the characters of the film are evoked but not
re-presented. More than adapting a single source (the film Fargo), the
television series adapts the world of the Coen Brothers, drawing on
their themes of randomness, outsiders and down-and-outers sinking
into moral quagmires in distinctly American landscapes, and violence
perversely wedded to humor. While the vast snowy landscape in the
television series Fargo imitates the mise-en-scène of the film, the general
Coen-esque quality of the television series is most immediately found
in the characters, who do not schematically correspond to those from
the film. Some organically become more like the film’s characters as
the story progresses, while others simply bring them to mind. From
the beginning of the series, the crime-solving Molly Solverson (Allison
Tolman) seems to evoke Marge Gunderson, but by episode 8, after
becoming pregnant and marrying Gus Grimly (Colin Hanks), she settles
into a recognizably Gunderson household (We’re doing good,” she says
to Gus, whose link to gentle Norm is quietly evoked in the stamps we
see populating their bedroom). William H. Macy’s Jerry Lundergaard
is in the background of Lester Nygaard (Martin Freeman), a similarly
desperate salesman who turns to violent crime to assert a masculin-
ity he cannot otherwise express. Several episodes into the first season,
Lester has fully “broken bad,” transforming from a midwestern loser
into an award-winning “salesman of the year,” adored by his new wife
Linda. The only impediment in Lester’s new life is the malevolent Lorne
Malvo (Billy Bob Thornton), whom Lester repeatedly goads into making
trouble. Malvo himself is reborn within the series from an assassin with
a Frankenstein haircut in the first episodes to a hit man hiding under
cover as a handsome dentist. The shift in the fates of these two dop-
pelganger figures further exemplifies a Darwinian competition among
survivors. Malvo evokes the chilling force of Anton Chigurh (Javier
Bardem) from No Country for Old Men (2007), an imp of the perverse
whose gleeful troublemaking accentuates an uncanny juxtaposition of
hopeful, benevolent people with the sense of arbitrariness and evil that
also characterizes the world and idea of “Fargo.” The Solversons, as their
name suggests, believe there’s meaning in the world, despite the pres-
ence of Malvo and the viciously narcissistic self-preservation of Lester
Nygaard. Molly Solverson, her wise and generous father (an ex-state cop
played by Keith Carradine), and Gus Grimly are all survivors, a kindly
and competent reverse mirror to the evil and desperate machinations of
most others in the story. The Solversons and Grimly find their strength
within this Darwinian landscape as “the season” evolves, and the
Introduction 15
weaker though well-meaning characters, such as Chief Bill Oswalt (Bob

Odenkirk) are weeded out. The show additionally alludes to the Coen
Brothers’ fascination with ethnic minorities striving to adapt within
a homogenously white American cultural landscape. A Jewish neigh-
bor strangely tells Lorne Malvo not to be a “nudnik,” and Nygaard’s
Asian-American wife Linda (evoking the fragile ethnic outsider Mike
Yanagita from Fargo the film) uncomfortably idolizes her violently over-
compensating husband Lester, the show’s doomed schlemiel. Fargo the
television series fully exemplifies the world-making Jenkins refers to
and offers a fascinating experiment in transposing a source text into
an evocative wholly different kind of work, adumbrating its source and
expanding (rather than simply digesting) it in a different medium.19
Experimental works of adaptation very usefully challenge the reader’s
or viewer’s comfort with conventional boundaries of identity and
textuality, a theme that emerges strongly in the later chapters of this
project. Throughout the book, however, I endorse a more elastic notion
of textuality that blurs the lines dividing discrete texts. Textuality that
is stretched across time and media gives birth to what often appear
to be misshapen works of art. These adaptations, however, force us to
reconsider preconceived notions about sources and their afterlives and
the value of difficult art work.
Such a reading of cultural production not only allows us to appropri-
ate for adaptation studies an emphasis on the relations among texts,
their elastextity, bypassing the more typical focus on discrete works of
literature, film, art, or theater, as well as their readers, viewers, or audi-
ences. It also shifts the emphasis in studies of adaptation to theorizing
about initially startling though often beautiful illuminations adapta-
tions can create by offering radically different perspectives on familiar
cultural material. In Chapter 7, for example, I discuss the immersive
theater adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s 1865 novel Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland entitled Then She Fell, which premiered in 2012. Then She
Fell dissolves the conventional distance between audience member
and performer as well as the textual distinction between the story of
Alice in Wonderland and the identities of Charles Dodgson, Carroll’s
actual name, and Alice Liddell, the little girl for whom he wrote the
Wonderland books. In its performance of “divided” characters as multi-
plied identities (the presence of two Alices; Dodgson becoming Carroll;
audience members mirroring characters), the production suggests rela-
tional art as a response to trauma. Then She Fell’s adaptation of Alice in
Wonderland enacts a dissolution of discrete textual and human identi-
ties and argues for an associational model of art in its very form. Then
She Fell practices an idea of adaptation that nicely exemplifies Kamilla

Elliott’s argument for models of interart adaptation theory that focus
on reciprocity:
reciprocal interart analogies differ from the usurping and rivalrous

analogies … for their reciprocity creates a mutual and inherent
rather than a hierarchical and averse dynamic. The reciprocity of
looking glass analogies ensures an endless series of inversions and
reversals rather than a one-sided usurpation. (Rethinking the Novel/
Film Debate 212)
Then She Fell literalizes Elliott’s concept of adaptation by performing

its relationship to Carroll, Dodgson, “Alice,” and Alice Liddell, using
not only mirrors as signs of texts and identities reflecting one another,
but also audience members as co-creators of the work, although this
can be an unsettling experience for many. Respecting the reciprocity of
the production and the audience member, Then She Fell exemplifies a
unique expressiveness made possible when elastic relations among texts
are enacted.
The importance of conceiving of adaptation in terms of multiple
relations—McFarlane’s observation, for example, that an adaptation’s
“anterior novel or play or poem is only one element of the film’s
intertextuality” (“Reading Film and Literature” 27)—can be traced
back to Shelley’s novel, in which Frankenstein’s transgression can be
understood as over-reliance on one other being. The sole “source” of
sustenance for Victor is his work on making and then destroying the
Creature, a myopia that parallels one of the problems in popular con-
ceptions of adaptations. As Mary Jacobus has argued about Frankenstein,
“the monster’s tragedy is his confinement to the destructive intensities of
a one-to-one relationship with his maker, and his exclusion from other
relations” (130). Like Jacobus’s notion of the creature’s restricted relations,
adaptations tethered to one source are limited in their purview and, in
popular and critical writing, can be treated narcissistically, as projections
of the critic’s or viewer’s own “home text.”
More elastic adaptations seek to invent new ways of rewriting or
interpreting preexisting texts and influences and prod readers and view-
ers to expand their understanding of texts and of textual influence.
These adaptations may be experienced as “hideous” because, from the
perspective of seeking “truthful” representations of single sources inter-
nalized by their readers or audiences, they so often seem “unsightly.”
Like Shelley’s Creature born on a “dreary night,” they challenge readers
Introduction 17
and viewers to avoid Frankenstein’s error and respond with imagination

and compassion, instead of the self-involved doctor’s “anxiety that
almost amounted to agony” (56). Rather than fleeing the laboratory, we
are called upon to read the story in a new context and asked to meet the
Creature on its own terms, rather than projecting onto it our internal-
ized “home text” and running from its hideousness.
It is not surprising that Shelley’s story provides an especially apt
metaphor for film adaptation, in part because of its “tapestry of
cultural and textual references and influences” (Phillips 23) and its
cultural “plasticity”—its propensity, as Susan Tyler Hitchcock observes,
to “morph to match the times” (323). In a text as far afield from
Frankenstein as Jim Jarmusch’s 1999 Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai,
we find the novel’s presence, as Jarmusch “personally thanks” Shelley
and lists Frankenstein as a source in the film’s closing credits. But the
novel’s own fascination with changing and reconstructed forms of being
makes it a ripe source for theoretical discussions of adaptation. Scholars
have noted Shelley’s own interest in scientific debates about 18th-
century Italian physician, physicist, and philosopher Luigi Galvani’s
experiments with galvanism—the contraction of a muscle stimulated
by an electric current—that would predict concerns about reanimation
that disgusted some of Shelley’s readers, even to some extent Shelley
herself.20 Some of that disgust can be paralleled with popular reactions
to adaptations. While academics have moved away from fidelity models
of adaptations, readers and film viewers still often scorn adaptations that
seek to animate but also deviate from their sources; to many these appear
to violate their foundational materials.
The language not only of monstrosity but of difficult birth—or even
abortion in some cases—helps us, this project assumes, to forge new
metaphors for critical engagement with art and culture, conversations
among texts that can supersede a more traditional language of
adaptation.21 This project thus seeks to reclaim the suppressed language
of monstrosity that seems traditionally to apply to adaptations. We
needn’t view them as parasitic, a perspective evoked as early as 1926 by
no less prominent a figure than Virginia Woolf, who saw film adapta-
tion’s vulgar and parasitic relation to fiction as “immense rapacity”
(182). Robert Stam characterizes this recurrent viewpoint that adapta-
tion exploits its sources as “awash in terms such as infidelity, betrayal,
deformation, violation, vulgarization, and desecration” (54). One thinks, for
example, of the 1996 birth of Dolly, the cloned sheep, and the paradox
of a fluffy sheep defined culturally as a monster. I wish to reclaim the
suppressed language of monstrosity in order to expose the extent to
which the label “monster” is really an insistence on a particular, usually

exclusionary, perspective. As the character James Whale (Ian McKellen)
says in the film Gods and Monsters (1998), pointing to his head, “the
only monsters are in here.” Since monstrosity is indeed a matter of
mental construction rather than objective identities, we might recast
the creatures of adaptation as a positive means of providing new per-
spectives on abiding themes and the many varied ways in which cul-
tures produce meaning.
The language of monsters is also helpful in conceiving of adaptation
as a kind of psychosocial sampling, that is, as a process whereby we
make new texts derived from other texts in order to make sense of the
world. In her book Understanding Deleuze (2002), Claire Colebrook talks
about the fact that the word “monster,” which “today,” she says, “refers
to Frankenstein-like or alien figures, originally derived from the Latin
verb monstrare (to show).” This suggests, Colebrook claims, “that the
word ‘monster’ carries the meaning of being significant or revelatory”
(10–11). I advocate bringing this understanding of the Latin verb “mon-
strare” to the study of adaptations, which can, in their most captivating
form, rouse us into thinking in different ways about cultural produc-
tion. Further, this reorientation to adaptation as revelation reminds us,
as Leitch has observed, that “the noun adaptation is subordinate to the
verb adapt” (Studia 101); the act of adapting and the examination of the
relations among adaptations and their sources are dynamic processes.
***
When we emphasize origins in discussing film adaptation, we focus
on the preexisting text as the authority, like a controlling parent. If
we applied a healthier model of parenting—mothers and fathers who
create an environment in which their offspring can thrive—we might
more easily conceive of the independent lines of inquiry and ingenious
expressions of art that these descendants explore. An over-reliance on
the authority of origins and anxiety about parents pulsates through
many of the texts referenced in this study, and Shelley herself wor-
ried about healthy parenting. As critics have noted, Frankenstein very
prominently explores Victor Frankenstein’s “total failure at parenting”
(Mellor 41). Shelley was desperate to imagine a model of family rela-
tions that balanced the notion of thriving children with the guilt and
danger of creation. She was competing with her husband Percy (who,
interestingly, strongly identified with Victor Frankenstein) and their (at
the time) much more famous friend Lord Byron, and she recognized the
Introduction 19
fragility of creations that weren’t nurtured. According to Mellor, Shelley

felt that “a rejected and unmothered child can become a killer, especially
the killer of its own parents, siblings, children. When the nuclear family
fails to mother its offspring, it engenders homicidal monsters” (47). A
second understanding of the figure of the “monstrous” in adaptations,
one proposed by this book, pushes discussion of adaptation beyond
the parental power relations implied in the first model of “monstrous”
adaptations as “hideous progeny.”
Anxiety about artistic creations going forth beyond parental pur-
view feeds ambivalent views and conventional models of adaptation.
Novelist Ron Hansen gave a talk about the 1996 film adaptation of
his 1991 novel Mariette in Ecstasy. The talk was entitled “Look What
They’ve Done to My Baby,” as Hansen saw in the film a bastard child
of his novel: a film, purporting to re-present his fiction, that had gone
awry. He wrote the film’s screenplay and admired its direction by John
Bailey, but Mariette in Ecstasy’s post-production effects were problematic
(including the addition of an odd voiceover that Hansen had nothing
to do with and a clichéd musical score). While there are other authors
who have more famously rejected the film scions of their novels,22
Hansen’s gothic language for describing this process is noteworthy. A
fan of adaptations who sees himself as a writer who “thinks visually,”
Hansen is very fond of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward
Robert Ford, Andrew Dominik’s 2007 adaptation of his 1983 novel of the
same name. Hansen’s figuration for the distortion of Mariette, however,
is horror; his talk title evokes another story of grotesque transforma-
tion: Henry Farrell’s 1960 novel What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?.
Concerning the cinematic progeny of his novels, Hansen represents this
process as at least potentially dreadful, “monstrous.” Living authors of
source texts (or the persons or institutions that control the copyright
for such works after the author or artist has died) are in a unique and
difficult position—at one and the same time giving license to adapters
to change their work, but also understandably maintaining a parental
protectiveness over their work’s upbringing, development, and future
life. Ron Hansen’s birthing metaphor in discussing what went wrong
with the filming of Mariette suggests the pitfalls of attempting to do
novels filmically, though the baby Hansen refers to is not the adapta-
tion but the novel itself, which, like Victor’s creation in Frankenstein,
went off the rails once it had left the laboratory of creation. Hansen’s
progeny only became “hideous” when appropriated and mangled by
commercial hands. A good example of adaptation as a certain kind of
stillbirth, Mariette in Ecstasy was never released.
Hansen’s invocation of adaptation as monster underscores the

problem with adaptation in the first place. Any text purporting to ren-
der a prior work invites criticism because, as Leitch reminds us, it can-
not be the text it seeks to reanimate (Film Adaptation and Its Discontents
16). Readers who have internalized the novels they have read are also
proxy figures: surrogate parents enjoying their “home texts,” as I term
it, with the loving and domestic pleasure of a doting caretaker who
wants to protect and control the life of those children into maturity.
Surrogate parents for these fiction-babies released into the world, read-
ers and viewers, as well as critics, of adaptations revile the “monstrous”
journeys of their progeny.23 Indeed, the notion that these offspring
have been raised badly can be carried logically into the realm of cor-
porate or Hollywood interests, motivated by ticket sales and revenue.
As Timothy Corrigan observes, “the traditional cultural and aesthetic
values that have informed the exchanges between film and literature
become overshadowed by financial value” (45). Trying to cash in on
popular, successful, or widely known source texts, some adaptations
convert good or interesting literature into commercial goods, and like
Shelley’s Creature ranging through the forest, the baby cries out: first,
she is vulnerable to becoming exploited by organized institutional
forces designed to harness her cries; second, she may become enraged,
resentful of having been conceived of and treated like a monster.
This “monster” of corporate or popular appropriations of works
of literature, corrupting the innocence of the baby source text—as
Wordsworth said, “The Child is father of the Man,” and indeed, the
Romantic idolatry of originary sources,24 the babies who take on
inauthentic masks as they proceed into adulthood, going out into the
world in different forms—is revealed as central to popular conceptions
of adaptations as knock-offs, as evils in a culture wanting to process
“natural” beings into consumable products. As babies are socialized,
they lose their innate goodness. The forces of culture and consumption
lying in wait to exploit natural ingredients into processed goods may
well be figured as “monstrous” and their products as “hideous.” Instead
of imagining the trajectory of textual children as “hideous” because of
their appropriation by the forces of cultural consumption, we might
instead embrace the potential for shifts in perspective and changes in
orientation on source texts and the authors and cultures that produce
them and their progeny or adaptations. Clearly, some adaptations are
made simply to cash in on the monetary potential in bringing a popu-
lar or classic literary or film text to the screen (or to the stage, as also
discussed in this book), marketing old material to new audiences who
Introduction 21
encounter “art” through new media. Beyond this dynamic ruled by

capital, however, we could be engaging in a more open-minded reflec-
tion on the “out-sourcing” of texts by adaptations,25 seeing the ways in
which adaptation can become avant-garde in its creative engagement
with form and content. As Patty Jenkins showed in her film Monster
(2003), hideous figures are often only seen as hideous because they are
evaluated in isolation from their multiple contexts.
Adaptations ask us to reorient ourselves to our knowledge base and
our relationship with previous texts—our “home texts”—and imagine
that “home” is a construct that may disguise an extensive series of pre-
vious works that build upon a set of ideas and textual productions.26
In the introduction to the 1831 edition of her novel, Shelley warns of
missing this point: “Every thing must have a beginning, to speak in
Sanchean phrase; and that beginning must be linked to something that
went before” (x). Resisting a conventionally Romantic emphasis on
originality, Shelley questions a fixed notion of sources. “The Hindoos,”
she goes on, “give the world an elephant to support it, but they make
the elephant stand upon a tortoise.” Charlize Theron’s Aileen Wuornos
is indeed a “monster” in her murder of the innocent in Monster, but
she is also a part of a process of exploitation, objectification, and a
machinery of destruction put in play by class and gender assumptions
leading to her miserable fate. Jenkins’s film is, as its title announces,
about perspective, about the ease with which we label what we don’t
like and what does not accord with our patterns of understanding the
world. This theme recurs repeatedly throughout discussion in this book
and can again be traced to Mary Shelley’s exploration of monstrous
creations and relations. Monstrosity can describe evil agency, actions
that are brutal or that seem inhuman. Often, however, as Shelley shows
and Patty Jenkins’s film also rehearses, monstrosity is a perspective that
is brought to bear on people and events. Mellor, like most readers, links
the Creature’s “monstrosity” to the Creature’s rejection by Victor and
the subsequent rejection by everyone the Creature meets, based solely
on appearance: “He thereby condemns his creature to become what peo-
ple behold, a monster” (102). Adaptations are thus “hideous progeny”
in their potential to be perceived, beheld, as “monstrous” for violating
their source text when in fact they catapult sources into new eras and
new media.
Imagining a longer more elastic history of influence in the case of any
given story can broaden our understanding of adaptations, loosening
their grip on individual source texts. These are the “progeny” that I am
interested in exploring in this book. Such adaptations are monstrous
in the way they shock us into rethinking the patterns that guide our
reading and viewing habits. Indeed, they can be seen as allied with the
avant-garde in their forcing a new mode of relation to the arts and to
the products of our individual and collective imaginations.
As James Naremore observes,
The study of adaptation needs to be joined with the study of recy-

cling, remaking, and every other form of retelling in the age of
mechanical reproduction and electronic communication. By this
means, adaptation will become part of a general theory of repetition,
and adaptation study will move from the margin to the center of
contemporary media studies.” (Film Adaptation 15)
In 2014, following its hit video series The Lizzie Bennet Diaries,
Pemberley Digital, a web video production company, premiered
Frankenstein M.D. on YouTube. In this digital “elastext,” Victoria
Frankenstein, a medical student, obsessively works to try to make her
name in science and medicine, tapping the highly charged contempo-
rary debates on women in STEM fields. Projects such as Frankenstein
M.D. should prod us “to allow the term ‘adaptation’,” as R. Barton
Palmer and David Boyd have enjoined, “to broaden and expand” (12).
Later discussions in this book include a number of works—for example,
Haynes’s [Safe], Marclay’s The Clock, and an episode of the Fox televi-
sion series The Simpsons—that would not be considered adaptation in
any strict or traditional sense of the term. However, as Julie Sanders
comments, “With readership and audiences already well honed in the
art of searching for wider referential frameworks and contexts for the
material they are receiving we need in turn to develop a more dynamic
theoretical vocabulary to describe and mobilize these processes of
response” (155). Expanding our conception of adaptations—their elas-
tic nature; their multitudinous relation to sources; and their potential
for avant-garde critique—will help to reshape our understanding of
adaptation as serving a vital role in cultural production.27 Within this
broadened landscape, it is the alien text, film, or artistic work, the one
that revisits or haunts its sources and us, that elicits the most compel-
ling insights and makes way for yet other “progeny”—new creative and
critical works—to be born.
Part I
Journeys and Authorship
1
“It’s Alive!”: The Monster and
the Automaton as Film
and Filmmakers
If hideous progeny and the mutating narrative of the Frankenstein

story can be considered a critical lens for understanding adaptation,
the films Gods and Monsters and Hugo demonstrate an obsession with
artistic progeny and offer an analogy between textual adaptation and
the ability to shift perspectives on earlier life and work. In the narra-
tive of Gods and Monsters (1998) and Hugo (2011), filmmakers are seen
as refashioning materials in life and art. In fact, the films are strik-
ingly similar: They both fictionalize the life of an important director
in cinema history, James Whale (Ian McKellan) and George Méliès
(Ben Kingsley) respectively. These directors are, as the stories told
in these films begin, lost—alienated and depressed. Having repressed
the experiences of their early filmmaking successes as these gave way
to personal trauma, the two men are brought back to life by the work-
ings of another male figure who has his own personal psychological
agenda; Clay Boone (Brendan Fraser) and Hugo (Asa Butterfield) seek
meaning in their lives after having been left or abandoned by their
fathers. Redeemed and revivified by their relationship with the boys
they encounter, Whale and Méliès come to terms with their past:
they “rejoin the living,” in the case of Méliès, and rest in peace,
in the case of Whale, who commits suicide after confronting his guilt
and regret surrounding past (Barnard) and present (Clay) “creatures”
he has loved. However, as I hope to show, both films explore the
relationship between the magical and the monstrous, affirming the
power of “hideous progeny” to reveal new ways of seeing the past
and the present.
An adaptation of Christopher Bram’s novel Father of Frankenstein, Bill
Condon’s Gods and Monsters cites James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) and
Bride of Frankenstein (1935), inviting “a complicated audience response
25
through allusion to a string of media images and cultural memories”

(Tsika 47). Bram’s 1995 novel fictionally renders the final days of James
Whale before his (real-life) suicide in 1957. The book was later renamed
Gods and Monsters after the success of the 1998 film apparently war-
ranted a retitling of the novel, an illustration of how commercial inter-
ests can guide the fate of a literary or film text or adaptation.
Like the winding course of the myth of Frankenstein, Scorsese’s
Hugo is about changes in personal and textual identity and thus func-
tions nicely to supplement a discussion of “monstrous” changes in the
human and cinematic worlds. Both Gods and Monsters and Hugo invite
a critical practice of examining works in dialogue that offer different
perspectives on known stories or canonic works. They also exemplify
a unique conception of what constitutes sources for adaptations, fol-
lowing Kyle Meikle’s provocative essay “Rematerializing Adaptation
Theory”:
Films can and do draw from materials … intertexts need not be texts
at all. Expanding the category of source texts to include different
matter makes way for an intermaterial model of adaptation to com-
plement the intertextual and intermedial models already at play in the
field of adaptation study. (175)
The film Hugo “[rematerializes] celluloid in the form of the automaton”

(178), according to Meikle, offering a model for imagining different
kinds of material as sources. It is cinema itself that is adapted into a fig-
ure of technology, art, and the filmmaker himself. If, in Hugo, “Scorsese
reminds his audience that films adapt sources other than texts, or
that ‘texts’ must mean materials and matter, too” (180), in Gods and
Monsters, Shelley’s and the 1930s Hollywood version of the Creature are
sources not only for the story of James Whale but also for the redemp-
tion of Clay Boone, the gardener to whom Whale is drawn in the final
days before his suicide.
Interwoven into the figures of the cinematic Automaton and
Creature, in Hugo and Gods and Monsters, Méliès and Whale are seen
themselves as adaptations, mash-ups of their films and the modern
transformations their movies represented and helped to marshal in.
That is, both films illuminate George Méliès and James Whale as a
very material part of the modern machinery they historically helped to
advance. In this sense the biographical interest of these films is subor-
dinated to the non-human materials they adapt. In Hugo, for instance,
alongside a fairly sentimental story of redemption and two children’s
Monster and the Automaton 27
coming of age is the central figure of the film, a machine infused with
human artistic will, the Automaton. An unlikely focus of the values of
artistic creativity and human bonds, the Automaton becomes—as does
the Creature in the Frankenstein stories—the mechanistic yet central
consciousness of the film and the fundamental means by which we are
forced to reorient ourselves as viewers to the shifting perspectives these
figures of adaptation foreground.
Condon’s film not only adapts Bram’s novel but also Whale’s own
“hideous progeny,” his Frankenstein films. Gods and Monsters repeats
specific motifs, character patterns, and mise-en-scène from the 1931
and 1935 films. Scenes of camaraderie between the Creature and the
Blind Man, Whale’s expressionist camera work, title sequences, and the
comic maid figure exemplify the film’s material reworkings of Whale’s
films. In one of the most visceral elements of the film’s adaptation
of Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein, Gods and Monsters uncannily
evokes the body and makeup of Boris Karloff in Clay Boone’s appear-
ance and affect. The character of Clay is derived from the filmic com-
position of the Creature. In the story, Whale’s desires are projected onto
Clay, who is thus like a piece of emulsified celluloid. Even the charac-
ter’s given name points to the film’s figuration of him as pure matter to
be adapted, “clay” to be molded into whatever story will be assembled
from its disparate pieces.
Clay Boone is, from the start of the film, a Creature in the sense that
he is unformed: child-like, “alternately boisterous and petulant” (Tsika
157). “You’re a big fun kid,” Lolita Davidovich’s character says to Boone.
And yet Clay is also potentially the monster that the increasingly dis-
abled James Whale wishes to create and incite to kill him because of
his terminal illness. Dangerous, neglected, and child of an absentee
father—like the Creature in Shelley’s novel and Shelley herself—the
gardener Boone, with his flat top, looks like a Karloff creature. Whale
himself threatens to become the cruel father-creator, who puts his
own concerns (dying with dignity) ahead of the creature and the aptly
named Clay he seeks to mold.
But Condon’s film presents other variations on the monster figure.
The mental deterioration of James Whale is presented as a monstrosity,
a degenerative disease afflicting his mind and imagination. Further, the
dead bodies of the First World War, the result of a monstrous devasta-
tion to which James Whale had himself been traumatically exposed,
haunt the film as one of its major backdrops. Even Hollywood appears
as a kind of monster figure in its fiendish way of exploiting artists like
Whale. Alongside Scorsese’s adventurous rematerializing of early cinema
in the Automaton,1 then, Gods and Monsters similarly explores a broader

“procession of quasi-objects” (Meikle 181) as sources for adaptation.
As just suggested, one major concern of Gods and Monsters is Whale’s
own war-time experience, adapted from Bram’s novel and Whale’s
biography. Having served (and been a POW) in “The Great War,” Whale
watched his peers die in vast numbers and suffered survivor guilt and
isolation. In his DVD commentary on Gods and Monsters, Bill Condon
observes that casting the actor Ian McKellen as Whale created a reso-
nance because of the AIDS epidemic (McKellen’s activism is fairly well-
known)—a catastrophic historical reality almost replicating the Great
War and the devastating influenza epidemic that followed, resulting in
a literally rather than merely literary Lost Generation. Gods and Monsters
also rewrites the Mexican maid in Bram’s novel. Hanna, played by Lynn
Redgrave, not only recalls the bravura performance of Una O’Connor
as the clucking, comic maid Minnie in Bride of Frankenstein; she also
evokes the idea of Germany, which had played such an important role
in Whale’s life. With Whale’s Frankenstein films released as the Nazis
begin to gain power in the early 1930s, one can imagine these adap-
tations gesturing toward a fascism inherent in the kind of monster-
making Victor engages in. These resonances provide clarity in a new
historical moment, and a new set of cultural concerns and preoccupa-
tions—for instance, the connection Bill Condon forges between AIDS
and “The Great War” through the idea of monstrous isolation. While
in Gods and Monsters (as well as Hugo), technology is seen as responsible
for filmmaking magic, it is also significantly related to the horrors of
war. In Gods and Monsters, references to failed or sick bodies evoke the
mechanized mass death that World War I brought to bear on human
society and experience. This is seen not only in Whale’s flashbacks to
the war but also in the gas mask Whale asks Clay to wear to dehuman-
ize him to the extent that he might kill Whale in a homophobic rage.
References to WW1, though clearly in part derived from Whale’s
biography, refer back to Peggy Webling’s 1927 play An Adventure in the
Macabre, which strongly influenced Whale’s 1931 Frankenstein. Lester
Friedman recounts Steven Forry’s discussion of the monstrous face of
modern warfare in Frankenstein, also exemplifying the force of intertex-
tuality in constituting adaptation:
Forry maintains that Webling’s play strikes different notes from

previous stage adaptations due to the “general disillusion follow-
ing World War I and preceding the Great Depression,” concluding
that her version “must be viewed in terms of an age frightened by
a spectre of its own creation” and that her work “presages the most
popular modern theme associated with the novel: society’s ability to
destroy itself.” (Forry 93, Friedman and Kavey)
Perhaps most important, in Webling’s play, the creature is portrayed

more sympathetically and (according to Forry) the doppelganger
theme is introduced, though, as Friedman and Kavey observe, Thomas
Edison had done this more than a decade earlier, in 1910. According to
the script of Edison’s 12-minute kinetogram film (written by director
J. Searle Dawley), “the evil in Frankenstein’s mind creates a monster,”
a deformed creation who “disappears” (with Elizabeth still alive) when
Victor’s “better self asserts itself,” and evil is “overcome by love.” In the
redemptive finale, when Victor looks in the mirror in which the mon-
ster had just been reflected, he sees—himself. The monster in Webling’s
play, a role performed by Hamilton Deane, would have been intertextu-
ally influenced by the actor’s portrayal of Dracula on alternate nights,
anticipating Cumberbatch and Miller almost 90 years later.
In Hugo, World War I is also figured as desolation, but its destruction
is specifically linked to the death of the artist figure, since it is the War
that has shifted public attention from Méliès’s “magic” to more worldly
concerns. Méliès’s films are melted into chemicals and used to make
shoe heels. Amidst this darkened industrial world, cinema appears to
be the light projected by Hugo to redeem the social and historical dev-
astation the War and modernity have caused. The flashback sequences
of Méliès’s discovery of special effects and the beautiful glass structure
in which he made his films suggest a brilliant cinema past devastated
by the machine of war; in the film, the character Méliès narrates a
flashback in which Scorsese cuts from the magical sparks of film special
effects directly to images of the explosions of war, conflagrations that
made Méliès’s magic tricks irrelevant: “But then the war came.”
In Hugo, the trauma of World War I, as in Gods and Monsters, is seen
in its massively mechanized form of destruction. Modern warfare is
defined by its efficiency, which is linked in Hugo to anxiety about
clockworks and the efficiency of the train station. Indeed, the station
is presented as a fully pragmatic space; as Gustave the Station Master
(Sacha Baron Cohen) says, “We are here to get on trains and to get off
them.” The station can in this context be seen as a utilitarian Victorian
workplace, with Gustave as the pragmatic unsympathetic warden, like
Mr. Bumble, who threatens poor orphans in Oliver Twist. With his
prosthetic leg, Gustave is himself a victim of the war’s devastation, but
he has sublimated his own postwar trauma into attempting to control
the potentially chaotic urban space of the station. Forces of modernity

include postwar trauma; the institution of the police or stationmaster
to regulate urban populations; and technologized time in the form of
clocks that help to organize the workings of the station but also (it must
be added) make it possible for Hugo to remain hidden in the station’s
clock tower. As for the juggernaut of the train: I will return to that
below. These are a bludgeoning counter to the worlds of literature and
film, indeed, to all imaginatively creative minds striving to find mean-
ing in their world.
And yet, ironically, in Hugo it is a machine—the Automaton—that
becomes the catalyst for resistance. The Automaton represents the
hopes of technology, not the machine of war but, like the tools of cin-
ema Méliès cultivated, a defining element in creative processes. A figure
assembled in concert with Méliès’s invention of his camera (“I built my
own camera, using left over pieces from the automaton,” he says), the
Automaton is allied with Frankenstein’s Creature as a unique source
of the film’s insights into the necessity of the creative arts in order to
sustain human happiness and relationships.
Adaptations can similarly transform our perceptions. The 1930s
Hollywood Frankenstein movies are certainly in some sense adapting
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein but they are also the “hideous progeny” of
their “creator” James Whale, as well as of modern Hollywood’s fascina-
tion with the horror picture. The films were also strongly influenced,
as suggested above, by Peggy Webling’s 1927 British stage adaptation
of Shelley’s novel and by the work of screenwriter William Hurlburt,
with whom Whale collaborated closely in making Bride of Frankenstein
in 1935. Friedman and Kavey have recently charted the journey of
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein through its stage adaptations and Edison’s
pioneering 1910 film version to land in Hollywood in 1931 and 1935.
Friedman discusses three important theatrical sources of Whale’s films
beyond Shelley’s novel: Richard Brinsley Peake’s Presumption; or, The
Fate of Frankenstein (1823), which Mary Shelley saw eight years before
the 1831 edition of her novel was released; Henry M. Milner’s 1826
play, The Man and the Monster; or, The Fate of Frankenstein; and Webling’s
Frankenstein: An Adventure in the Macabre, mentioned above. Webling’s
play was first performed in England in 1927 but premiered in London
in 1930, the year before Whale’s Frankenstein was made in Hollywood.
In America, Friedman and Kavey note, John Balderston was set to adapt
Webling’s play to the American stage—an adaptation never performed
though it was sold to Universal, becoming an important source for
Whale’s 1931 film.
These stage adaptations had a significant impact not only on the

transmission of the story of Frankenstein but also on the reputation
of Mary Shelley, whose fame was determined in some sense by adap-
tation. Peake’s Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein premiered in
London in 1823 and, as Friedman and Kavey recount, “When Mary
Shelley returned to England five days before her twenty-sixth birthday
and a year after the death of her husband, she was shocked to discover
that, ‘lo & behold! I found myself famous!’” (Friedman and Kavey, and
Morton 29; Mary is echoing Byron’s accurate observation on the over-
whelming response to Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: “I awoke and found
myself famous”). In Webling’s play, Forry notes, the scientist extends
his family name to the creature (“I call him by my own name. He is
Frankenstein.” [Forry 96]), initiating a shift of mythic proportions in
popular culture in which, Mary Shelley’s novel notwithstanding, the
creature is subsequently called “Frankenstein.” Friedman and Kavey
further observe that in Webling, the scientist Waldman is introduced
and Victor’s name is changed to Henry, both of these changes making
their way into Whale’s film.
One of the most interesting instances of Whale’s multiple sources
is the exclamation in The Man and the Monster, “It lives!” As Friedman
and Kavey observe, this becomes the source of “one of the most famous
lines in film history”—“It’s Alive!” Not only does this iconic phrase
announce the animation of dead material, but it signals the continual
rebirth of the story of Frankenstein; each subsequent incarnation pro-
vides an opportunity to recast the story with different emphases, shifted
perspectives. And just as the Creature comes to represent the birth of
new ways of looking at familiar matter (the body of the story, in this
case), so too the Automaton in Hugo is animated in order to provide a
new perspective on the losses and changes the world has undergone,
finding in its very own “clockwork” a salve for a parallel loss in the crea-
tive ingenuity of the artist figures: Méliès, Hugo and his father, Isabelle
the writer (Chloe Grace Moretz), and Scorsese the filmmaker and 21st-
century innovator in digital film technology.2
For James Whale, his creativity and his sexual orientation made him
feel himself to be an unfortunate creature, an outcast. From a young
age, his talent for painting was seen as an aberration, since there was no
familial or social context in which his vocation had particular value in
the English Midlands of the early 20th century. Hollywood also treated
Whale as an outcast, creating powerful social and psychological isola-
tion that contributed to his growing sense of himself as “monstrous.”
Whale left Hollywood in the early 1940s, “at the mercy,” biographer
Mark Gatiss says, “of unsympathetic studio heads who disliked him
because he was English, gay, and ‘aloof’” (147). He became a recluse,
pursuing his passion for painting. In 1957, mental deterioration made
him feel still more isolated, more monstrous, less human. In real life,
he was hospitalized for a nervous breakdown and treated with shock
therapy before his suicide; in Bram’s novel, he suffers a stroke.
Whale’s identification with the Creature at some level begins
with Mary Shelley’s role as a creative artist. An outsider figure like
Shelley, Whale was always aware of himself as the unsightly Other,
as a “Creature” of sorts. Whale understood that Mary Shelley herself
linked the artist and the monster, as the frame narrative of the Bride of
Frankenstein makes clear. Here, Mary Shelley (played by Elsa Lanchester,
in the provocative double role of author and, later in the film, Bride)
exhibits a quiet confidence. Less flamboyant than the Byron depicted
in the narrative, she is still tenacious:
I say look at [Percy] Shelley—who would suspect that pink and white
innocence, gentle as a dove, was thrown out of Oxford University
as a menace to morality, had run away from his lawful spouse with
innocent me but seventeen … reviled by society as monster himself.
I am already ostracized as a free thinker, so why shouldn’t I write of
monsters?
Harold Bloom argues that in Shelley’s novel the “monster is more

human than his creator” (215). More than that, however, the Creature—
sometimes the artist herself—gains clarity and insight into how
monsters are made and the unfamiliar demonized. As we see in both
Hugo and Gods and Monsters, it is paradoxically the Creature and the
Automaton who illuminate the importance of human bonds and crea-
tivity, just as adaptations can sometimes draw out or expand upon the
themes of their sources. As the Creature in Danny Boyle’s Frankenstein
says of his own adaptation, “I am good at the art of assimilation.”
As I suggested earlier, both Hugo and Gods and Monsters reflect on the
convergence of the human with the mechanical, extending Shelley’s
and Whale’s representation of technology to invite sympathy for the
outsider figure. Shelley’s female outsiders (Shelley herself or, in the
novel, the silent listener who shares her initials, Margaret Saville,
Walton’s sister) and the abandoned creature reconstructed from dead
bodies are all reflected in Whale; Boone’s form and mien echo Karloff’s
blunt modernist visage, evoking a technologized figure of the creature
while he is also, like Hugo, an abandoned child. The Automaton in
Hugo is also an abandoned child, as well as a figure for Hugo’s father

(Jude Law), whom the boy has lost—which helps to explain why Hugo
endangers his life to retrieve a key shaped like a heart that will presum-
ably “animate,” turn on, the Automaton, so that it might communicate
with him now that his father no longer can.
The sequence in which Hugo jumps on the tracks is central to the
film’s portrayal of machines as magical and monstrous. The train sta-
tion is full of threatening forces for Hugo: Clocks dominate the lives of
everyone, most especially Hugo, and Gustave seeks to capture him, a
constant threat. The trains themselves are portrayed as a crushing force,
most dramatically seen when Hugo steps onto the tracks to retrieve the
heart-key that operates the Automaton. Hugo is on the tracks as a train
speeds toward him (Figure 1.1).
Scorsese uses jump cuts to dramatize the danger to the boy of the
oncoming train (while interestingly reproducing the panels in his liter-
ary source, Brian Selznick’s graphic novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret).
The scene adapts an historical event here, the Montparnasse derailment
in 1895—the same year the Lumière brothers later premiered “Arrival of
a Train” at the Boulevard des Capucines in Paris and audience members
are often said to have fled the theater terrified by their confusion of the
visual image with their experience of an approaching train.
By referencing the 1895 devastating train accident but also the magi-
cal invention of cinema, the scene captures a double vision of machines,
the “hideous progeny” of modernity. At the same time, however, as the
Figure 1.1 Hugo: the approaching train in Hugo’s dream

scene develops, Scorsese both enhances the idea that technology is

monstrous but also modifies that idea. After the train crashes through
the station building to mirror the 1895 event, Hugo awakens and takes
off his shirt to find clockworks in the place of his heart. He is now
himself a machine, and his body is subsequently transformed into the
Automaton, as he is swallowed up by a large machine. The sequence
portrays modern technology as literally dehumanizing. At the same
time, however, technology is also allied with the magic of cinema and
its power to recast past texts and events, like the Lumières’ premiere,
the train crash of 1895, Méliès’s magical inventions at the turn of the
century, and the graphic novel by Brian Selznick.
This double-dream sequence is a cinematic tour de force. Scorsese’s
montage tricks us into thinking the initial approach of the train is actu-
ally part of the narrative; there’s no dissolve or anything in the cutting
to suggest that the runaway train isn’t “real.” Indeed, the grace in the
gestures of Hugo as he subsequently turns into an automaton suggests
not so much the loss of subjective identity but, as the film argues con-
tinually, Hugo’s part in the workings, the mechanics, of Méliès’s redemp-
tion and Hugo’s transformation into a prodigal son. Accentuated by 3-D
cinematography, the double dream presents a mise-en-abyme (scene of
the abyss) reflection on the endless production of fantasy made possible
by film. Scorsese performs a cinematic sleight of hand by suggesting at
one level that technology is monstrous, when, of course, it is precisely
the mechanics of the film that present Scorsese’s disarming fiction.
The sequence restages a debate within modernism, an era the film
invokes, surrounding the status of the machine. Is it something to
be afraid of (as in, for example, Lang’s Metropolis or Chaplin’s Modern
Times) or to be embraced (as in, for example, Buster Keaton’s The
General)?3 The film recognizes this discussion, figuring technology in
the dream as a source of anxiety then working to recontextualize it as
having a purpose. Like the monsters throughout this study that reveal
magical workings, the Automaton in Hugo is a figure for the beauty of
film and the filmmaker who can refashion its sources and redeem an
insufficient reality. Thus Figure 1.2, on the one hand, conveys the mon-
strousness of the machine, like the one that devours Charlie in Modern
Times, but on the other, shows the Hugo/Automaton machine mov-
ing gracefully among the parts of the larger, Chaplin-echoing cogged
machine (Figure 1.2).
The Automaton is figured here as inseparable from Hugo, or Méliès
for that matter, and thus represents their loss and their trauma. Like
the Creature, the Automaton wishes to communicate; eventually, it
Figure 1.2 Hugo: Hugo becomes the Automaton in his dream
becomes the catalyst for all of the magical transformations enacted in

the story. One of the material sources of Méliès’s art (its parts were at
some point reused to make Méliès’s camera), the Automaton connects
Hugo with Méliès and reconnects Hugo with his father. It is the agent
of reunification and transformation.
In the fluidity of the movement depicted above, the Automaton’s
gesture registers trauma but also elegance.4 A similarly paradoxical
image of grace and monstrousness can be seen in the opening sequence
of Danny Boyle’s 2011 stage version of Frankenstein referred to earlier,
which, I should add, has been culturally re-visioned in its movie theater
run as part of the Royal National Theatre’s filming and distribution of
its theatrical productions. While some might miss the electricity of the
live performance, the filming allows for other things to happen, such
as an aerial view of the Creature’s finding his legs and learning first to
walk, then to run. The shot from above captures the exhilaration of the
Creature’s movement, as he runs in circles around the stage.
This adaptation is unique not only in the theatrically rendered
elegance of the Creature’s physicality but also in Nick Dear’s (the play-
wright’s) foregrounding of the Creature’s verbal eloquence, despite his
difficult stilted delivery. The Creature speaks movingly about friendship,
love, and the profound trauma of living devoid of human connections.
Though he is driven to destroy, the grace in his movement and speech is
his redemption. In terms of speech he resembles the archetypal literary
“monster,” Shakespeare’s perhaps redeemable Caliban, whose brutish

gabble is transformed into eloquent pathos when he recalls Prospero’s
former tenderness toward him and, especially, in the speech in which
he describes the island’s “Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight, and
hurt not,” inducing dreams so beautiful “that when I wak’d,/I cried to
dream again” (III.ii.136, 142–143). In his final lines, Caliban says he will
“be wise hereafter,/ And seek for grace” (V.i.295–296).
In Gods and Monsters, the creature Clay Boone is also looking for
redemption, the right form; he searches for a purpose, while serving
in the film as an avatar for James Whale (as Hugo, Méliès, and the
Automaton do, in some sense, for Scorsese). In one scene, inverting
the obvious connection the film makes between Whale as creator
and Clay as creature, Clay (in Whale’s dream) takes on the role of Dr.
Frankenstein, the creator, the doctor who fixes the monsters in Whale’s
head by sawing its top off and replacing the abnormal brain with a non-
infected one (and in a nice touch, tying off the suture with his teeth).
Like the cinematic images that haunt Whale and Méliès and pervade
cultural history, Whale’s dream works to help him imagine a way out of
the creeping dementia that has assaulted him, the “electrical storm in
[his] head” (Bram 77).
In the form of dream work, the Frankenstein images and narrative
give Whale a means of forging a solution to the monsters in his head:
“When you die,” he tells Clay, “make sure that your brain is the last
organ to fizzle.”
In Gods and Monsters, Whale is figured as the Creature in the two
dream sequences I’ve referred to above, which goes against the obvious
narrative grain of his creator/artist role in forming and molding the
clay/Clay Boone before him. That Whale becomes the Creature in his
dreams symbolizes his willingness to be led (have his brain replaced
by Clay, be brought to lie beside Barnard in the grave). And he is led
by an unlikely being, the gardener who becomes his friend (“Friend?”)
(Figure 1.3).
If the creator—Whale, the Father of Frankenstein—can give up that
role of authority, of authorship, or originating force (the creator role),
a theoretical model emerges concerning the insights and power that
creatures, the “hideous progeny,” can bring to older figures of authority,
fathers, “originating” texts. This shift in perspective is in sharp contrast
to the mastery Scorsese maintains in relation to his film: his devotion
to the creator/auteur role. As much as Scorsese has done to revivify
the history of cinema (in his support for film restoration, as well as in
this film’s introduction of popular audiences to early film history), his
Figure 1.3 Gods and Monsters: Clay walks Whale to his grave in shared dream
signature on this film as its “father” is clear. The contrast in the films’
treatment of the creator/creature role invites a consideration of the dif-
ferent perspectives textual progeny can bring to bear on their parent
texts: the beauty and magic of the “monstrous” refashioning of sources.
The resolution in these films’ narratives derives from both former
directors’ recognition of themselves as utterly imbricated within
their films. Whale is presented as having been absorbed into the
life of his “monster movies.” Méliès’s humanity is inseparable from
the Automaton that represents the director’s artistic achievements.
Becoming the filmmaker himself, the Automaton draws on the page the
most famous image from A Trip to the Moon (1902) when the rocket hits
the moon. At the same time, this act of drawing provides Hugo with
the means to connect with (and thus redeem) Méliès and also connect
with his own father, who began the reanimation of the Automaton in
the first place. In Gods and Monsters, Whale’s indivisibility from the
Creature is cinematically enacted in Condon’s montage, blending the
life and death of Whale with clips from Frankenstein (1931) and Bride of
Frankenstein (1935). Whale’s and Méliès’s lives are presented as insepa-
rable from their films, which are, in turn, part of the great machine of
history.
Both Hugo and Gods and Monsters enact a dynamic conversation
among films from a century of adaptations, each contributing to an
accrual of meaning and often providing a challenging new perspec-
tive on popular stories and images. Hugo further stages a conversation
between media—books and film—shifting its perspective on the story
from the marvels of the visual to a passion for the written word, in
Hugo’s and Isabelle’s gift-of-the-magi sharing of their pastimes. As

Jennifer Clement and Christian B. Long argue, the prestidigitation of
Méliès in early film is re-mediated as narrative storytelling in Hugo that
is itself engaged with a kind of media magic, 3-D computer digitaliza-
tion. Hugo ends with Isabelle embarking as a writer on the story of
Hugo, as the boy takes up his vocation as a magician: “The ending of
the movie thus enables the beginning of a written text that does not
replace but rather collaborates with film for an imagined audience that
Hugo construes as both viewers and readers” (J. Clement, C. Long). An
apt model for adaptation, the film’s unique focus on the complemen-
tary nature of literature and cinema foregrounds creative intermediality
in the service of storytelling.
In his monograph about Gods and Monsters for the Queer Film Classic
series, Noah Tsika observes the “the importance of an openly gay actor
portraying an openly gay historical figure in a mainstream film writ-
ten and directed by an openly gay man” (41). Tsika’s analysis links the
film’s production with the stories of insiders and outsiders within Gods
and Monsters but also cinematic images of Frankenstein referenced by
Condon’s film. Such associations underscore the common emphasis
in this adaptive sequence on a freedom beyond the categories of insid-
ers and outsiders. At the end of Gods and Monsters, the creature Clay is
molded into a responsible young man and, like Hugo, is sentimentally
rewarded with a conventional family, including a loving wife and a son
who likes old monster movies. Clay’s final homage to Whale and his
creature—his physical imitation of the stilted monster-walk through the
rain behind his middle-class household—leaves viewers with a sense of
connection, connectedness (Figure 1.4).
Figure 1.4 Gods and Monsters: Clay in the rain at the end of the film
Clay has channeled Whale’s creature and it has humanized him and
enabled him to establish relationships with a spouse and a child. While
there seems to be something problematic in the film’s resolution resting
on a heteronormative domestic portrait, I think the final images of the
film, with Clay resuming his role as the Creature, try to move beyond
an opposition of gay versus straight narratives and get us to think more
generally about what sustaining human relationships might be; and,
once again, the figure of the Creature is the agent of that insight. The
“Creature” has internalized the artistic vision of the artist and performs
it as a tribute. The film concludes with an image of Clay as the monster,
the movie’s color changing to black and white photography in a climac-
tic homage to Whale just before the credits roll.
As this final image of Clay as the Creature suggests, the pulse of Gods
and Monsters is with the dead man, James Whale, and his monsters
(his “hideous progeny,” his films), just as the heart of Hugo lies with
the machine, another monstrous figure that paradoxically reveals the
humanity imbued in cinematic storytelling. If not exactly a representa-
tion of Clay’s imagining an “escape from the confines of home and of
connubial fatherhood” at the end of the film (Tsika 100), the conclud-
ing imitation of Karloff walking in the rain portrays Clay as emotionally
tethered to the figure of the monster, but a creature that is revelatory
and liberating rather than destructive.5
Largely because of Ian McKellen’s uncanny performance as Whale,
the character of James Whale maintains the humor, wit, and sense of
trauma that capture the idea of hideous progeny—the pain associated
with creation that Mary Shelley herself connected with birth. Shelley’s
own obsessions with creation and destruction, as many have observed,
had a biographical analog in the death of her children and her own
mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, who died soon after giving birth to Mary
Shelley. As suggested above, Frankenstein registers guilt surrounding
creation, and such suffering, exacerbated in Shelley’s own life by her
father’s bitterness toward her because of his wife’s death in childbirth,
is adapted through all of the Frankenstein stories, providing a culturally
resonant means of expressing the psychological costs of making art,
as well as other forms of creation that bring trauma. These adapta-
tions, when figured in terms of the monstrous, become a means of
critical engagement, since it is the monster, the creature/creation, who
has a different perspective, who draws meaning forth—like the figure
Herman Melville calls an “incubus,” Bartleby the Scrivener, another
creature figure who exists to provoke the narrator into revealing the
limits of his imagination and sympathy.
As the Creature in Frankenstein offers a shift in perspective on Victor’s

wild schemes to explore the “hidden secrets of nature,” so too, cin-
ematic adaptations are perhaps like creatures that come alive to offer
a new perspective on culturally familiar content and themes. In these
terms, Scorsese’s creature is really the Automaton, a figure—with its
corrective vision—of the filmmaker and the most important figure in
Hugo, as is indicated in its being the subject of the last shot of the film.
Gods and Monsters seems to suggest that death in life is a perspective
that needs to be unearthed, from Whale’s experiences of dementia as
premonitions of his own death to the haunting of World War I and the
traumatic after-life of Barnard’s dead body hanging on the wire on the
front line—and, even, to the notion of moving images, which are eter-
nal but also not alive. The confrontation with what has been lost is dug
out through the story of Clay’s growing friendship with Whale, who is,
in the end, able to lay beside Barnard, the man he loved in the trenches
and whom, for many years, he has felt he betrayed.
Adaptation can be seen as a process of producing creatures and crea-
tions across media that change our perspective on seemingly familiar
texts. Such transpositions emphasize the refashioning of texts in “an
endless process of recycling, transformation, and transmutation, with
no clear point of origin” (Stam 66). The rewritings of the Frankenstein
story and Hugo have something to say, first, about the dangers of crea-
tion conceived as acts of isolation outside of informing contexts, and,
second, about the reliance on previous cultural icons and works of art
implied in all artistic acts, which become part of a dynamic culture’s
fabric. These adaptations, like most of the works I consider throughout
this study, blend the past with the present, the living with the dead,
monsters with creators, human and machine, the masculine with the
feminine, fathers with sons, styles of presentation with technique, a
mixture of genres and of media, to galvanize—that is, to animate and
electrify—texts we think we know, seeing them in new or different con-
texts, and thus finding new, if difficult to behold, human expression of
what still haunts our collective imagination.
2
Lightening Up: Reappearing
Hearts of Darkness
The chapters in this book represent conversations of a sort among texts

related to one another. Clear sources, pointed or loose adaptations,
indistinct influences, “quiet adaptations” (see Chapter 5), or intertex-
tual resonances—the subjects, topics, and texts I address in this book
generate meaning through their relationships. Such meaning is not
limited to the varied perspectives on human experience and culture
these works establish, but extends to the idea and issue of perspective
itself: its importance as the critical and creative linchpin of humanities-
based teaching, writing, and cultural conversation. Indeed, in their
recent book Adaptation Studies and Learning, Laurence Raw and Tony
Gurr argue that “adaptation studies has the potential to open up new
paths for collaborative work in the humanities, film, and media studies,
thereby strengthening their position in the higher education institu-
tion” (5).1
I begin this chapter by analyzing part of the afterlife of one of the
most canonical of literary texts, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. As
James Naremore observes, the novella “became a sort of ur-text for
Anglo-American modernism” (True to the Spirit 60), which helps explain
its appeal to two very ambitious modernist filmmakers, Orson Welles
and Francis Ford Coppola. Like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Conrad’s
novella has achieved a cultural resonance. (Most recently, this includes
beer, in Magic Hat’s “Heart of Darkness” Stout.) I move quickly beyond
Heart of Darkness, however, in order to establish a conversation among
some of the works it has generated.
In 1991, young filmmakers Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper com-
pleted the documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse,
which had originated as Eleanor Coppola’s behind-the-scenes footage
of her husband Francis Ford Coppola’s professional and personal trials
41
attempting to adapt Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to the Vietnam War in

his 1979 film Apocalypse Now. Throughout the filming, Eleanor Coppola
was documenting it, revealing the dramatic experiences of many of the
people involved in its making, mainly her husband, who is likened to
Kurtz in Hearts of Darkness in his quasi-insane devotion to the film and
his anxiety about its potential failure. Recording Coppola’s tortured
experiences getting the movie made, the documentary recounts the
legendary production postponements and their causes, including a dra-
matic and deadly typhoon in the Philippines (where the film was shot),
the director’s battles with studio executives over money and schedules,
and the actors’ physical and professional traumas and limitations that
constantly hindered the completion of the film.
Though Apocalypse Now has drawn a range of critical responses, it
remains without doubt a memorable film: its cinematography and set
pieces are visually stunning and reveal the absurdity of war. The movie
about its making, Hearts of Darkness, drew a more uniformly positive
range of critical reviews. The documentary—itself an adaptation of
Conrad’s novella, with Francis as Kurtz and Eleanor as Marlow—adapts
the journey motif by way of a grand-failure narrative that privileges
genius authorship over what I am calling elastextity. Instead of an
identity best understood in relation to multiple other texts, Hearts of
Darkness relies upon the fixed singular imprint of Coppola himself.
Although the documentary is more about his authorship than it is in
dynamic dialogue with prior works of art, it does foreground the idea of
perspective at the heart of adaptation.
In Hearts of Darkness, as extreme a perspective on Coppola’s author-
ship as the documentary assumes, the film is, strangely, in no way
a critique; it adapts the story of Kurtz and Marlow to the making of
Apocalypse Now and argues unambiguously for the integrity and creative
power of the auteur. Branding Apocalypse Now as the distinct product of
its master, Hearts of Darkness flips not only the earlier film’s value system
(its critical vantage point on the media and the Vietnam War) but also
Conrad’s view of Kurtz as an abject figure of destructiveness. Instead,
the portrayal of Coppola in Hearts of Darkness vindicates Kurtz’s last
words—“The horror! The horror!”—as a necessary by-product of artistic
genius.
When Orson Welles referred to Citizen Kane (1941) as a “failure
story” (Mulvey 81), he articulated what would become the frame
for many auteur films: the grand failure—great men whose thirst for
personal or political power causes them to fail. The notion of the
grand failure is a familiar trope in literary Modernism—inherited from
Reappearing Hearts 43
literary Romanticism’s obsessions with incompleteness in relation to

artistic creation and the acute awareness of mortality—from Conrad to
Faulkner. In the Romantic era, Percy Shelley would say in “A Defence
of Poetry,” “When composition begins, inspiration is already on the
decline.” This belief in the disappointments of materiality helps to
explain Victor’s disgust with his “composition” once he attempts to
complete the Creature in Frankenstein. Shocked by the failure of mate-
riality to live up to the ideals that ignited his quest, Victor becomes
the target of Mary Shelley’s critique of Romantic overreaching. What
the modernists add to the idea of incompleteness in the Romantic view
of art is an understanding of the director as controlling the world of
the film. This notion dominates Hearts of Darkness, even as Coppola—
feeling out of control throughout the film—struggles against it.
This modernist conception of the artist, combined with the Romantic
notion of incompleteness, has contributed to a culturally pervasive
image of greatness embedded within the grand failure, defining film
legends from Orson Welles to James Dean, as well as the characters
these film lions played. In Kane, Leland’s insight into Charles Foster
Kane’s motives—“He was always trying to prove something”—provides
an effective gloss on Coppola’s drive to realize a vision in Apocalypse
Now. “My greatest fear,” Coppola says in Hearts of Darkness, “is to make
[an] … embarrassing pompous film on an important subject, and I am
doing it.” Feeling like an artistic failure, he later despairs,
I’m feeling like an idiot at having set in motion stuff that doesn’t
make any sense, that doesn’t match, and yet I’m doing it. And the
reason I’m doing it is out of desperation ‘cause I have no rational way
to do it. What I have to admit is that I don’t know what I’m doing
…. [Others] see the magic of what has happened before. I’m saying,
“Hey, it’s not gonna happen! I don’t have any performances. The
script doesn’t make sense. I have no ending.” I’m like a voice crying
out, saying, “Please, it’s not working! Somebody get me off this.” And
nobody listens to me! Everyone says, “Yes, well, Francis works best
in a crisis.” I’m saying, “This is one crisis I’m not gonna pull myself
out of!” I’m making a bad movie. So why should I go ahead? … I’m
going to be bankrupt anyway. Why can’t I just have the courage to
say, “It’s no good”? … There’s almost anything I’d do to get out of it.
I’m already thinking about what kind of sickness I can get ….
Coppola’s self-flagellating comments (Figure 2.1) reflect his reaction

against a Romantic conception of the artist that he feels is being
Figure 2.1 Hearts of Darkness: a desperate Coppola
imposed on him. And yet Hearts of Darkness defines Coppola’s art in

these very terms of self-destructive energy, as Coppola is portrayed as
bucking authority in its various guises of rationality, Hollywood, and
the demands of friendship and family. Indeed, Hearts of Darkness shows
the value of artistic collaboration overwhelmed by the grandness of
the radical individual embodied in Kurtz, and, in the documentary,
by Coppola himself. His wife Eleanor endorses the radical selfhood
claimed by Coppola, which is quite striking, particularly since her
romanticization depends, as I suggested earlier, on the analogy her
film draws between Coppola and the megalomaniacal, corrupt, and
racist Kurtz.2 She endorses her husband’s “choice of nightmares,” just
as Marlow engages Kurtz’s “choice of nightmares,” as a viable, possibly
ennobled, choice (Conrad 57). “I affirm that Kurtz was a remarkable
man,” says Marlow. “He had something to say” (65). Like Conrad’s
Marlow, Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) in Apocalypse Now seems to
privilege downright insanity over hypocrisy. Willard despises the mili-
tary bureaucrats as credentialed fools, “four-star clowns,” and Brando’s
Colonel Kurtz hisses at Willard that he is the “errand boy” of “grocery
clerks.” In Conrad, Kurtz’s contempt for the “peddling notions” (57) of
the Manager cements the reader’s understanding of the small-minded

acquisitiveness of company men as more vile, a worse “choice of
nightmares,” than the psychotic unrestraint accompanied by the self-
consciousness of Kurtz that at least began as idealism. Coppola affirms
this “choice” when he says about Apocalypse Now, “My film is more
of an ‘anti-lie’ film, in that the fact that a culture can lie about what’s
really going on in warfare—that people are being brutalised, tortured,
maimed and killed—and somehow present this as moral is what horri-
fies me, and perpetuates the possibility of war” (quoted in Dinh, 2). In
Conrad, Marlow’s own compromise at the end of the novel—his lie to
the Intended that Kurtz’s last words were speaking her name rather than
“The horror! The horror!”—implicates the narrator in such hypocrisy.
But in Hearts of Darkness there is no such qualifier. Instead, Francis
Coppola’s role as mad overreacher isn’t extinguished, as Mary Shelley’s
Victor Frankenstein and Conrad’s Kurtz are at the end of their respec-
tive stories. Coppola’s choice of nightmares is vindicated in the
documentary, and the mostly laudatory reviews of this film (which I’ll
reference more fully later in this chapter) are testament to the success
of the Coppola family in branding his adaptation as a personal and
artistic triumph.3 Interestingly, Eleanor’s heroicized documentation of
her husband’s filming of Apocalypse Now may be her way of sublimat-
ing her frustration with him by “directing” her own sublime narra-
tive.4 Eleanor relies on Conrad’s metaphors to interpret her husband:
“You have to fail a little, die a little, go insane a little to come out the
other side.” And later,
[H]e can’t go back down the river because the journey has changed
him. I was watching from the point of view of the observer, not real-
izing I was on the journey, too. Now, I can’t go back to the way it
was. Neither can Francis. Neither can Willard.5
The conclusion of Hearts of Darkness once again pits the artistry of the
director against the Company, the studio, the structures that seek to
contain and can often constrain the vision of the artist in the interests
of “professionalism.”
One of the most memorable scenes in the documentary occurs just
after actor Martin Sheen (only 36 at the time, but smoking and drink-
ing heavily) suffers a near-fatal heart attack during production. Coppola
desperately tries to appease the studio that all is on track. In a stun-
ningly narcissistic moment, he says to the studio executives, “If Marty
dies, I wanna hear that everything is okay, until I say ‘Marty is dead.’”
As portrayed in the novel by Conrad and played in the film by Marlon

Brando, Kurtz is irredeemable. An icon of Western culture (“All Europe
contributed to the making of Kurtz” [45]), he represents a toxicity at
the heart of civilization. Once an idealist, Kurtz has lost his way, kill-
ing people to affirm his power to destroy. He is corrupt and abhorrent,
and his fall and necessary death reflect the hubris inherent in Western
civilization. Kurtz’s malevolence was clear to Orson Welles in his 1939
script based on Heart of Darkness; as I discuss below, he drew an obvi-
ous parallel between Kurtz and Hitler. But Hearts of Darkness’s Kurtz is
Coppola, whose portrait as an artist on the edge culminates in the film’s
encomium to the uncompromising artist who will risk everything to
achieve his vision. On the one hand, the fact that the portrait is based
on Conrad’s Kurtz provides the very fascination of the documentary;
on the other hand, the documentary mythifies a googly-eyed perspec-
tive on the auteur, bypassing the critical orientation that, in my view,
characterizes the richest adaptations.
It is left to a parody in another adaptation of Heart of Darkness to
offer that critical vantage point. In 1993, as part of the promotion of
Jim Abrahams’s comedy/parody film Hot Shots! Part Deux, HBO aired
a mockumentary called Hearts of Hot Shots! Part Deux—A Filmmaker’s
Apology, written and directed by Thomas C. Grane and Victor Davis.
Hearts of Hot Shots! Part Deux sends up Francis Coppola’s tortured pro-
cess of “making art,” as it is ardently represented in Hearts of Darkness:
A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse. Grane and Davis’s mockumentary serves as
an instrument for critiquing auteurist ideology, taking particular aim at
Coppola’s solipsism. Mocking his comments about Sheen’s heart attack,
for example, Abrahams shares his own reaction to actress Valeria Golina
falling sick in the supposed filming of Hot Shots! Part Deux:
She’s not dead unless I say she’s dead. Just get someone else. You
know, we can find …. Get another Italian girl, you know, they’re all
the same.
The mockumentary shows up the isolation and insensitivity of

Coppola, but instead of demonstrating the artist’s mad genius, as the
documentary does, it illustrates the folly of Romantic egotism. Says
actor Richard Crenna in the mockumentary, “Every scene we do 17, 18,
27 different ways …. I don’t know what to do next.” Says actor Charlie
Sheen, “I understand the method approach, you know, getting an actor
to do [pause] things for the sake of the production, but … that cost us
an extra 26 million.”
Sheen presents a veiled reference to his father Martin’s experience

playing Willard, since his method acting in Apocalypse Now produced
the memorable scene of Willard in the hotel room, drunk and emo-
tional, before he sets out to find and assassinate Kurtz. One might say
about filming this scene, shown in Hearts of Darkness, that there was “no
method at all” (Conrad, 57), since it painfully documents Sheen’s own
drunken emotional breakdown preceding his heart attack. Interestingly,
the elder Sheen appears in the mockumentary as an assassin sent by the
studio to terminate Abrahams after Hot Shots! Part Deux has ostensibly
surpassed 200 days of shooting and gone 45 million dollars over budget.
Just as Coppola loses his grip on reality as the filming of Apocalypse Now
spins out of his control, in the mockumentary Abrahams also loses all
touch—says daughter Jamie, “The actors grow confused, as Dad begins
to speak in tongues.” Toward the end of the mockumentary, Abrahams
himself says, in a parody of Coppola’s role as alienated genius director,
There was no support. There was no help. It was me and my vision

versus the entire cast, the entire crew.
The mockumentary invites a critique and analysis of Romantic isola-

tionism; it restages Romantic energy in the service of working commu-
nities and offers a corrective to Romantic egotism.
Like the beginning of Hearts of Darkness, the mockumentary opens
with a title card:
In February 1989, Director Jim Abrahams traveled to the remote

jungles of Los Angeles to shoot Hot Shots! Part Deux. Based loosely
on Bram Stroker’s short story “Part Deux,” the film is set during a
hostage crisis in the Middle East.6
We hear in voiceover these words, sung to the tune of The Doors’s

“The End”:
This is the start. We’re making art.

This is the start. Brando didn’t get the part.
And our director has no heart.
Grane and Davis deflate not only the auteurist pretensions of Coppola’s
grand gestures in the making of Apocalypse Now but also Eleanor
Coppola’s paradoxically self-protecting and codependent gesture in the
filming of its filming. In the mockumentary, Abrahams’s young daughter
Jamie is seen typing, as Eleanor does in her film (see Figures 2.2 and 2.3),
while we hear stated in voiceover (echoing Eleanor), “The film Daddy
is making is a metaphor for the journey into self. It’s scary to watch
someone confront their fears … Daddy is not the first to tackle these
fears.” Jamie then notes that D.W. Griffith and David O. Selznick failed
magnificently when they took on the Part Deux project decades earlier,
just as Eleanor references Welles’s failure to bring Conrad’s novella to life
in the late 1930s. “Daddy wanted Brando,” Jamie’s voiceover continues,
“and he sulks over news reports. For the first time he feels the pressure of
a project that has defeated many a film director”.
The mockumentary’s casting of Jim Abrahams’s daughter Jamie in
Eleanor’s role deflates her idealized portrait of her husband, and recasts
the Marlow character as a subordinate family amanuensis. Jamie’s side-
bar filmmaking may also be a reference to the end of Hearts of Darkness,
at which point Francis Coppola says,
[O]ne day some little fat girl in Ohio is gonna be the new Mozart and
make a beautiful film with her little father’s [camera-recorder]. And
for once the so-called professionalism about movies will be destroyed
Figure 2.2 Jamie Abrahams, Hearts of Hot Shots! Part Deux—A Filmmaker’s Apology
Figure 2.3 Eleanor Coppola, Hearts of Darkness
forever, you know, and it will really become an art form. That’s my
opinion.
In its own adaptation of this Romantic idyll, Hearts of Hot Shots! Part
Deux rewrites the role of the artist in the grand failure narrative as
contingent and humorous. Further, because of its advertising role, its
position as ephemeral marketing material or marginalized commentary,
Hearts of Hot Shots! Part Deux is in a better position to puncture the high
Romanticism of Eleanor Coppola’s documentary. The mockumentary
suggests, in other words, the potential of even fringe popular culture
such as Grane and Davis’s film to bring elements of critique to a level
of self-conscious analysis.7
Despite the position of Grane and Davis’s mockumentary at the
margins of popular culture, the parody emphasizes the problems with
adaptations that aren’t critical, that don’t shift perspectives and forge
new ways of conceiving the form and content of prior literary or cul-
tural material. Hearts of Hot Shots! Part Deux—A Filmmaker’s Apology also
gives credence to the possibility of reading films and the process of
filmmaking with greater critical awareness, since the popular audience

addressed by the mockumentary surely participates in its savvy critique.
As an adaptation, the mockumentary redefines the heart of darkness as
the product of a community of observers who share a sense of the value
of satire and the social norms on which satire depends.
The relationships among these adaptations reveal a fascinating con-
versation about textual journeys and the interventions that send those
journeys sideways by authorship, artistic communities, critics, market
and industrial influences, and ambivalent cultural attitudes toward suc-
cess and failure. Hearts of Hot Shots! Part Deux lays bare, in very immediate
ways, the parameters and limits of Hearts of Darkness’s deeply auteurist
project: its endorsement of the idea of grand failure; its low priority on
community and affiliation; and its proliferation of stereotypes about the
isolated power of the artist (or the single text) that works in concert with
culturally inscribed notions of Romantic individualism. In its deconstruc-
tion of the auteur, the mockumentary exemplifies Linda Hutcheon’s
defense of the critical import of parody, its “value problematizing, de-
naturalizing form of acknowledging the history (and through irony, the
politics) of representations” (The Politics of Postmodernism 90). It also
exemplifies the extent to which the persona of the auteur can overde-
termine the meaning of an adaptation, as Thomas Leitch has observed:
Perhaps the most indispensable of these factors is a public persona—

Hitchcock’s archly ghoulish gravity, Kubrick’s fiercely romantic quest
for control, Disney’s mild paternalism—that can be converted to a
trademark more powerful than any of the other authorial trademarks
with which it will inevitably compete. (“The Adapter as Auteur” 121)
There could hardly be a more emphatic instance of a director’s persona

becoming “converted to a trademark” than Coppola’s drive to make
Apocalypse Now, as portrayed in Hearts of Darkness.
In the introduction to this book, I discussed a challenge for con-
ceiving of adaptation as creative when we privilege sources both as a
Romantic originary and also as internalized “home texts.” Hearts of
Darkness portrays the director as a tortured genius, a label commonly
applied to modern artists, like Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and
Pablo Picasso.8 The problem with such a portrait, one unambivalently
embraced by Hearts of Darkness, is that it makes it hard to take on a truly
creative, or critical, stance, since its energy is absorbed fully into filling
out this grand portrait of the artist.
***
A metaphorical father figure to so many 70s “raging-bull” American

filmmakers, Orson Welles is an absent presence in Hearts of Darkness as
the misunderstood genius-artist figure Coppola aspires to be. As Biskind
says, “Welles was venerated by the New Hollywood, and the wreckage
of his career was regarded with horror and indignation as the most
egregious example of how the town destroyed the auteur” (57). Intent
on doing something spectacular to live up to the expectations of audi-
ences and the studio, but also driven by a remarkable creative energy
and attraction to experimental means of storytelling, Welles in 1939
embarked on his adaptation of Heart of Darkness. His script details a
plan to adapt Conrad’s modernist dream and nightmare worlds of Heart
of Darkness to cinematic form. Amy Taubin more pointedly connects
Welles and Coppola’s desire to make Apocalypse Now:
What Hearts of Darkness suggests is that Coppola’s personal psy-

chodrama was an encounter with the century-long struggle of the
artist in Hollywood—embodied in the figure of Orson Welles …. For
serious filmmakers, Welles’s mythic status has as much to do with
his ultimate castration by the studio system as with his early great
films …. Coppola wanted to overcome Welles not only by making a
masterpiece greater than Kane, but, paradoxically, by risking failure
on a grander scale than Welles could have imagined. (54)
In keeping with the film’s epic tribute to the great director figure, Hearts
of Darkness employs the voice of Welles as a narrative frame throughout
the documentary. Jonathan Rosenbaum observes Welles’s influence on
Apocalypse Now in
not only the portentous offscreen narration, first-person camera

angles, and juicy larger-than-life character acting, but much of the
chiaroscuro and other lighting effects of Vittorio Storaro’s cinema-
tography. Even the opening shot—a close-up of Willard’s face shown
upside down—seems a direct steal of the opening shots from two
Welles films, Othello and The Trial. (Movies as Politics 138)
At the end of Hearts of Darkness, as Coppola walks the red carpet

at Cannes with his family in 1979, the conclusion of Welles’s 1938
Mercury Theater radio broadcast of Heart of Darkness is heard:
What greatness has not flowed on the ebb of that river, into the
mystery of an unknown earth? The dreams of men, the seed of
commonwealths, the germs of empires … [lead] into the heart of an

immense darkness.
When Welles went to Hollywood in 1939, he chose as his first project to

adapt Conrad’s novella for RKO, and it became, in Naremore’s words, a
“legendary film that was never made” (True to the Spirit 60). Welles over-
reached at that early point in his film career, as his plan to tell Conrad’s
story using the camera as the first-person narrator proved impossible to
accomplish. He then turned to Herman Mankiewicz’s script for Citizen
Kane (previously titled “American”) and embarked on the project that
secured his role as the quintessential auteur.9
Welles’s attempt at adapting Conrad’s novella failed for reasons hav-
ing as much to do with the limits of industrial Hollywood as anything
else, despite his well-earned reputation as the controlling force in all of
his artistic efforts. As he said in his 1941 remarks in Stage,
I think a movie needs a boss. There has never been a motion picture
of consequence that has not been, broadly speaking, the product of
one man. This man has been the producer, could be the writer ….
[but] should be the director …. Good pictures … bear the signature …
of this dominant personality. (Qtd. in Heylin, 13)
Welles’s comments are predicated on the threat of the studios to com-

mandeer creative projects. Like Francis Coppola, who later exhorted
viewers to “let creative people be creative” (quoted in Whaley 47),
Welles rejected studio interventions. Welles and Coppola, along with
the Coen brothers (discussed in the next chapter), show contempt for
authority other than their own creative agency.
Welles, however, was aware of the paradox. In fact, the tension
between his charisma and creative control of his projects, on the one
hand, and his repeated preoccupation with the theme of power gone
wrong, on the other hand, was a central fascination of his life and
work.10 In his adaptation of Heart of Darkness, Welles undertook to
“prove himself,” as Kane’s Leland would say about Kane. He wished
to show himself as worthy of his generous RKO contract and infa-
mous reputation, which, combined with his youth (he was 24 when
he arrived in Hollywood), itself inspired jealousy among colleagues.
Though Welles had no experience as a filmmaker, he was set to write,
direct, produce, and act in his films. Martin Scorsese explains the ire of
his peers in terms of the showy authorship this unprecedented contract
signified: “Who the hell is that? How dare he take credit for everything?”
(quoted in Leaming 169). To mock-celebrate Welles’s notorious arrival

in Hollywood in 1939, Gene Lockhart wrote a poem called “Little Orson
Annie” (Callow 458).
In his adaptation of Heart of Darkness, Welles planned to replace
Marlow with the camera, filming everything from Marlow’s perspective.11
The first sequences of the film stage a series of subjective panning shots
to establish the eye of the camera as equivalent to Marlow’s—and the
film viewer’s—viewpoint. The viewer is cajoled by the narrator into see-
ing from inside a birdcage just before being shot by a smoking gun, then
electrocuted, and finally placed on a golf course tracking a ball. These are
all primers for an audience unused to a subjective camera; viewers are led
to understand that they will be seeing what Marlow sees but additionally
that they are the eye of the camera—and also the “I” of the film, its very
subject. At one point, the script describes a human eye filling the screen,
Figure 2.4 Welles during the making of Heart of Darkness

Source: Courtesy of The Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.
accompanied by Welles explaining to the audience, “the camera is your

eye” (Rosenbaum, “Orson Welles: Heart of Darkness,” 26), and later, an
eye is seen alongside an equal sign and the word “I” (see Figure 2.4).
Just before this, Welles surrealistically posits viewers in the theater as
movie cameras:
SHOT of inside theatre as it would appear from the stage or rather

from the center of the moving picture screen! Beginning on the projection
booth, CAMERA PANS DOWN taking in the orchestra floor of the
theatre, dimly lit by the reflected light from the screen. The audience
is entirely made up of motion picture cameras. When this has registered:
WELLES’S VOICE: I hope you get the idea.

(Rosenbaum, “Orson Welles: Heart of Darkness,” 26)
The “idea” in this adaptation is not just a diegetic story of imperialism

and/or obsessive power but also of audience members being implicated
in the role of the narrator and observer. Welles was certainly aware of
the power of popular media to manipulate audiences, but he was also
aware of the perverse pleasures of audience voyeurism. After the scene
in which the viewer is executed, Welles says,
Ladies and Gentlemen, there is no cause for alarm. This is only

a motion picture. Of course, you haven’t committed murder and
believe me, I wouldn’t electrocute you for the world. (Rosenbaum,
“Orson Welles: Heart of Darkness,” 26)
His signature coyness was familiar to radio audiences from his famous War
of the Worlds broadcast (whose infamy, in part, brought him to Hollywood
in the first place). But Welles’s challenge to the audience here is a serious
one: “You’re not going to see this picture—this picture is going to happen to
you” (Rosenbaum, “Orson Welles: Heart of Darkness,” 26). Welles thus
announces in this introductory sequence that the cinematic experience
will be more than simply retinal. Anticipating my reference to John Cage
later in this book, Welles imagined Heart of Darkness as a kind of “hap-
pening,” an experience of art as something new that would make the
audience active, not passive, viewers. DeBona argues that Welles brought
a Brechtian sensibility to modern cinema (76), that he wanted audiences
to know they were watching a movie. Welles wants to implicate the audi-
ence to show the control the director has in manipulating its responses,
echoing Kurtz’s manipulation of his followers in Heart of Darkness.
Like Apocalypse Now, Welles’s adaptation of Heart of Darkness was

meant to illuminate the megalomania of leaders corrupted by the
machinery of social institutions and public image, including politics and
modern warfare—a motif that surely undergirds the film Welles turned
to after Heart of Darkness, Citizen Kane. While the latter film is ingenious
and a landmark in its use of perspectival narration, Heart of Darkness was
to be even more experimental cinema, not only dissolving the line that
separates the audience from the world of the film (echoing the blurred
line between fiction and life in his War of the Worlds broadcast and in
the “News on the March” sequence in Citizen Kane), but also implicat-
ing it in its voyeuristic participation in the story and its responsibility to
hold leaders accountable for their dangerous rhetoric. In his prologue, he
implicated himself and the audience in his adaptation of Conrad’s explo-
ration of the seductions of power. Naremore observes that the prologue
to the script was a way of introducing the director’s authority, creating
“an illusion of Welles’s omnipotence” (Magic World 22).
Welles intended to use the cinematic form to suggest that Heart of
Darkness was also about his own time, which was worrying about the
rise of fascism in Europe. The references to Hitler in Welles’s script, as
Jonathan Rosenbaum notes, were “unmistakable”:
KURTZ: There’s a man now in Europe trying to do what I’ve done in

the jungle. He will fail. In his madness he thinks he can’t fail – but
he will. (Rosenbaum, “Voice and the Eye,” 29)
As Naremore says, “[Welles’s] prologue to Heart of Darkness underlined

the theme of manipulation and demagogic deception which was central
to the story; on another level, it helped establish the sense of pervasive
evil, the subtle link between the audience and Kurtz which Conrad
himself had implied” (Magic World 23).
Welles’s voicing of both Marlow and Kurtz would formally echo these
themes and allow him to experiment further with sound. He not only
relied on the carefully planned overlapping dialogue viewers of his
later films would come to recognize, but also on a collage of sounds to
begin his film, which he set in New York rather than in London, as in
the novella.
[s]natches of jazz music are heard from the radios in the moving taxicabs.
The sweet dinner music in the restaurants of the big hotels further west.
The throb of tom-toms foreshadow the jungle music of the story to come.
The lament of brasses, the gala noodling of big orchestras tuning up in
concert halls and opera houses, and finally as the camera finds its way
downtown below Broadway, the music freezes into an expression of the
empty shopping district of the deserted Battery—the mournful muted clan-
gor of the bell buoys out at sea, and the hoot of shipping. (Welles’s script,
Rosenbaum, “Voice and the Eye,” 29)
Such “auditory innovations” (Heylin 29) further demonstrated Welles’s

plan to challenge traditional cinema, but they also reflected Welles’s
interest in sound inherited from his radio days. The importance of
sound to the film would be clear in the presence of his own charismatic
voice. In playing both Marlow and Kurtz, Welles would develop his
themes of shared criminality, since Marlow recognizes in Kurtz a dop-
pelganger and his own potential to lose his humanity, and of the danger
of eloquence, a point Conrad himself makes clear:
Kurtz discoursed. A voice! a voice! It rang deep to the very last. It

survived his strength to hide in the magnificent folds of eloquence
the barren darkness of his heart. (63)
The seduction of a powerful voice would be well served by the cadence

and power of Welles’s own booming and compelling voice. As Callow has
said, “The uncanny power of the voice, the diabolical seduction of words,
was a magical attribute with which Welles was entirely familiar” (466).
The production of Welles’s Heart of Darkness was aborted by RKO
ostensibly because of its cost. DeBona posits that the adaptation was
abandoned because of its political allegory as well as its “critique of the
Hollywood culture industry” (66). RKO was worried about the film’s anti-
fascist political stand, particularly the embedded critique of America’s iso-
lationism in 1939. Even Welles’s champion, RKO head George Schaefer,
was “unhappy with a couple of clear allusions to Hitler at a time when
America was still ostensibly neutral in what would be (for two years yet)
an essentially European conflict” (Heylin 33). It is interesting to wonder
if Welles’s anti-isolationist stance (present two years later in Citizen Kane’s
critique of Kane’s isolationism) was the political analogue to his avant-
garde sensibility. Ironically, this modernist artist-icon was also deeply
invested in global involvement that would in part characterize postmod-
ernism. Welles’s belief in engaging world culture and politics suggests a
commitment to relations—relational art, relational politics—that belies
his ego-laden position as consummate auteur, modernist genius.
Implicating his audience in unstable power relations, drawing analo-
gies between the technology of filmmaking and a potentially fascistic
means of controlling the masses, and questioning in the narrative

form and the content of his Heart of Darkness the fixity of truth and
the subversiveness of illusion, Welles’s failure here seems to have been
inevitable:
[Like] Conrad, Welles retains a suspicion that his two protagonists,

the narrator, and the author himself are all linked to the lies and
propaganda circulated by the Company. Ultimately, his doubts
would proliferate and destroy the film itself. Both Welles and RKO
eventually became so suspicious of the ambiguity of the narrative
itself that they shelved a project that might have proved to be as
revealing and controversial as the novel from which it was adapted.12
Welles’s planned adaptation of Conrad’s novel would have brought

the audience inside the work and thereby questioned the very medium
of film. His Heart of Darkness script perfectly exemplifies adaptation as
“hideous progeny,” since it offered a perspective deemed too bold and
controversial for Hollywood at that time. The surrealist introduction of
the camera as a character involved the audience in ways more serious
than Welles’s affinity for magic or his reputation as a trickster implied.
He experimented with form in every medium in which he worked.
Thus, like other “hideous progeny” explored in this book, Welles’s Heart
of Darkness forced a consideration of perspective through its form and
content, challenging conventional Hollywood filmmaking. His Heart of
Darkness “[suggested] that film isn’t merely a passive objective record-
ing medium” (Leaming 175) and challenged its audience by “[creating]
a tension between identification and estrangement” (Naremore, True
to the Spirit, 67). To borrow from the aesthetic philosophy of Marcel
Duchamp, another experimental modernist who, like Welles, worked
across disciplines and upended conventional conceptions of his
medium, the viewer completes the work.
According to Hearts of Darkness, the viewer isn’t necessary to complete
Apocalypse Now. In its focus on the archetypal Romantic artist, the docu-
mentary demonstrates a more compartmentalized understanding of
culture than is seen in Welles’s comprehensive fascination with theater,
radio, and film.
***
“My film is not a movie,” says Coppola at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival
at the beginning of Hearts of Darkness. “My film is not about Vietnam.
It is Vietnam. It’s what it was really like.” Such a claim—the belief in

the power of art not just to faithfully render an historical reality (not
to mention a famous literary text), but to supersede it with a new
reality—relies both on the idea of a representable prior reality (histori-
cal or textual) and even more on the artist’s own belief in his power to
transform realities (“If Marty dies, I wanna hear that everything’s okay,
until I say, ‘Marty is dead’ ”). Instead of Hearts of Darkness inviting view-
ers into different points of view, this adaptation revels in a dramatic loss
of perspective other than that of the auteur.
The seduction of film critics by the auteur’s grand narrative in Hearts
of Darkness makes critical engagement with the film more difficult, rein-
forcing for viewers its univocal perspective. Roger Ebert, for example,
canonized Coppola by describing his venture in making Apocalypse Now
(as recorded in the documentary) as “fascinating, harrowing film his-
tory,” and Hal Hinson of The Washington Post called the documentary a
“portrait of an artist in crisis,” and further said that Hearts of Darkness is
“the most engrossing, most revealing film about the making of a movie
ever produced.” High praise, indeed, although Hinson did note that the
filmmakers “[place] Coppola in the company of angels.” Still, Hinson
endorses the mythifying narrative by ending his article,
Perhaps Coppola is right to think that the gods have their eye on
him. To have his youthful dream realized not only with “Apocalypse
Now” but with this engrossing new film as well seems close to
miraculous.
The lionizing here is further echoed in Janet Maslin’s comment that

Coppola “tested the limits of his capacity for courting disaster,” or
Ebert’s claim that Hearts of Darkness “strips Coppola of all defenses and
yet reveals him as a great and brave filmmaker.”
Such endorsements carry over to an uncomfortable extreme when
critics imitate Coppola’s error in mistaking representation for reality,
the making of art for waging real battle, as is exemplified in the fol-
lowing remarks by Robert Rothenberg writing for USA Today about
Apocalypse Now Redux, the 2001 “director’s cut” of Apocalypse Now:
At the peak of his reputation, lionized for his two Oscar-winning

“Godfather” epics, Coppola set out to fulfill his dream to convert
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness into a film, setting it in the middle
of the Vietnam War. The idea turned out to be as much a mistake as
the war itself.
The troubling overstatement in the last sentence bespeaks more (even)

than the writer’s confusion of reality and representation, his confusion
of war and films about war; the critic’s repetition of Coppola’s own ges-
ture in his famous remarks at Cannes (“My film is not a movie”) suggests
the powerful influence of Coppola’s star text or persona and of auteurist
ideology that places the grand master at the helm of a threatened ship.
In the following comments by Brian Johnson in Maclean’s magazine,
the very cadences of Coppola’s speech at Cannes are imitated:
In the process, [Coppola] ended up creating his own Vietnam in the

Philippines. He did not know why he was there. He could not with-
draw. He became a victim of his own escalating imagination.
Johnson not only adopts Coppola’s self-congratulatory representation

of his tortured-artist experiences and repeats the confusion between
reality and fiction but does so imitating Coppola’s speech patterns in
his Cannes remarks:
We were in the jungle. There were too many of us. We had access to too
much money, too much equipment, and little by little, we went insane.
Coppola’s self-presentation has apparently permeated viewers’ con-

sciousness in such a way as to cloud a critical stance on the Romantic
egotism Coppola exhibits in Hearts of Darkness. This phenomenon is
especially strange given that, like Alfred Hitchcock (or Scorsese in Taxi
Driver), Coppola signs his 1979 film by making a cameo appearance as
a television director. In Apocalypse Now, his character shouts at a bewil-
dered Willard as he documents the violent chaos of the war. “Don’t look
at the camera,” he yells repeatedly at Willard. “Keep going,” he insists;
“keep going, like you’re fighting. Like you’re fighting” (Figure 2.5).
The simile “like” mocks the loss of perspective that bringing media
coverage onto the front lines of the war has produced, and Coppola’s
appearance in the film draws attention to this confusion of reality and
spectacle. The distortion of point of view Coppola wishes to expose
in Apocalypse Now is further seen in Kilgore’s (Robert Duvall) threat to
the men that they either “surf or fight,” or more famously, in Kilgore’s
mock-poetic tribute to the power of America to levy destruction on the
enemy, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.” Considering the
film’s exploration and critique of such dramatic distortions in point of
view, the unironic repetition of the theme of lost perspective in the field
of moviemaking in Hearts of Darkness is jarring.
Figure 2.5 Apocalypse Now: Coppola’s cameo – “Like you’re fighting ….”
As viewers, we may well be inclined to enjoy the frisson of confus-

ing image and reality (“My film is not a movie”), and we may find the
filmmaker’s persona as the tragic hero in a grand narrative about his
journey in a self-proclaimed “Idiodyssey” titillating. But the idealization
of the obsessive artist-figure seems to curtail nuanced, interrogative,
and analytic thinking about filmmaking. Hearts of Darkness adapts Heart
of Darkness’s journey motif, its observer role, and its figure of Kurtz.
But the documentary’s myopia short-circuits the potential of adapta-
tion to provide a new and complicated perspective on previous works
and the cultures that helped to produce them. Instead, it employs the
auteurist grand narrative and focuses on the “mythic proportions” of
Hollywood’s battles with “visionaries” (according to a review in The
Economist). Hearts of Darkness may be a fascinating film, but its fasci-
nation lies not in Coppola’s transcendence of the limits of his experi-
ence but in its view of art and adaptation as obsessively reliant upon
Romantic ideas about the artist. Eleanor Coppola’s final words about
Francis make this point unequivocally:
[H]e’d gone to the threshold, maybe, of his sanity or something. It

was scary, but also kind of exhilarating or thrilling that he would take
such risks with himself and his experience to go that far. And I think
this film was all about risking, risking your money, risking your san-
ity, risking how far you could press your family members …. I mean,
everything that he did, he went to the extremes to test those fringe
regions and then come back.
If he hadn’t “come back,” Hearts of Darkness would be a very different

film, since its values fully depend on Coppola’s success in mastering his
materials. The earlier “hideous progeny” of Conrad’s novella are ambiv-
alent about such mastery, revealing multiple viewpoints on the failures
of Romantic overreaching. A lighter fare altogether (ironically “lighter”
than the biting parody discussed above, A Filmmaker’s Apology), Hearts
of Darkness can be contrasted with Apocalypse Now in the latter’s critique
of Romantic idealism. Apocalypse Now transports the abject Kurtz and
the helpless narrator to Vietnam. In addition to critiquing the exploita-
tive machinery of American politics, Coppola identifies the audience
as part of the toxicity of the media, as the frantic camera operator
tells Willard “don’t look at the camera” and the Playboy bunnies are
absurdly dropped into the middle of the war to entertain the troops. In
both these instances, Coppola implicates the audience in its voyeuristic
pleasures, which ties Coppola to Welles’s Heart of Darkness. Welles’s
unfinished adaptation also suggests systems failure—the failure of
Hollywood to support his artistic vision but also the dangers of political
and media rhetoric, as Welles’s experimentation with image and sound
explored. If Romantic art relies upon the idea of failure and the inevita-
bility of incompleteness—mastery of an ideal vision being impossible—
Coppola’s success in completing Apocalypse Now is portrayed in Hearts of
Darkness as untroubled, ameliorative, and resolved, thus contradicting
the myth of the artist in the documentary and also contradicting the
critique in Apocalypse Now of media and political exploitations of power
and control. Paradoxically enough, Orson Welles, known as the quin-
tessential controlling artist or auteur figure, seems to reject this myth.
He was deeply skeptical of the social mechanics of control, a suspicion
he tried to explore thematically and formally in his Heart of Darkness.
Welles’s hope was to ask the audience to complete his work, sharing the
agency that might make for an experimental and truly provoking work
of art.13
3
Hideous Fraternities: The Coen
Brothers Hit the Road
Joel and Ethan Coen’s O Brother, Where Art Thou? revisits the theme of
the journey, interpreting Homer’s Odyssey by way of Preston Sturges’s
Sullivan’s Travels (1941), the source of the film’s title. In Sturges’s film,
John Lloyd Sullivan (Joel McCrea) is a film director weary of making
silly hit comedies such as “Hey, Hey in the Hay Loft” and “Ants in
your Plants of 1939.” With the nation still in the pre-war throes of the
Great Depression, he sets out to make a serious film, to be titled “O
Brother, Where Art Thou?” about the suffering of the unemployed. His
plan includes first going undercover as a hobo. Sturges’s film reveals
Sullivan’s journey to be foolhardy and affirms the role of comic art
rather than high-toned “message pictures” in providing escapist enter-
tainment for the common person.
In O Brother, it is music—an artistic addition to film comedy—that
provides the salve that rescues the film’s three antiheroes from despair.
The song that brings them fame, “Man of Constant Sorrow,” evokes the
character of Odysseus in the person of Ulysses Everett McGill, the trio’s
leader played parodically by George Clooney. While his self-inflated
diction is mocked throughout the film as self-importance, Everett
shares the Homeric hero’s intellect and propensity for clever strategiz-
ing. Just as Odysseus is characterized as a man “on whom nothing is
lost,” Everett is a sly “tactician” whose strategies to get himself and his
companions Delmar (Tim Blake Nelson) and Pete (John Turturro) out
of “tight spots” make up the film’s episodic form. “O Muse!” the film
begins, with an epigraph citing Homer’s own opening invocation: “Sing
in me, and through me tell the story/Of that man skilled in all the ways
of contending,/A wanderer, harried for years on end ….”
Some of the best-known characters and episodes from The Odyssey
are adapted in the Coen brothers’ tribute to the Greek poet’s song
62
Coens Hit the Road 63
and storytelling. Big Dan T. (John Goodman) appears as the Cyclops,

morphed into a violent and exploitative religious hypocrite and Ku
Klux Klan member. The Sirens seduce “the boys” and then turn Pete in
for ransom money. Most notably, Everett’s wife Penny (Holly Hunter)
appears as a less patient version of Homer’s Penelope. Concerned for the
well-being of her seven daughters, she decides to marry one of her “suit-
ors,” Vernon T. Waldrip (Ray McKinnon). Paralleling Homer’s Antinous,
the most physically aggressive of Penelope’s suitors, Waldrip displays
his physical prowess in besting Everett in their brief boxing match. But
his unsuitor-bility for Penny becomes apparent when Waldrip turns
out to be a crony of the racist so-called reform gubernatorial candidate
“Homer” Stokes (Wayne Duvall). Given this Southern racist element, it
seems appropriate that Vernon Waldrip’s name is drawn from a charac-
ter in William Faulkner’s dual-narrative novel The Wild Palms. (Faulkner
also provided the Coens with a name for the Snopes brothers in Raising
Arizona; and the drunken screenwriter in Barton Fink is clearly modeled
on Faulkner in Hollywood.)
As with the Heart of Darkness variations discussed in the last chapter,
this pair of films, O Brother and Sullivan’s Travels, captures the notion
of adaptation as a paradoxical journey “home” and “away” from the
source text. And, as in the parodic mockumentary of Hearts of Darkness
by Jim Abrahams, the Coen brothers’ satire reveals the irreverence of
adaptations that rewrite source texts in order to celebrate a sense of
community as well as the creative process. O Brother, Where Art Thou?
is wildly anti-hierarchical, deflating ideas of “origins” and “originality”
in favor of a free-floating, free-wheeling conversational and dialogical
mode in revisiting prior texts.
Joel Coen once said that “[b]eing original and always doing the new
thing is incredibly overrated” (McKenna 181). His comment suggests the
relevance of the Coen brothers to a discussion of adaptation as a fun-
damental cultural force in creative art-making. Central to this endeavor
is the idea of the journey, but a journey that is non-teleological,
a “multi-directional dialogue among creator, borrowed materials, and
the present” (Seeley 98).
In the world of the Coen brothers, adaptations carry us along for the
journey’s ride, though no journey of theirs has an end point, and under-
standing is always inchoate and partial. In this way, O Brother, Where Art
Thou? is not only an adaptation of The Odyssey but a parody, function-
ing like a shaggy dog story—a lark, a tale that regenerates as a quirky
and seemingly random retelling of Odysseus’s adventures. As such,
it sends up the linear or teleological model of revisiting source texts.
The parody within the film of looking for answers and journeys’ ends
extends, I want to suggest, to discussion by viewers, critics, and schol-
ars about the film’s sources. The quixotic journey of Everett parallels,
in other words, a red-herring search for adaptations’ sources. O Brother
satirizes the folly of looking for them, since the practice of adaptation
for the Coen brothers is unstable and ephemeral.
O Brother pokes fun at notions of fidelity as the film plays with the
idea of true sources and true relations. For example, Pete’s cousin Wash
Hogwallop has a watch engraved with “amor fidelis” once given to him
by his wife before she “R-U-N-N-O-F-T” to (as Everett surmises) “look for
answers.” Faithful up to a point, Penny insists that Everett isn’t “bona
fide” because of his imprisonment and subsequent long absence from
home. The film argues, instead, for faithfulness to the roaming imagina-
tion and the pleasures of music rather than to a source or institution,
or even an individual, since the Coens see individuals as having only
limited power to effect meaningful change. In the end, though, more
than the frailty of human relations, the fragility of individual agency,
and the bonds of brothers, in O Brother it is art—as it is in Sullivan’s
Travels and in Homeric epic (in the poet’s encomium to song and story-
telling)—that remains its most serious focus.
O Brother, Where Art Thou? offers an iconic story—treasure seeking—
and reveals the treasure to be either nonexistent in terms of the plot
(Everett had been lying to Delmar and Pete about the existence of
buried money from a robbery to ensure their cooperation in his escape
from their chain gang); a misdirection of efforts (the Blind Seer they first
encounter echoes The Odyssey’s Tiresias in telling them the treasure they
find will not be the one they seek); or existentially foolhardy. Everett
wishes to return home so that he may resume his position as the “pater
familias,” a claim, like any in the Coen brothers’ films, that meets only
partial resolution, since O Brother ends with the image of spousal squab-
bling about the ring Penny demands in order to get remarried.
The seeming drive toward an uplifting resolution is central to one
of O Brother’s major sources, Sullivan’s Travels. In this film, Sturges
reveals Sullivan’s journey (at least the one he thinks he’s on) to be
quixotic and self-undermining. Janice Siegel sees in O Brother a “mythic
sense of placelessness familiar from The Odyssey” (217). But Everett’s
return is unlike Homer’s distinct and resolved end-point: the nostos or
Homecoming of Book XXIV. Sullivan too has achieved resolution; he
comes to understand, like Dorothy Gale in The Wizard of Oz (an absent
presence in O Brother), that there’s no place like home, here defined in
terms of the artistic practice Sullivan had sought to abandon. He should
return to making silly comedies that will “lighten the burden” for film
viewers assaulted in their “real” lives by a bleak Depression with “grim
death gargling at you from every corner.”
In contrast to Homer’s portrayal in The Odyssey, “home” is not the
place that resolves the story for the Coens, since “the journey never
ends” (Spiro 71). A metaphor for the single source and meaning of their
film (the “home text” I referred to in the introduction), “home” is a
chimera for the Coens, both in the story of O Brother, Where Art Thou?
and in their conception of adaptation. In fact, in O Brother, the idea of
returning home, though borrowed from The Odyssey, owes more to an
inside-out version of The Wizard of Oz (1939), a film the Coens credit
as “an inspiration and a big influence on the movie” (McKenna 179).
Here, there is an echo of Salman Rushdie’s deconstructive 1992 reading
of Dorothy’s journey to Oz, for, as Tracy Seeley observes, “‘There’s no
place like home’ inflected just a little differently says that there is no
place like home. The home that nostalgia longs for doesn’t exist. In fact,
it never did” (104). “Home,” in fact, represents the answers that can’t
be found.
In the tragi-comically Sisyphean spirit the Coen brothers revel in, eve-
ryone persists in looking for answers in O Brother: Mrs. Hogwallop left her
family, as Everett notes, because she was “looking for answers”;1 Penny
says she must marry Vernon Waldrip because her daughters “look to me
for answers”; at the baptism scene, Everett observes again, “Everybody’s
looking for answers.” The Coens, however, repeatedly display their dis-
taste for institutions purporting to provide answers. As Film Quarterly’s
review claims, “The film’s obvious villains, the ‘monsters’ of this odys-
sey, can be seen more revealingly as a symbolic rogues’ gallery of human
institutions—business, politics, education—that corrupt us, dividing
brother against brother” (Content et al. 45). The law and prison system
are utterly corrupt, personified in the satanic figure of Sheriff Cooley
(Daniel von Bargen). In a reference to the sunglasses of the most noto-
rious guard in the iconic prison film Cool Hand Luke (1967), Cooley
wears glasses that continually reflect fire. Institutionalized religion is
similarly disparaged. Big Dan T. explains how selling bibles is big busi-
ness because, again, “people are looking for answers.” He is violently
appetitive, hypocritical, and exploitative. Delmar’s baptism leads only
to mock-salvation: “The preacher says all my sins is warshed away,” he
exclaims upon emerging from the river, “including that Piggly Wiggly I
knocked over in Yazoo.” The workings of politics are no less vile: Pappy
O’Daniel (Charles Durning) is a dyspeptic hypocrite and his opponent
Homer Stokes, a virulent racist.
The various sources of meaning parodied by the Coens include the

idea of authorial intention. Even more than most artists, the brothers
are famously resistant to interpreting their films. William Rodney Allen
summarizes critical consensus on their comments as “bored, mildly
annoyed, elliptical, or flippant” (xi). They offer an interesting contrast
to Coppola, whose meaning-drenched journey in making Apocalypse
Now was discussed in the last chapter. Indeed, the Coen brothers are
profoundly anti-authorial: In the prologue to the published screenplay
of O Brother, Where Art Thou?, they mock scholarly interpretations of
their work, glossing the frog figure in the film: “Modern man … hops
fretfully about, banging his nose against limits so obscure their very
nature is enigma. And too like box-bound frog, he is alone” (qtd. in
Spiro 63).
The Coens edit their own films (with Trisha Cooke) but credit a
pseudonymous editor, one “Roderick Jaynes,” described as “a florid
Englishman with a taste for Saville Row suits” (Bennun 117). Jaynes
exists, the Coen brothers, say, “Because it would be bad taste to have
our names on our movies that many times” (McKenna 185). They
reject filmmaking as another institution with rules and hierarchies to
be followed. The Coens were nonplussed that “Roderick Jaynes” was
nominated for Academy Awards for Fargo and No Country for Old Men,
claiming that since he was very old, he might not be present. In 2001,
“Jaynes” even published a review in The Guardian of the Coens’ newest
film The Man Who Wasn’t There.
The disavowal of authorship has a history in the avant-garde.
Roderick Jaynes could be linked to Richard Mutt, Duchamp’s invented
artist, who famously submitted The Fountain, a white porcelain urinal,
to the American Society of Independent Artists’ show in 1917. Like the
Coens, Duchamp was opposed to the established institutions seeking
to dictate evaluations of art on the basis of taste. Three elements of
Duchamp’s defense of R. Mutt are important to this study of adaptation:
one, the belief that the artist’s choice of object is in itself an artistic act;
two, the idea that in overturning the urinal, The Fountain shifted the
viewer’s point of view on the object; and three, the notion that mov-
ing the object away from its conventionally fixed venue gave it new
meaning. The shift in perspective Duchamp insisted upon in his ven-
triloquist submission of The Fountain shifted the focus of art from the
object itself to its relations, and I am arguing that this is precisely what
we need to emphasize in our understanding and practice of adaptation.
Disavowing the kind of ownership associated with Romantic views of
the controlling artist figure, Duchamp did in The Fountain what many
adaptations seek to do: shift the tone and context of an object from
familiar ground to something new.
In the magazine The Blind Man, on whose editorial board Duchamp
served, an unsigned editorial titled “The Case of Richard Mutt” was
published in May of 1917. On the cover of the first issue of this journal,
which had appeared a month earlier, there was an image of a blind man
being led through an exhibition of paintings. The drawing challenges
the medium of painting, just as Roderick Jaynes’s ironic review of The
Man Who Wasn’t There undercuts the veracity of authorship in the mak-
ing of the Coen brothers’ films.
Duchamp continued to play with notions of authorship and anonym-
ity. In the second issue of The Blind Man, the editorial about submission
of “The Fountain” argues that
Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has
no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed
it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and
point of view—created a new thought for that object. (Ades 127)
If the source of an adaptation is its “object,” Duchamp establishes a

“case” for “[creating] a new thought for that object.” That “new thought”
is dependent upon the viewer so that its “art” is never fixed, always
dynamic. Further, like Duchamp, the Coen brothers dispute industrial
claims to power. While Duchamp claimed famously that “Taste is the
enemy of art,” the Coens share the anti-hierarchical mistrust of high-art
assumptions about what good art is and, also, the genius brand of the
artist and the demonstrated virtuosity of his handiwork. Challenging
the overarching figure of the artist/author, readymades such as “The
Fountain” were selected, not fabricated by a single artist. Claiming that
they are “not big on taste” (Romney 130) (they make the same point
above in explaining the presence of Roderick Jaynes as an ironic disa-
vowal of their own authorship), the Coens make the character called
“Homer” in their film a malicious racist. Knocking down the idea of
the artist as inviolable and steering clear of an auteurist emphasis on
the hand of the master filmmaker(s), the Coens prefer the focus to be
on the work and its creative engagement with their “dizzying array of
artistic influences” (Allen xv) and with cultural history generally.
One such artistic influence is obviously Preston Sturges, who also
debunks Hollywood as an institution in Sullivan’s Travels. When
Sullivan tells Trusty, The Mister’s assistant at the prison camp,
“They don’t sentence picture directors to a place like this for a little
disagreement with a yard bull,” Trusty replies, “Don’t they?” Sturges

is opposed to Hollywood pretension and its glass-tower isolation from
real life while purporting to “mirror” it in social-problem films like The
Grapes of Wrath, released a year before Travels. Sturges stands instead
with the “motley mountebanks, the clowns, the buffoons.” Debunking
contemporary filmmakers who “want to make an epic about misery”
(as the studio executive Hadrian says to Sullivan), Sturges pokes fun at
the social-problem strain of filmmaking in the 1930s and 40s. Instead,
his protagonist director Sullivan is lessoned in his desire to make a film
about “the suffering of humanity.” Coppola, too, wanted to make “an
epic,” “to hold a mirror up to life” (recall his claim about Apocalypse
Now: “My film is not about Vietnam. It is Vietnam”), to which we can
imagine Hadrian saying, as he does to Sullivan, “Who wants to see that
kinda stuff? It gives me the creeps.”
While, according to Hearts of Darkness, Francis Coppola felt himself to
be traveling on an epic scale into the very heart of darkness as he made
Apocalypse Now, Ethan Coen says of the Coens’ career, “the movie people
let us play in the corner of the sandbox and leave us alone” (McKenna
169). Fame and celebrity, the motivation for O Brother’s George “Baby
Face” Nelson (Michael Badalucco), are of little interest to Coen and
his brother, and they hire actors who share their values. While Marlon
Brando hijacked film production in Coppola’s film because of his stat-
ure and demands, Joel Coen says, “The bigger stars we’ve worked with
have been without the movie-star vanities or meshugas that you read
about and dread” (McKenna 171). Indeed, he mentioned Brando spe-
cifically, saying that he would “make us nervous …. You’d never know
whether he was going to show up and want to play the part as a bagel or
something. I think he’s gone off the deep end” [McKenna 171]. Instead
of the kind of high-toned method acting viewers associate with Brando,
the Coens prefer a controlled artistic world. They storyboard everything
so there will be little overage during production. “There’s little improvi-
sation. Preproduction is cheap compared with trying to figure things
out on a set with an entire crew standing around” (McKenna 170).
The pragmatism here is in pointed contrast to Coppola’s style and
ambition. Coppola trumpeted his belief that Apocalypse Now was “a
monument” to “an American era” (qtd. in Chiu); the Coens were con-
tent to play in the corner of their un-monumental sandbox, in part
because, in their earlier years, they lacked clout, and, more importantly
and still, because it guaranteed that the “movie people” would “leave us
alone”—a consummation devoutly to be wished by all filmmakers, by
none more ardently than Francis Ford Coppola.
While the Coens themselves eschew reputation and recognition,

O Brother whimsically plays with Homer’s fascination with fame, most
notably in the character of “Baby Face” Nelson. His obsession with
notoriety is portrayed tragicomically as manic depression. A “thrill-
seeking personality,” in Everett’s diagnosis, George has his finest
moment at the end of the film when he is led to his execution. Now
the center of the attention he has craved, George calls himself “the
criminal of the century,” “bigger than any John Law that ever lived.”
Erica Rowell sees in George’s mania a powerful critique of the ego and
individualism. “George’s giddy welcome of death,” she writes, “skewers
the desire for celebrity and the concomitant culture of nihilism that
puts individual, money, and fame above the collective” (271). Homer’s
arrogant hero Achilles comes to mind, his thirst for individual glory
and reputation in contrast to the resistance to authorial ego embodied
by the Coen brothers, akin in this sense to Homer’s self-effacing com-
munal hero, Hector.
In Sullivan’s Travels, after his release from the prison camp has made
national news, Sullivan says that he is too happy to make “O Brother,
Where Art Thou.” Hadrian the producer asks, “What are we going to do
with all that publicity?” Like the Coens, Sturges critiques the very over-
reaching Coppola would be known for, as Sullivan’s high-minded plan
for “stark realism” in the context of Hollywood is debunked as absurd-
ity. One thinks here of Joe Gillis’s contemptuous reference to “the mes-
sage kids” in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950).2 “Next time,” Joe
acerbically says to script reader Betty Schaefer and producer Sheldrake,
“I’ll write The Naked and the Dead.” From Homer’s Achilles and Antinous
to Sullivan to Everett and his inflated diction, the twinned motives of
self-importance and ambition are mocked by Sturges and the Coens.
For this reason, Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses” may be seen
as a significant intertext for O Brother, Where Art Thou? Written in 1833,
Tennyson looked not to Homer but to Dante’s Inferno for his source,
which is itself modeled on the account of Ulysses in Virgil’s Aeneid, in
which the famed adventurer is reviled for sacrificing his men on a voy-
age that meant certain death. Tennyson’s poetic adaptation of the hero’s
journey offers a fascinating ambiguity whose interpretive framework
has largely to do with which sources are seen as “authoritative.”
Read in the context of Tennyson’s Romanticism, the poem is an
encomium to Ulysses’ adventurous spirit. He wishes to leave the
Ithaca to which he has only recently returned, called back to sea by
a longing to resume his journey, a quest less finite and external than
internal and limitless. How can he rest with “this grey spirit yearning
in desire/To follow knowledge like a sinking star,/Beyond the utmost

bound of human thought” (ll. 30–32)? Ulysses despairs at the dull
prospect of the workaday duties of his peers in Ithaca, notably his son
Telemachus, who is “centred in the sphere/Of common duties, decent
not to fail” (ll. 39–40). Damning him with faint praise—he is “most
blameless” (l. 39)—Ulysses characterizes his son as the kind of “grocery
clerk” (Coppola), or “peddler” (Conrad) Kurtz sees in Company men, a
sorry contrast to Ulysses’s self-image as a heroic wanderer: “How dull
it is to pause” (l. 22). This reading of Ulysses as a passionate Romantic
seeker allies him with the Romantic artist figure, such as Coppola, who
is unwilling to compromise his vision. In this context, Everett “Ulysses”
McGill, in his words and deeds, pointedly deflates such heroism, mock-
ing any grounds for grand action.
However, there is a counter reading of “Ulysses” that questions the
very Romanticism many associate with Tennyson’s speaker. This read-
ing relies upon the different perspective brought to bear not only by
Dante’s reading of Virgil, but also by Tennyson’s own contemporary
status. As British Poet Laureate from 1850 until his death in 1892,
Tennyson was deeply cognizant of two antithetical roles: his social role
as the quintessential Victorian bard, and yet a poet also acutely aware
of his own debt to the Romantic poets before him and their passion
for expression and the breaking of boundaries. Tennyson wrote poems
throughout his life that explored “The Two Voices,” to cite the title of
one of them. His poetry addresses the competing values of Victorian
restraint and community on the one hand and Romantic individualism
and the belief in unfettered poetic expression on the other.
Torn between a Keatsian love of sensory indulgence and the com-
munal values of compromise and accommodation, Tennyson may, in
“Ulysses,” whether fully consciously or not, be impugning the titular
hero’s abandonment both of his ties in Ithaca and of his responsibil-
ity to his men. Ulysses rouses them up with passionate rhetoric such
that they too lose their selves in the hopes of glory. In Virgil’s version,
Ulysses and his men die almost immediately after they resume their
journeying. In this alternative reading, Tennyson’s poem is a critique
not only of the Romantic figure’s solipsistic drive for glory but also his
impatience with and contempt for domesticity, a newly regarded realm
in the 19th century as the novel developed in part to address the world
of hearth and home. Penelope, no “angel in the house,” is portrayed
in the poem as an “aged wife,” and Ulysses unfeelingly represents her
and his life in Ithaca as equally sterile. Indeed, he begins his monologue
by depicting himself as “an idle king,/By this still hearth, among these
barren crags,/Match’d with an aged wife …” (2–3). Such monosyllabic

activities as “mete and dole,” in reference to “laws” intended to civilize
“a savage race/That hoard and sleep and feed, and know not me” (3–5),
emphasize how boring and meaningless his roles as king, husband, and
father are to Ulysses, who craves the adventure of roaming, once again,
“with a hungry heart” (12). Even as we admire his Romantic desire as
a relentless questor of experience and knowledge, we may, with equal
justice, see this Ulysses as less a “hero” than an egocentric visionary
who abandons his familial and communal responsibilities in pursuit of
an elusive and unattainable vision. One may even wonder if Tennyson,
in the final lines (68–70) he gives Ulysses, about “heroic hearts/Made
weak by time and fate, but strong in will/To strive, to seek, to find, and
not to yield,” was consciously echoing Satan’s invocation (in Book 1 of
Paradise Lost) of “courage never to submit or yield” (108). What makes
“Ulysses” a truly great poem, aside from the language in which its ten-
sions are conveyed, is the divided response it invites: polarized and
perhaps finally irresolvable perspectives.
Like “Ulysses,” Tennyson’s poem “The Lotos-Eaters” presents different
perspectives on the Odyssean journey. The poem presents the men as
longing, not for the return home, but for the sensuous pleasures of the
far-away island. It presents the point of view of the men, but also sug-
gests a counter-reading: a judgment of the men as weak, failing to resist
seduction and return home. This view coincides with the Sirens scene
in O Brother, in which the boys are lulled to sleep by the Sirens singing
“Go to Sleep Little Baby.” Tennyson’s poetic adaptation of these classical
stories helps us to see the fascinating shifts in perspective brought to
bear in creative adaptations. Particularly if we read Tennyson’s Ulysses
as a solipsistic figure of doom, his poem can also be seen as the “hideous
progeny” of its sources.
The Coen brothers, taking up a similarly varied perspective on O
Brother’s classic figures, deflates the quest-figure who enjoys glory and
fame. The Coens are deeply skeptical of the Romantic artist figure. No
auteurist pretensions in their past or future plans; their approach to
adaptation merges their satire of looking for answers with their defla-
tion of self-importance. One of the means of doing this is to cast dis-
similar genres, characters, or ideas together to see what such adaptive
blends will yield. Seeley calls O Brother a “Depression era-Mississippi-
buddy-chaingang-roadtrip musical comedy” (97), while Joel Coen
himself has described the film as “The Three Stooges meets Homer’s
Odyssey” (Woods 14). Anti-hierarchical to their artistic core, the Coens
level the literary-historical playing field.
The brothers even claim never to have read their stated source. Ethan
Coen says, “We read the comic book version of The Odyssey and tarted the
movie up with the Cyclops, etc.” (Woods 14). They also note that actor
Tim Blake Nelson (Delmar) is a classicist who, among all of the cast and
crew, is “the only one who’s actually read the Odyssey.” Ethan wondered if
he’d “read it in Greek,” but “I know he read it” [Romney 127–128]). This
parodic hedging about the knowledge of source material contrasts with
Brando’s failure to read Heart of Darkness before the shooting of Apocalypse
Now. Coppola is understandably frustrated by Brando’s unpreparedness,
while the Coens casually equivocate on the issue. Rather than reverence
for their stated source, the Coens describe the film as “haphazard,” mix-
ing literary, film, and historical references to construct “an imagined
world where all those things intersect—real people and made-up people”
(Romney 130). They describe the influence of Sullivan’s Travels in terms
of “reminiscence” (Ridley 136), suggesting a kind of world-making that is
possible when adaptation is conceived of as trickling up from the artists’
knowledge and imagination, recalling the amnesiac aspect of adaptation
I referred to the introduction. “It’s all stuff that to one extent or another
we were aware of,” Joel Coen says. “It was back there somewhere and fil-
tered up into the script” (Romney 130). William Rodney Allen’s comment
that “the Coens … managed to ‘remake’ a movie [Sullivan’s ‘O Brother
Where Art Thou’] that never existed” (xix) points to an idea of adapta-
tion that concerns the imagination—fictional universes that generate and
then are governed by their own laws.3 Jonathan Romney captures the
idea of this self-sustaining fictional cosmos when he writes, “Every Coen
film describes a world so thoroughly conceived that each one is its own
fictional microclimate” (176–177).
While the Coens adapt Homer’s love of episodic storytelling and
his exploration of fame and human agency, from Preston Sturges’s
Sullivan’s Travels they add, as their own adaptation, a mayhem and
anti-authoritarian love of fiction-making. Ethan Coen’s labeling of
O Brother as “a musical romp about the Depression” (Woods 13) defies
generic associations and is “reminiscent” of Sturges’s mixed-generic film
that revels in juxtaposing unlike things. Sullivan’s Travels is a tribute to
comedy; nevertheless, its covert “message” about the social importance
of film and art, as well as its rather stunning montage of Depression-era
poverty, belie its seeming disavowal of its own seriousness as a film.
As R. Barton Palmer observes, Sturges has a unique artistic vision in
his “unharmonized mixture of tones” in Travels that includes a seri-
ous representation of “a very different America [that] exists outside the
privileged environs of the Hollywood dream factory” (134).
Sturges’s humor in Travels often relies on absurdist juxtaposition, as in

the poster outside the theater where Sullivan and the Kornheiser sisters
go. The poster reads,
3 FEATURES TONIGHT
BEYOND THESE TEARS
THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW
THE BUZZARD OF BERLIN
also
SWINGO
Another example is the scene in which a boy in his homemade tank

engine (which has “USA Tank Coarse” emblazoned on its side) pro-
vides Sullivan with a high-speed getaway from the double-decker coach
filled with the director’s entourage. When the kid finally stops, he says,
“I guess I better be getting to school now anyway.” Sullivan tells him
to “Drive carefully.”4 At the home of the Kornheisers, we see another
instance of Sturges’s absurdist world-making—the facial expression
of the portrait of “Dear Joseph” keeps changing as his widow tries to
seduce Sullivan.
More broadly, Sullivan’s Travels, like O Brother, is governed by unsta-
ble and self-consciously contingent laws of fiction, such as naming
Veronica Lake’s character “The Girl.” The police officer who has arrested
the couple asks, “How does the girl fit into this picture?” Sullivan
replies, “There’s always a girl in the picture.” Later, in another metafic-
tional moment, as he tries to figure out how to escape from the prison
camp, he says, “If ever a plot needed a twist, this one does.”
The ambiguous separation of made-up and real worlds is fore-
grounded at the very beginning of Sullivan’s Travels as we are brought in
medias res into a movie within a movie. We see a thrilling train scene
of two men, representing Capital and Labor, fighting to the death, both
finally falling from the train to their deaths in the river below. The
lights come up, and we realize that Sullivan has been screening this film
at the studio to make his initial case for directing “O Brother, Where Art
Thou?” Sturges thus defines Sullivan’s “travels,” his journey, as one that
will explore what is actual and what is “projected,” the film blurring the
lines between the real and the fictional from its very start.
The journeys in Sullivan’s Travels and in The Odyssey seem to have
inspired the Coens to reimagine art-making as a journey, whether in
oral traditions of storytelling, filmmaking, or music. In O Brother music
is revealed to be the only force that can triumph over evil, as when
the audience rejects Stokes’s attack on the boys, disguised as the Soggy
Bottom Boys, in favor of hearing them sing “Man of Constant Sorrow,”
which unbeknownst to the boys has become a radio hit.
The works of the Coen brothers often epitomize the kind of adaptation
I introduced at the beginning of this study—vehicles for other texts to
ride in for new journeys.5 Indeed, part of the reason why their inventive
film O Brother stands as such a quintessential creative adaptation is its
indiscriminate love of stories drawn from so many spheres, disciplines,
and media. It surges as if a dream version not only of The Odyssey and
Sullivan’s Travels, but also a spate of other texts and cultural or historical
events and figures, including I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), The
Wizard of Oz, The Grapes of Wrath, and Cool Hand Luke. Huey Long (and
his literary and filmic counterpart Willie Stark of Robert Penn Warren’s
All the King’s Men), who was also a notoriously hypocritical politician who
used music and a “stump band” to rile up crowds (Romney 129), is ech-
oed in Pappy O’Daniel. Blues singer Robert Johnson, part of whose legend
is that he sold his soul to the devil for the gift of music, is evoked by
Tommy Johnson (Chris Thomas King). Parchman Farm, the Mississippi
State Penitentiary, was an institution synonymous throughout the
American South with punishment, brutality, and racism (see Oshinsky); a
1959 recording at Parchman Farm of a chain gang singing “Po’ Lazarus” is
the first song we hear in the film. The Tennessee Valley Authority, which
brought cheap electricity to portions of the rural South during the Great
Depression, is an historical source for the flooding Everett attributes to
the government’s initiation of a new “Enlightenment.” All compelling
stories and characters—some historical, others fictional, the sources for
this film are wide-ranging and provocative.
The Coen brothers’ bent for adaptation is very much about their
interest in “hideous progeny,” the strange and intriguing things the
imagination can do with a variety of source texts. They meld stories
from different perspectives. Seeley suggests that the multiple sources of
O Brother engage southern history in an important way, resisting a kind
of “cultural monologism” represented in the one eye and single vision
of Big Dan (descendent not only of Homer’s Cyclops, I would add, but
of Joyce’s one-eyed anti-Semitic Irish xenophobe in the “Cyclops” epi-
sode of Ulysses): “By playing with the celluloid remnants of films past,”
Seeley writes, “this assemblage of allusions to past styles and genres
also comments on the very attempt to offer a packaged, monological
account of regional culture” (104). I would further argue that the cul-
tural value Seeley finds in O Brother, Where Art Thou? models a more
open theory and practice of adaptation.
There are more serious things at stake in connection with O Brother

than some critics have allowed. Critics have lambasted the Coens’
postmodernist bent,6 the “hall of mirrors” they construct (Hoberman,
qtd. in Palmer 45). Rafferty calls the Coens “nihilistic showoffs” (Spiro
63), and McGavin sees O Brother as “cold” (qtd. in Seeley 97). McGavin
captures the resistance of many to the Coens’ films when he refers to
them as “postmodern pranksters,” suggesting a kind of shallowness in
their play “in the corner of the sandbox,” as the brothers themselves
have labeled their filmmaking. Critics often object to what they see as
the Coens’ contempt for their characters, who are extremely unlikable
(Marge Gunderson of Fargo being a notable exception). Apart from the
strain in popular culture that insists that film characters be “people”
we can identify with,7 the charge that the Coens eschew the warmth of
human relations and happy endings misses the point of their fascina-
tion with world-making, in which their will to adapt plays a crucial part.
That the Coens affect unfamiliarity with their stated sources further
ignites the debate and charge that there is “no real point” (Seeley 98) to
their films. Still, as Seeley and others argue, there are substantive themes
in O Brother concerning the commercialization of art, the exploitation
and hypocrisy of social and religious institutions, and the bonds (albeit
sometimes unstable bonds) of humans. Rowell calls O Brother a “singular
biting social drama that defies categorization” (244) and notes the film’s
“more serious message, about subjugation” (248) and the “importance
of solidarity” (249). This may be why the film relies so heavily on three-
shots or four-shots, in which the boys’ solidarity is figured in the mise-
en-scène, as, for example, in Figure 3.1, where they are sandwiched
between imprisoning brick walls.
Figure 3.1 O Brother, Where Art Thou? The three boys hiding from capture
As much as critics and viewers may find O Brother light or superficial,

it has glommed on to the desires of Odysseus, Dorothy Gale, and
Sullivan to reclaim a meaningful existence in their communities.
While the Coens despise institutions and see only vestiges of hope in
individuals’ power to create meaningful lives for themselves (e.g., their
anti-heroes are usually helpless), the critique embedded in these values
is a serious one. The seriousness of that critique can be missed by those
understandably focused on the surface appeals of O Brother. The film is
allusively rich and very funny, and its wonderful soundtrack, produced
by T Bone Burnett, was so popular that it initiated, as Rowell observes
(244), “an American roots music revival.” But the film is also a scathing
condemnation of hypocrisy and failed institutions. The Coens are ruth-
less in their critique of forces that claim to problem-solve while often
exploiting the saps who give themselves over to such institutions. Even
the intellectual life and education are parodied in Everett’s speech. This
occurs throughout the film, as when this know-it-all wonders aloud to
Pete’s cousin Wash if it might be “the acme of foolishness” to inquire
whether or not he has a hair net.8
But the overarching theme of Sullivan’s Travels that inspired the Coen
brothers remains the idea that film (and particularly film comedy) pro-
vides an important escape from life, that “cockeyed caravan” (to quote
Sullivan) full of inequality and despair. Sturges here provides a sleight
of hand. As full of screwball dialogue as Sturges’s films so famously
are, Sullivan’s Travels includes a striking six-minute silent montage of
Sullivan and The Girl moving through flop houses and food shelters, a
piece of Depression-era documentary realism that presents the very real-
ity the film claims to want to escape from. Like Sturges, the Coens create
a madcap comedy that nevertheless engages the brutality of racism and
the sustenance of human bonds, whether the trio of Delmar, Pete, and
Everett or the charismatic pair of Penny and Everett.
While the Coen brothers often represent the frailty of human rela-
tions, in O Brother they pay tribute, once again following Sturges, to
camaraderie, to a brotherhood apparently like their own, characterized
by work that is also play. The Coens claim to be “joined at the quip”
[Allen xii]). O Brother uses montage (as in Sullivan’s Travels) to convey
this idea of brotherhood. While making their way toward Everett’s
(nonexistent) treasure, the boys have fun on the road. They steal a
pie from a window sill (while leaving money in its place) and then
tell stories by a campfire—scenes of fraternizing and fun scored by the
song “I’ll Fly Away.” In Sullivan’s Travels, Sullivan and The Girl have
fun, too. They banter and play, laugh at and with one another, and, at
Sullivan’s estate, throw one another (and the butler) into the pool. The
camaraderie, like the community of those parodying Hearts of Darkness
discussed in Chapter 2, remains a value perhaps more durable than
grandiose universals such as knowledge and truth. Nor, it is worth men-
tioning, does the fun and fraternizing rule out a certain nobility. When
The Girl tells Sullivan he is “like those knights of old who used to ride
around looking for trouble,” Sturges makes fun of Sullivan’s quixotic
journey but also very genuinely compliments his earnestness and helps
us understand, and share, The Girl’s attraction to him.
A significant moment of human bonding in O Brother occurs just
after Everett confesses to Pete and Delmar that he lied about the treas-
ure because they were chained together and lying was the only way to
convince Pete and Delmar to try to escape. Pete begins to choke and yell
at Everett, and Delmar muses that the time he would have to serve for
escaping from prison means he would be 84 when he is finally released.
They are never more sharply divided. It is the prospect of saving Tommy
from a lynching that shifts their attention. Their solidarity resumed, the
three brave the Ku Klux Klan to save their friend and fellow musician.
Rowell nicely explores the centrality of chains in the film, “which refer
not only to slavery and bondage but also to the ties formed in friend-
ship.” Moreover, she notes, the chain metaphor refers to the “the unify-
ing bonds of art and music” and the “cultural links—often stretched and
distorted through the Coens’ sardonic lens.” (247). For Rowell, and this
I would also stress, “music and storytelling are chains that connect—and
empower.” This Tommy-saving scene ties together the Coens’ portrait
of subjugation and camaraderie, and the importance of music and art.
Postmodernism may imply “pranksterism,” but it also alludes to an
anti-hierarchical stance that emphasizes human bonds, as well as a
self-referentiality within the literary and artistic worlds, that privilege
art and the imagination over the failures of individual agency and the
frailties of the human condition. Paying tribute to artistic influence,
the Coens are aesthetes. The cinematography in O Brother, Where Art
Thou? has been much remarked upon, with Roger Deakins’s pioneering
digital photography transposing the American South into a parched
dream vision. The baptism scene may parody religious salvation, but
the images are visually spectacular, even haunting, especially the mass
of flowing white gowns of the supplicants moving through the woods
and toward the river singing “Down to the River to Pray.”
Many shots in the film showcase the Coens’ aesthetic virtuosity and
their love of mise-en-scène. In an issue of In Camera, Deakins describes
the Coens’ photographic vision in O Brother: “Ethan and Joel favored a
Figure 3.2 O Brother, Where Art Thou? Stunning cinematography
dry, dusty, delta look with low golden sunsets” (2). Desaturating the lush
greens of a Mississippi summer, Deakins converted to digital photogra-
phy and recolored the landscape with burnt tones, seen, for example, in
the stunning long shot of the Blind Seer and the boys traveling the rail-
road tracks on a handcar (see Figure 3.2). The visually arresting dream
world cinema makes possible may also explain why The Wizard of Oz,
with its kaleidoscopic use of color, remains for the Coens a touchstone.
While they reveal social ills and corruption and also celebrate camara-
derie, the Coen brothers locate human value primarily in the pleasures
of imagination, where they also find the energy of adaptation. Echoing
Sullivan’s wacky professional team and his fun and Romantic chemistry
with The Girl, O Brother shows its adaptation of the pleasures of the
journey in its signature mise-en-scène, three-shots of the boys that the
Coens at certain points model specifically on scenes from The Wizard of
Oz. Everett’s achievement in finding home is like Dorothy’s, which is less
the focus of her story, really, than the peregrinations with her buddies,
and the brains, heart, and bravery that saving her elicit in the Scarecrow,
the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion. Everett, Delmar, and Pete display
similar courage and commitment as they save Tommy from a lynching.
For Dorothy, meaningful things happen in Oz, a striking contrast
with home, where she is ignored by family and friends. As James Walters
notes, in Oz “emotions and action are abundantly heightened and exag-
gerated” (71). The vitality of this “imagined world” is the only “answer”
available to Dorothy, which is the abiding appeal of The Wizard of Oz for
the Coen brothers. An alternate imagined world of support and friend-
ship, Oz is a source for the world of Everett, Delmar, and Pete. While
serving as another example of the Coens’ irreverent juxtaposition, its
Figures 3.3 O Brother, Where Art Thou? The three boys looking at lynching; The
Wizard of Oz. Saving Dorothy
choreographed Ku Klux Klan ritual alludes to Busby Berkeley and, even

more immediately, to the march of the Winkie Guards in the Wicked
Witch’s castle in The Wizard. The boys, as seen in Figure 3.3, watch the
beginning of the ritual from above, in a shot that Joel Coen distinctly
links to The Wizard.9
Interestingly, Dorothy is, like many of the Coens’ characters,
“attempting to find a place to be heard and understood” (Walters 61).
That place is not home, but a temporary or contingent haven in dreams

and the imagination: a fictional world, like the Coens’ adaptations, with
its own absurdities, that only sometimes harks back to the real world in
weird and distinct ways. When Sullivan complains about his inability to
go deep into the “trouble” he seeks, he says it’s almost as if he is being
taught a lesson—“You don’t belong out here in real life.” For the Coens,
“real life,” like original ideas, is overrated. They prefer working in Candy
Land, as in the “Big Rock Candy Mountain” song O Brother begins with,
a hobo’s dream of paradise as an escape from the misery of his life.
A “rich cinematic intertext” (Palmer 132), O Brother, Where Art Thou?
epitomizes the notion of “hideous progeny”: born of other works it
is obsessed with but not beholden to, the film invites viewers into an
absurdist alternate world where myriad referents invite different per-
spectives. Consistently set against one-eyed myopia of any sort, the
Coens take Homer’s belief in storytelling and magical adventure and
graft onto it Sullivan’s encomium to comic filmmaking and the ordi-
nary pleasures of life. They pepper their story and mise-en-scène with
“allusive wizardry” (Rowell 263) worthy of Oz and create a window
onto a weird fictional universe that values the imagination, play, and
friendship (of a Coen-brotherly sort).
Part II
Textual and Marginal Identities
4
Imitations of Life and Art
The works called Imitation of Life—Fannie Hurst’s 1933 novel and its two
film adaptations, John M. Stahl’s in 1934 and Douglas Sirk’s in 1959—
investigate a series of ideas about selfhood and identity, adapting not
only previous texts but also a cultural history and debate about “passing.”
Resonating powerfully with novels about passing, such as Nella Larsen’s
Passing (1929) and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970), this sequence of
texts reveals how adaptations display their richest meaning in conversa-
tion with other works. Often these adaptations are deeply self-conscious
about their provisional nature as singular free-standing texts. The
Imitation of Life texts tap into reader and viewer ambivalence about repre-
sentations of race and of gender roles. The wildly varied responses these
works elicit suggest their importance in examining the ways in which
adaptations can ignite discussion about differing perspectives on textual
and cultural matters. These works raise issues of fixity and change that are
at the heart of adaptation theory, as well as of American cultural politics.
In The Bluest Eye, Morrison’s focal character is named Pecola, akin
to the character named Peola in both Hurst’s novel and the 1934 film
Imitation of Life. (The glossary of Harlem slang that Zora Neale Hurston
appended to her 1942 short story “Story in Harlem Slang” defined
“pe-ola” as “a very white Negro girl.”) Because the production and reception
of adaptations are so dependent upon socio-cultural change, adaptations
haunt their source(s) with new perspectives brought to bear by such
change. In the case of the Imitation of Life novel and films, these changes
include race and American society; ideologies surrounding capitalism
and motherhood; and gendered attitudes toward melodrama. These
themes are a particularly resonant version of “hideous progeny” in the
context of African-American history and literature, and the adaptations
in this chapter can be seen to redress, if not resolve, representations of
83
race history. The Bluest Eye certainly falls into this mode of presenting
different perspectives on cultural history. By agitating sources to re-
present their concerns in light of more contemporary observations and
insights, the adaptations discussed here, like the instances of intertextu-
ality addressed throughout this study, are active “Creatures,” engaging
the past in their attempt to rewrite the present.
***
In the 1959 version of Imitation of Life, the heroine Annie Johnson (Juanita
Moore) says of her light-skinned daughter Sarah Jane (Susan Kohner), who
has been passing in school, that “it’s a sin to be ashamed of what you are.”
Annie’s conviction is at once an Emersonian call to be true to the self
and akin to blaming the victim, since it is not Sarah Jane’s fault that who
she is has been oppressively defined by a racist society. Annie’s critique
raises questions about the wisdom and possibility of such adherence to
fixed notions of identity when that identity is objectified by the culture
at large. The 1959 Imitation of Life presents a critical crux in its lambasting
of inauthenticity and its sorrowful recognition of the psychosocial limits
of passing, which can also be figured as an alternative remaking of the
self. Refashioning identity to navigate a world brutally hostile to parts of
the self, “passing,” in this film and in the others works in this sequence,
represents a negotiation of identities as a means of survival.
This chapter posits the notion of remaking the self—implicit in the
present book’s understanding of a text as having an identity of its own—
as an analog to the adapted work’s protean engagement with its source.
Attempting to rewrite sources and reorient our perspective on them while
connecting to contemporary audiences, adaptations that have elastextity
can model fluid identities that break away from the restrictive language of
truth and falsity, the black-and-white constructions of reality and experi-
ence, that create ideological, confining boxes. Through their repetition and
shifting of perspectives on Hurst’s original novel, the works by Stahl, Sirk,
and Morrison illuminate the importance of seeing textual and personal
identities as unfixed. When we consider textual identities as fluid in the
context of adaptation studies, we see in the Imitation of Life sequence an
allied concept of adaptable personal and cultural identities in terms of
race and gender. In Imitation of Life, the notion of selfhood is shown to be
problematic insofar as it refers to fixed (and thus objectified) notions of
personal identity and to texts that are seen as fixed and unchanging, since
such a conceptualization not only limits or chokes off opportunities for
personal and literary creative adaptation but also reveals the “illusoriness of
self-affirmation” (Dyer, “Four Films,” 204). In a society so deeply invested
Imitations of Life and Art 85
in categorizing identity, the self is cornered by definition and yet judged

as inauthentic and escapist when it tries to rewrite its terms of existence.
While 19th-century American and British Romantic poets and essayists
celebrated change and progress, even revolution, they also lauded radical
selfhood as the vehicle for achieving change and a major gauge of suc-
cess in life. Adaptations point up the paradox at the heart of Romantic
ideologies: the powerful self remains isolated when it cannot converse
within a community and produce progeny that reanimate its parts. The
Romantic self, and the originary text, must play with others. As the
television series Breaking Bad parodies its main character Walter White’s
fantasy of radical freedom and authenticity beyond the conventions that
oppress him, so Imitation of Life’s multiple texts reveal the “true” self to
be a chimera. Rewritings of and responses to Hurst’s story show not only
the difficulties of sustaining stable identities in the face of racism and
sexism, but also deep sympathy for the negotiations of fragile selves seek-
ing to refashion identity and find safety in a hostile American landscape.
Parts of the Imitation of Life novel and films can be troubling to read
and painful to view. Racist stereotypes, as Sterling Brown first observed
in his scathing critique of what he termed Hurst’s “stock characters,”
are manifest in “the old stereotype of the contented Mammy, and the
tragic mulatto, and the ancient ideas about the mixture of the races”
(Brown 88). The representation of the slave-like mammy figure Delilah;
the idealization of white culture (poignantly critiqued by Morrison
in The Bluest Eye); the caricaturing dialect of Delilah (whose name is
changed to Annie in the Sirk film) in both Hurst’s novel and the 1934
film adaptation; and the seeming acquiescence of Delilah and Annie to
their subservient and sometimes degraded positions are indisputable
and troubling. Delilah, as Valerie Smith observes, is “devoid of any
desire other than to care for the white mistress” (48), and Annie, as Lucy
Fischer notes, has “a sense of contentment unknown to postwar black
women, for whom domestic work was a ‘last resort’” (17).
In the 1934 film, the language of mystification spoken by Delilah
Johnson (Louise Beavers) seems to reinforce her lack of agency and weak
intellectual tools:
Oh, it ain’t her fault, Miss Bea. It ain’t yours and it ain’t mine. I don’t
know rightly where the blame lies. It can’t be our Lord’s. It’s got me
puzzled.
In Sirk’s film, Annie establishes a different kind of quietude. While

no longer speaking in Delilah’s caricatured dialect, Annie often spouts
anodyne white cultural platitudes like “it’s a sin to be ashamed of what
you are.” Her lack of agency is illustrated by the quote attributed to her
in the film’s original poster (see Figure 4.2): “I can’t hate … even when
I’ve got every reason to.”
Alongside the black servant’s passive subservience, many have
claimed, is the African-American mother’s active idealization of white
culture, best exemplified in Delilah’s and Annie’s repeated figurations of
“the white velvet hearse” and the white horses they dream will eventu-
ally lead their spectacular funerals. That Delilah and Annie only wish
to serve Bea and Lora and then die reinforces these characters’ lack of
agency, “the apologist’s vision of the plantation mammy revisited”
(Smith 45, quoted in Branham 266). Delilah is at best powerless to
resist white domination (exhorting her daughter Peola in the novel to
“[keep] yourself in your place” [100]), and at worst identifies with her
oppressor by idealizing white laws and cultural practices that subjugate
African-Americans. Caputi pinpoints the critique often made of the
Imitation of Life sequence, as she references Morrison’s revisitation of
the story in her 1970 novel, which “[condemns] the racist culture’s wor-
ship of white standards of beauty, particularly as these are force-fed to
African-Americans through popular images—dolls, billboards, products,
trademarks, and Hollywood movies” (710–711).
Recognizing the racial self-loathing exacerbated by class division,
viewers no doubt recoil when Annie insists to Lora that she “[likes]
taking care of pretty things.” In The Bluest Eye, Pecola’s mother Pauline
goes to the movies to see white female stars, though this “made com-
ing home hard” (123). Morrison brilliantly rewrites a white portrait of
the idealized black servant in Imitation of Life from the perspective of its
injury to African-American self-image. Even Morrison’s representatives
of future hope, nine-year-old narrator Claudia and her ten-year-old sis-
ter Frieda, have names borrowed from Stahl’s and Sirk’s films—Claudia
a version of Claudette (Colbert, who plays Bea in the 1934 film) and
Frieda, the name of the white doll in the 1959 film that Lora’s six-year-
old daughter Susie prefers to the black doll Nancy, which eight-year-old
Sarah Jane fiercely rejects.
For Pecola in The Bluest Eye, however, more bruising than what
Morrison calls “the devastation that even casual racial contempt can
cause” (Foreword, xi) is the damage of internalized racism. At 11, she is
raped by her father Cholly, himself a victim of parental abuse:
Abandoned in a junk heap by his mother, rejected for a crap game

by his father, there was nothing more to lose. He was alone with his
own perceptions and appetites, and they alone interested him. (160)
Pecola drinks white milk and generally accedes to the stronger will
of others around her. She is tortured by other children and deceived by
adults, culminating in the rape by her father. Her mother is enraptured
by white culture, a point Morrison metaphorically alludes to through
Pauline’s blueberry pies, pointing to the blue eyes Pecola craves.
The tragic idealization of whiteness in African-American culture is
portrayed as a horrible violence in The Bluest Eye, evident in Morrison’s
description of Pauline’s vocation to serve the Fishers, the rich white
couple who employ her:
She became what is known as an ideal servant, for such a role filled
practically all of her needs. When she bathed the little Fisher girl, it
was in a porcelain tub with silvery taps running infinite quantities of
hot, clear water. She dried her in fluffy white towels and put her in
cuddly night clothes. (127)
A history of degradation and self-loathing inherited by one genera-

tion after the other, the story culminates in Pecola’s descent into mad-
ness. She loses her self in a fantasy that she has magically been awarded
blue eyes, the apotheosis of beauty defined by a white world. From
her title on, Morrison reveals the destructive effects of idealizing white
culture, a false idol that contributes to black self-loathing. Tragically,
at the center of Morrison’s “bleak narrative of psychological murder”
(Foreword, x) is Pecola, who like Sarah Jane in the 1959 Imitation of Life
was (in the words of her mother, Annie) “born to be hurt,” because of
race, class, and gender injustices over which she has no control.
For many, however, there are counter narratives in these works.
Some readers and viewers see in the African-American mother a figure
of strength and caring who calls attention to injustice and the flaws
of society. The strongest critical voice in defense of Delilah is that of
Lauren Berlant, who sees in Delilah one who “talks back to the nation
… on the political brutality of the national public sphere” (125). In
Hurst’s novel, Delilah imagines heaven as a place where there are “no
such heart-breakin’ colors as black and white” (149). The comment is
important as it articulates “black and white” as ephemeral construc-
tions, a point she reinforces when she notes that “de Lawd” may see “all
men is equal” (100), unlike “de eyes of man.” Further, Delilah’s preoccu-
pation with her death echoes a tradition of African-American sublima-
tion of oppression into Christian theology, gospel songs, poetry—like
Nat Turner’s prophecies or Phillis Wheatley’s celebration of the better
life in heaven, “Freed from a world of sin, and snares, and pain” (“On
the Death of a Young Lady of Five Years of Age,” l. 25). As is the case for
many of the outcast figures discussed throughout this study, Delilah’s
life is tinged with death; her survival depends tragically on projecting
an afterlife in which she might have some agency and a voice.
Berlant is interested not only in Delilah, but in Delilah’s and Bea’s
mutual partnership, their status as a “quasi-companionate couple” who
enjoy, in Stahl’s film, “the sisterhood of the laboring body” (Berlant
114, 142). As Berlant notes, though, this business relationship ceases
to function as progressive once the women achieve success in capital-
ist terms. Significantly, that business partnership falls entirely out of
Sirk’s 1959 adaptation, which is, for many, a sign of the later film’s
conservative cultural politics. But Sirk’s film, though painfully regres-
sive in certain ways, is also powerful in its portrait of racism and the
victimization of profoundly misunderstood and desperate individuals.
This critique of racism goes back to Hurst’s novel, which, though also
deeply troubling in aspects of its representation and acceptance of rac-
ist stereotypes, draws attention to the evils of racism. One thinks, for
example, of the doctor who summarily stops treating Peola once he
finds out she is black (187). Though they employ troubling and racist
stereotypes in their representations, all of these texts intend to show the
brutality of racism, clear not only in the horrible beating of Sarah Jane
by her white boyfriend Frankie (Troy Donahue) when he discovers that
she is black, but also more subtly in the combined racism and classicism
in Lora’s assumption that Sarah Jane’s date is the son of a neighbor’s
(black) chauffeur, or even in Lora’s surprise that Annie has a private life,
with many friends, beyond her duties in Lora’s household.
Because the 1959 Imitation of Life is a more melodramatic adaptation
of Hurst’s 1933 novel than its 1934 predecessor, the film raises unique
questions about the fixity of source texts that are interestingly allied
with the stories’ theme of fixed identity. The differences among these
works are in part produced by cultural change. Generically, the Sirkian
melodrama transposes Stahl’s Depression-era woman’s film into an
ambivalent expression of dramatic changes in race and gender on the
cultural horizon in 1959. One major example of the film’s progres-
sive agenda is its inclusion of Mahalia Jackson, whom Harry Belafonte
famously called “the single most powerful black woman in the United
States.” Jackson’s appearance as the choir soloist at Annie’s funeral
brings the civil rights movement directly into the film, a gesture empha-
sized by the considerable time Sirk devotes to her singing. Her gospel
expression also echoes the African-American tradition referenced above
of finding solace in Christian death songs.
Marina Heung comments on how the documentary tone of the

portrayal of the black neighborhood at the film’s conclusion reinforces
the film’s critique of racism. In dramatic tension with the film’s over-
arching melodrama, the documentary realism of its film’s final scenes
reminds the viewer of the social stakes and civil rights context that
undergird this film. Berlant further notes that the “concealed but vital
and ongoing public sphere within the black community” shown at the
end of the film “deconstructs the simulacrum of ‘one’ American pub-
lic sphere and reveals that the notion of one dominant culture is one
of the culture’s most powerful myths” (131). In contrast to the film’s
dominant narrative and mise-en-scène, its conclusion offers a differ-
ent perspective—that of the black community—and finds the most
authentic expression of emotion in the film (and, as Dyer observes,
its “high point of grief” [205]) to be within the black community.
Like other creative adaptations’ challenge to a dominant text and a
dominant narrative, the 1959 Imitation of Life brings Hurst’s source
and Stahl’s version into a present utterly self-conscious about the civil
rights movement. As Fischer observes,
Sarah Jane’s attempt to “pass” at school reminds us of the struggles

around Brown vs. the Board of Education; her rejection of a black doll
invokes research on children’s racial identification; her anger with
her mother bespeaks her generation’s rejection of domestic work;
her affair with a white man reminds us of loosening prohibitions
against screen miscegenation; Mahalia Jackson’s presence at Annie’s
funeral sparks associations to the singer’s participation in civil rights
demonstrations, and her role in mainstreaming of [sic] black gospel
music. (18–19)
In Sirk’s film, Sarah Jane is a defiant progeny of Peola. Viewers have

to work to sympathize with her, as Sarah Jane’s cruelty toward her
mother Annie is more visceral and angry than the more pleading tone
of Peola (Fredi Washington) in Stahl’s film. Sarah Jane’s more aggressive
portrayal of her insistence that she be free to pass is best exemplified
by her parody of a servant slave at one of Lora’s parties. Still burning
over the fact that Lora has assumed that her date is black, Sarah Jane
rebels through parody, another critically-oriented form of “imitation.”
She mocks Lora’s ignorant assumption and desire that she stick to her
own kind and submit to the servant life defined for her by her class and
race by imitating the role of a slave, carrying a party tray on her head
and saying to Lora, in front of her bewildered guests, “Fetched y’all a
mess of crawdads, Miss Lora, for you and yo’ friends …. Oh, no trick to
totin’, Miss Lora. I learned it from my mammy, and she learned it from
ol’ massa ‘fore she belonged to you.”
It is worth considering whether the “mammy” here is an indirect ref-
erence to Delilah’s broad smile, brandished in neon in Stahl’s Imitation of
Life, and the minstrel-show dialect prominent in the previous film and
novel. Sarah Jane’s “imitation” of minstrelsy can be seen as part of a long
cultural narrative adaptation that extends even to Spike Lee’s conclud-
ing montage in Bamboozled (2000) of racist minstrel images of African-
Americans in the history of film and media. In this scene in Imitation of
Life, Sarah Jane confronts Lora with the history of a separation of black
from white and of white privilege that Lora and Annie repress. If Annie
treats racial divides as irrelevant or inoffensive, Lora pretends that they
do not exist, demonstrating her white privilege in her insistence to
Sarah Jane that the young woman’s rebellion “won’t solve anything.”
However, Sarah Jane’s repeated efforts to break free of the mold exter-
nally imposed on her reveal “imitation” as adaptation and as a more
authentic response to an intractable, and finally unacceptable, reality.
Passing, the performance of race as a form of adaptation, is viewed
sympathetically in these works. As Traci Abbott observes in connec-
tion with Peola, her passing is “a courageous assertion that her public
identity match her personal beliefs about the instability of race” (649).
Abbott’s important reminder that it is society that is at fault and not
Peola (“Peola’s misery is an outgrowth of her environment” [649]) is
seemingly harder for viewers to appreciate in the case of Sarah Jane,
who is more patently cruel to Annie than Peola is to Delilah. While the
denial of identity politics in passing is painful for readers and viewers,
the violation of Sarah Jane’s responsibility to acknowledge her mother’s
love and sacrifices exceeds many viewers’ compassion for her suffering.
When I teach Imitation of Life to undergraduates, they become angry
with first Peola’s then Sarah Jane’s considerably more emphatic outward
contempt for their mothers. The sympathy for Sarah Jane’s resistance,
like Peola’s, to a system that denies her independence, freedom, and
safety is trumped by her active rejection of maternal caring. Going to
the core of sanctified relations in American culture, Imitation of Life thus
pits the ungrateful child against the victim of racism. Students have
to work to find Sarah Jane sympathetic, because their response can be
clouded by an overinvestment in the mother figure, who represents an
idea of nurturing that is often seen as acultural, apolitical.
Nella Larsen’s interventions in the cultural ideation of motherhood in
her novel Passing are worth noting. Clare Kendry, an African-American
woman passing as white, poses multiple psychosocial threats to Irene

Redfield, her similarly light-skinned childhood friend who has made
different choices and now is living a prominent and comfortable life in
Harlem with her husband, a black doctor, and children. One of the threats
Clare’s reappearance presents to Irene’s “safe” life is the former’s casual
dismissal of the value of motherhood: “Children aren’t everything ….
There are other things in the world” (123). An African-American literary
daughter of Edna Pontellier, the heroine of Kate Chopin’s 1899 novel
The Awakening, Clare rebels against “the mother-woman” (Chopin 8) as
well as against Irene’s moral judgment, a product of her role, according
to W. E. B. Dubois, as a “race-conscious Puritan” (98).
Undergraduate readers and viewers tend to distinguish themselves
from the perspective of ungrateful or abandoned children, and their
ambivalence is only fueled by the assertion, on the part of critics, of
Sarah Jane’s and Peola’s “justified rebellion against [their] mother’s
powerlessness and servility” (Heung 315). And indeed, as Heung,
Abbott, and others note, it is Delilah’s and Annie’s subservience to rac-
ism that raises the stakes in Peola’s and Sarah Jane’s bids for freedom.
The more Delilah in the novel insists “[a]in’t no way to dye black white”
(149), the more Peola (and her more “hideous progeny,” Sarah Jane)
seeks to enact her own idea of American freedom and individualism—
found, ironically enough, only in Bolivia, to where Peola escapes at the
end of the novel. This notion of self-expression that emphasizes a pur-
suit of freedom from oppression is opposed to another idea of selfhood,
which focuses on self-acceptance.
The challenge of the novel Imitation of Life is that it draws to the
surface the fact that identity is never divorced from political realities.
Is Delilah telling Peola to accept being black, surely a maternally sanc-
tioned lesson in self-acceptance, or to acquiesce to racist social rules
that make her miserable, which implicates Delilah (and, obviously, the
author Hurst) in the “decimation of Black female spirit and sanity”
(Caputi 713)? Such questions present divergent views of the novel’s
characters, challenge the varied perspectives readers and filmgoers bring
to these texts. Peola’s appeal (in both the novel and the film) specifi-
cally addresses this issue of perspective: “You’ve succeeded in a world
that matters to you! Give me that same chance” (Hurst 245–246). It
also foregrounds the parallel between the daughter, Peola, struggling to
establish a life in which she will be free from pain, and another mother,
Bea (and, to a lesser extent, Lora), who similarly desires independence
from stifling social conventions. Bea is “the mother figure … who, like
Peola, refuses to stay in her ‘place’” (Gosselin, quoted in Abbott 650).
Lora may be upset by Sarah Jane’s behavior toward Annie, establishing

the terms of sympathy by which viewers can judge Sarah Jane, but Sirk’s
film also draws out both Lora’s and Sarah Jane’s resistance to the cultural
roles to which they are assigned. While the race politics of this story are
vexing, the representations of gender and motherhood are challeng-
ing as well. Much has been said about Lora’s ambition blinding her to
the more “authentic” roles of wife and mother. Many have also drawn
attention to Bea’s strength as an unconventional working woman who
succeeds, at least initially, by “passing” as a man (i.e., identifying herself
as “B. Pullman”). Kristi Branham sees a strong feminist element in the
portrait of Bea, noting that Hurst critiques inadequate social forms by
showing Bea’s “inability to connect with home, her culturally assigned
space” (260). Heung succinctly notes that Bea represents “women’s
resistance to the social order” (22).
Though for many readers, the end of the novel Imitation of Life pun-
ishes Bea for her independence and ambition, this judgment seems
a limited way of responding to the conclusion. Bea is shocked at the
end to learn that Frank Flake, a younger man who has worked for her
and with whom she has fallen in love, has also fallen for her daughter
Jessie. While the suddenness of the denouement of a lengthy novel
may violate readers’ expectations, Hurst shows flatly the impossibility
for women to achieve fulfillment in the realms of love and professional
success. This conclusion, one of the most fascinating aspects of Hurst’s
novel, enacts a realization so traumatic for Bea that some readers have
faulted Hurst for failing to imagine a happier ending; Daniel Itzkovitz,
for example, writes that it is “curious that Hurst did not come up with
more alternatives for her heroine” (xxv).
Decrying, in this ending, an authorial capitulation to imagined
reader expectations that a working woman cannot be successful in love,
many are disappointed by Bea’s failure to end up with Frank Flake. If
some readers (including myself) find him to be a lightweight mate for
Bea beyond even what his name would suggest, the novel’s ending
reinforces a view of Frank’s weakness as much as anything else. Frank
hasn’t the maturity to appreciate Bea’s virtue as a romantic partner,
and his obvious interest in her until he is required to take bold action
in consummating their obvious attraction surely reflects his own inau-
thenticity. Whether or not this makes Jessie a more appropriate match
for Frank, it reveals him as altogether inappropriate for Bea. That men
and women in Hurst’s era had not adapted to the prospect of meeting a
strong woman in new terms of equality is part of the critique embedded
in the novel’s finale.
Condemning Hurst for not giving Bea a conventionally romantic,

happy ending is an interpretive habit that mistakes bracing narrative
choices—Hurst’s decision to emphasize Bea’s double bind in a culture
invested in limited roles for women—for a failed feminist agenda, a topic
I take up in connection with Todd Haynes’s [Safe] in the next chapter.
On the contrary, Hurst avoids a romantic ending, forcing the reader
to contemplate the obstacles to female desire. Stahl’s 1934 adaptation
similarly separates Bea and Stephen Archer (the successor to the novel’s
Frank). Though the film’s ending is less threatening to a popular audi-
ence’s conceptions of maternity and love, it retains the novel’s focus on
the tragic choices Bea makes because she is a woman. In the tradition
of the Stella Dallas franchise and Hollywood women’s melodrama, Bea
sacrifices Stephen to protect her relationship with Jessie, who has fallen
in love with him. But Stephen and Bea are mutually in love; there is no
one-sided affair, as there is at the end of the novel between Bea and the
inadequate Frank. Thus the movie draws cleaner ideological lines by
showing Bea to have chosen motherhood over romantic love, sending
Stephen off—perhaps, however, to reunite with her at some later time.
Despite the conceptual tidiness of the conclusion of the 1934 Imitation
of Life, the final images, dialogue, and performances belie such easy ide-
ological closure. One of the film’s strangest moments is the final shot,
after Bea has parted with Stephen, when Jessie appears. Bea reminds
Jessie of when she was two, circling the viewer back to the first scene
of the film, when baby Jessie repeatedly cried for her toy rubber duck,
“Want my quack-quack.” At the end of the film, the line Bea repeats to
adult Jessie, “I want my quack-quack,” now expresses Bea’s melancholic
desire, as well as reminding both the audience and Jessie of the toddler
she once was. The most evocative gesture of female desire in the film,
this moment uniquely adapts Hurst’s exploration of yearning—i.e.,
desire foiled by cultural constructions of race and gender—into a decep-
tively simple and silly, but nevertheless moving refrain.
With regard to gender, the ending of the 1934 film, on the one hand,
is ameliorative: Bea and Jessie end up together; the repeated final line, “I
want my quack-quack,” can be read as Bea’s resumption of her primary
role as mother. On the other hand, the conclusion is quite gloomy.
Bea wants more—something ineffable for a woman in modern culture,
given the choice she faces—that might only be expressed obliquely (“I
want my quack-quack”). Cleverly couched in a way that can simultane-
ously indicate Bea’s embrace of her maternal responsibility and also the
loss of sexual fulfillment, the ending softens Hurst’s uncompromising
finale for Bea.
In the 1959 film adaptation, Bea Pullman has become Lora Meredith
(Lana Turner), an actress instead of an entrepreneur. Reportedly changed
to fit Lana Turner’s star text and unconventionally older age for a lead-
ing woman (Turner was 38 at the film’s release), the role of actress liter-
alizes the notion of “imitation” and creates an apt vehicle for the film’s
melodrama. After learning that her daughter Susie (this film’s version
of the novel’s and earlier film’s Jessie) has a crush on Lora’s fiancé Steve
Archer, Lora tells Susie (Sandra Dee) that she will give Steve up if Lora’s
relationship with him causes a rift between mother and daughter. Susie
replies, “Oh, mama, stop acting!” And Lora’s line was self-consciously
delivered as melodrama, exemplifying her inauthenticity.
There was, of course, an underlying real-life melodrama involving
Turner and her daughter Cheryl Crane. The year before the film’s
release, Cheryl killed Turner’s lover, gangster Johnny Stompanato, com-
ing to her mother’s defense after he and Turner had been arguing heat-
edly. This scandal was much on the minds of moviegoers at the time,
and for many who have viewed the film over the past quarter-century,
Susie’s “Oh, mama, stop acting!” resonates with Cheryl Crane’s com-
ment on her own mother’s behavioral style (made in her 1988 auto-
biography, Detour: A Hollywood Story): “For mother,” she said, “life was
a movie” (57). Reflecting on her own experience as the daughter of a
narcissistic celebrity, Crane cast her mother’s maternal gestures as “nice
cinematic moments” (quoted in Fischer 25) and reports a “shiver of
recognition” watching Lora and Susie (Fischer 26). Because of Turner’s
comeback (or “return,” as Sunset Boulevard’s Norma Desmond would
have it), the sordid Stompanato killing behind the scenes,1 and the
dysfunctional relationship between Turner and Crane, Sirk’s version of
Imitation of Life becomes indelibly about the glamour and emptiness of
American celebrity (“this rotten place, Hollywood,” as Sirk so viscerally
called it [Halliday 231]). The film adapts a contemporary obsession with
celebrity (that still resonates today) as a complement to other examples
of imitation.
Indeed, it is Lora’s distance from what the film seems to offer as the
truer or more real value of motherhood that casts her as the problem
in this film. Certainly viewers looking for validation of self-sacrificing
mothers will find solace in recognizing Lora’s mistakes and in her con-
cluding redemption, when her mother role is restored—she comforts
Sarah Jane in the car at her mother Annie’s funeral, with Susie alongside
her, and Steve gazing on the reconstructed maternal unit. The film has
been seen by many as a postwar conservative affirmation of women’s
return to the domestic sphere. In this view, Lora’s insistence on
individualistic desire and a career (“I want more … everything,” she

tells Steve. “Maybe too much.”) is revealed, as that “Maybe” suggests,
to be a chimera, and she is led to return to the truer values of family,
home, and motherhood. Like the 1934 adaptation, Sirk’s film plays into
a conventional audience’s desire to see family values affirmed by the
story’s conclusion. In his film, there is no longer even a loss suffered
by the mother once she has reasserted her maternal role, since Steve
remains in the fold, putting the patriarchal stamp of approval on the
idyll following Annie’s funeral. However, the ending is more a sop to
Hollywood studio demands than an organically conceived conclusion
to the narrative of the film. Sirk himself says as much:
[Y]ou don’t believe the happy end, and you’re not really supposed
to. What remains in your memory is the funeral. The pomp of the
dead, anyway the funeral. You sense it’s hopeless, even though in a
very bare and brief little scene afterwards the happy turn is being
indicated. Everything seems to be OK, but you well know it isn’t.
By just drawing out the characters you certainly could get a story—
along the lines of hopelessness, of course. You could just go on. Lana
will forget about her daughter again, and go back to the theatre and
continue as the kind of actress she has been before. Gavin will go off
with some other woman. Susan Kohner will go back to the escape
world of vaudeville. Sandra Dee will marry a decent guy. The circle
will be closed. But the point is you don’t have to do this. And if you
did, you would get a picture that the studio would have abhorred.
(Halliday 229)
Sirk’s mise-en-scène corresponds to this darker reading of Imitation of

Life. The resolution offered in the car at the end of the film takes place
in cramped quarters, and, for Sirk, one moment’s nestling is another’s
confinement. Throughout the film, there is a marked association
between intimacy and entrapment, the best example of which occurs
when Steve first asks Lora to marry him. The scene takes place in the
cramped hallway of Lora’s apartment building. A neighbor carrying
Christmas presents squeezes by Lora and Steve as they talk, forcing the
couple to shift awkwardly in the hallway (Figure 4.1).
Deflating the romantic potential of the scene, Lora’s response to
Steve’s question about whether she loves him is interestingly vague—
“I think I do.” Like the walls that limit the characters’ physical move-
ment in this scene, Steve’s proposal is inhibiting, and it is a welcome
relief to Lora that the phone rings back in her apartment to introduce
Figure 4.1 Imitation of Life: cramped hallway
a professional acting opportunity that will delay her commitment to

Steve. Rainer Werner Fassbinder famously said that in Sirk’s films people
are always planning their futures, and then the phone rings. Here, Sirk’s
counter-narrative to Steve and Lora “settling down” is that of a woman
desperate to wriggle out of such conventional expectations.
Lora’s ambition is itself figured as a sort of “hideous progeny,” whose
darkness is contrasted with the blonde, sunny conventionality of her
daughter Susie. Only minutes after telling Susie she isn’t sorry to have
missed out on starring in an Italian movie, Lora reacts excitedly to a tele-
gram from the Italian director meeting her terms to be in the picture. Susie
is visibly upset. In this feminist strain of Imitation of Life, Lora’s ambition
is a rebellion against the social roles that are enforced by Susie and Steve.
The original poster reproduced as Figure 4.2 positions Lora sugges-
tively as trapped among warring ideologies of motherhood, gender, and
race. The typescript points directly to her womb, as Lora’s arms widen
in a grand gesture, but of what? Keeping these columns demarcating
gender, race, and class apart? Holding them up? Pushing them down?
Steve’s returns in the film are tellingly schematic. The years pass, and
Steve continually reappears at the Meredith household. His patronizing
tagline appears in the poster: “I’m willing to give all my love … no
questions asked!” Viewers attuned to Steve’s regulatory function in the
film’s ideological ambivalence toward female ambition may come to
read this character as disingenuous, like a bad penny that keeps show-
ing up to reintroduce the false seductions of patriarchy. When Steve first
Figure 4.2 Imitation of Life: publicity poster

Source: Courtesy of the British National Archive.
proposes to Lora, he tells her not to pursue an acting opportunity that

has just come her way. That young Susie is so drawn to Steve reinforces
this reading of his role as a restorative father figure, resisted by Lora
throughout most of the film.
Like Lora, Sarah Jane is repeatedly figured in Sirk’s film as walled
in by social and familial expectations. The picture below shows her
Figure 4.3 Imitation of Life: Sarah Jane pinned among the masks on the wall at
the club
performing at a nightclub, flanked by a wall that she appears pinned to,

like the masks that surround her in the shot (Figure 4.3).
The masks are, on the surface, continuous with Sarah Jane’s seemingly
self-destructive mask as a white sexual object.2 However, the self beneath
her mask of whiteness is embattled too, for she cannot easily conform
to the limited categories of experience on offer as an African-American
woman who appears to be white. In this view, the “imitation” is not Sarah
Jane’s pretense that she is white, though the film is obviously pitched at
a certain level toward this reading. On the one hand, Sirk means viewers
to understand Sarah Jane’s passing as one of the film’s instances of imita-
tion. As the director said, in an interview with Jon Halliday,
[Sarah Jane tries] to escape her condition, sacrificing to her status in

society her bonds of friendship, family, etc., and rather trying to van-
ish into the imitation world of vaudeville. The imitation of life is not
the real life …. The picture is a piece of social criticism—of both black
and white. You can’t escape what you are. (Halliday 228)
On the other hand, in this same interview, Sirk expresses his belief that
there is no “real life,” anticipating Richard Dyer’s insight about the film’s
exploration of the “illusoriness of self-affirmation” (“Four Films” 204):
You can’t reach, or touch, the real. You just see reflections. If you try
to grasp happiness itself your fingers only meet glass. It’s hopeless.
(Sirk, in Halliday 228)
What, then, is the self, the “real” self to be affirmed “behind a

mask”?3 The fascination of Imitation of Life resides in large part in
this mise-en-abyme, the very depth of illusoriness embedded in the
American Dream that has offered inspiration to artists such as Sirk and,
later, Todd Haynes, when, in 2002, he made his splendid homage to
Sirkian melodrama, Far from Heaven. The stable self to be affirmed is a
fiction, just as “the real life” is ephemeral, a fantasy of authenticity that
itself masks the trauma these filmmakers associate with marginalized
figures trying to fit in. And thus these characters wear masks, which
only appear inauthentic until we consider that the self beneath the
mask is as embattled as is a life of imitation. The mask becomes a means
of survival, for, as Dyer observes, “if there is anything other than imita-
tion it is in suffering” (“Four Films” 205). Adapting to an intractable
reality, donning the mask forges a path toward safety.
One thinks here of Zora Neale Hurston’s fascinating relationship with
Fannie Hurst. Hurston was a longtime friend of Hurst’s (as well as her
driver for a time). As Fischer notes, “Despite their hierarchal position-
ing, the women became confidantes and Hurston regarded Hurst as a
friend and ally” (13). Further, Hurston wrote in her autobiography that
Hurst was one of two women who “most influenced her life (the other
being Ethel Waters)” (Fischer 13). Scholars have debated Hurston’s
motivation for maintaining an intimacy with Hurst. As Caputi observes:
Although Zora Neale Hurston assures Fannie Hurst that her work was
“true,” her own definition of mammy, published just two years later
in her 1942 “Glossary of Harlem Slang,” unmistakably acknowledges
some serious inauthenticity in at least part of Imitation of Life. I
spoke to Hurston critic Karla Holloway regarding this contradiction,
asking for her interpretation of Hurston’s motivations. Holloway
noted that Hurston, unable to express opinions openly which might
offend her sponsors, frequently adopted a mask in relation to them.
Yet, as Holloway adds, through her writing, Hurston, with all of her
estimable powers, could and did tell the truth; her writing became
for Hurston a means to “dissolve the mask.” (705)
“Clearly,” Fischer suggests, Hurston was part of the “grand set of

admirers” she refers to in a letter to Hurst about the novel. But in her
feigned or genuine devotion to Hurst and admiration of her novel,
Hurston may well have been ambivalent. Such ambivalence may be
the very mask Holloway refers to, though one can as easily say that
this ambivalence is the “truth” or “reality” that the mask covers.
Again, the conception of a false mask with a real truth beneath it vastly
oversimplifies the complex arrangement of psychosocial feelings associ-

ated with such judgments.4
In their attempts to escape suffering, those who wear masks are often
judged for betraying their “true” selves. In the case of African-Americans
striving throughout modern American history to assert their rights and
value, passing can appear as self-loathing. Certainly this is the case for
Morrison, who invokes the mask—inauthentic and self-bruising—as
central to her exploration of African-American ideation about physi-
cal appearance. In The Bluest Eye, Pecola has been sold a false ideal
by a racist society, a “cloak of ugliness” (39). Morrison figures this
“ugliness” as a mask not only imposed on her by society but also one
adopted by Pecola herself, as she dons a false self-image as a defense,
a self-protection: “And Pecola. She hid behind hers. Concealed, veiled,
eclipsed—peeping out from behind the shroud very seldom, and then
only to yearn for the return of her mask” (39).
Pecola’s defensive strategy shifts as the novel proceeds, as she trades a
negative white fantasy of the black woman (her “cloak of ugliness”) for
a fantasy about white women, the ideal feminine body with blue eyes.
The blue eyes will give Pecola a rose-colored view of the world and will
allow her to imagine that she is seen as a classical American beauty, like
the female stars the novel is preoccupied with—Hedy Lamarr, Greta
Garbo, Ginger Rogers, and Betty Grable. Of course, the rebellious narra-
tor, Claudia, prefers the lesser-known child star Jane Withers, rejecting
the idealization of Shirley Temple that, for Morrison, exemplifies “the
damaging internalization of assumptions of immutable inferiority origi-
nating in an outside gaze” (Foreword, xi).
In Larsen’s Passing, this critique is part of Irene’s resentment
toward Clare, the seductive and threatening figure who audaciously
passes, while Irene, another light-skinned African-American, chooses
to embrace her black identity. As the wife of a doctor, moving among
Larsen’s version of “the talented tenth” (W. E. B. Dubois’s 1903 phrase
referring to educated African-American leaders), Irene’s felt need to
escape her identity is a far cry from Pecola’s poverty, psychological
abandonment, and physical trials in The Bluest Eye. But her judgment
on Clare is a projection of her own unstable self, her own desperate
need for safety and sameness. The more dangerous Clare’s actions
are (married to a racist white man who doesn’t know his wife is pass-
ing, Clare has embarked on a perilous quest), the more resentful Irene
becomes. The narrative reveals a similar illusoriness at the heart of self-
hood, since Clare and Irene both seem desperate to protect the self that
is revealed to be equally unsafe for the one who doesn’t pass as for the
one who does. Driven by psychosocial demons, Irene may have pushed
Clare out of a window at the end of the novel, dispelling the threat
Clare has posed to Irene’s fragile quietude.
Clare’s transgression is not so much passing as it is luxuriating, like a
film-noir femme fatale, within her mask: “The trouble with Clare was,
not only that she wanted to have her cake and eat it too, but that she
wanted to nibble at the cakes of other folk as well” (74). That Clare seeks
pleasure (including, potentially, having an affair with Irene’s husband)
is an affront to the rule-abiding Irene, who seeks to find in Clare’s imita-
tion some kind of punishment, a punishment she herself will eventu-
ally level on Clare. As Irene says to Clare about the risk she undertakes,
“everything must be paid for” (107). The novel’s examination of Irene’s
projection is important, for it suggests a kind of will to judge (and to
punish) a supposed inauthenticity that is not only a strategy for survival
but also itself a mask whose face beneath is incoherent and unstable.
The marginalized though creative American female figure (besides
Clare, the woman in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 short story “The
Yellow Wallpaper” and the title character in Morrison’s novel Sula)
attempt to craft personae—imitating life—to escape trauma.
In Pecola’s case, self-protection, her final defense and haven against
the brutality she has endured, leads to madness. Like the woman in
“The Yellow Wallpaper,” a haunting American literary work that sur-
faces in the next chapter, Pecola has retreated into a world fully popu-
lated by her own imagination, the only place where she can control the
terms of her existence. But Pecola is also a progeny of the title charac-
ter of Herman Melville’s 1856 short story “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” a
provocation to readers to imagine a response to the problem of cultural
objectification of the outsider figure. Like Bartleby, Pecola’s orientation
is passive. She doesn’t say his repeated phrase, “I would prefer not to,”
but the affect is similar and the resonance is clear. When Frieda asks
her what she wants to do, Pecola replies, “I don’t care …. Anything you
want” (26). A bid for a kind of caring that seems impossible in the world
in which these characters live, Pecola’s reply (“Anything you want” [my
emphasis]) reveals the tragic limitations of a psychosocial world that
savages vulnerability.
The 1959 Imitation of Life’s Sarah Jane is another literary lost soul with
no place in America. Instead of finding refuge in madness or suicide,
though, she uses sexuality, like a femme fatale, to try to forge a place
for herself, breaking the rules and shattering the unbending identity
her mother Annie wishes to impose on her. In so doing, she shatters
her mother, who hasn’t the flexibility and drive to change what’s
unacceptable; she cannot handle the strain of Sarah Jane’s rebellion. In

point of fact, it is the unbending role of being subservient Annie and
Sarah Jane are conventionally forced to inhabit that is inauthentic.
Annie’s inability to imagine a different way of being in the world
dooms her. Constantly figured behind bars (see Figures 4.4), she is
imprisoned in her passivity. Her idealization of whiteness constitutes a
kind of death wish and traps her in the impossible position of misun-
derstanding her daughter’s aspirations. Fassbinder goes so far as to cast
Annie as an actively destructive figure in the life of her daughter: “It
is the mother who is brutal, wanting to possess her child because she
loves her” (245). And yet Fassbinder’s provocation comes back around
to capturing the trauma that besets everyone in this narrative:
And Sarah Jane defends herself against her mother’s terrorism,

against the terrorism of the world. The cruelty is that we can under-
stand them both, both are right and no one will be able to help
them. Unless we change the world. At this point all of us in the cin-
ema cried. Because changing the world is so difficult.
Fassbinder found his own creative venue for expressing such psychoso-
cial devastation in his 1974 adaptation of Sirk in Angst essen Seele auf
(Ali: Fear Eats the Soul).
A film that lambastes conventional social roles through its mise-en-
scène, Sirk’s Imitation of Life presents culturally defined categories as
arbitrary and ultimately false signs of identity. It is repressive notions
of race and gender that are the imitations of life, false constructs that
limit desire and drive people to erect institutional idols—marriage and
servitude—based on synthetic categories. The film morphs some of the
concerns of the previous Imitation of Life texts, while it enacts an idea
of identity as performance, not only through its visual presentation of
Sarah Jane as white girlfriend and white dancer, but also through its
melodramatic tone and generic attributes. In so doing, it constitutes
adaptation as itself fluid, resistant to categorization like Lora and Sarah
Jane, who are, in Emerson’s words, “the Devil’s child” in their rebellion
against the roles imposed on them from the outside. The most intrigu-
ing adaptations are themselves the “devil’s children,” the “hideous
progeny” that seek to redraw the borders of their source texts.
The sequence of works called Imitation of Life provides a context for
seeing imitation as, like adaptation, a means of continued existence in a
hostile world. Adaptations must face the preconceptions and categories
favored by readers and viewers overinvested in a notion of purity, i.e.,
Figures 4.4 Imitation of Life: Sirk’s mise-en-scène; Annie, trapped
the sanctity of the source text. Acculturated by Romantic ideologies of

textuality and selfhood, we are trained to see adaptations as knock-offs,
as violations of their sources, as merely pretending to be the texts we
know exist in a truer form. Like Sarah Jane, however, adaptations seek
to alter the terms of the sources we take for granted, offering a challeng-
ing perspective—in the case of Sirk’s film—to our judging Sarah Jane’s
cruelty toward her mother.
So too, Lora’s abandonment of her maternal responsibility (she is first
seen searching at the crowded beach for the daughter she has lost track
of) must be seen in the context of her own attempts to transform the
conventional role she has been assigned. Wishing to adapt and thrive
within the new postwar context of women seeking work and social
agency, Lora wants more. Her desires, seen as monstrous (like Sarah
Jane’s treatment of her mother) from the perspective of a conventional
conception of motherhood, are an appeal to imagining new forms of
agency. Like the most interesting adaptations, these are not imitations,
but bids for reimagining “home texts” in ways that challenge and rede-
fine our assumptions.
5
The Quiet Presence of “The
Yellow Wallpaper” in Todd
Haynes’s Film [Safe]
In Far from Heaven (2002), filmmaker Todd Hayne’s mash-up of Douglas

Sirk’s Imitation of Life and All That Heaven Allows (1955), Haynes levels a
contemporary critique of conventional notions of selfhood and identity
that is in conversation with the Imitation of Life sequence discussed in
the previous chapter. In this chapter I want to posit another of Haynes’s
films, [Safe] (1995), as the “hideous progeny” of Charlotte Perkins
Gilman’s 1892 short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” a classic American
text about selfhood and oppressive social institutions that anticipates
by a century Haynes’s critique of cultural disciplines that objectify and
repress human desire, especially that of women. Further, his film sub-
verts the principle of ameliorative art, a shallow optimism that thinks
a feminist position can only be imagined in terms of paradigms of
role-modeling.
In [Safe], Haynes adds a critique of American self-help dogma to his
exploration of the oppressiveness of the institutions of marriage and
medicine. The film’s refusal to lend conscious and effective agency to
the central character of Carol White (Julianne Moore), thereby frustrat-
ing and disturbing critics and viewers, shows aggressively not only the
extent to which social institutions can victimize women but also the
limits of feel-good representations of women who overcome obstacles
and manage their oppression. Another profoundly isolated outsider,
Carol, like the unnamed narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper,” becomes a
difficult—even “hideous”—“case.”
Haynes’s films, which began appearing in the last decade of the 20th
century, serve as a popular/cultural bridge to the avant-garde. His adap-
tations of cultural material show the creative potential of breaking with
old forms while retaining the importance of their traces in cultural pro-
duction and critique. While his films employ self-conscious references
105
to earlier cinema, in the case of [Safe], one can discern a “quiet adap-
tation” of Gilman’s story. Though to my knowledge Haynes has not
alluded to “The Yellow Wallpaper” in interviews or recorded comments
about [Safe], the film represents an opportunity to mine the relations
among works in different media that informs our understanding of
both texts. There is a provoking moment in the film that invites this
investigation. During a group therapy session at the Wrenwood retreat,
Carol White muses about the yellow wallpaper she remembers from her
childhood bedroom. Given the powerful thematic connections between
Gilman’s story and Haynes’s film (as I hope to show), the reference to
yellow wallpaper bids us to revisit the story in connection with its para-
doxically subtle yet resounding “quiet adaptation,” [Safe].
Linda Hutcheon has claimed that to be an adaptation, a work must
intend to adapt (A Theory of Adaptation 7–8). Deborah Cartmell and
Imelda Whelehan also address this definitional issue, asserting that
adaptations should do more in relation to source texts than merely
quote them or superficially allude to them. It is hard to imagine finding
a compelling or sustaining interest in adaptations as adaptations that
only briefly reference other texts. While Cartmell and Whelehan seem
to agree with the idea that an adaptation must intend to adapt, they
subsequently broaden the notion to include “found adaptations” that
don’t “explicitly [announce]” their relation to sources (Screen Adaptation
18). This understanding of adaptation resonates with “quiet adapta-
tions.” With their accent on an elastextity that may not be tied to the
explicit intentions of the adapters, “quiet adaptations” complement
an emphasis on textual progeny that shifts our perspective on sources
and their afterlives. An expansion of the field of adaptation to include
“found” and “quiet” adaptations deconstructs a binary of intentional
adaptation on the one hand and hidden (thus impossible) adaptation
on the other hand (“there is no such thing … as a ‘secret’ adaptation”
[Catherine Grant, quoted in Geraghty 3]). I endorse a middle theoreti-
cal ground that may encourage critics, scholars, viewers, and readers to
discover and argue creatively for more covert sources and adaptations.
Many scholars have noted the influence of other filmmakers on
Haynes. Because he is, like Joel and Ethan Coen, an independent artist
steeped in film history, Haynes’s films are often described as being in
dialogue with other visual texts and cultural productions (for example
the generic influences of the ABC Movie of the Week on Superstar: The
Karen Carpenter Story [1987] and Poison [1991] or Sirk’s melodramas
and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s films on Far from Heaven). John David
Rhodes points to the presence of not only Fassbinder and Sirk in
Haynes’s [Safe] 107
Haynes’s films but also Michelangelo Antonioni and Stanley Kubrick.

In his essay on [Safe], Rhodes argues for its allegorical power. As Haynes
has explained, the film resonates with the cultural discourse surround-
ing AIDS because the filmmaker was interested in the extent to which
self-help rhetoric had been responsible for AIDS victims internalizing
guilt for having contracted the disease (Haynes, in White 145). Rhodes
contrasts the allegorical function of [Safe] with a notion of its intertex-
tuality, which he finds an insufficient critical frame for talking about
the film, since it is “often about naming, referencing, pointing: it is
often a mode of consumption” (69). In his critique of intertextuality,
Rhodes mentions Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994),
in which proliferating allusions to earlier films and film genres act

less as hermeneutic guides and more as clever announcements, winks
at the audience, onanistic aside. Haynes is up to something more
substantial and more serious, something I think can best be under-
stood as allegorical.
The distinction Rhodes makes seems very much in debt to Fredric

Jameson’s critique of the “nostalgia film” (19), assuming a superficial
allusiveness in intertextuality as opposed to a depth of meaning that
he associates with allegory. This opposition assumes intertextuality to
be passive instead of fundamentally creative, especially in its subset
of adaptations that have elastextity. Haynes’s work serves as a case in
point, since his films suggest a process by which works stretch over
time to embrace other texts. He adapts film sources (as well as a literary
one, I suggest in the case of “The Yellow Wallpaper”) into new expres-
sions of form and content, reading and rewriting other works in his
films, as the Coen brothers do. Though most scholars and critics have
focused on the film progenitors of Haynes’s work, I want to suggest
that Gilman’s short story and [Safe] are mutually enhancing in their
twinned concerns with institutional discourse and its particular effects
on the fate of women. The “quiet” adaptation I refer to in my chapter
title offers a bridge between the intentional intertextuality more com-
monly referred to in relation to Haynes (and the Coens) and a critical
practice that may de-emphasize intentionality but offers a model of
close reading texts as they stretch over time to embrace other art and
cultural production.
In Todd Haynes’s 1995 film [Safe], Carol White becomes environmen-
tally sick as a sublimated response to the empty upper-class housewife’s
role she leads in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles. Although
she has no voice in the face of her husband, family physician, and
the psychiatrist, all of whom see nothing wrong with her, she rebels
by developing multiple chemical sensitivity. [Safe] functions as a late
20th-century reprise of the late 19th-century portrait of a woman’s
postpartum experience of the rest cure in “The Yellow Wallpaper.”1 Like
Gilman, Haynes charts the story of a woman forced into sickness and,
strangely, forced through her sickness to rebel against a culture ruled by
discourses that inhibit human agency and imagination. While Gilman’s
narrator escapes her confinement through madness, the affectless Carol
White (brilliantly played by Julianne Moore) escapes her indoctrination
as a sanitized Stepford-wife of male consumerist culture, first, through
illness, then, as a response to that illness, through the adoption of
mindless self-help rhetoric. Both texts are about a woman’s attempt to
own her life in a culture utterly defined by stifling conventions and
social regulations, in particular, the institution of medicine. Gilman’s
narrator wishes to counter her depression and isolation by becoming
active and by writing, but her doctor-husband insists that she has “a
slight hysterical tendency,” and that she is “absolutely forbidden to
‘work’ until [she is] well again” (Gilman 63).
Reading [Safe] in juxtaposition to “The Yellow Wallpaper” helps illu-
minate the strongly feminist spirit of the film.2 [Safe]’s meaning is less
ambiguous—though no less complex—than it is generally taken to be;
it is more than a “chic postmodern chiller,” as film critic Rita Kempley
(Kempley D2) described it. Further, the critical response it has elicited
points to the powerfully persistent role of ameliorative cinema, even
in the context of independent filmmaking. Through its alienating
mise-en-scène, [Safe] forces us to rethink our sentimental reading of
film. Through its presentation of Carol as a woman far removed from
a conventional feminist ideal, [Safe] also forces us to reconsider that
ideal’s sentimental portrayal in mainstream American film and the
danger to women inherent in the social disciplines that rule, define,
and explain them.
Haynes is the ultimate Foucauldian social-problem film director, all
of his films addressing how social institutions (including the cinema,
as Edward O’Neill notes) produce identities.3 [Safe] shows the very
categories of mind and body to be unreliable barometers of health and
well-being. Social structures, including marriage, medicine, American
individualism, the cult of self-help, class, gender, and race,4 are more
determinative of Carol’s fate. While Gaye Naismith documents the
effect of these structures on Carol (including, for example, the way the
New Age retreat center Carol moves to “ignores the social and structural
factors that produce ill health” [379]), she stops short of articulating
Haynes’s critique, since she, like other viewers and critics,5 maintains
that there is ambiguity regarding the sources of Carol’s illness:
Despite a bias towards the physical explanation, Haynes makes it

impossible to settle definitively on one reading over another because
of the complicating factors of Carol’s fragile sense of identity, which
enters into both her and our response to her illness, and the absence
of concrete knowledge about environmental illness. [Safe] sets up
these possible readings, only to throw their validity into doubt, so
that our understanding of what and who is to blame for Carol’s ill-
ness constantly fluctuates. (368)
Naismith’s reading of Carol’s experience as ambiguous is open to ques-

tion, though. Haynes clearly identifies as criminal all of the social dis-
ciplines and structures that appear in the film, and Carol’s case is too
hopeless to allow for anything but sympathy for her. It is our psycho-
logical and socially inscribed need to rebuke individuals who have no
power to change their circumstances that makes us want to find fault
with Carol. Focusing on the trouble with Carol bypasses her status as a
character, as a symbol in a pattern of meaning. Far from evading poli-
tics by showing his “heroine” to be “merely” a victim with no hope of
transforming her condition or circumstance, Haynes offers an uncom-
promised and deeply politicized view of a diseased system of social
regulation. The film begs viewers to examine the process of the social
production of identity—in this case, sick identity—and to consider the
serious cost of both leaving these processes unexamined and settling for
trite or easy answers.
In his book Karl Marx, Allen W. Wood has written that we are alien-
ated (in a Marxian sense) “if we either experience our lives as meaning-
less or ourselves as worthless, or else are capable of sustaining a sense of
meaning and self-worth only with the help of illusions about ourselves
or our condition” (quoted in Tong 98–99). Wood’s comment helps situ-
ate the central female characters in “The Yellow Wallpaper” and [Safe]
as, at least at the start of their respective texts, participators in false con-
sciousness. The narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper” has internalized her
status as a commodity by supporting the efforts of John, her husband,
to restrain her body and suppress her imagination:
He is very careful and loving, and hardly lets me stir without special
direction.
I have a schedule prescription for each hour in the day; he takes all
care from me, and so I feel basely ungrateful not to value it more.
(Gilman 64)
The narrator’s initial denial of her entrapment, even as she begins to

become aware of dissatisfaction with her relationship to her spouse—“It
is so hard to talk with John about my case, because he is so wise, and
because he loves me so” (Gilman 69)—is matched by Carol’s affectless
and vague repetition throughout [Safe] that she is “fine,” exemplifying
Simone de Beauvoir’s portrait in The Second Sex of victims and perpetra-
tors of false consciousness:
Indeed, along with the ethical urge of each individual to affirm his
subjective existence, there is also the temptation to forgo liberty and
become a thing. This is an inauspicious road, for he who takes it—
passive, lost, ruined—becomes henceforth the creature of another’s
will, frustrated in his transcendence and deprived of every value ….
Thus, woman may fail to lay claim to the status of subject because
she lacks definite resources, because she feels the necessary bond that
ties her to man regardless of reciprocity, and because she is often very
well pleased with her role as the Other.
(de Beauvoir xxi)
Carol’s alienation and self-delusion—her failure to “lay claim to the

status of subject”—are signaled in the scene with which Haynes point-
edly begins his film: Carol having sex with her husband Greg (Xander
Berkeley). The camera records her dissociation, as she calmly and
methodically rubs her husband’s back while he grunts toward orgasm
on top of her. The sterility of the scene is haunting—the idea that this is
how they always have sex. But the scene is particularly painful to watch
because it is also clear that Carol treats sex as Marx’s alienated workers
regard their labor: as something to be endured.
Carol begins to experience persistent fatigue, but she diagnoses her-
self as “a little stressed out lately,” as just needing rest. She goes to the
hairdresser and gets a perm, ironically underscoring what Betty Friedan
identified, in the title of the first chapter of The Feminine Mystique (1963),
as “The Problem That Has No Name.” Haynes suggests that the solution
late-capitalist consumer culture offers for malaise is to spend money,
and the perm has the effect of turning Carol herself into a commodity, a
beauty product. With her perm, an apt sign of the times (the film takes
place in the aerosol-loving late 1980s), Carol looks like one of Mary
Wollstonecraft’s “mere dolls” who have “nothing to do, but listlessly to

go they scarcely care where, for they cannot tell what” (Wollstonecraft
444, 446). Thus Carol’s alienation and tragedy reside partly in her abso-
lute ignorance about the sources of her fatigue and discomfort.
Initially, Carol believes she has the resources to get better. The Whites
have money and status, and she lives a seemingly safe, conventional
life, whose underlying sterility and dysfunction are indicated by her
cheerful admissions that she is a “total ‘milkaholic’” and that she does
not sweat. She becomes more ill, though, experiencing nose bleeds,
vomiting, uncontrollable coughing, and shortness of breath. Overcome
by industrial spraying at the dry cleaners, she collapses and is hospital-
ized. The family doctor, Dr. Hubbard (Steven Gilborn), who has already
examined her more than once, insists that nothing is “turning up on
the tests.” In a patronizing and irritated tone, he tells her, “Look Carol,
from a medical standpoint, there’s just no way to prove that this thing
is an immune system breakdown, much less one based on environmen-
tal factors.” Unconscious of a more complex set of assumptions than
conventional enlightenment discourse can provide, the medical com-
munity fails to treat her effectively, just as the doctors alluded to in “The
Yellow Wallpaper” fail to treat the narrator. In each case, the medical
community—dominated by men—lacks the means to recognize what
in fact is wrong.
“The Yellow Wallpaper” and [Safe] offer a similar explanation for
these failures: that the systems of thought in place to respond to illness
are devoted to their perpetuation of the system, rather than to the sick.
These systems are rooted in the rationality and reason of the scien-
tific model.6 In Gilman’s story, for example, the narrator says, “[John]
knows there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him” (Gilman 65).
Similarly, Carol undergoes a series of tests that reveal nothing conclu-
sive but seem to satisfy her doctor, who sends her to another medical
discipline—psychiatry—to try to cure her illness. (It is worth noting
that when Dr. Hubbard refers Carol to the psychiatrist, he hands his
card to Carol’s husband Greg, not to her.) The psychiatrist, however, is
equally impotent, a fact made clear in Haynes’s mise-en-scène: Carol,
vulnerable, sits across the room from the psychiatrist, who appears dis-
tant, seated behind his vast desk. Social structures in the film claim to
fortify; they parade as protection, but are in fact forms of entrapment.7
When Carol discovers environmental factors are the cause of her
symptoms, for the first time she becomes engaged with her experience.
She develops beyond the simple role of empty and passive suburban
housewife, a role which she simultaneously reflects and rebels against.
Ironically, her discovery of the reasons for her illness brings her to life.
She has a purpose now—to figure out how best to treat her multiple
chemical sensitivity.
In an interview with Rob White, author of the first comprehensive
study of his work, Haynes comments on Carol’s incipient political
awareness, which coincides with telling Greg and Dr. Hubbard that she
has “a chemical impairment.” Insisting here on a cause for her illness
outside herself, Carol’s agency is presented as a positive turn in the nar-
rative. As Haynes says,
That’s where Carol might actually learn something and make a change
in her life for the better—and revolt. Her body is already in revolt.
(Haynes, in White 146)
The moments in which Carol’s voice and body reject her social
environment—throwing up on Greg (who has just applied deodorant
and hairspray) as he tries to embrace her; nodding off at the restaurant
while Greg’s client tells a sexist joke; telling her husband and doctor
what is wrong with her—represent “a sort of radical hope,” says Haynes.
Situating this “radical hope” in the middle of [Safe] resonates power-
fully with “The Yellow Wallpaper.” There, too, it is the middle of the
story that introduces feminist agency, when the narrator begins to
rebel against her husband and her suffocating quarantine, turning from
passive acquiescence to a fascination with discerning what is in the
wallpaper:
But I know [Jennie, John’s sister] was studying that pattern, and I am
determined that nobody shall find it out but myself!
Life is very much more exciting now than it used to be. You see
I have something more to expect, to look forward to, to watch.
I really do eat better, and am more quiet than I was.
John is so pleased to see me improve! He laughed a little the other
day, and said I seemed to be flourishing in spite of my wallpaper.
I turned it off with a laugh. I had no intention of telling him it was
because of the wallpaper—he would make fun of me. He might even
want to take me away.
I don’t want to leave now until I have found it out. There is a week
more, and I think that will be enough.
I’m feeling ever so much better!
I don’t sleep much at night, for it is so interesting to watch devel-
opments; but I sleep a good deal during the daytime. (71)
Having a purpose, the narrator rebels against her rest cure. While she
is prohibited from writing, her favorite form of creative expression, she
does maintain a secret journal, in which she writes about the woman
she sees in the wallpaper. Like Carol’s increasingly debilitating symp-
toms, the images in the wallpaper begin to suggest a systemic break-
down as they challenge (and defile) convention and the status quo:
The front pattern does move—and no wonder! The woman behind

shakes it!
Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind, and sometimes
only one, and she crawls around fast, and her crawling shakes it all over.
Then in the very bright spots she keeps still, and in the very shady
spots she just takes hold of the bars and shakes them hard.
And she is all the time trying to climb through. But nobody could
climb through that pattern—it strangles so; I think that is why it has
so many heads.
They get through, and then the pattern strangles them off and
turns them upside down, and makes their eyes white!
If those heads were covered or taken off it would not be half so
bad. (72)
The images of shaking and strangling are projections of the narrator’s

own desire to shake herself free of her imprisonment. As she increas-
ingly rejects the rules of her confinement, the narrator’s obsession with
the wallpaper represents an escape from the untenable role she has been
assigned in the “safe” part of the house. At the end of the story, when the
narrator has gone insane, readers understand the high cost of her mental
freedom—she escapes from an oppressively gendered ideology as a sick
woman into a state of madness, as Gilman represents her metaphorical
escape from the constraints of her life. The earlier moment of felt free-
dom, when the narrator discovers her own discourse, represents a “radical
hope,” as in [Safe], that subsequently falls back into a socio-historical real-
ity that understands her prospects for genuine freedom to be impossible.
In [Safe], Carol’s illness also functions metaphorically. That is not to
say that people do not struggle with environmental illness and chemi-
cal sensitivity in our post-industrial age. However, Haynes does not
exhibit much interest in the particular illness, in the same way, perhaps,
as Gilman is not interested in the specific nature of her narrator’s illness
(which is likely postpartum depression). What is clear is that Gilman
and Haynes are much more interested in attacking the disenfranchise-
ment of people unnourished by mainstream society.
It is impossible for the medical or self-help groups represented in

“The Yellow Wallpaper” and [Safe] to cure either the narrator or Carol
because their illnesses are cultural diseases understood as symptoms of
a sick society’s reliance on enlightenment discourse designed to main-
tain the cultural status quo, which, Roddey Reid observes, requires it
“to draw boundaries, purify, and segregate out pollutants and blamable,
unhealthy others” (Reid 34). Historically, the implications of this con-
servative ideology have been particularly grave for women, as Barbara
Ehrenreich and Deirdre English suggested in their 1973 work Complaints
and Disorders: The Sexual Politics of Sickness. In the 19th century,
women were both accepting their inherent “sickness” and finding

a way to rebel against an intolerable social role. Sickness, having
become a way of life, became a way of rebellion, and medical treat-
ment, which had always had strong overtones of coercion, revealed
itself as frankly and brutally repressive.
(Ehrenreich and English 42–43)
Carol’s life is characterized mainly in terms of stereotypical women’s

activities—aerobics classes, home furnishings, fruit diets, baby show-
ers. She betokens the women Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote about in
her 1898 book Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation
Between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution: “As men go down
to the sea in ships, and bring coffee and spices and silks and gems from
far away, so do women partake of the coffee and spices and silks and
gems the men bring” (Gilman 5). Carol’s context for emotional expres-
sion is so limited in her somnambulist role as affluent housewife that
she is at her most animated when the furniture store delivers a couch
in the wrong color. With dramatic irony, Haynes records Carol’s reac-
tion before we see the source of her dismay. Her dissociation is sym-
bolic not only of the failure of sexual and gender roles to function but
also of utter disconnection among classes, which Haynes dramatizes
in a mise-en-scène foregrounding Carol and Greg listening to his son,
and her stepson, Rory (Chauncey Leopardi), reading part of his school
report on black and Chicano gangs in Los Angeles. Carol asks insipidly,
“Why does it have to be so gory?” as the Hispanic maid Fulvia (Martha
Velez-Johnson) of the aptly named Whites is framed in the background,
working in the kitchen.
As suggested, [Safe] is not invested in the biochemical reality of
Carol’s illness because her symptoms are not indicative of individual
sickness but of the disease inherent in the modern industrial landscape.
It is, however, Carol’s attempt to escape to the remote, chemical-free

New Age enclave of Wrenwood that accounts for the film’s most wither-
ing commentary on contemporary American culture.
The Wrenwood Center is the epitome of a cultural discipline that
spreads social disease even as it purports to regulate lives and cure ill-
nesses. The program at Wrenwood is a satire of self-help and 12-step
programs, full of vapid rhetorical questions (“What is your total load?”)
and ameliorative mottos: “We are safe and all is well in our world.”
Carol is embraced by her new friends, all of whom are disenfranchised,
ostensibly as a result of their illnesses that are not acknowledged by
mainstream culture.
Wrenwood’s founder is Peter Dunning (Peter Friedman), who comes
across with such smarmy earnestness that it may be easy to miss
the film’s scathing attack on all the cultural obsessions he represents.
The camera first exposes Peter’s hypocrisy in a shot of the huge mansion
he lives in. More aggressive is Haynes’s deflation of Peter by juxtaposing
images of him (in one case just after he has piously stated how “lucky”
and “blessed” he is) with images of Lester (Rio Hackford), a longtime
Wrenwood resident who is covered (bandaged) from head to toe in
protective gear and walks in a pained way, eviscerated and enfeebled
by who-knows-what combination of physical and emotional trauma.
Lester paces the sidelines of the film’s action as its “hideous progeny,”
like a silent chorus. He is the film’s version of the woman in the yellow
wallpaper, a figure reflecting Carol’s trauma back on her, as the images
in the wallpaper do for the narrator (Figure 5.1).
Figure 5.1 [Safe]: Lester at Wrenwood

Peter’s theme, according to the logic of the film, is a fairly monstrous

emanation of American individualism, a notion underscored by the
film’s repeated reference to the power of the individual. In a television
ad, Claire Fitzpatrick (Kate McGregor Stewart), director of Wrenwood,
says, “What I think makes us really unique is our emphasis on the
individual.” Peter echoes this in his opening speech, pointing to the
centrality of “personal transformation.” Toward the end of the film,
the now-indoctrinated Carol, a true tabula rasa, tells her husband (with
her typical use of vague pronouns), “I just think it’s true what they say,
that it’s up to the individual and that it takes time.” Because the cult of
Wrenwood assumes that individuals have the power to heal themselves,
the program sets the residents up for madness when they discover the
limits of their own power to address the real sources of their illnesses.
In fact, Wrenwood insists on isolation and self-love, rather than
attention to community and social politics. Peter tells the assembled,
I’ve stopped reading the papers. I’ve stopped watching the news
on TV. I’ve heard the media gloom and doom, and I’ve seen their
fatalistic, negative attitude, and I finally realized, once and for all,
I don’t need it.
The dismissal of politicized readings of social illness evokes the specter

of Forrest Gump, the title character of the 1994 Robert Zemeckis film,
whose lesson that simplicity and ignorance constitute health and well-
being merely generates more false consciousness in a culture unwilling
to examine the effects of oppressive social systems.8 Peter’s Gump-like
response to political and cultural strife is best expressed in his opening
speech:
[W]hat I want to give you … is an image to reflect on. An image of

a world outside as positive and as free as the world we’ve created
here …. [W]hat you are seeing outside is a reflection of what you feel
within … [W]hat I am seeing is a global transformation identical to
the transformation I revel at within.
Wrenwood’s false gift of self-love and the inadequacy of radical indi-

vidualist responses to social problems reflect a significant reason Haynes
had for making [Safe]—to contest motivational author Louise L. Hay’s
The AIDS Book: Creating a Positive Approach (1988), which, according to
Haynes, “literally states that if we loved ourselves more we wouldn’t get
sick with this illness …. That’s scary.”9 We are told in the film that Peter
is “a chemically sensitive person with AIDS,” which Haynes addresses

in an interview with Collier Schorr, specifically referring to Hay’s book:
What is it that makes people with AIDS read a book that says, “If you
loved yourself more you wouldn’t have gotten sick, and now that
you are sick if you learn how to love yourself you will be cured”? This
puts the subjects in an impossible situation where they will never
overcome their illness because they’ll never love themselves enough.
I think I made Peter someone with AIDS not only because it’s another
immune-system illness, like environmental illness—they’re often
linked—but also because there was this history of New Age thinking
and AIDS that I wanted to bring into the film.
(Schorr 128)
The Barmecide feast of Carol improvement is clearly demonstrated

in her increasingly rarefied existence at Wrenwood. While she claims
to feel better and to be more content, surrounded by those who
understand her, her climactic speech expressing gratitude after being
surprised with a cake on the eve of her birthday is utterly incoherent:
Oh, god, um, I just wanna thank Chris for doing this, and everybody
here so much. Um, it just pulled me through a really hard period.
Anyway, I couldn’t have done it without you. [Applause.] I don’t
know what I’m saying. Just that I really hated myself before I came
here, and, um, so I’m trying to see myself hopefully, um, more as I
am. More, um, more positive, like seeing the pluses. Like, I think it’s
slowly opening up now. People’s minds, like, um, educating, and-
and, AIDS, and, um, and other types of diseases, ‘cause-‘cause, and it
is a disease, ‘cause it’s out there, and we just have to be more aware of
it. Um, we have to make people aware of it, and, um, even ourselves,
like, uh, going … reading labels and-and going into buildings.
Carol’s rambling and incoherent speech parallels her fragmented life

and body, as opposed to the unified sense of well-being she thinks she’s
gaining at Wrenwood and that she tries in vain to articulate. She is per-
manently attached to an oxygen tank, her face is pale and blotchy, and
the clothes she wears hang loosely on her thinning frame. Her living
quarters are also increasingly alien; by the end of the film, she has moved
into a sterile, white, aseptic igloo. She is enclosed in a hut just like the
word “safe” is bracketed in the film’s title.10 This room, Claire has told
her, is “perfectly safe as long as no one [else sets] foot inside.”
At the end of the movie, when Carol White looks into the mirror and
in a low and hesitant voice says “I love … I love you. I really love you. I
love you,” [Safe] shows us the desperate and vapid gesture of a trapped
woman who, like the narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper,” in the end
has no options for freedom under the available cultural dispensation.
What is left is a kind of madness. For Carol, the madness is disguised as
self-love. In emphasizing the failure of Carol’s individualist attempts to
cure herself, the film’s ending exposes systemic problems in the culture
that many have not wanted to acknowledge.
While there is not a lot of critical writing on [Safe], to the extent
there is—a small number of articles, several interviews with Haynes,
film reviews—many find the ending dissatisfying. Leonard Maltin, for
example, calls the Wrenwood scenes “tiresome” (Maltin 1205), and the
then San Francisco Chronicle critic Edward Guthmann said that in the
second half of the film, Haynes “shifts into a minor key” (Guthmann
C3). These responses seem to reveal the culture’s inadequate language
for talking about America’s allegiance to the ideology of self-reliance
and self-help. More surprising are those who say the film’s ending is
hopeful. The Washington Post’s Rita Kempley, for example, said “Drained
though she may be, [Carol] is nonetheless happier than ever when she
moves into a germ-free igloo” (Kempley D2).
Carol’s final words to herself are not a sign of incipient recovery nor
the triumph of a woman who has “found herself,” but an indication of
her lost grasp on reality. I would argue that only in American culture
would it be possible to read [Safe]’s ending as unironic.
A way of getting at why [Safe] is read in such a way that clearly violates
the critical spirit of the film can be gleaned by thinking about Forrest
Gump, the comedy-drama of a slow-witted but good-hearted Alabamian
who finds himself in many of the defining events of 1960s-through-
1980s America that won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1994,
the year before [Safe] was released. According to Gump, it does not
matter what happens in the world around us if we believe in ourselves.
Forrest, expressing his intuitive sense of the right and the good, declares
how much he believes in himself: “I’m not a smart man, but I know
what love is.” In the desire to ratify ameliorative filmmaking, which
teaches the value of the power of the individual to determine her life,
we endorse the movies that offer simple answers to complex problems,
dismissing the difficult film texts that seek to incite our thinking about
these complexities.
America’s interest in the transcendent self, free from the forces of cir-
cumstance and society, pervades the culture. Andrew Ross observes that
“while most New Age practices today are still restricted to a minority
culture, the influence of their ethical principles is quite mainstream and
quite middle-class, permeating suburban life and corporate philosophy
alike” (533; qtd. in Naismith 375). Peter Dunning’s radical self-help
stance in [Safe] implies a world entirely without contingency, exactly
the ideological position the film is savaging. “Why,” asks Haynes, “is
there such a complete and total replacement of what was once an
outward-looking critique of society by this notion of a transcendent
self that can solve all our problems?” (Gross 53). The answer to his own
question lies in his film’s title: American culture is desperate for “safe”
havens, inventing categories to define that safety and to project the
ameliorative fantasy that we can attain mastery of our environments. In
his portrayal of the profoundly limited Carol White, Haynes challenges
mainstream American culture’s attraction to this very model of the
transcendent individual as it purports to mark possibilities for feminist
empowerment.
The concern of some of the film’s reviewers that the character of
Carol fails to provide a model of female empowerment reveals serious
lacunae in our understanding of the structural foundations of illnesses,
such as those symbolized by her multiple chemical sensitivity. Critics
as diverse as Constance Penley and Janet Maslin have agreed that the
film’s representation of Carol is problematic. Reid paraphrases Penley’s
comment to him that Carol is “one of the emptiest female characters
ever to appear on screen and anachronistically evokes in 1987 a world
of women untouched by feminism (pre-1970),” while Maslin says
Carol is “more a specimen than a heroine” and sees Haynes as “fail-
ing only when it comes time to give his audience some glimpse of
her inner life.”11 Even an excellent critical essay by Roy Grundmann
focusing on the film’s identification of “the deeper levels of patriarchy”
(Grundmann 23) concludes by suggesting that in the end the film
falls short by relegating Carol to the role of pathetic object of our pity
(as opposed, presumably, to a character with whom we might finally
identify). Such responses to [Safe] illuminate the tendency to confine
politically useful readings of texts to those that emphasize individual
transcendence and thus fail to take into account the many lives that
do remain untouched by feminisms, because of the difficulty and the
unsafety of abandoning individual-based conceptions of empowerment.
Instead of confronting, for example, the ways in which and reasons
why feminisms have not yet reached mainstream society, we support
the further proliferation of “safe” discourses: “women’s culture,” such
as Oxygen Media, WE television, the work of Deborah Tannen, and the
Lifetime network, all of which emphasize the common “inner life” and
supposedly shared experience of women.12
Anticipating the next chapter’s discussion of musical theater’s
unlikely turn to unameliorative feminist texts for adaptation, I want to
mention the 2014 premiere of the chamber musical The Yellow Wallpaper
by Pallas Theatre Collective of Washington D.C., with book and lyrics
by Lane Williamson and music by Sarah Taylor Ellis, which challenges
the “home text” of Gilman’s short story in its shift from first-person
narration to musical performance. In one of the most striking elements
of the adaptation, Williamson has enhanced the relationship between
“Wife” (the narrator in the short story) and Jennie, her sister-in-law, in
order to develop the story’s feminist themes. While Gilman’s emphasis
on the narrator’s isolation is crucial to the story’s themes of freedom,
power, and expression, in the stage show, the friendship between Wife
and Jennie, as well as Jennie’s gradual awareness of the failure of her
brother John’s imposition of the rest cure, establishes a bond central to
the adapted story. As she invites Jennie to share her own vision of the
woman in the wallpaper, Wife implores her sister-in-law to support her:
I know you know it’s true so please be on my side.

We’ll find something to do. There is no need to hide.
I love you, Jennie, dearly, and you’re the only one who’s
Able to see clearly how this has come undone.
While Wife discerns in her sister-in-law a friend and sympathetic lis-

tener, Jennie is caught between her sister and John, and pleads with the
latter to address his wife’s condition with more nuance:
You said this house was like therapy, that it would

Cleanse her soul. You said we’d all end up happily, but
We’ve not reached your goal. You said a doctor would do
More harm, and you could handle it ….
Maybe the city was too much work, but she is far from well.
This ancient house is a crucible and she’s trapped inside her cell.
The musical establishes another female voice in sympathy with Wife,

although Jennie is also troubled by her rebellion against her brother’s
patriarchal dictates. The musical thus adapts the feminist theme of
female expression into a different set of allegiances and betrayals that
nevertheless maintains Gilman’s critique of medical discourse and its
gendered practices.
The power of this theatrical adaptation of “The Yellow Wallpaper”

can also be seen in connection with ekphrasis. That is, the stage set
must find a visual correlative to the yellow wallpaper that functions so
prominently as description in the story. Casting the stage set as a sort
of “hideous progeny,”
the dialogue gave the artistic team pretty clear clues as to how it
should look. It had to be “monstrous,” with the ability to “induce
vomiting,” and a “fetid eyesore” that reveals a haunting woman’s
face. In short, the set had to be ugly enough to hasten the mental
deterioration of a woman already in a precarious state …. “This
is about the yellow wallpaper on the wall, a pattern that repeats
and repeats, and starts to move and meld in the character’s head
until that obsession starts to overtake her brain,” says Tracey Elaine
Chessum, the production’s co-director. (Judkis)
The set design is inspired not only by Wife’s “precarious state” but also
by the motifs apparent in Ellis’s music. The score is full of sequences
and their variations as a musical analog to the obsessive riffs in the
woman’s mind.
Thomas Leitch has suggested that all adaptations can be considered
“reverse-ekphrasis” in that they demonstrate the struggle of a later work
of art to represent a prior one in a different medium, inverting the tra-
ditional hierarchy associated with ekphrasis that privileges the pictorial
and visual arts over literary language (“Adaptation and Intertextuality”
92–94). The stage version of “The Yellow Wallpaper” provokes audience
members with its theatrical representation of a literary description of
visual imagery (the wallpaper). This dramatizing of a visual experience
is even more vexing, because it seeks not only to represent what does
not exist in the written literary source (i.e., there is no visual image of
yellow wallpaper) but also to enhance the ekphrastic relation, in that
the patterns on the yellow wallpaper are also imagined projections of the
narrator/Wife’s desires and fears. While the narrator in the short story
is prohibited from writing by her husband John, the musical makes
that writing theatrically present in the set design, as Wife writes mania-
cally on the wallpaper itself. Exploiting the visual theatrical potential
of our seeing the “writing on the wall,” as it were, the show presents
this writing as not only a release for Wife but also a visceral emblem of
her rebellion; as the musical’s writer Williamson observes, “The ripping
down and writing on the paper is a symbol of her conquering the thing
that has ruined her” (Figure 5.2).
Figure 5.2 The Yellow Wallpaper musical, Pallas Theatre Collective, 2014
Source: Courtesy of Teresa Castracane Photography.
If the set design attends to the story’s projection of the woman’s mad-
ness and rebellion, the songs’ lyrics adapt the story’s emphasis on the
power of the senses:
The yellow wall-paper

A shifting sea of putrid hate
Afraid of what will come too late
The yellow wall-paper unable to contain her rage
So she breaks out of her cage
Of yellow wall-paper.
Breaking the story out of its literary form, The Yellow Wallpaper musi-
cal stretches the story’s identity and its reach into a new medium and
to new audiences.13 Such an adaptation may not be academically sanc-
tioned, or “safe,” in Haynes’s terms, but it is certainly creative, critically
engaged, and a means of connecting classic works of literature to con-
temporary audiences.14
The cultural pull toward safe havens exists in its most entrenched
form in popular film, in which the concern with safety is reflected
in and, to some degree, constructed by, unchallenging so-called role-
models. [Safe] aims to undercut this preoccupation, while appealing to
a more complex understanding of the effects of gender construction on
female agency. Without such attention to these complexities, both in
our cultural responses to safe discourse and in our craving for stable cat-
egories of identity, prospects for change are limited, a point made clear
by Haynes: “Is there something diametrically opposed about political
engagement and having a secure absolutely unquestioning identity? I
think there is” (quoted in Dargis 39).
In the area of film representation few films invent new ways of talk-
ing about gender and feminisms that challenge the status quo. The
films that do try to locate the systemic resistance to female power are
marginalized because they do not make us feel good. For example,
Susan Streitfeld’s little-seen Female Perversions (1996), like [Safe], is about
the blurring of internal and external influences on female identity. Both
films invert the terms of social hierarchies, since it is the “safe” worlds
of Eve and Carol, the respective films’ main characters, that are revealed
to be alien, “perverse.”
What these unameliorative films share is a willingness to violate a
tacit cultural contract that “feminist” texts are those that offer positive
models for female empowerment, such as The Spitfire Grill (1996), a
perfectly enjoyable film about an outcast young woman named Percy
Talbot (Allison Elliott) who redeems a small Maine town. In stark
contrast, [Safe] presents the more troubling view that there is hardly
any escape from the ideological frames within which we live. Carol in
[Safe] and all of the women in Female Perversions try to meet, at varied
levels of consciousness difficult to articulate, the demands the culture
so often places on them either to ignore (in post-feminist fashion) the
limitations placed on them, or to transcend (in enlightenment-individ-
ualist fashion) these same limitations. Insight about the complicated
and disturbing network of cultural forces that impede female agency
has to lie in some middle ground of awareness, in the uncomfortable
psychic and social terrain Haynes and Streitfeld symbolically represent.
We do not identify with Carol White because there is no heroic teleol-
ogy embedded in her character. Haynes comments on his attempt in
[Safe] to pass judgment on this aspect of ameliorative mainstream film:
If [Safe] is constructed with any kind of target, it targets that unbeliev-

ably persistent “warm feeling” in Hollywood filmmaking that every
clumsy narrative is moving towards achieving in the last five minutes,

where the central character is really the director, is really the writer, is
really you and we’re all the guys and we’re all in it together and we get
the girl and feel so good about life. It’s so upsetting to me, I can’t tell you.
(Gross 54)
In Thelma & Louise (1991), where this teleology exists, the heroines’
gradual abandonment of makeup reveals their ability to escape culture
(which traps women) into nature (which liberates women). In [Safe],
Carol’s relinquishing of makeup and her subsequent escape into the
natural world of the New Mexico desert signals her freedom from one
set of imprisoning discourses, only to be caught within another ideo-
logical frame which seeks to cordon her off, and ultimately, to kill her.
Anxiety about ambivalent portraits of women and searing representa-
tions of the social traps the culture sets for women keeps us from exam-
ining with adequate care and sensitivity some of the texts that mean to
go more deeply into analyzing culture than a schematic presentation of a
film heroine allows for. To draw an example from literary study, if we pull
away from Toni Morrison’s 1973 novel Sula because it is possible to read
the female characters as pitched against one another, we lose the insights
yielded from critical analyses of a text that will not settle for easy catego-
rization of women. The potentially problematic gender politics of Sula do
not vitiate the novel’s appeal to a complex emotional intelligence that
respects a variety of perspectives and imagined possibilities for female
empowerment. The novel will not simply choose (nor allow the reader to
simply choose) the straightforward virtues of conventional, or “realistic,”
versions of transcendent female strength, as opposed to symbolic consid-
erations of female power or its lack that might more clearly identify the
obstacles that stand in the way of women gaining that power.
Thus Jonathan Rosenbaum’s observation that [Safe] exceeds plausibil-
ity seems, finally, to miss the point, since the film is so clearly working
at a symbolic level to dramatize the excessively brutal, the utterly evis-
cerating, emptiness that constitutes Carol White’s environment.15 In his
generally insightful reading of [Safe], Rosenbaum alludes to “Haynes’s
southern Californian posthumanism—no doubt inflected by one’s dis-
tance from other people on the freeway and in Sherman Oaks living
rooms” (Movies as Politics 212). Indeed, with his long shots of domestic
space, point-of-view driving shots, use of deep focus, and emphasis on
walls and other objects as physical markers of separation and dissocia-
tion, Haynes seems much more interested in portraying an alien social
environment than the psychology of the individuals that inhabit it.
Still, I disagree with Rosenbaum that the movie is brutal because of its
ending, which viewers most likely see as nihilist if they do not see it as
happy or ameliorative. I think the movie may qualify as posthumanist,
but posthumanist in the only way in which that term might be mean-
ingful as a tool of social critique, a tool of change: not as a reflection of
the text’s play with notions of the death of the human (or humanist)
subject, but as a politicized critique of society’s marriage to structures
that define our experience at the expense of the very many people who
fall outside these normative categories, not only because of their gender,
sexual orientation, race, or class, but because they dare to question, in
whatever fragmented way their minds and bodies will allow them to do,
the cultural assumptions that underlie these normative categories.
While it may seem as if Haynes implies that the culture offers no
solution to those, especially women, who are thoroughly acculturated
into their social roles, [Safe] aggressively suggests, as Gilman’s story did
a century earlier, that these individuals’ illnesses and their attempts to
cure themselves—through false consciousness, imagination, empty New
Age self-help mottos, all leading eventually and inevitably to forms
of madness—are symptoms of profound social illness. Thus, Haynes,
in politically engaged and aesthetically elegant commentary, argues
against the cult of enlightenment American individualism, which seems
a horribly apolitical evasion of institutionalized repression.
[Safe]’s “quiet” adaptation of “The Yellow Wallpaper” suggests a crucial
role for the creative rereading and rewriting of texts in different cultural
moments and settings. While so commonly associated with rehash and
retrospect, adaptations may in fact be at the center of avant-garde cul-
tural production, offering different perspectives on familiar works of art
and the socio-historical contexts that gave rise to adaptations as well as
their sources. Shifting our point of view on what constitutes “art” and the
intermedial shapes sources can take over time, adaptations foster critical
thinking and provocation. James Morrison suggests as much in his com-
ments on Haynes’s contributions to contemporary cultural production:
[I]n an age of consumerism, what is the proper social role of art—

especially the art of film, that quintessential hotbed of mass produc-
tion and commodity fetishism? After its wholesale commodification
in the twentieth century, can art sustain the expression of critical atti-
tudes, a pursuit that some have called its most essential function? (1)
Adaptations and their attending dialogues can play a central role in

sustaining this expression of critical attitudes.
6
Musical Theater and
Independent Film
This study argues for a broad concept of adaptation, one that recognizes
the extent to which works born of other works often do not inhabit
source texts or try to recreate them but shift, sometimes aggressively,
our perspective on another text, just as good critical readings choose a
point of emphasis in relation to their object(s) of inquiry. Adaptation is
an act of independence that acknowledges what is most interesting to
the adapter about a previous work of art, stretching its identity into new
media and different socio-cultural or historical eras.
Our socio-cultural moment seems to have inspired stage musicals to
adapt stories about marginal “creatures” from independent film. The
musicals discussed in this chapter adapt films about cultural “monsters,”
figures on the margins, whose stories are less likely to be portrayed in
mainstream Hollywood film. That Broadway and Off-Broadway artists
are drawing their sources from the world of independent film speaks to
an expanded cultural understanding of the unique ways in which texts
and media might converse with one another.
Of course, the flourishing relationship between film and musical
theater is, in part, a consequence of economic factors. For some time
now, Hollywood studios have looked to enhance their profits by repro-
ducing their films on stage, given that theatrical productions can be
significantly less expensive than making a film. In 2002, musical theater
producer Sue Frost commented:
The instinct is to go for what feels safe. It remains to be seen how

many [musical adaptations of films] really work and how many are
knee-jerk reactions to what seems to be the trend. (“If It’s a Musical,
It Was Probably a Movie”)
126
Musicals and Film 127
The Walt Disney Studios, the only studio that has a theatrical division,
has been the most prodigious and successful: the musical version of its
1991 animated film Beauty and the Beast opened on Broadway in 1994
and ran for 13 years, and the musical adaptation of The Lion King (1994)
opened on Broadway in 1997 and continues to run. Other Disney films
adapted to musicals include Mary Poppins (1964) and The Little Mermaid
(1989), and there are planned stage productions of Frozen, its hugely pop-
ular 2013 animated film, and The Princess Bride, a modest success when it
was released in 1987 that has since become a cult film classic. Other stu-
dios have been busy perusing the movies they own, as well. According to
Sony Pictures Entertainment executive Lia Vollack, for instance, Sony has
been looking “for the stories with the strongest emotional resonance, for
stories that feel like they want to be sung onstage.” Extending Vollack’s
anthropomorphizing language, New York Times theater reporter Patrick
Healy has written that “[w]hat the studios are confronting is the tricky
alchemy of stage adaptation: finding films and books that have the DNA
that might spawn a musical ….” To invoke this study’s central metaphor,
musicals adapted from films may be seen as the latter’s “hideous prog-
eny,” a process perhaps more easily recognizable when violent stories are
adapted, as in American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis’s 1991 novel adapted to
film in 2000 and as a musical in 2013, with music and lyrics by Duncan
Sheik and a book by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa; the 1988 dark comedy film
Heathers, adapted to the musical stage in 2014 by Laurence O’Keefe and
Kevin Murphy; and Silence! The Musical, a parody of The Silence of the
Lambs (1991), written and composed by Al and Jon Kaplan, which pre-
miered Off Broadway in 2005.
In 2002, theater, opera, and film director Nicholas Hytner captured
the potential of film-to-musical-theater adaptations:
If the camera changes a story, music transfigures it; and the musical
theater has always been drawn more to the adaptation of old stories
than to the invention of entirely new ones. Musical dramatists have
always looked for stories that can be remade with a musical motor.
Their primary concern has rarely been for narrative novelty, more
often for the excitement that is to be found in the acquiescence of a
story to the musical form.
The films and musicals discussed in this chapter exemplify this creative
“acquiescence of a story to the musical form,” yet their sources are not
“old stories” but contemporary, non-canonical ones that may have more
challenging content than that of classic films. When a film that has
attained classic status becomes a source for adaptation, the same preju-
dices appear as when a treasured literary work is adapted. Adaptations of
independent films to musical theater represent in part an effort to mini-
mize the perceived threat to audiences’ identifications with “home texts,”
i.e., beloved classic sources viewers may want protected from “adaptation
incursion”—a viewpoint pointedly expressed in the headline of a 2013
article in The Daily Telegraph: “Can We Please Stop Turning Great Films
Into Musicals?” Taking small films as their sources quells this anxiety for
the musical book writers, whose adaptations do not have to compete with
the legacy of their sources in the way adaptations of Romeo and Juliet, Pride
and Prejudice, or The Great Gatsby inevitably do. Readers and viewers are
less likely to be proprietary about sources when these have not achieved
the cultural status of the “great” classic literary or film “home texts.” At
the same time, musical theater adaptations of independent or offbeat
films need to forge their own creative identities, since there is not a ready
brand (a well-known, popular, or classic source) on which to capitalize.
Like many of the other works treated in this book, the musicals ref-
erenced in this chapter are tied to their sources in their common fasci-
nation with the outcast figure. As Glyn Davis notes, the very genre of
independent film has been defined in terms of the outcast figure, seen in
the title of books such as Emanuel Levy’s 2001 Cinema of Outsiders: The
Rise of American Independent Film (Davis 36). Itself the “hideous progeny”
of Hollywood film, independent films have been “freed to a significant
extent from the relatively narrow moral economy typically operative in
Hollywood” (King 199; also quoted in Davis 36). Rose’s unconventional
wallflower figure in Dogfight (1991); Lola’s cross-dressing in Kinky Boots
(2005); Cathy Whitaker’s and Raymond Deagan‘s entrapment in brutally
limiting class, gender, and racial conventions in Far from Heaven (2002);
Guy and Girl as penniless musician and immigrant single mother in
Once (2006); even the title character’s inarticulate boxer in Rocky (1976):
all struggle not only with their identities at the margins of mainstream
culture but also with an inability to conceptualize their experiences. The
musicals draw these marginalized sources and characters into view as
spectacle, magically giving them a voice, though this seems incongruous
in a way that can give an impression of “monstrosity.”
***
The little-known film Dogfight, directed by Nancy Savoca and written

by Bob Comfort, based in part on his experiences in the United States
Marine Corps, is about four macho young Marines in 1963 on leave in

San Francisco before shipping off to “a little country called Vietnam,”
as one of them says. They plan to attend a “dogfight,” a party where
Marines compete to bring the ugliest date, unbeknownst to the women
they choose. The film, like the musical adaptation that premiered Off
Broadway in 2012 (with music and lyrics by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul
and book by Peter Duchan), is striking for its blended tone. The medium
of musical theater seems an improbable vehicle for a story of vulgar
Marines engaging in a contest about female appearance. The objectifi-
cation of women in the stage show as well as in the film is so starkly
presented that the dogfight scenes are painful to watch. But the merger
of stage and screen is also intriguing, in part because the musical con-
trasts these outcast figures—the women in the dogfight as well as the
misguided young men looking for their manhood in the military—with
a dramatic representation of an America centered on youth and energy.
The adaptation’s medium, vibrant musical theater, realizes this aspect of
the film in ways particular to the form.
The story in Dogfight offers a biting satire of the homosocial underpin-
nings of war at the same time that it explores the budding relationship
between one of the Marines, Eddie Birdlace (played by River Phoenix
in the film and Derek Klena in the Off-Broadway production), and the
young woman he brings to the dogfight, Rose Fenny (Lili Taylor in the
film and Lindsay Mendez on stage). As Duchan explains, Eddie “has
been sold a false bill of goods.” The bait and switch performed on him
and his fellow Marines, that they will receive a hero’s welcome after
their return from war, reflects a destructive convergence of political and
social ideologies. Patriarchal pressures influence these young men to
“do or die,” just like their fathers who comprised the mythic “Greatest
Generation” that grew up in the Great Depression and then fought in
World War II. In the military, men learn very quickly that their bonds
with one another are sacred. The relationships among the four (three
in the musical), this “band of brothers” that devises and executes the
dogfight, are secured by a sense of duty that lends meaning to the cha-
otic events they experience in Vietnam; these bonds are also seen as a
practical necessity, given war’s unpredictability. But the dogfight also
introduces cracks in the cement of these ties, when the value of human
intimacy contradicts that of homosocial pledges.
Dogfight the musical and Dogfight the film not only share a fascina-
tion with the cultural construction of masculinity and its sometimes
sorrowful effects but also offer a critique of ideologies grounded in the
values of tradition. Exploring the dire consequences of a faithfulness
born solely of precedent (“my dad, your dad, all the dads” [Dogfight the
musical]), the movie and musical thus help to consider the ways we
conceptualize adaptation itself.
One of the major ways the stage show connects to its source is through
the thematic presence of music in the content of the film. In Savoca’s
Dogfight, music is a crucial element in the story. Rose is obsessed with
folk music, its earnestness, politics, and community-mindedness. A
means of adapting regional cultures into a non-hierarchical experience
of art, folk music is itself a particularly resonant form of expression in
the context of adaptation. The music Rose listens to—songs like Pete
Seeger’s “We Shall Overcome” and Malvina Reynolds’s “What Have
They Done to the Rain”—is about social change and the role of music
and art in sustaining community in the face of dehumanizing war,
industry, and capitalism. The juxtaposition of Rose’s social-minded folk
music with musical theater composition forces a re-examination of the
latter as not merely diverting, as simple entertainment, but as revela-
tory, since audience members are prodded to relate the conventionally
escapist values of musical theater with the political values of folk music.
The songs in the stage musical stretch the conventions of musical
theater beyond feel-good representations even as they inhabit the forms
of musical theater. For example, the second-act song “Hometown Hero’s
Ticker Tape Parade” captures the Marines’ motivation for joining the
military. They await the “cotton candy and lemonade” that will welcome
them home, “main street blocked all afternoon … your face on a big
balloon.” But the song also articulates the driving force of patriarchal
ideologies surrounding war in determining the lives of these young men.
There is dramatic irony in the men dreaming of “telling tales of a brave
brigade” as the audience listens with the knowledge of what will in fact
greet them upon their return (those who do in fact return) from Vietnam.
The first-act song “Come to a Party” that Eddie sings to Rose, whom
he identifies as his potential date for the dogfight, is also full of dra-
matic irony. Eddie makes his earnest appeal to her to join him because
of their “connection,” based (as it was in the movie) on his fake interest
in a made-up folk-singer hero called Jim Swain:
[W]e saw eye to eye on all that music stuff….

Now isn’t that rare, that kind of connection….
Come to a party with me, just say yes.
Eddie identifies himself as “an open book,” a nice American boy, “[a]
Wally Cleaver type.” The most brutal line in the song is also its most
disarming to Rose, for who could resist his crooning?—“Now look in

these eyes, they ain’t gonna hurt you.” There is the traditional saying
that “the eyes are the window to the soul,” and here Eddie’s betray Rose.
His dishonesty is disorienting in the musical in a way that is differently
presented in the film. Phoenix’s charm appeals to viewers as well as
to Rose, despite our knowledge of his plan, but in the stage show the
courting in the song’s music and lyrics apes an authenticity that almost
defies our knowledge of Eddie’s intentions. The brutality of the dogfight
is enhanced by the fact that Eddie Birdlace sings as beautifully as a bird.
The musical’s Rose also sings like a bird. While the film’s Rose singing
“What Have They Done to the Rain” is poignant because of the vulner-
ability she expresses in her weak but earnest rendition of this powerful
song, the musical presents a paradox, since anyone who can sing like
Mendez can never really be “seen” as ugly. An ingenious match of story
and musical, Rose’s singing on stage enacts a transformation that’s a
result of art, of music transporting us from a reality that is insufficient
or dangerous—even hideous—to an experience that is about being
in the moment. The stage adaptation of Dogfight uses its musical and
theatrical medium to transform our vision of Rose: a makeover of sorts
that is more than cosmetic (and free of cosmetics) and demonstrates the
power of performance to shift our perspective.
Indeed, the theme of perspective is central to both the film and its
adaptation, seen most clearly in Dogfight’s treatment of time. While the
show is able to play with time in ways the film cannot, e.g., creating
Eddie and Rose’s extended moments together by suspending time via
their musical interludes, Dogfight the musical is more about the trauma
of altered perspectives. Time figures prominently in the show’s songs.
“Take Me Back,” for example, serves as the prelude and finale, when
Eddie returns to San Francisco from Vietnam. In Act I’s “Some Kinda
Time,” the Marines anticipate the good time they are going to have
on their 24-hour layover before shipping out, singing with confidence
about being “kings for an evening.” In Act II, the sunrise repetition of
“Some Kinda Time” (drawn out as the musical background for “the
morning after”) suggests the idea of shifting perspectives after the dog-
fight and Rose and Eddie’s night together. Also in Act II, the lovely and
vertiginous song “Before It’s Over” that Rose sings expresses hopes for
exploiting life’s pleasures in the context of mortality: “See a world beau-
tiful and strange/Spinning … how fast it runs away…. See that you’ve
got so much more to be.” Finally, the theme of altered viewpoints is
clear in “Come Back,” Eddie’s wail after his Marine buddies have died
in Vietnam and he is lost between the past and present, with seemingly
little hope for a future. The tone and treatment of time in the stage
show foreground the ironies and tragedies of perspective—individual,
historical, and, also, textual, as this adaptation, like the others treated
in this book, provides an imaginative reorienting of the story derived
from the film.
Both the film and the musical utilize a frame narrative, beginning
with Eddie’s bus trip back to San Francisco. The story of his previous
time in San Francisco appears in an extended flashback, though the
musical returns to this image of Eddie on the bus at the end of Act I,
after Rose sings “Pretty Funny.” This song treats Rose’s shift in perspec-
tive after learning that she was the victim of the men’s contest. The
final chorus of the song is set against those that come previously: “Isn’t
it funny?/For a moment he convinced me I could be pretty, funny.”
When Rose discovers the truth of what they have been subjected to
from Marcy (Annaleigh Ashford), the prostitute hired by Boland (Josh
Segarra) to help him win the contest, their duet, “Dogfight,” represents
in its form not only these women bonding but also the juxtaposition
of their different perspectives—Marcy’s practicality and Rose’s idealism:
Marcy: See if I’m gettin’ screwed, I’m at least getting paid/At the
dogfight, dogfight….
Rose: How can you let a pack of jerks tell you this is how the world
works?
If perspective is thematized in the staging and content of the songs in

the musical, both it and the film explore the historical tragedy of per-
spective that occurred in the aftermath of the Vietnam war. Would-be
heroes came home to spitting and cursing. Vital young men returned
defeated and debilitated—the war’s “hideous progeny”—devastated
physically and/or psychologically. While the stage version of Dogfight
revels in the moments of connection between Rose and Eddie and the
musical pleasures that transport the characters and the audience to an
aesthetically rendered suspended time, it also explores the historical and
personal tragedies resulting from the war. One of the badges of brother-
hood in the musical is the ditty the Marines sing at the beginning of the
show: “We three Bs have a mighty sting” (the men call themselves the
Bs because their names all start with a B). Toward the end of the show,
the motif is reprised amidst the loud, drum-led cacophony of the war, in
which two of the three are killed. Its recapitulation within the horrible
context of battle again demonstrates the show’s use of music and song
to thematize profound changes in perspective taking place at the level
of character and history. “All changed, changed utterly” is the refrain

of William Butler Yeats’s iconic poem “Easter 1916,” about the shift in
perspective necessarily following the 1916 failed armed insurrection
by Irish republicans. In the Dogfight film and musical, this change in
perspective is also an aspect of viewer and audience response to Eddie
and his fellow Marines: at the end, we see Eddie as broken, as one who
has lost his friends, his true family. In the film and musical, the cruelty
of passersby on the San Francisco streets upon his return underscores
our sympathy for Eddie as a decimated person. Savoca remarks in the
DVD commentary that the scene in the film in which the old-man bar-
tender shows off his belly-dancer tattoo, in which the dancer is seen to
be dancing when he moves his fat belly, is a projection of Eddie’s status
now as a kind of old man: “He’s been robbed of his youth, his life.”
Dogfight demonstrates the importance of letting go of preconceptions
and ideologies that block experiences individuals may have “before it’s
over,” as Rose sings. The film and stage show chart the failure of faith-
fulness to an idea at all cost and the trauma besetting people too ruled
by an ideology of fidelity. Eddie and his buddies follow a social script
that Rose’s individualized passion disrupts. She ruptures, at least for
Eddie and for a time, the sexist and patriarchal ideologies that dictate
these men’s behavior in life as well as in the “theater” of war. Sharing a
benighted fantasy of masculinity, the men want to do what they imag-
ine “the dads” did. They are unable to imagine, instead, what a newly
conceived relation to gender roles and culture might be.
The ingenious adaptation of Dogfight to the musical stage offers a case
study in the importance of relinquishing a text to its next incarnation.
Adaptations loyal to a new perspective (rather than a previous text)
model an openness that can be valued in the realm of human as well as
textual relations. On the DVD commentary, co-producer Richard Guay
says that Dogfight is a story about loyalty. Savoca seems suspicious of
such loyalty when it can harden into narrow-mindedness. She says that
the film explores for the young Marines
how threatening sometimes it is to be with a woman because then

you really do start to lose all that stuff that makes you feel good and
important and connected to your guys and suddenly you’re connect-
ing to this other part of yourself and that makes everybody a little
nervous.
There is, as her insight suggests, a psychosocial value in reconceiving

identity as flexible. Like a person adapting to a new idea of the self
freed from ideologies that have defined her or him, the text perceived
as adapting with an openness to new contexts can liberate its viewers
and readers to “[connect] to this other part of [the text] and that makes
everybody a little nervous.”
The musical Dogfight transposes the film into a new “key,” a new
medium. It draws on the energy of live theater and the vitality of musi-
cal expression, counterpointing the story’s subject matter. Rather than
finding inspiration in a notion of semper fi (the shortened version of
the Marine Corps motto Semper fidelis, “always faithful,” and the men’s
bonding call for faithfulness to an idea they do not fully understand),
the Dogfight film and musical are ignited by a notion of how art—
theater, film, music—can move viewers and audiences to respond anew
to a story of youthful romance, damaging sex and gender ideologies,
and a tragic war.
Another film that seems an unlikely source for musical theater is Todd
Haynes’s Far From Heaven. This film is better known than the other
films discussed in this chapter (with the exception of Rocky, of course),
in part because it reflects on the history of Hollywood film, specifically
the melodramas of Douglas Sirk. In 2011 Davis named Far from Heaven
“one of the most significant American independent films of the last
twenty years” (2). The book for the stage adaptation was written by
Richard Greenberg, with music and lyrics by Scott Frankel and Michael
Korie, respectively, who had previously worked together most notably
on the 2006 Grey Gardens, a musical inspired by the Maysles brothers’
1975 cult-classic documentary of the same name. The musical Far from
Heaven, which premiered Off Broadway in 2013, recreates the 1950s
suburban Connecticut setting of the story in jazzy office scenes, staging
a representation of Frank Whitaker (Steven Pasquale) and his jaded and
smug office partner Stan Fine (James Moye) at work that is evocative of
the AMC period drama television series Mad Men (which had its final
season this year). Their “Office Talk,” as one song is titled, includes “sly
dog” innuendos and sexist patter about their secretaries, other “chicks,”
and the “ball and chain,” scored with engaging clarinet and piano riffs.
The stage set in these scenes is brilliant, particularly during the trau-
matic discovery by Cathy Whitaker (Kelli O’Hara) of her husband Frank
kissing a man in his office, followed by her flailing around in a cage
passing as an elevator that is spun by stage actors to approximate her
downward-spiraling emotional state, rendering a Sirkian and Haynesian
melos beautifully in a clever set design and stage direction.1
In the most affecting song in the musical, “The Only One,” Cathy
and Raymond Deagan (Isaiah Johnson) sing about being the only
“different” ones in a given social space (this recalls their exchange at

the art opening in the film version, when Cathy [Julianne Moore] asks
Raymond [Dennis Haysbert] how it feels to be the only “one” in the
room, which resonates with the W. E. B. Du Bois question in The Souls of
Black Folk (1903): “How does it feel to be a problem?”). While this song
features a sequence that refrains throughout the play and lends fluid-
ity to the score, most of Far from Heaven’s music is operatic, an attempt
to translate the melodrama of the story into musical theater. The stage
show shifts the tone of the story into more ameliorative ground, gener-
ating sympathy for Frank, for example, whose vulnerability and desire
are rendered in musical expression. He sings a song, “I Never Knew,”
about “how much I never knew” before falling in love with Chase,
the hunky young guy he meets in Miami. In the film, the relationship
between Frank (Dennis Quaid) and the young man is represented as
more sexual than romantic, while the stage musical, invested in Frank’s
interior life, presents that aspect of the story in conventional romantic
terms.
Another example of the musical’s more ameliorative tone is seen in
the ending, which celebrates Cathy’s resilience. In the film, Haynes’s
long shots of Cathy waving goodbye to Raymond as his train departs are
fairly heartbreaking, but in the musical she is seen gently rejoicing with
her children after Raymond leaves. In the film, Cathy’s relationship
with her kids is mediated utterly by social roles and stereotypes (which
is why Frank’s crying causes their son David [Ryan Ward] to break into
tears). Cathy’s smiling relationship with her kids at the end of the
musical opposes Haynes’s interest in the rhetoric of the family. O’Hara’s
Cathy concludes the musical with a song about carrying on, moving
on, that employs butterfly images. She sings, “I’ll find my stride!” and
“The worse it hurts the more a person grows!” The loveliness of the
show’s (and film’s) title is literalized in song at the end: “Not as close to
heaven as it used to seem. That was just a dream.” The sentimentality
reifies Cathy’s and Raymond’s relationship as transcendent: as he leaves
on the train, they sing, “For a moment we were autumn” and “Though
I may be far away, I’ll never say goodbye.”
This narrative resolution enhanced by music and lyrics is of a piece
with Far from Heaven the musical’s limited interest in irony. The show
levels its critique of social hypocrisies visually by displaying the rich
colors of the sets and costumes as ironically out of keeping with the
black-versus-white cultural climate that rejects any relationships that
deviate from social convention. But the show’s commitment to conven-
tions of the musical theater, especially its emphasis on Cathy’s resilience
and the transcendent nature of her relationship with Raymond, veers

the show away from irony and its deployment as a means of represent-
ing psychosocial devastation.
As adaptations reflect the cultural moments in which they are
produced, the musicals treated in this chapter are interesting in their
apparent response to a desire to both acknowledge the disturbing
stories about social outcasts and outsiders in their sources and then,
also, reproduce these stories as ameliorative. The musical Far from
Heaven is aware of Haynes’s desolate and ironic tone in the film, an
emotional intensity (in large part due to Moore’s moving portrayal of
Cathy) accompanied by speech patterns, dialogue, and images that
are utterly defined by artificiality, a self-conscious re-presentation of
a style recognized by viewers as 1950s Sirkian melodrama. But the
musical is much more invested in a theme of transcending difficulty
and transposing a melodramatic cinematic style drawn from both
Sirk and Haynes into a rich stage set, score, and costumes. While the
deep autumn colors of the musical Far from Heaven’s set and costumes
emulate the cinematic palette of the film, the show relies on dynamic
stage sets, acting, and a well-sung score to portray a satisfying story
about a romantic moment of connection that transcends oppressive
social roles.
The 2013 Tony-award-winning Kinky Boots, another stage musical
adaptation of an independent film with a stalwartly happy ending,
celebrates the cultural “monster” of the drag queen. Like Dogfight, Kinky
Boots (with a book by Harvey Fierstein and music and lyrics by Cyndi
Lauper) takes the theme of the outsider and repositions the marginal-
ized figure as central to the spectacle of musical theater pleasures, thus
enacting a shift in the perspective of the viewer/audience member that
has been thematized in the source text. Further, while the 2005 film
Kinky Boots makes use of the camera’s eye to pose the problem of fetish-
istic observation (the camera focusing on rows of shoes, for example;
Charlie [Joel Edgerton] watching the drag queen Lola [Chiwetel Ejiofor]
through an opening in the doorway; Charlie watching Lola dance with
the woman he falls for, Lauren [Sarah-Jane Potts] [Figures 6.1]), the
musical resolves the social challenge of “accepting the other” by invit-
ing audiences to participate in a kind of evangelical conversion to a
belief in the transformation of mindsets and the power and pleasures
associated with the “monstrous.”
Kinky boots are the “hideous progeny” of this story, a metonymic
reference to the cultural monster of the drag queen Lola. “They call me
Figures 6.1 Kinky Boots: watching
Lola,” Lola (Billy Porter in the original Broadway cast) says in the stage
musical, “because it’s my name.” Once again asserting selfhood and
identity at the same time that such assertion ironically undoes the fixity
of that gesture, Lola’s name evokes a cultural history of drama queens
and divas: “Whatever Lola wants, Lola gets … ,” sings Ejiofor in the
film, referencing the famed 1955 theater musical comedy Damn Yankees.
In Lola’s dressing room, a poster of Marlene Dietrich as Lola Lola in
the 1930 film The Blue Angel provides the source of Lola’s name. Again,
the naming refers to Lola’s self, but that self has been redesigned, like the
boots that the drag queens wear, whose weight requires heels engineered
with more skill and savvy. More importantly, the concept of reinforcing
the sole with a continuous metal shank reflects an idea of adapting the
environment (garment accoutrements) so that it can support someone
with two identities. “Soul of a Man,” Charlie’s show-stopping song in
Act II of the stage musical shows “the soul” or absent presence of the
father to be the “sole,” the major support and foundation of the show:
How can I be the soul of a man, noble and wise

Like the soul of a man who lifted me high
Soul of a man, heroic and true
Like the soul of a man that I looked up to.
This song, about reinforcing the sole of identity to achieve the soul of
manhood, privileges a notion of identity defined in terms of the practi-
cal machinations of daily life: its relationships over and above an con-
cept of gender defined, as in Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse
or the world of Dogfight, by legacy, patriarchy, or the past.
The show’s clever representation of changes in identity is fore-
grounded from the very introduction of Charlie, whose adult form
walks out from behind a leather display case a split second after the
Young Charlie (Sebastian Hedges Thomas) runs down the stairs and
steps behind it. While film uses cutting (montage) to demonstrate the
passage of time, Kinky Boots realizes the passage of time through its use
of the stage set.
When Porter’s Lola quotes Oscar Wilde, “Be yourself; everyone else is
already taken,” she captures the paradox of the show’s attitude toward
identity: believing in a notion of being true to the self, Kinky Boots also
argues for flexible identities and questions the grounds on which iden-
tity is affirmed. The show is preoccupied with authenticity—what does
it mean, Lola asks Don (Daniel Sherman), the shoe factory foreman, to
be “a real man?” It turns out that a real man, like, presumably, a real
woman, or a “real” good person, is someone who opens his or her mind
to the Other, embracing the creativity and courage of people who are
different or who transgress conventions.
The show, more than the film, is interested in fathers—their author-
ity, their authorship of the identities of their sons—“Price and Son” is
the name of the family business Charlie is trying to save, paying the
“price” of paternal influence. The logo of the red kinky boot on the
side of the factory on the stage announces a newly flexible institution
in “Price and Sons,” as the company “adapts” and revises the patriarchal
history of the father’s business. The story suggests that such adaptation
is indeed the only possible way to survive the burden and oppression
of a patriarchal culture. The musical adds an unlikely number staged
in the nursing home of Lola’s aged father, whom we were told earlier
perished from lung cancer, suggesting acceptance of and resolution
with the father figure. Fierstein has said that he wanted to draw out the
theme of sons and fathers, interestingly connecting this musical with
Dogfight. Both works show oppressive gender roles directly connected
to patriarchal views of legacy and inheritance. And both shows main-
stream stories contained in independent projects that are themselves
about the margins. Both versions of Kinky Boots allude to the weight
of parental judgment as a source of anxiety about masculinity. Kinky
Boots the musical finds performance to be the way out of this trap, as
song and dance provide a different perspective on the identities of Lola,
Charlie, and an audience culturally trained to focus on difference rather
than continuities.
The theater musical interestingly adapts an arm-wrestling battle
between Lola and Don in the film into a full-blown boxing match on
stage. While the narrative purpose of the scenes is similar—Lola show-
ing that she can best the homophobic blowhard Don then allowing him
to win so as not to shatter his own self-image—the effect of the boxing
match is not only to enhance the dramatic nature of the scene but also,
simply, to make dramatic use of Porter taking his shirt off. Because the
audience has already been acculturated to Lola as a woman, by the time
this scene unfolds, the baring of Lola’s chest in the boxing scene creates
cognitive dissonance. The scene demonstrates the practical effects of shift-
ing viewpoints, in this case from our vision of Porter’s Lola performing
the role of a woman to acting the part of a masculine man in his “boxers.”
Modeling the possibility of retraining the eye, the scene reveals gender
conventions to be window-dressing, to be temporary and flexible. The
revelation is aptly made through live theatrical performance. The show’s
adaptation of the film makes clever use, then, of an idea of adaptation
as social-psychological, suggesting the virtues of imagining selfhood in
terms of gender costumes, just as, this book has been arguing, texts and
adaptations in their elastextity are best understood as “trying on” a new
take and stretching something beyond what seems familiar. The uncan-
niness of our being made uncomfortable by Porter’s taking his shirt off
forces a confrontation with the arbitrariness of what we see as fixed and
unchanging, and Kinky Boots performs its re-vue/view of the film’s story
as one about shifting perspectives and the virtues of that movement.
When Charlie dons those kinky boots at the Milan footwear show
late in Act II, he stumbles and falls. He is rescued by his “Princess
Charming,” Lola (the show earlier plays with the Cinderella trope when
Charlie tries to fit “the right shoe” on Lola and recalls Lola in the film
thanking Charlie for rescuing her from London thugs—“very Prince
Charming”), after which Charlie somewhat magically is transformed
from a man unable to walk in kinky boots to a consummate dancer.

Charlie’s coming into character is symbolized through the actor’s radi-
cally changed performance on stage.
Kinky Boots the stage musical ends with a rather remarkable conver-
sion story, that of the audience brought into the fold through music
and dancing. One of the effects of having all of the men from the fac-
tory, notably the once homophobic Don, dancing and wearing kinky
boots at the end of the show is to universalize the message of accept-
ance and transformation. The words of the closing song “Raise You Up/
Just Be,” a mash-up of 12-step earnestness and the energy of a Christian
revival meeting, leads the audience to believe through a kinetic recita-
tion of the moral of the story:
Now I’m standing on high heels,

If Dad could see me now!
Feed your fire, to take you higher.
We’ll light you up like a live wire.
Celebrate you, to elevate you,
When you struggle to step, we’ll take a helping hand.
If you hit the dust,
Let me raise you up.
When your bubble busts,
Let me raise you up.
If your glitter rusts,
Let me raise you up (and up).
Alright, now we’ve all heard of the 12-step program, have we

not?
Yes, but what you can do in 12, I want you to know that we all
can do in 6 now, and it goes like this:
One: Pursue the truth
Two: Learn something new
Three: Accept yourself and you’ll accept others too!
Four: Let love shine
Five: Let pride be your guide
Six: Change the world when you change your mind!
Just be. Who you wanna be.
Never let them tell you who you ought to be.
Just be. With dignity.
Celebrate your life triumphantly.
Unlike the satiric allusion to 12-step, self-help programs in [Safe], the

immediate impact of this quasi-evangelical scene is to raise the audience
to its feet to join in the pleasure of performance. This performance,
however, is a primer in the ethics of acceptance and changing one’s
mind. Kinky Boots mainstreams lessons about sex and gender, Lola’s
insisting on sameness (“We’re the same, Charlie Boy, you and me”), the
show arguing for adaptability and performance as the most fundamen-
tally human values art celebrates.
Of course, some may usefully object to the appeal to individual trans-
formation (accept yourself, accept others) as opposed to radical social
change. The show may very well exemplify Haynes’s objection to feel-
good resolutions discussed in Chapter 5. Similarly, Laurie A. Finke and
Susan Aronstein assess Monty Python’s Spamalot, the musical comedy that
ran on Broadway from 2005 to 2009, and its “knowing wink” at audiences
“while leaving the Broadway musical’s American ideologies—the melting
pot of democratic possibility, individualism, romantic love, and happy
endings—intact, encouraging its audience to participate in the final
celebration of those ideologies” (291). Granting Finke and Aronstein’s
concern that Broadway musicals that deal in content with race, class,
gender, or sexual orientation “[paper] over the increasingly obvious rifts
within American culture” (292), there is something to be said for main-
streaming “cultural monster” figures. Kinky Boots is a musical-theatrical
Bildungsroman that insists on the conventionality of drag queens. “These
boots can be mainstream,” says Charlie. “Drag queens are mainstream,”
Lola retorts. While not immersive theater, the show does incorporate the
presence of the audience into its lessoning: as Lola belts out “Hold Me in
Your Heart” in the nursing home, the spotlight scans the audience. When
the song reaches its crescendo, the audience is “with” Lola, and the scene
plays out like a comfy rave, igniting the audience to fully appreciate Lola’s
passion, virtue, and her pipes, which are impressive. In the final number,
“Raise You Up,” the show’s designers light up the audience, which con-
tributes to the revival meeting tone of the end of the show.
***
Kinky Boots, while not a radical theatrical event, does incorporate an

awareness of its audience. If its message is broad and humanistic, its debt
to independent film, as in the cases of Dogfight and Once, which I’ll briefly
turn to now, establishes a different relationship than other theatrical
productions that begin with a blockbuster film (such as The Lion King).
In the 2012 Tony-award-winning Once, performance and audience

intermingle, adding a new dimension to live theater. While the musical
(book by Enda Walsh, music and lyrics by Glen Hansard and Markéta
Irglová) shares the theme of music as “conductor” of/for relationships
found in the 2006 film of the same name, it translates the story’s passion
for music into form, a set and conceptual frame that are meant to blur the
boundaries of art and life, though the show is in many ways more artificial
than the naturalized world of the musical film. Ian Freer has noted the
unlikely success of the film Once: “1) It’s about a diffident busker walking
the streets of Dublin with a Czech woman who carries a Hoover. 2) In 88
minutes, there is nothing that approaches a dramatic incident. 3) It’s a
musical. 4) It’s an alternative Irish folk musical. 5) It was Big At Sundance.”
The Broadway musical begins immersively, as the pub setting on
stage is actually opened for business to audience members ordering
drinks, while the supporting cast enters the stage with their instru-
ments. The cast begins to jam, flanked by the audience at the edges of
the stage, and when the actor playing Guy (Steve Kazee in the original
Broadway cast) enters, the audience members are ushered back to their
seats. As Guy sings the first number, Girl (Cristin Milioti in the original
Broadway cast) begins her role off stage, entering from the back of the
theater, walking down the aisle as if she has been taken with Guy’s song
and voice and enters the pub (i.e., the stage) with piqued interest. The
intimacy of the film’s representation of the two characters is achieved
through the disarming appearance of Hansard and Irglová as Guy and
Girl, as well as a tracking camera, for instance, in the continuous shot
tracking Girl’s walk in her fuzzy slippers across Dublin as she listens
through headphones to Guy’s music, to which she has added lyrics.
Such intimacy is revised as a theater trope in the theater musical when
the audience joins the cast on stage as it plays music. But as Once pro-
ceeds, the musical further breaks boundaries by having the entire cast
and company become the orchestra. Upending the very idea of musical
accompaniment, all of the music becomes diegetic in the show. Walsh
has commented that “I always wanted the actors to be the musicians—to
present them honestly and allow the music to be central to their storytell-
ing” (Program Notes). The musical thus interprets the film viewer’s sense
of immediacy (everyday and unnamed characters falling in love, tracking
shots of Dublin street scenes) in its own medium, achieving its tone of
intimacy by blurring the lines that divide the audience from actors and
questioning the discrete roles of music, acting, and stage design. In Once
the musical these aspects of the show are uniquely merged (Figure 6.2).
Stage musicals indebted to independent film reintroduce the latter
to audiences who now have the opportunity to experience the altered
Figure 6.2 Once the musical

Source: Courtesy of Joan Marcus.
perspectives the varied and different kinds of media bring to bear on

content. Even the crowd-pleasing 2012 show Rocky the musical (music
and lyrics by Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens, book by Thomas
Meehan), which ran on Broadway in 2014, stretches a little outside
itself in some intriguing ways in its conclusion. While the show itself
is not particularly challenging, making fairly simplistic musical theater
gestures in adapting plot points to catchy songs (such as “My Nose Ain’t
Broken”), some of its staging is ingenious. The show uses rear projection
to suggest the familiar film scenes of Rocky Balboa (Andy Karl in the
Broadway cast) running through the streets of Philadelphia and up the
steps of the Philadelphia Art Museum, scored with “Gonna Fly Now,”
the film’s theme song. The shifting site of the audience at the finale
is quite thrilling—audience members in the first several rows of the
theater are led onto the back of the stage as the entire stage is moved
into the center of the theater space. Transforming the stage into a box-
ing arena, audience members find themselves flanking the boxing ring
for the final match between Rocky and Apollo Creed (Terence Archie).
Rocky the Musical’s foray into imaginative stage design represents
the potential for even the most mainstream of adaptations to stretch
beyond its ideological or medial limits. As will be discussed in the next
chapter, the influence of immersive theater has been a significant factor
in recreating art spaces and our understanding of the role of the audi-
ence and adaptation in constituting contemporary cultural production.2
Part III
Immersive Theater and the
Monstrous Avant-Garde
7
Adapting Time and Place: Avant-
Garde Storytelling and Immersive
Theater
In 2011, the Punchdrunk Theater Company brought its intriguing

“immersive theater” mash-up of Macbeth and film noir to Chelsea
warehouses in NYC. Supporting the show’s attempt to create a holistic
mood that goes beyond a traditional performance “stage,” “SLEEP NO
MORE” is inscribed on the sidewalk yards away from the entrance to
“The McKittrick,” which is the character of the dormant hotel in which
the show takes place (Figure 7.1).
Etched into the sidewalk, this graffiti reference to the show’s prox-
imity introduces audience members (and passers-by) to the unique
presence of Sleep No More that permeates the boundaries of the stage
and theater. Seeping outside conventional theater space and into the
personal experience of audience members, Sleep No More offers a stun-
ning example of the unique pleasures of adaptation conceived of as
performative “acts.”
Sleep No More features the central characters from Shakespeare’s
Macbeth, though, as D. L. Hopkins observes, Alfred Hitchcock is a
“guiding spirit.” Drawing especially on Rebecca and Vertigo (the latter an
obvious source of Sleep No More’s fictional environment, the McKittrick
Hotel), “The production filters Macbeth through the atmosphere of early
Hitchcock films. When encountered alone, each character performed
actions based on a vaguely Hitchcockian reimagining of that character’s
personal life—as a taxidermist or a private investigator, for example”
(Hopkins 270). The set is dispersed among six stories of rooms in two
adjacent warehouses in Chelsea. The eerie rooms include children’s
nurseries, office spaces filled with mysterious books and clues, religious
altars, a cemetery, haunted woods, a taxidermist shop, a hotel reception
lobby, a padded cell, and the bed and bathroom of the guilty Macbeths,
147
Figure 7.1 West 27th St. sidewalk, New York City, September 2013
where they wash the blood off in a tub after Macbeth has killed the
king. In each of these rooms, there are weird and evocative objects and a
mise-en-scène that invites audience members to wonder and to analyze.
The decor and scenes, as they are acted out in set pieces throughout the
six stories, allude to Macbeth and its parts but not in a linear way, since
the trajectory of the story will be displayed differently depending on the
decisions each audience member makes about which rooms to visit and
which actors to follow.
In a recent article in Comparative Drama, Jennifer Flaherty surveys
blogsites and intermedial analyses of Sleep No More, examining the
immersive elements of the production and the unique role of the
audience. Flaherty recounts the established language for experiencing
Sleep No More, which includes a variety of names for audience mem-
bers, including “Sleepalos,” “Insomniacs,” or simply “The Sleepless.”
Engagement with the show is described in terms of modes: “the search”
and “the tail.” “The search” refers to audience members’ examining of
the intricate details of the set, and because the stage is spread out over
six floors of performance space, one can spend her/his entire evening
Immersive Theater 149
on “the search.” The other mode involves “tailing” actors, chasing them
into rooms, in which they may stop to perform a scene.
Audience members spend several hours perusing the rooms of the
show and following actors who perform carefully choreographed scenes
that contain no spoken dialogue. The show’s ending is cannily staged
so that all of the actors, with audience members rushing after them
to the denouement of the story, convene on the bottom floor where
a banquet and the hanging of Macbeth take place. The final banquet
scene in which ghosts and the guilty dine together is visually stun-
ning and emotionally affecting. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth sit at their
respective heads of the long table, the audience crowding into the large
space below the stage on which the dinner table and its attendants sit.
The scene is acted in slow motion, the actors’ movements brilliantly
choreographed to give the illusion of watching a film. The hanging of
Macbeth is very powerful, his body swinging down from the stage above
the audience as the lights go out and a body substitution takes place. As
Macbeth swings dead in his noose, Benny Goodman’s “A Nightengale
Sang in Berkeley Square” is played, ironically evoking the “magic abroad
in the air.” The song was written and first performed on the eve of
WWII and is also featured as a refrain in Fritz Lang’s Man Hunt, which
gives Sleep No More its aptly noir conclusion.
The nightmarish tone and content of each room, as well as the
performances that continually (though not predictably) inhabit
the spaces, all reflect a kind of objective correlative of Macbeth’s
haunted internal life. As W. B. Worthen aptly notes, “Sleep No More
reifies Macbeth’s interior world as ‘immersive’ performance space,
materializing elements of the play’s verbal texture as objects in a
thematically resonant environment” (86). Adapting Shakespeare’s
play through a Hitchcockian lens and soundscape, which includes
Bernard Herrmann’s score from Vertigo, Sleep No More transposes a
canonic story about desire and transgression into a theatrical experi-
ence that in its form repeats these ideas. The themes of the show may
be familiar in their literariness—passion, power obsessions, and iconic
literary moments (“Out, out damned spot!” is one of few phrases that
can be heard during the show)—but the show expresses Macbeth’s and
Hitchcock’s shared fascination with desire and power in its configura-
tion of audience members as voyeurs reaching beyond the stable role
of static viewer. After a short period in a smoky bar that functions as
an initial holding room, guests are asked to don Venetian-style masks
and to refrain from speaking for the duration of the show. In a reversal
of traditional theater conventions, it is the audience that wears masks;
this establishes clarity about who the actors are but also lends ano-
nymity to the audience members. As artistic co-director (with Maxine
Doyle), Felix Barrett says,
Handing out the masks is like assigning seats in an auditorium. It estab-

lishes each individual as part of an audience, and creates a boundary
between them and the action. The masks create a sense of anonymity;
they make the rest of the audience dissolve into generic ghostly pres-
ences, so that each person can explore the space alone (24).
Viewers are isolated within their masks, neutralizing the personalities

of the audience.
Immersive theater has borrowed from film one of its trademark
formal and theoretical trappings, an exploration of voyeurism. While
in film, the camera’s eye has often been understood to stand in for
the eye of a viewer (in Laura Mulvey’s classic terms, a male observer
who confirms his sexual and social power through a voyeuristic gaze),
traditional theater does not, with its typically wide proscenium, inves-
tigate this theme through its form. Both Sleep No More and Then She
Fell (discussed below) make use of windows, behind which convention-
ally private experience is on view for the audience members crowding
voyeuristically behind the glass to see what is revealed through the win-
dow. Lady Macbeth takes off her clothes and puts on a sequined gown
for the dance ball, all the while smashing against the window to suggest
madness and entrapment. Similar themes surround Alice and the Red
Queen, who act scenes behind the glass in Then She Fell. In Sleep No
More, Bernard Herrmann’s score of Vertigo is a major refrain throughout
the space, evoking not only the noir motifs of murder and the general
darkness of human experience but also the desire to watch while (aided
by masks) not being seen watching. This feeds a constant state of desire
(emulating a sort of Scottie Ferguson figure), as we perpetually follow a
trail and try to evaluate and judge our objects of vision.
While the wearing of masks ensures audience anonymity, it also erases
the self-consciousness associated with individual selfhood, liberating
audience members to make active decisions about the next moment of
their experience at the show. Sleep No More precludes passive viewing,
provoking audience members to create an experience of the show based
on their own personal choices and desires. As Myrto Koumarianos and
Cassandra Silver observe, “What SNM achieves then, with impressive
finesse, is what Erika Fischer-Lichte (adopting Victor Turner’s phrase)
calls the ‘betwixt and between,’ the experience of constantly blurred
boundaries between the real and the fictional in contemporary and

avantgarde performances” (170). Immersive theater challenges perfor-
mance conventions by dissolving the lines that separate its elements.
In 1957, Allan Kaprow, a student of composer John Cage, coined the
term “happening” to refer to a series of staged art “events” that sought
to question the difference between art and life. Cage was a leading
figure in crossing traditional disciplinary barriers. Looking forward to
immersive theater’s radical inclusion of the audience, pieces such as
Cage’s 4’33” challenged audiences’ assumptions about what and who
makes art. The piece 4’33”, for example, was comprised of four minutes
and 33 seconds with no music that prodded the audience to “hear”
and fully experience the sounds and the silence of the concert venue.
Like Cage and his followers, immersive theater questions the bounda-
ries that define “art,” adapting “happenings” to new spaces and the
voices of contemporary artists. Cage has commented on the walls we
like to erect between ourselves and our making or experience of art and
the rest of reality, which seems an “intrusion.” Many contemporary
adaptations—immersive theater being an extreme example—intrude on
our ownership of what I’ve called the “home text,” violating its sanctity
within our mental landscapes. Home ownership has its advantages—
mainly a sense of security—but it can be usefully challenged by adapta-
tions that seem initially to be intruders. As Cage said in 1966, “What
we don’t like we consider an intrusion in our life … we are continually
being intruded upon.” Contemporary adaptations that seek to rewrite
classic texts may be intruders but they offer an opportunity for viewers
and audience members themselves to be artists, or at least to become
creatively engaged in art as a process. At least one audience member at
Sleep No More, Erin Morgenstern, brought her experience of that show
into the making of her 2012 novel The Night Circus. Such engagement
suggests the power of creative adaptations to transcend their initial
“hideousness” and ignite new ways of thinking about culture, art, and
human imagination, realizing for great numbers of viewers and audi-
ence members Cage’s notion of who the artist is, “someone deep in
thought who is constantly interrupted.”
Apparently eager to push the boundaries of immersive theater wider
still, Punchdrunk is now at work with MIT’s Media Lab to adapt Sleep
No More into the online world. Punchdrunk purports to expand the
world of Sleep No More by technologizing the masks audience members
wear and connecting on-site guests with online participants for whom
they serve as “avatars.” Objects in the show might become animate
through RFID (radio frequency identification), activated by the masks
and tracked, also, by the online partner. As Punchdrunk’s Peter Higgin

has said, “We wanted to see if we could create an online experience
which lived up to the visceral intensity of the live show and facilitate a
shared experience which takes place in both the performance space and
a remote user’s location.”
Throughout, I have been arguing that adaptation is a rich means of
engaging the relations among life, culture, criticism, and art, coaxing
us to acclimate to what are sometimes radically different perspectives
on familiar stories. Moreover, while immersive theater and the most
engaging adaptations erect barriers to conventional spectating, the
involvement of the viewer in contemporary adaptations suggests the
importance of adapting to new kinds of cultural production. Sleep No
More initiated a sustained interest in immersive theater. Since 2011,
a number of other immersive theatrical works have appeared, mainly
Off-Broadway. Because in these works the identities of performer and
audience member are merged and the divisions between the stage and
a stable separate audience space dissolved, these immersive theater
adaptations model an aesthetics that decenters sources and adaptations
and imbricates readers, viewers, actors, and audiences into their “home”
and newly created texts, privileging an associational understanding of
textual relations.
Then She Fell, an immersive theatrical adaptation of Alice in Wonderland,
merges the idea of adaptation as a formal literary artistic endeavor with
a notion of mental dissociation and psychological adaptation. The
show uses its form as a means to explore conflict and trauma while
exploiting a collision of diverse cultural experiences. Then She Fell, like
Sleep No More, dramatically incorporates audience members into the
content of the performance. Alice in Wonderland is a particularly reso-
nant story for such formal investigation, since Then She Fell’s interest
in mirrors (audience members staged to mirror the characters; two dif-
ferent actresses playing Alice to suggest the girl’s divided feelings about
Charles Dodgson) explores dissociation as a means of managing trauma,
in this case the failed relationship between Dodgson and Alice Liddell,
which is central to the story. Further, Carroll’s world-making and his
story’s play with the abrogation of rules by desire and imagination
become a perfect text to realize on the immersive theater stage, whose
own interest in these very values can be usefully seen as in dialogue
with its source.
It is no coincidence that Kamilla Elliott’s rich analysis of adaptations
of Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland serves to exemplify a new model of adap-
tation theory that is worth noting here: Elliott proposes “looking glass
interart analogies” for adaptation theory, a “reciprocal” analogy that is

relational and not hierarchical: “verbal/visual looking glass analogies
are predicated on the reciprocal power of words to evoke mental images
and of pictures to evoke verbal figures in cognition” (Rethinking the
Novel/Film Debate 211). Then She Fell perfectly illustrates Elliott’s model,
“refracting” its source material and self-consciously drawing the viewer/
audience member into its practice of adaptation, bringing down the
walls that divide performers and observers.
Then She Fell begins with an introduction by a fictional doctor
at “Kingsland Ward” hospital, the building, as is the case for the
McKittrick Hotel in Sleep No More, serving as a major “character” in the
show. The doctor tells the 15 audience members that the show is about
the liminal, places in transition between dreaming and waking lives.
The blurring of space and identity is apparent throughout the show.
Moreover, the “coming apart” of fixed identities that is enacted in the
production (identities merging and dissolving through ingenious stage
and performance devices; the dynamic relation between the performer
and audience member) reflects a model of textual identity that is flex-
ible and relational rather than fixed and discrete.
Several scenes enact this idea. In one scene, I was pulled into Alice’s
bedroom, asked to brush her hair and questioned about when I first fell
in love. The scene was fascinating, perhaps mostly because my anxiety
surfaced when I did not know the script I thought I was being asked to
recite. I wondered first whether I should reveal my “true” love-life his-
tory, or try to discern what Alice wanted to hear, then second whether
my honest delivery of my lines would ring false in any case, since this
was an artificial environment, no place for honesty. Thus, I adapted to
the conditions of the scene and gave myself over to Alice’s lead.
Like Sleep No More, Then She Fell is interested in the dangers posed
by transgression but also by not following the train of desire. An initial
scene has one audience member sitting in a small room with a large bed
of fresh red roses. The Red Queen cuts off the head of a rose, and the
White Rabbit plays with the offending knife, which carries a threaten-
ing tone for the lucky audience member stuck in the room with “WR,”
as he signs his documents. Much of the show, on the other hand, is
about loss and the rupture of the break between Dodgson and Alice
Liddell, with the Red Queen appearing as a threatening Mother figure,
who pulls Alice from the idyllic fantasy Dodgson has projected onto his
relationship with the young girl.
The show’s interest in personality—the two sides of Alice (desir-
ing young woman and petulant little girl) and the double identity of
Dodgson/Carroll—is explored by suggesting the potential other identi-

ties of audience members. I advise Alice when I brush her hair, but I
question how fixed my own responses are and how stable my own “his-
tory” is that I report to Alice. In one scene, the Hatter asks an audience
member about her relation to crafts and craft-making. “Do you sew or
knit?” “No,” says the audience member. “What do you do well?” asks
the Hatter, and the audience member says, “Nothing.” The Hatter asks
if she does anything in a “mediocre” way. “Yes,” the audience member
responds. The show in this way can become very personal for audience
members, who engage the performance from both an objective position
(watching scenes from the outside) and a subjective perspective (becom-
ing an integral part of the scenes).
At another point in the show, the Alices stand on each side of a large
empty frame of a mirror, as two audience members stand facing each
other behind the Alices. The Alices mimic each other’s gestures and
movements, suggesting dual identity. Mirrors and glass are featured
uncannily throughout the show, sometimes with the two Alices on each
side of the glass or window, creating a sort of holographic effect that cul-
minates, with the aid of lighting, in the window becoming a mirror that
reflects an audience member rather than one of the Alices. One identity
morphs into two, then three identities. Identity is presented as something
unfixed, a series of images that mirror, reflect, deflect, and distort the
desires that seem to define selfhood. In Carroll’s story, Alice continually
struggles with the instability of identity and the real, as she comes from a
punitive social world that rewards only those who follow the rules:
[Alice] had read several nice little histories about children who had
got burnt, and eaten up by wild beasts and other unpleasant things,
all because they would not remember the simple rules their friends
had taught them …. (29–30)
A good Victorian girl, Alice must confront, as theatergoers at Then She

Fell must do as well, a world in which the unexpected can happen
and the stability of the characters, stage set, and audience members is
threatened. After her encounter with the Gryphon and the Mock Turtle,
Alice “[wonders] if anything would ever happen in a natural way again”
(137). When Alice is told by Tweedledum that her existence is “only”
contingent on the Red King—she is part of his dream—she cries, “I am
real!” (245). Dissolving the arbitrary though culturally naturalized divi-
sions among actors and audience members, Then She Fell explores the
theatrical worlds created by the blurring of such divisions.
Much of Then She Fell is enacted melodramatically through dance:

provocative sliding along walls (echoing similar peregrinations across
the set in Sleep No More) and bodies moving in concert complementarily
to suggest an alternative aesthetic experience of oneness. In one scene,
Dodgson and Alice wrap themselves around a stairwell, an institutional
set of stairs in the hospital brought to life by the slithering bodies
climbing in unison up the rails, the walls, and the steps. Non-art space
becomes art sites. Breaking another boundary, the show adapts space,
and the form of Then She Fell becomes its content. Some of us trade
hats with the Hatter, trying on different ones for size and style. We are
told stories in bed about remembering the future by the White Queen,
asked to document information and take notes in various scenes, and
encouraged to drink alcoholic thimbles of “potion” imitating the con-
coctions Carroll devised to make the fictional Alice small and big. The
set design is ingenious: one room is filled in a corner with dolls, piled
high, with the Mad Hatter perched atop. The illusion is that the spec-
tator has “gone small,” contributing to the production’s effective play
with changing identities.
In one somewhat frenzied scene, audience members attend the mad
tea party. The Red and White Queens and the Hatter follow a chaotic
pattern of smashing cups, saucers, and spoons together. Audience mem-
bers try to mimic the play. About to sip the tea poured in front of them,
visitors are finally commanded loudly by the Hatter to “Move one place
over!” “I want a new cup!” Four times, audience members move one
chair over as teacups and dishes clack and crash together and the chaos
of the scene includes turning spectators into “characters.” Audience
members thus literally “take the place” of other characters, who are seen
as adapting to new conditions, as we are asked to do in our dynamic
experience of the story and scenes.
Visitors to Then She Fell are brought into a world in which psycho-
logical adaptation to disorienting experiences is required. The particular
nature of such adaptation involves a dissolution of fixed identities that
allows for three mutually informing processes: one, a questioning of
how fiction and creativity are always already part of the structure of our
lives—such questioning endorses a creative model of engaging life and
connection with others as an artistic and critical endeavor; two, a medi-
tation on dissociation as a means of surviving trauma—the immersive
form of Then She Fell and its story about our fantasy other selves who
navigate extreme realms to ensure the possibility of surviving radically
changing experiences; and three, an appeal to audience members to
integrate seemingly dissimilar scenes and ideas by making connections
among and making meaning out of the dissociated parts, or identities,

of the production.
The 2013 Off-Broadway musical theatre production of Natasha, Pierre,
and the Great Comet of 1812 adapts the eighth book of Tolstoy’s War
and Peace to create an immersive theatrical experience that similarly
examines issues of audience and textual identities: The show is as much
interested in how audience members experience the story as it is in
adapting the form of the 19th-century novel into live pop-opera perfor-
mance. Great Comet is set in a Russian supper club: audience members
are served pierogies and vodka and the actors weave their way through
a serpentine performance space that surrounds the audience. Actors
sometimes join audience members at their tables, hand them letters,
and invite them to shake maraca-type Russian eggs during a raucous
Russian folk song late in the show. These devices, including the decision
to intersperse the band members throughout the performance space,
integrate the performers with the audience, blurring the boundaries
between audience and performers and putting members of the show “in
a community,” as composer Dave Malloy has said, “with everyone in
the room.” “Half the show,” Malloy comments, “is watching the audi-
ence, which feels very Tolstoyian.” Because the show happens among
the audience, viewers must watch one another, as well as the actors,
thus echoing Tolstoy’s fascination with how each person in society is
“regarded,” seen and assessed.
Not only are the setting and choreography immersive, dynamic, and
eminently social, but the sounds and lyrics of Great Comet also evoke
and yet radically revise the landscape of Tolstoy’s novel. Though a
pastiche of musical styles, including Russian folk music, rock-inflected
blues, modern classical music, electronica, and American pop, the var-
iegated score of Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812 reflects not
only contemporary theater culture but also—in a different medium—
the vast social world of the 19th-century novel. Through its musical
expression, Great Comet additionally converses with the novel’s roots in
Romantic selfhood.
Malloy combines Tolstoy’s language with contemporary and tradi-
tional musical styles, the characters operatically narrating their own
actions. This stages a dialogue between a contemporary musical form
and War and Peace. Commenting that classic novels inspire in readers
the contradictory experience of feeling utterly alien and uncannily
familiar, Malloy plays with time by mounting an at times campy ren-
dering of Tolstoy’s characters—in, for example, Lucas Steele’s eroticized
but gender-ambiguous portrayal of the “hot” cad Anatole (his strutting
across the room often accompanied by a confident and threatening

bass drum). The show’s pastiche of present verbal and musical idioms
with 19th-century styles calls to mind Haynes’s I’m Not There, which
ends with a tribute to the imagination’s power to dissolve time as an
exclusionary boundary. Instead, “Yesterday, today, and tomorrow [are]
all in the same room. No telling what can happen.” Malloy also wishes
to place works in proximity, suggesting not only the imaginative pos-
sibilities of such a relation but also the abiding relevance of Tolstoy’s
novel. As I have argued throughout this study, creative adaptations look
not so much backward at unified source texts they seek to dissemble but
forward to carry stories into new contexts. As Leitch has noted, “adapta-
tion study has been resolutely archaeological in its orientation, looking
back in time to what it calls the source of every adaptation” (Studia
Filmoznawcze 98). As Leitch observes in this essay, however, adapta-
tion need not be understood simply as re-visioning something that has
already been fixed. In fact, in contemporary practice, adapters often
actively undermine the authority of the source. Adaptations are part of
a process of cultural change, in which works are protracted rather than
only refracted, becoming other things as they retain recognizable ele-
ments. Arguing for the idea not only that adaptations are dynamic but
also that source materials are themselves ignited by adaptations, Leitch
describes “a kind of change involving an organism that evolves in
order to achieve a longer life, reach a new audience, or demonstrate its
viability in a new medium or a new set of cultural circumstances” (97).
The adaptation work of the experimental theater company Elevator
Repair Service attempts just such a demonstration of the “viability” of
great works of literature. The group has produced three shows designed
to showcase the literary powers of F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby
is adapted to Gatz), Ernest Hemingway (The Sun Also Rises becomes The
Select [The Sun Also Rises]), and William Faulkner (The Sound and the Fury,
novel and production). The productions create theatrical forms that
reflect these novels’ content, exemplifying the potential and variety of
creative adaptations to transpose classic literature into contemporary
artistic terms. Gatz is immersive not because it includes the audience in
the production directly but in its absorption of the play into the life of
audience members over an unconventionally long period of time, thus
anticipating the film art event The Clock, discussed in the next chapter.
Gatz includes a dinner hour and two shorter intermissions and thus is
threaded into the happenings of a day for theatergoers.
Paradoxically an adaptation that “adapts without adapting”
(Zinoman), Gatz consists of Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby read
verbatim—all 49,000 words of it—on stage over the course of six and
a half hours. The show calls into question prescribed judgments about
adaptation and re-visionings, such as Harvey Young and Jocelyn Prince’s
assessment of books and the stage as they analyze the theatrical adap-
tation of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye: “A narrative presented within
a novel should look and sound in a way that differs from a narrative
expressed within the dramatic or cinematic arts. When a play feels like
a book, it has failed to realize its potential as a form of theater” (145).
Experimental adaptations continue to challenge such generalizations,
and Gatz specifically counters them in its specific attempt to make its
adaptation “[feel] like a book.”
Gatz not only adapts Fitzgerald’s story but also the form of the novel
into a theatrical experience, projecting the literary elements of the
novel through a different medium defined by performance. The stage
set of Gatz is a dilapidated office scene, in which actor Scott Shepherd
enters the stage and, distracted from a computer that isn’t working,
picks up the book The Great Gatsby and begins to read, word for word,
as other office characters enter the scene. As The New Yorker’s Rebecca
Mead describes,
A vaguely menacing janitor, with keys jangling at his waist, comes

onstage to sort mail as the narrator describes Tom Buchanan, “one
of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-
one that everything afterwards savors of anti-climax.” A sporty-
looking young woman, in exercise pants and tennis shoes, lounges
on the leather couch, reading a golfing magazine, as Jordan Baker is
introduced into the narrative: “her chin raised a little, as if she were
balancing something on it which was quite likely to fall.”
While in its recitation of Fitzgerald’s words this adaptation is furiously

“faithful” to its source, it also constitutes a different sort of “hideous
progeny” by igniting a kind of dissonance or confusion in its audience.
Theatergoers must come to terms with the experience of words that
are lifted from their familiar context, the glamorous 1920s setting of
flappers and overindulgence exploited visually by the good number
of film adaptations of the novel, most famously the 1974 film starring
Robert Redford as Jay Gatsby and, more recently, Baz Luhrmann’s 2013
film featuring Leonardo DiCaprio in the lead role. In Gatz, the setting
is drab and quotidian, inviting a new way of understanding the rela-
tion between content and form, which works in several ways: First, the
setting strips away a clichéd set of images of flappers and the Roaring
Twenties. As artistic director John Collins notes, “You get better access
to that without decorating it too much—or without decorating it at all,
for that matter—with all the trappings of that period.” A second, related
point is that the show’s creators imagined the set as a way to establish a
kind of blank screen, a tabula rasa for the audience to project the story
onto, without the distraction of the glamour Jazz Age, certainly an
association with the novel enhanced in the cultural imagination since
Luhrmann’s 2013 adaptation. Collins’s remarks about the office setting
suggest an attempt to adapt the act of reading to a theatrical venue:
Setting aside that it was a very intuitive choice on our part, I think
it’s important that it has a kind of neutrality, that it isn’t asserting
itself ahead of what’s being described, but is a great projection screen
for it. We’ve talked about the “bookness” of the book, and I think
one of the aspects of the book’s “bookness” is that you’re just hav-
ing your imagination fed by it. So a dirty, messy office, something
mundane and pedestrian like that, is a better way to watch people’s
imaginations taking control of them. Because otherwise you’re just
watching the director’s and the set designer’s imaginations. It’s just
their vision of it; it’s no longer yours.
Gatz is thus to some extent an anti-adaptation adaptation, attempting

to winnow down the visual matter of film adaptations. And yet, the
theatrical production does adapt the novel’s content into its form. As
the artistic designer as well as critics have noted, the novel’s fascination
with desire becomes an idea implicit in the setting. A stripped-down
site wherein characters can dream of becoming something or someone
else, the depressive office space theatrically introduces the idea of a
fictitious American Dream. The notion of desire and transformation is
even announced in the show’s title, as we are told by Fitzgerald that
“Gatz” was Gatsby’s original name. As the Village Voice review of the
show observed, “We are always made aware of the gap between what we
actually see and what we ought to, Gatz and Gatsby at once” (Soloski).
The show plays in its form with the novel’s idea of illusoriness by
unfixing the character not only of Gatsby but also of the narrator, the
office worker morphing into Nick Carraway as he proceeds to read the
novel on stage. Unfixing character and setting while casting the novel
itself (always literally on stage) as the star of the show, Gatz stretches
its source novel into new artistic realms of theatrical performance,
although this work may threaten readers of the novel less because the
language is held fully intact.
Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet similarly carries a great novel
through history into a new medium, messing with an existing gene
pool in a new cultural context. But Great Comet radically resituates War
and Peace, too, adding contemporary idioms to Tolstoy’s language, as
well as various musical styles.
From the beginning of the show, Great Comet is in dialogue with
Tolstoy’s fascination with the major characters of history: time and
the individual. Similarly to Dogfight the musical’s foregrounding of the
theme of perspective in that show’s music, lyrics, and book (as discussed
in the previous chapter), Great Comet also emphasizes the idea of time
by having the characters sometimes describe their actions in third per-
son and sometimes narrate in first person; in addition, the action and
thoughts of the characters are at times described in the past tense, at
times in the present tense. These modulations and Malloy’s addition
of contemporary idioms not only revivify War and Peace by having
the story told as if it is happening in the present (and of course it is
experientially happening in the present, since Great Comet is a theatri-
cal performance) but also introduce narrative perspective as a theme of
the show, as Tolstoy’s omniscient narrator was a crucial element of War
and Peace.
Recalling Kamilla Elliott’s claim in Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate
that adaptation theory should focus more on “novelistic cinema” than
the anachronistic “cinematic novel,” we can see in Malloy’s work a
novelistic musical. Great Comet rewrites the convention in 19th-century
fiction of setting the plot decades earlier, a narrative device in many
novels that lends authority to the omniscient voice, since the story
has already revealed itself. (This is an especially powerful device in the
historical novel, when characters fall into a history familiar to read-
ers). The retrospection also underscores the idea of time passing gener-
ally: individuals swept away by a history that is beyond their control,
whether these forces be war, or radical cultural shifts, such as the demise
of the aristocracy. Tolstoy refers in Book Eight to Pierre’s “huge house”
in Moscow, “in which the faded and fading princesses still lived” (591);
Malloy appropriates this language in the song “Moscow” that opens
the show. Like Renoir’s film Grand Illusion, in which von Rauffenstein
mourns the loss of “the von Rauffensteins and Boeldieus,” War and
Peace represents an earlier modernist stage of observing the death of
the upper class, represented in Prince Bolkonsky’s “marked signs of
senility” (Tolstoy 595) and his son Andrew’s (Blake DeLong, playing
father and son) cold compliance with social forms out of time in the
new modern Europe. Great Comet re-visions this modernist dirge for an
obsolete aristocracy in its representation of the Bolkonskys, even while

(like Tolstoy) registering a sympathy for the human experience of loss.
For example, in Malloy’s piece, the Prince’s cacophonous screaming
for his glasses is punctuated by fragmentary lines about being out of
control: “Oh, God. I’m frightened. I’ve aged. I’ve aged so very much.”
Even in the context of Bolkonsky’s exploitation of power and cruel
authoritarianism, it is this recognition of intimate thoughts and feel-
ings that Malloy adapts from Tolstoy into musical theater. In forging a
unique connection between media, Malloy shows an uncanny continu-
ity between Tolstoy’s fascination with the competing demands on the
modern self to be integrated into society and culture and also to be
happy and feel safe within, free to pursue individual desire. In dialogue
with the classic novel’s notion of character as a negotiation of public
and private selves, Great Comet expresses through its narrative form and
musical expression the challenge and poignancy of accommodating
outside realities and inner desires within the context of forces—death
and war—beyond the control of individual agency. The contingent set
of Great Comet—a temporary tent-like structure erected in New York
City’s meatpacking district in Chelsea—not only establishes the show
as a kind of avant-garde “happening,” but also relates to the fragility
of the characters’ way of life.1 Further, the process (and procession) of
entering the space of the show (a dark labyrinthine hall, a temporary
architecture—as opposed to a grand theater) effectively relocates the
viewer and readies her/him to experience the lives of characters who
are being buffeted by war and social change, even while their own lives
are insulated from direct contact.
Having the characters speak—in this case sing—for themselves suggests
the value of human agency despite the “innumerable, diverse, and petty
events” that make up history (Tolstoy 1331). Aware throughout that
history is defining these characters (“There’s a war going on out there,”
Great Comet’s “Prologue” begins) and that there is an historical inevitabil-
ity to their irrelevance (Book Eight is set on the eve of Napoleon’s march
into Moscow, which is portended by the “great comet” of 1812), the
novel and show explore individual desire, whose passionate expression is
celebrated theatrically in Great Comet. This is especially of interest in con-
nection with the female characters in Malloy’s show, since the women
are particularly powerful presences: the luminous and captivating
Natasha (Phillipa Soo), her loyal friend Sonya (Brittain Ashford), seduc-
tive Hélène (Amber Gray), the commanding Marya (Grace McLean),
repressed but willful Mary (Shaina Taub) all have “a voice” in the
musical that they don’t have in the novel, since their roles in Tolstoy
are circumscribed to some degree by the gender conventions of their

historical moment. Mary’s rock-inflected blues duet with her father, the
cold Count Bolkonsky, rages with energy and passion. As Bolkonsky bel-
lows, “Give me my slippers,” Mary echoes back, “Yes, father, yes, father.”
This song, “The Private and Intimate Life of the House” (Tolstoy 596),
alludes to the domestic dictatorship of Prince Bolkonsky, the “loving des-
pot” (597), and his oppressive authority over young Mary. The Princess,
however, while “reverently devoted to [her father]” (596), cultivates
rebellion quietly, in her solitude. Submitting on the one hand to the per-
verse behavior of her father, “the more cruel because he loved her” (597),
Mary relishes on the other hand a jealousy and hatred of Natasha: in a
“pride of sacrifice” (Malloy; Tolstoy 598), which “gathered in her soul,”
Mary’s unique powers are expressed by Malloy in a competitive blues
duet with her father, but then (as happens repeatedly in the musical) in a
piano-accompanied simple solo, as Mary poignantly registers her father’s
mortality even as she feels deeply his cruel treatment of her. Tolstoy
describes that Bolkonsky “would look for his spectacles in her presence,
fumbling near them and not seeing them” (598). In the musical, the
driving blues duet is followed, as referred to above, by Bolkonsky’s Tom
Waits-like screeching “Where are my glasses?! Where are my glasses?!”
Mary’s quiet piano-accompanied rejoinder follows: “They’re there upon
his head. They’re there upon his head, the pride of sacrifice gathers in my
soul. They’re there upon his head.” Mary registers in a gently rendered
third-person description her alienation from her increasingly senile
father, but also her strength (as well as vulnerability) in remaining loyally
beside him. Mary’s selfhood is formidable, despite the institutional social
forces (family, religion, gender) that are militating against her.
Historically, if the post-revolutionary Romantic movement celebrated
individual selfhood as against a conformist and hierarchically organized
public conception of the self, Great Comet gives voice to the individual,
while paying tribute to the vitality of social life. Malloy does this musi-
cally by establishing a rich play of musical identities: simple piano
melodies poignantly accompany Natasha’s, Pierre’s, Mary’s, or Sonya’s
intimate moments of expression. Great Comet establishes spaces and
moments for individual expression, soliloquys such as Natasha’s stun-
ning first aria “No One Else,” or Sonya’s lyrical ballad “Sonya Alone”
about her friendship with Natasha and her loyalty to her. In these lovely
tunes, the piano dominates, an instrumental analogue to the intimate
desires and thoughts of the characters.
As against these private moments of expression, the social world in
Great Comet is loud, chaotic, and dynamic. However, what Malloy finds
in these bombastic social scenes (the Opera, the Ball, the Duel, and
Balaga the Troika driver’s [Ashkon Davaran] assistance in the abduction
of Natasha by Anatole) are creative opportunities to play with the idea
of performance on the one hand as layered artistic expression and, on
the other hand, as social pretense. As regards the latter, Great Comet is
in dialogue with Tolstoy’s social critique, a large-scale display of the
hypocrisies resulting from class and gender oppression, as in the scene
discussed above in which Princess Mary suffers the will of her unyield-
ing father. One of the most potentially damaging consequences of social
convention is its inculcation of false desires in individuals wishing to
escape the roleplaying demanded of them. Thus, Natasha, though virtu-
ous, is ignorant of Anatole’s counterfeit love for her. Ascribing to a simple
Romantic alternative to the stressful pretense she must make with
the Bolkonskys, whose coldness she reviles but must endure, Natasha
responds impulsively—romantically—to Anatole’s passion. Believing in
her own feelings and unschooled in the duplicitous ways of narcissistic
cads, she believes that because she loves him, he must be good. Natasha
chooses expression over repression (exemplified by Princess Mary’s self-
denial). She errs, her mistake revealing the traps laid for individuals
seeking escape from oppressive convention.
Continuing his engagement with Tolstoy’s exploration of public
versus private modes of communication and expression, Malloy begins
the second Act of Great Comet with the players’ seduction of audiences
with a song about writing letters. In the classic novel, letters often serve
as symbols of self-expression in the context of strict social rules that
govern public behavior. Jane Austen’s heroines covet their letters, for
example, finding in them a retreat from the studied gestures expected
of them in society.
Characters from the play slink across the room, handing out
letters. Like the classic novel, the show alludes to the way in which
letters allow for alternative ways of expression beyond what is socially
acceptable, but, also like the 19th-century novel, the show satirizes the
solipsism of Romantic selfhood, when passion and desire are unmedi-
ated by mature thought and engagement with the real. One of the
subtle pleasures of 19th-century fiction is its simultaneous reverence
for the integrity of the self and belief that selfhood can only fully have
meaning in social context, in relation to culture and community. Thus,
in Wuthering Heights Cathy I and Heathcliff’s untethered expressive-
ness must give way to the more socially-rooted bond of Cathy II and
Hareton; Jane Eyre’s and Rochester’s passion settles into a mutual rela-
tionship based on compromise; Pip is schooled by reality to accept the
limits of his “great expectations”: these characters learn the pleasures

of accommodation to structures larger than their own desires. So, too,
in some sense audience members at Great Comet play out in the form
of the show the tension between individual desire and social or collec-
tive expectations. Audience members don’t know the script, and when
they are included in the action of the show (actors sit beside them, give
them letters, sing to them), they feel both special and uncomfortable.
They are learning, as Tolstoy’s characters must do too, how to behave
in a distinct social system.
In Natasha’s relationships we also see the tension between individual
desire and social expectations. Lovely Natasha is a young Romantic,
and we find in the melodrama of her reverence for Andrew, and then
her impulsive fall for Anatole, a critique of the unworkable idealism
of Romantic selfhood. Musical expression reinvents the classic novel’s
exploration of the intimate selfhood that is navigating social institu-
tions, illustrating a case in which “one art raises the cognitive effects
of the other” (Elliott, Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate 215). Natasha
sings “No One Else,” cordoning her love off from reality. There is no
one but Andrew, whom her imagination summons to the stage during
her song. The idea of Andrew fuels Natasha’s desire here, but the reality
of Andrew, his rigidity that doesn’t, we find later, allow for forgiveness,
completes a negative portrait of Romantic absolutism. It is this lack of
compromise in conceptions of the Romantic self that the classic novel
calls into question, usually representing idealists and radical selves to
be doomed.
At the same time, the 19th-century novel prizes interiority, as its
authors were indeed the “charming legacy,” as Grand Illusion’s von
Rauffenstein coolly offers, “of the French Revolution.” More positively
than von Rauffenstein would have it, 19th-century novelists believed
in Romantic thought and feeling, particularly as a refuge from the false
social roles discussed above. What binds Natasha and Pierre is their
desire for authenticity: their self-questioning and their aversion to
the pretense of social costuming. Musical expression becomes in Great
Comet an apt way to imagine escape from such oppressive roleplaying.
And, indeed, Malloy’s challenge is in part to translate narrative interest
in the private lives of Tolstoy’s characters to live theater.
Malloy transposes this formal aspect of the novel into his show
by having the characters narrate their feelings and thoughts, such as
Natasha’s perplexed observations on how she is being “seen” at the
opera during her fateful meeting with Anatole there, soon after she
arrives in Moscow from her country home. Interestingly, narrating her
actions and desires in first person up to this point, it is only when she
is lambasted by Marya Demetrietev for yielding to Anatole that she
retreats into the third person: “… Natasha cried out, ‘go away go away.
You all hate and despise me.’ And she threw herself down on the sofa.”
A brilliant way to show how Natasha has now internalized the judg-
ment of society, Natasha has nowhere to go, but to withdraw further
into herself, until Pierre (Dave Malloy, followed during the show’s run
by David Abeles) comes to forgive her.
When Pierre drives Anatole out of town, Natasha is grief-stricken
when she discovers that Anatole is married. She survives a suicide
attempt, but is forlorn when Pierre comes to see her. While initially
participating in the conventional judgment of Natasha—disdain for her
betrayal of Andrew in falling for Anatole—when he sees her suffering,
Pierre’s judgment dissipates, and he is reminded of his affection for and
admiration of her. In a simple piano duet, Natasha asks for forgiveness
and Pierre tries to understand and then to give her hope: “She began
to cry and a still greater sense of pity, tenderness, and love welled up in
Pierre …. ‘We won’t speak of it any more, my dear,’ said Pierre, and his
gentle cordial tone suddenly seemed very strange to Natasha …. ‘All is
over for me,’ she replied with shame and self-abasement.” Lines from
the novel appear in the musical almost verbatim, but at this point,
for the first and only time in the opera, lyrics are spoken: Overcome
with love, Pierre expresses himself fully in spoken words: “If I were not
myself, but the handsomest, cleverest, and best man in the world, and
were free, I would this moment ask on my knees for your hand and
your love.” Inverting the conventional idea that in musicals, actors
break into song to express their emotion, Malloy questions the clichés
associated with the genre.
In this same scene in Great Comet, Natasha’s reaction to Pierre’s gen-
erous and unmediated expression of love is represented in omniscient
form as it is in the novel—“For the first time for many days Natasha
wept tears of gratitude and tenderness, and glancing at Pierre she went
out of the room.” In the musical, these lines are narrated by Natasha
herself, continuing a pattern of present narration the musical has
employed throughout: “I leave the room smiling.” Landing, at the end
of the musical, back in the realm of first-person expression, Natasha is
restored to life by the sympathy she receives from Pierre, by the moment
of intimate connection they share. That this moment is experienced by
the audience as beautiful melody (and the lights interestingly reveal not
only these two sharing their moment but also the entire audience and
its reaction to the scene) reflects Malloy’s tribute to Tolstoy’s belief in
community as well as the individual. War and Peace argues for compas-
sion and hope in the face of dissociating social pressures and internal
self-doubt. The final song in Great Comet, sung by Pierre, who is himself
now using the first person when for much of the show he has narrated
his actions in the third person, remains in the key of D, a stable chord
progression reflecting Pierre’s stability and virtue. Having shown his
character with Natasha (blending with her in a beautiful musical duet),
he achieves at the end what the classic 19th-century novel aspired to
chart, individuality coming fully into character. The final scene has
Pierre observing the comet, a symbol of forces whose trajectory may be
fated but is still individualized.
The last hybrid sounds of the show imitate the arrival of a comet.
Pierre, with insight into forces larger than himself, gives himself over,
as members of the audience do, to the mélange of sound and light that
closes the show: a climactic and moving creative drive toward one indi-
vidual yet powerful light. Tolstoy had said in his novel that we “seek ref-
uge” from the rigors and difficulties of life in all sorts of ways—“some in
ambition, some in cards, some in framing laws, some in women, some
in toys, some in horses, some in politics, some in sport, some in wine,
and some in governmental affairs” (595). Malloy reimagines War and
Peace in contemporary terms while recalling Tolstoy’s own epic tribute
to the real and the now. Showing how we also “seek refuge” in theater
and in music, Malloy immerses us in an imaginative conversation with
War and Peace.
8
Time Will Tell: Adaptation Going
Forward and Film at the Art
Museum (Christian Marclay’s
The Clock)
Christian Marclay’s 2011 video installation The Clock, a 24-hour film

comprised of thousands of film and video clips drawn from the history
of cinema and television, stretches the idea of adaptation into the realm
of avant-garde art. Synching the clocks and watches featured in each clip
to real time over the course of a 24-hour period, The Clock exemplifies
an idea of adaptation that fully divorces the process of revisiting earlier
texts from a dyadic model (origin/adaptation). Like immersive theater,
The Clock assumes its viewers to be utterly part of the film, challenging
not only the idea that the viewer or audience is distinct from the art
itself but also the notion that film is opposed to life. Instead, viewers’
lives correspond to filmed fiction: the very moments experienced by the
viewer are represented within the film, thus exemplifying the world-
making Jenkins describes in his analysis of transmedial adaptations:
“More and more, storytelling has become the art of world building, as
artists create compelling environments that cannot be fully explored or
exhausted within a single work or even a single medium” (414).
Indeed, The Clock creates a new environment that merges high-art
and popular cultural experiences in an ambiguous theatrical space that
also imitates installation art. The film suggests the idea that art is the
web and woof of life, as viewers spend their days and nights confront-
ing the “real” elements of daily life simultaneous to watching Marclay’s
film. At meal times, viewers experience hunger; in the middle of the
night, viewers are sleepy. The constant reminder of the actual time pos-
its film as life, as part of the fabric of one’s day. Every scene symbolizes
a continuity between film and reality, weaving real time through fiction
as well as forging a bond between fictional characters and viewers.
The Clock evidences both the arduous work and imagination brought
to bear on Marclay’s “found” elements, film and video clips compiled
167
by a staff of researchers. “A collage that’s also a kind of Duchampian

ready-made” (O’Rourke) and the product of Marclay’s three years of
editing, The Clock is a tribute to montage, showing its contemporary
relevance. Indeed, updating the theories of Eisenstein or Kuleshov,
The Clock demonstrates the emotional force (if not the logical narra-
tive potential) of images joined in surprising ways.1 We see Inspector
Clouseau (Peter Sellers) opening and looking inside a refrigerator fol-
lowed by a reverse shot from inside another refrigerator looking back at
Bridget Fonda. The pleasure and humor of startling juxtapositions are
apparent throughout the film. George Sanders picks up the phone to
say “hello,” and the film cuts to David Duchovny identifying himself as
“Mulder.” A cramped mise-en-scène with Margo Channing (Bette Davis)
and Carol and Lloyd Richards (Celeste Holm and Hugh Marlowe) rush-
ing to the train station at 5:55pm in All About Eve is soon followed by
Mr. Banks’s (David Tomlinson) self-satisfied arrival at home singing “At
6:01 I march through my door” in Mary Poppins. Actors from different
eras, media, genres are brought in proximity through Marclay’s editing,
and the film relies in part on audience recognition, since we fill in the
gaps created by our only seeing snippets of familiar material. For exam-
ple, we supply the context (the famous parody of faked female orgasm)
for Meg Ryan’s Sally eating in a deli in When Harry Met Sally as we do
when we see Mia Farrow’s Rosemary in Rosemary’s Baby explaining her
strange nightmare to husband Guy (John Cassavetes), knowing as view-
ers that he has condoned the devil having raped and impregnated his
wife during the night.
That this last clip is experienced by Marclay’s viewer at the exact time
at which Rosemary expresses her concern about her “dream” to Guy has
the effect of blending the character’s strange sensation with our own.
Because the film’s represented clocks and watches are synched to real
time, the experience of viewers is inextricably linked to what is happen-
ing within the film clips.
In implicating the audience in the very content of the film, The Clock
also underscores viscerally the trauma of the elapse of time. One way
Marclay elaborates on this theme is by cutting away from a suspense-
ful scene to an entirely different film clip, only to cut back to the first
scene a short time later, reminding us that its narrative is still unfolding.
We experience the suspense, and trauma, of time passing alongside the
characters, again as if there were no distinction between them and us.
Moving away from Laura’s final scene long enough to allow Lydecker
(Clifton Webb) to creep into Laura’s (Gene Tierney) bedroom, The Clock
then returns us to Laura’s eerie denouement, having allowed us time
Marclay’s The Clock 169
enough to become more anxious about her fate. Not only does this
sequence unfold as if in real time, but Lydecker’s pre-recorded voiceover
on the radio exacerbates the scene’s eerie play in Marclay’s film with the
idea of identification and dissociation. Lydecker’s body appears as a vio-
lent threat dissociated from his voice that has not only functioned as the
viewers’ narrative guide throughout Laura (in the form of his voiceover),
but now speaks from the radio (one is reminded of the “No hay banda”
scene in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive) on the subject of love and
aesthetics. Lydecker’s radio voice quotes the aesthete Ernest Dowson,
whose spirit closes Laura, as well as Marclay’s clip from that film, with
the theme of the twinned immortality of love and art. Opposed to such
eternal realms lies the mortal viewer.
The Clock has become somewhat of a critical crux for viewers who
may alternately find it to be ingenious or mere pastiche; as Thom
Anderson asks, “Is it a masterpiece or is it a symptom?” Richard Brody
finds the latter, arguing in The New Yorker that the film “[reduces]
the world of movies to their lowest common denominator, the
stylization and falsification of commonplace activities in the inter-
est of narrative drama.” Brody sees Marclay trivializing the cinema
relied upon in the film’s composition. Judging the film by standards
generated by one of The Clock’s sources—the history of cinema and
television—Brody repeats some of the habits of viewers of adaptation,
who carry an internalized emotional relationship with their “home
texts” that determines their response to the later work. Indeed, as
Anderson reports, Brody is most disturbed that Marclay “doesn’t
seem to love movies.” Moreover, the judgment seems based on the
notion that Marclay’s source is only the history of film and television,
whereas Marclay himself has noted that the works of Duchamp, John
Cage, Bruce Naumann and, one might add, Robert Rauschenberg are
all important sources of The Clock.
In a New York Magazine piece that wonders about the value of
Marclay’s film, “Ticktock Film Critic vs. Art Critic on Christian
Marclay’s ‘The Clock,’ ” film critic David Edelstein and art critic
Jerry Saltz debate the film’s merits. The structure of the dialogue sug-
gests the strongly disciplinary biases that characterize responses to
The Clock, which interestingly mirror the different bent film studies
scholars bring to adaptations versus literary scholars. While Edelstein
finds The Clock to be “gimmicky,” Saltz is “swept up in its strange,
abstract contrapuntal rhythms and visual coincidences.” For the film
critic, the criterion by which the work is evaluated seems linked to
the films themselves (“there were compensations—like the chance
to congratulate myself for having seen maybe three quarters of the

movies”), whereas the art critic seems more interested in the patterns
of the film on its own terms; as he watches, Saltz observes how “an
abstract narrative forms.” I would add to the latter’s fascination with
The Clock a point about its thorough engagement with the audience,
whose own body “clocks” become part of the work.
The debate surrounding The Clock mimics much of the discussion
around adaptation theory: how to define the adaptation’s relationship
to its source or sources, as well as our predilection for evaluating the
later work as inferior to the earlier one as a kind of inevitable conse-
quence of its not being the prior text. The Clock makes us think about
the distinctions we conventionally draw between media and disciplines,
with such distinctions leading almost invariably to judgments based on
culturally or institutionally inscribed hierarchies: source vs. adaptation
or pastiche; the intention of the adapter vs. the reception of the viewer/
reader; high/literary art vs. popular/film culture; film studies vs. art
criticism. The Clock works to break down these boundaries, or at least
to question the arbitrariness of classifications, a lesson usefully carried
over to the study of adaptation.
Certainly, the film challenges the binary discourse surrounding adap-
tations. My own attempt at challenging this discourse is to focus on
“quiet” adaptations, such as the influence of “The Yellow Wallpaper” on
[Safe], or to investigate adaptations that rely on more than two sources,
such as the mash-up of The Odyssey and Sullivan’s Travels in O Brother,
Where Art Thou?; the relationships among Heart of Darkness, Apocalypse
Now, and Hearts of Darkness; and, as I’ll discuss in my next chapter,
Mr. Burns’s conversation with Cape Fear (1962), Cape Fear (1991), and
The Simpsons. I have been arguing throughout this book for refocused
attention on the process of using familiar stories and texts to make new
art that often looks monstrous in its reformulation of an aspect of a
prior text. Marclay’s work exemplifies the avant-garde potential of such
monstrosity that forces us to examine the grounds on which we make
judgments about source texts and those that follow.
The Clock echoes the immersive theater productions previously dis-
cussed in creating a new context for shards of cultural history that cen-
trally involve the viewer, whose “real life” is referenced by the work itself.
Like the immersive theater works discussed in the last chapter, The Clock
makes use of previous cultural material to forge a new artistic expression.
Untethered to its source material but in creative dialogue with it, The Clock
converses with known cultural texts and establishes a unique relation with
the viewing audience, a strangely ambiguous group, since Marclay’s work
dissolves the institutional boundaries dividing museum space from

other public venues in which popular art and entertainment appear as
spectacle. The Clock, appearing in modern and contemporary art muse-
ums all over the world, transforms the museum into a movie theater,
or a rowdy “after-hours” club that sometimes invites younger viewers
of The Clock to spend a “Night at the Museum.” At 3 a.m., lines can
be hours long, as museums morph from conventional art forums into
party venues (albeit with no food or drink allowed). Like Yoko Ono’s
Voice Piece for Soprano (“Scream. 1. against the wind 2. against the wall
3. against the sky”), which turns viewers into performers, as museum-
goers are invited to scream into a microphone (filling a conventionally
sacrosanct space), or Marina Abramovic’s The Artist Is Present, in which
Abramovic transforms museum space into a performance venue that
connects the museum goer with a conventionally inaccessible notion
of high art, Marclay’s The Clock dissolves the line not only between the
public and the private, but also between popular and art films.
Just as screening The Clock in an art museum collapses cultural spa-
tial boundaries, within the movie such boundaries are challenged, as
well. Television series are referenced alongside high-art movies; high-art
cinema is juxtaposed with popular entertainment. A clip from Ingmar
Bergman’s Cries and Whispers is followed two minutes later by Glenn
Close appearing as Cruella DeVille in 101 Dalmatians. A clip from a pop-
ular crime thriller, Nick of Time, follows one from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.
Such leveling juxtapositions irk some critics, such as Anderson, who
finds clips of The Time Machine “excruciating.” He quotes Lee Sanders,
president of the Motion Picture and Video Projectionists Local 150, who
says that “[The Clock] trivializes all the films …. [I]t’s like watching cable
TV with a remote control: 500 channels and nothing worth watching.”
Bristling at the inclusion of films some viewers don’t like or at the lack
of attention paid to films other viewers admire, members of The Clock’s
audience struggle with their personal connections to the films Marclay
references. This concern echoes viewers of adaptation whose gaze is
preoccupied with previous texts: It is not the present film taken on its
own terms but another prior work that regulates viewer responses and
viewers’ desires to evaluate the current work negatively because it is dif-
ferent from its source.
For Marclay, at least, such concerns seem beside the point. By includ-
ing “B” (and for some, “C” and “D”) movies and television episodes,
Marclay questions the arbitrary borders we draw among classes of media
(television vs. film; found objects vs. bronze sculptures; musicals vs.
plays) and within media (Disney vs. high-art films) and instead suggests
that the meaning of cultural products is determined by context and by

proximity to other work. Interspersed with stunning images of Louise
Brooks from Pandora’s Box or surrealist shots of the yellow cab from
Taxi Driver and gorgeous close shots of Glenn Ford in 3:10 to Yuma are
scenes from The Twilight Zone, in particular the episodes “Time Enough
at Last,” in which Burgess Meredith’s Henry Bemis has “time enough
at last” with all his books after a nuclear holocaust, and “Ninety Years
Without Slumbering,” in which Ed Wynn’s character desperately tries
to keep the clocks wound around him, since they are keyed, he believes,
to the ticking of his heart. These episodes directly address the fear that
time will run out and foreground human vulnerability in the face of
time, a theme that hovers around the entire experience of watching
The Clock. Such democratic treatment of the history of visual culture
breaks down the will to judgment on the part of viewers and connects
them with the substance and the art of the film at the level of human
vulnerability. The film is mesmerizing on its own terms, both asserting
and celebrating the forged connectedness and continuity between and
among these film clips and their human viewers. Marclay’s film clips
combine to reflect on the idea of film, the space of the theater and
museum, the role of the viewer, and the theme of mortality.
The medium of film is an apt vehicle for The Clock’s exploration of
mortality through star text and the viewer’s experience of seeing famil-
iar actors age a lifetime within the 24-hour montage. The film shows,
paradoxically, the eternality of the celluloid image but also the mortal-
ity of those artists who inhabit the image,2 a phenomenon similarly
explored in the Richard Linklater film Boyhood (2014), which was filmed
over the course of 12 years, “documenting,” though in a fiction film,
the aging not only of its characters, but of the actors within the film.
In The Clock, if we see Jack Nicholson trying to order off the menu in
1970’s Five Easy Pieces, we also see him as J. J. Gittes retrieving the watch
crushed under Hollis Mulwray’s tire in 1974’s Chinatown, or as The
Specialist in 1975’s Tommy, Daryl Van Horne in 1987’s The Witches of
Eastwick, and Warren Schmidt in 2002’s About Schmidt. Daniel Zalewski
makes a similar point about Catherine Deneuve: “At 12:27 a.m., there
was a clip of a resplendently dewy Catherine Deneuve, then twenty-one
years old, from ‘Repulsion.’ Four hours later, she’s three decades older,
in ‘My Favorite Season,’ an embittered wife intentionally knocking a
clock off a fireplace.”
At 7:30 p.m., we see a medium close-up from The Towering Inferno
(1974) of Fred Astaire showing up at Jennifer Jones’s door for their date,
just before the fire kills her and traumatizes him. “7:30 sharp. I hope
you like your men prompt,” he says. “At my age,” Jones responds,
“I only hope they show up at all.” Elsewhere in The Clock, we see a
much younger Jones starring in Indiscretion of an American Wife (1953).
Over 20 years later in Towering Inferno, but mere hours into the life of
The Clock, she is now seen in romantic dialogue with another aging
Hollywood icon, Astaire, in a scene that triply references time: it is “7:30
sharp”; Jones references her age and its limiting aspects; and the narra-
tive context for their relationship is a fire, her impending death, and its
painful effect on him.
As The Clock uses star text to display a confrontation between the real
(the mortal) and the fictional (the immortal), it questions the divisions
between these realms. The Clock challenges the lines we draw between
age and the immortality of art and posits fictional worlds as a salve for
the fact of death, aesthetically rendered, as against the onslaught of time
generally and its march toward death for both artist and viewer. Not long
before Jones’s and Astaire’s “7:30 sharp” date, Louise (Susan Sarandon),
in Thelma and Louise, gives her watch to an old man at a watering hole
in the desert. As the sun sets in this moment of the film (and will soon
do so permanently for Louise and her companion Thelma), Louise relin-
quishes the cultural designator of time, her watch, to enter the natural
landscape where her freedom and agency are possible. Like the cosmet-
ics she no longer wears, the watch—a symbol of her entrapment within
society and culture—is traded for a fulfilling rather than an imprison-
ing expression of time. The scene is an especially poignant moment in
Marclay’s film, as it foregrounds The Clock’s obsession with time not only
as an oppressor but also as an invitation to fully experience the relatively
few moments mortal men and women have on offer.
Linking artistic moments with this omnipresent theme of mortal-
ity, The Clock resonates with modernist fiction. In fiction (the clips
in the film) and in life (the real-time engagement of the viewer), The
Clock mines the experience of lived moments. Indeed, as Zalewski
writes, “Marclay began thinking of the hours as chapters in a novel.
This seemed fitting: in building a monument to the drama of a single
day, he was following the lead of ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ and ‘Ulysses.’”
The analogy with high modernist fiction is interesting, as it suggests
Marclay’s adaptation of modernist fiction to film form in a way that
has often been declared to be impossible, as Kamilla Elliott has noted:
with its “unfilmable” prose, modernist fictional practices provide “a
taunt that film cannot follow” (Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate 53),
a judgment seemingly validated by critical reviews of the 1997 film
Mrs. Dalloway.3
Marclay comes close to realizing in avant-garde film form an adap-

tation of modernist fiction, as he merges the aesthetic experience
of artistic moments—our appreciation, for example, of the beauty of
the celluloid image—with his confrontation of the viewer with the
materiality of that experience of art. We feel the moments in the film
materially because its moments are our own. Blurring the distinction
between reality and art, The Clock also undercuts the idea that film is
escapist, since we experience the texture of real time as we watch fic-
tional characters move through these moments.
The Clock similarly delivers the viewer into an artistic realm in
which moments are shared not only mentally but also nearly physi-
cally across realms, in a kind of Joycean metempsychosis. Some of
the late-night sequences, for example, evoke feelings of fear, anxiety,
or strangeness because we viewers are physically in the night. Just
after midnight, we sit alongside Bree Daniels (Jane Fonda) in Klute
as the killer’s phone call scares her and the creepy soundtrack affects
us strangely in our darkened, late-night museum theater space. Later
still, Rear Window’s L. B. Jefferies’s (James Stewart) desultory late-night
watching of his neighbors has a different effect on viewers, as we too
desultorily watch the screen over an unregulated period of time. Peggy
Bowden’s (Polly Bergen) nightmare about Max Cady (Robert Mitchum)
in Cape Fear has a visceral effect on the viewer, since for Peggy, as
well as the viewer, it is 2:10 a.m. Soon after, in Leaving Las Vegas, Sera
(Elizabeth Shue) asks Ben Sanderson (Nicolas Cage), “How long is it
going to take for you to drink yourself to death?” The material fact of
Ben’s undertaking has a strange and immediate effect on the viewer,
as does the short clip of Twin Peak’s Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle
MacLachlan) saying, “Someone is missing,” at 3 a.m., or a few minutes
later the retired clockmaker Sam Forstmann’s (Ed Wynn) desperate bid
to fix his neighbor’s clock in the aforementioned Twilight Zone epi-
sode, as he is convinced that when the clock stops ticking, so will his
heart. Just as Sam imagines his heart is synched to the clock, Marclay’s
viewers’ body rhythms are tethered to the fictional experience of the
characters. This creates a vulnerability in the viewer, a distinct effect of
Marclay’s obsessive preoccupation with time. The nocturnal surrealist
spinning of clock dials has a visceral effect on us, as does Eli Lapp (Jan
Rubes) waking up John Book (Harrison Ford) at the first sign of dawn
in Witness. “It’s 4:40. Time for milking,” says Eli, as we see him from
Book’s point of view in a close up, coming toward Book. The scene
coincides with our own liminal experience of the moments between
nighttime and morning.
The materiality of the viewer’s experience of the film carries over to

all parts of the day. In the morning hours, after Marclay exploits the
humor in many scenes of waking up, mostly involving alarm clocks, we
settle into a critique of the oppressiveness of the daily work routine—
time cards punched, scenes of the workday, multiplied images of
cubicles and office life whose mise-en-scène works on viewers because
of the weight of the many images and scenes, as well as our internalized
associations with that time of day. Marclay makes this point himself
when he says, “What’s on screen reinforces your awareness of your daily
schedule” (Pohl).
While the film reminds us of the grind of our conventional use of
time, it also finds humor in characters’ resistance to such conventions.
In The Last Seduction, Linda Fiorentino’s Bridget Gregory is startled
awake in the early morning hours in upstate New York, which she finds
loathsome, by a musical alarm clock that plays “I want to be a cow
girl.” She grabs a cigarette and mutters, “I gotta get out of here.” Just
before this, Allan (Woody Allen) and Linda (Diane Keaton) are seen in
bed discussing their night of sex in “Play It Again, Sam.” He says to her,
“You were fantastic last night in bed …. How do you feel now?” Linda
replies, “I think the Pepto-Bismol helped.”
A little later in the morning, Tommy Lee Jones’s Ed Tom Bell appears
in a breakfast scene from No Country for Old Men. Ed Tom dolefully won-
ders to his wife how he should spend his day. “Maybe I’ll go ridin’,” he
decides, and the emptiness he faces as the day breaks is carried over to
an audience wondering similarly how the day will unfold. Mimicking
the variegations we experience in a 24-hour period, the film carries
us along from the stress of the workday to the fear and anxiety of the
night; the humor, anxiety and pleasures possible throughout the days
and nights, as well as their traumas; and our awareness of mortality,
drawing throughout this experience the continuity between familiar
real life and the representations unfurled before us. Engaged viewers
of The Clock uncannily cross the borders of representation and reality,
like the “Sleepalos” raiding the space of the McKittrick in Sleep No More.
It is worth adding here that although the distinction between high
“museum” art and popular film is blurred in The Clock, the film does
share an aspect of performance or installation art in its resistance to
commodification. The film is computer programmed to begin at the
point in the film that is synched to real time. Though the film is com-
prised of popular film and media clips, this aspect of it, combined with
the 24-hour length of the film, makes it difficult if not impossible to
commercially profit as a popular film would do. While the potential of
streaming video makes commodification of The Clock more possible, the

impossibility of viewers owning a DVD of the film is part of the work’s
meaning.
The Clock illustrates adaptation in its multiplicity, where I think its
theoretical heart lies. Arguing in its relational aesthetics for a broad
conception of how contemporary cultural production converses with
and interprets prior artistic work, The Clock suggests analogies for see-
ing revisitations of prior cultural texts in far-reaching and provocative
terms.
9
Cape Fear, The Simpsons, and
Anne Washburn’s Post-Apocalyptic
Mr. Burns, A Post-Electric Play
In describing the power of Christian Marclay’s The Clock, Daniel

Zalewski has written, “By presenting a day in the life as a ceaseless
parade of fictional narratives, [Marclay] had confirmed Joan Didion’s
dictum that ‘we tell ourselves stories in order to live’ while reminding
us that we are all going to die.” Appropriately enough, the final chapter
of this study explores Anne Washburn’s musical drama Mr. Burns, A
Post-Electric Play, which premiered in 2012, about a group of survivors of
the fall of civilization recreating episodes of the long-running animated
Fox television series The Simpsons. The play engages not only television
but also film, music, theater, and popular culture in general, leveling
the playing field of sources and adaptations in a post-apocalyptic
setting. While it argues for the dire necessity of retelling stories in times
of trauma, Mr. Burns avoids the fatalism implied in Zalewski’s comment;
instead, the play imagines stories, including reframed ones, as creative
forces that look forward instead of backward. Washburn’s play suggests
the vital role adaptation can play in crafting a future in which our real
and imagined worlds merge.
Mr. Burns stages a unique conversation among multi-disciplinary texts,
grafting new contexts onto older stories. The main source of the play
is a 1993 episode of The Simpsons, “Cape Feare.” The episode is itself a
clever parody of the 1991 film Cape Fear, Martin Scorsese’s remake of the
1962 film of the same name, which is an adaptation of the 1957 John D.
MacDonald novel The Executioners about a recently paroled rapist, Max
Cady, who seeks revenge on Sam Bowden, a lawyer who witnessed Cady’s
crime and testified against him. In the 1962 adaptation directed by J.
Lee Thompson, Cady is played by Robert Mitchum, whose menace as he
wages battle on Bowden and his family is enhanced by the actor’s “inso-
lent ease” (Hoberman, “Sacred and Profane” 10). Mitchum’s performance
177
in the 1962 Cape Fear contains strong echoes of his role seven years
earlier as Harry Powell, the murderous and magnetic preacher in Charles
Laughton’s expressionistic thriller Night of the Hunter. In 1991, Scorsese
cast Robert De Niro in the role of Max Cady, establishing an even more
epic range of associations with the antagonist. Cady’s danger is located
in De Niro’s sheer physicality—the method actor famously built up his
body, transforming it into a formidable weapon. As Kirsten Thompson
has observed, “The sexuality and violence hinted at in the purring physi-
cality of Robert Mitchum becomes hyperbolically explicit in De Niro’s
baroque performance of Max Cady” (127).
While the 1991 film suggests Cady to be a kind of nightmare dop-
pelganger of Bowden, the earlier film does not go as far. As played by
Gregory Peck—in the same year he portrayed another lawyer, the iconic
Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, whom the American Film Institute
in 2003 voted the greatest hero in American film—Bowden is brought
to the brink of losing his humanity in the fight to protect his wife and
daughter. Increasingly desperate to eliminate Cady’s threat to his family,
Bowden is seduced by the efficiency of illegal means. His moral decline
shows the fragility of domestic happiness and the vulnerability of main-
stream America to fear and upheaval.1 In the film’s climactic showdown,
Bowden shoots and wounds Cady, but does not otherwise succumb to
his most violent impulses. Instead of killing him, Bowden snarls at Cady
that he will “live a long life in a cage … until the day you rot.” Brian
McFarlane has astutely observed about the 1962 Cape Fear that “the
Bowden ménage is potentially fragile, vulnerable to external invasions,
but that doesn’t lead either the Bowdens or the implied author seriously
to question its essential rightness and soundness” (Novel to Film 174).
In Scorsese’s 1991 Cape Fear Nick Nolte’s Bowden is not potentially
but explicitly guilty. He was Cady’s lawyer, and he admits to having
buried evidence at Cady’s trial that the woman he raped had a history
of promiscuity. Knowing that Cady was guilty but with the chance that
he might not be convicted with this evidence, Bowden rationalizes vio-
lating his attorney’s oath as serving justice. This shift in the back story
and in the characterization of Bowden suggests a breakdown in the
legal system that parallels the corruption of the family, an overt critique
absent in the 1962 film.
The 1991 Cape Fear is clearly the “hideous progeny” of the Thompson
film and MacDonald novel. In its gruesome scenes of violence and its
recasting of Bowden as deeply complicit in the evil that visits his family,
the film radically shifts our perspective on the story. While Mitchum
plays Max Cady as a sixties cool cat from hell, De Niro’s Cady is hell
Mr. Burns 179
anthropomorphized, an extreme figure of vengeance, who bears little

resemblance to a three-dimensional psychologically-rendered character.
Instead, he is a melodramatic figure of the repressed monster that has
been unleashed and externalized cinematically. As Bowden’s alter-ego,
Cady resembles Mary Shelley’s own Creature: an autodidact like the
Creature, Cady has educated himself while incarcerated; like the socially
marginalized Creature (and Shelley herself), Cady has been forced to
gather resources on his own because social institutions have failed him.
For Shelley, gender roles inhibited her expression (as they did for [Safe]’s
Carol White and the narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper”), which makes
Pam Cook’s analysis of the gender politics of the 1991 Cape Fear especially
intriguing. “As an avenging angel,” Cook argues, “Cady is acting on behalf
of victimised women” (15). While Cook objects to the film’s “monstrous”
representation of femininity (for her, Scorsese seems to “revel” in the vic-
timization of women), her point about Cady’s identification with female
vengeance presents a critical vantage point on the film’s representation
of gender: “Cady’s sense of loss links him with the women characters,
all of them ‘done over’ in some way by Bowden, whose resemblance to
Cady the dialogue repeatedly stresses.” Cook reads Cady in terms of “the
distorted picture he reflects back at [the women characters] of their own
rage and pain, and of their desire for revenge” (15).
The earliest film adaptation of Shelley’s Frankenstein (by Edison
Studios in 1910) uses the Creature figure to reflect back on the crimes
of others. Recognizing this motif in Shelley’s story, this silent-film
Frankenstein includes mirror imagery to suggest the Creature as a projec-
tion of its scientist-creator. In 1994, De Niro would play the Creature in
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, directed by Kenneth Branagh, but his Cady
three years earlier certainly prefigures that role. Both characters repre-
sent repressed voices at the margins, echoing Shelley’s own struggles to
express herself. The “hideous” progenies of Cape Fear and Frankenstein,
mashed up into De Niro’s Cady, constitute a critical, if violent, perspec-
tive on figures of the monster in film and literature.
The most memorable scenes in Scorsese’s Cape Fear are hallmarks
in The Simpsons “Cape Feare” episode, in which Sideshow Bob, Bart
Simpson’s longtime nemesis, takes on the role of Cady. Voiced by Kelsey
Grammer, Sideshow Bob plans his vengeance on Bart: he lifts weights
in one scene (accompanied by Bernard Herrmann’s haunting 1962 Cape
Fear score), but the episode then cuts to him doing aerobics (“and turn
and flex and shake and bounce and turn”) in a playful parody of De
Niro’s physical threat as Cady. The episode exploits Grammer’s fastidi-
ous star text to ironize Cady’s villainy and, in making Bart (whom Bob
calls “the spirited little scamp”) the object of threat, deflates the act
of vengeance (Figures 9.1). Such deflation functions similarly to the
casting of Jim Abrahams’s young daughter in the Eleanor Coppola-
narrator role in the mockumentary Hot Shots! Part Deux—A Filmmaker’s
Apology, in which Abrahams punctures the grandeur of Francis Coppola’s
role as director, as discussed in Chapter 2.
Figures 9.1 Cape Fear; “Cape Feare,” The Simpsons

Mr. Burns 181
In the 1991 Cape Fear, Scorsese is already making self-conscious refer-

ences to the playful possibilities implied in remakes and adaptation: he
casts Mitchum as a police lieutenant, Peck as Cady’s snake-oily Southern
lawyer, and Martin Balsam (the police chief in the earlier film) as the
judge. Scorsese’s ability to cross-reference through casting reflects his
auteurist power to cull icons from film history, recalling the director’s
serious meditation on his own role in artistic lineage and film history in
Hugo discussed in Chapter 1. More than this, however, the “inversion”
of actors and characters’ values points to a larger pattern of uncanny
reflections in the film. According to J. Hoberman, “Scorsese’s remake …
contains its own negative image,” a process highlighted in the use of
negative exposure in the film’s cinematography (Hoberman, “Sacred
and Profane” 11). Cady’s role as Bowden’s monstrous doppelganger is
parallel to the film’s role as “hideous progeny” of the 1962 film, reveal-
ing an even scarier underbelly to civilization and culture than the moral
swamp figured in the earlier film: “in Scorsese’s version it’s clear that the
cracks had appeared long before Cady arrived” (Diski 13).
***
Anne Washburn’s Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play explores the destruction

of civilization, filtering Cape Fear’s melodramatic portrait of a family
in crisis through the lenses of the Simpsons’ comic mishaps and the
magical reinvention of stories. In the play, survival depends on adap-
tation: physical and psychosocial adaptation, aided by the practice of
retelling stories.
Emily St. John Mandel’s recent post-apocalyptic work Station Eleven
(2014) also involves storytelling invested in popular culture that helps
its characters survive. In the novel, a troupe of players and musicians
perform Shakespeare while traveling across a wrecked landscape fol-
lowing a devastating pandemic. On one of their caravans is written,
“Because survival is insufficient,” a quote from an episode of Star Trek:
Voyager, the 1995–2001 science fiction television series.
Both Mandel’s novel and Washburn’s play are meditations on the
crucial role of art, including art referencing popular culture, but Station
Eleven differs from Mr. Burns in the kind of apocalypse it envisions.
Rather than a flu pandemic that kills largely by chance, in Mr. Burns,
human greed and hubris lead to the catastrophic loss of nuclear power.
Although the play’s postmodern mash-up of television, film, and
theater is highly entertaining, its powerful ethics resides in seeing capi-
talism and consumerism (symbolized by the greedy Simpsons character
Mr. Burns) as the causes of civilization’s decay. At the same time, sto-
rytelling, art-making, and remaking the story of the Simpson family
represent the only potential for creativity in a dystopian landscape.
While The Simpsons’s parody of the American family would obviously
find Cape Fear’s abject and melodramatic view of the family a perfect
target for satire, the setting of Washburn’s play is also an apt progeny
of the film’s post-civilized views of society. Mr. Burns centers on The
Simpsons episode, which becomes a mental anchor at the play’s begin-
ning for the small group of survivors trying to occupy their minds in the
days, weeks, and months after this unspecified nuclear disaster. We are
introduced to these characters in a moment of calm amidst the ensuing
violence and trauma, as they sublimate their desire to remember what
they have lost into an accessible exercise of conjuring up diverting
threads of popular culture. As New York Times chief theater critic Ben
Brantley has interestingly observed, “ ‘Mr. Burns’ is a latter-day relative
of ‘The Decameron,’ Boccaccio’s 14th-century masterwork about young
Italians swapping narratives in a deserted villa, where they have fled
the Black Death.” (“Stand Up, Survivors”). The characters, led by Matt,
recall the scenes of “Cape Feare” in detail, amusing themselves and join-
ing together in the effort to remember moments from the story.
The first act toggles back and forth between a funny recitation of The
Simpsons episode on which the characters cathect to occupy and distract
themselves, and moments of sheer terror as they contemplate the “the
dread” of “not knowing” (36) what the fallout from the disaster will
be and if, when, or how they will die. At one point, a new character,
Gibson, wanders into their space, and an extended sequence follows in
which his route from Massachusetts is traced, and then the characters
exchange the names and ages of those whom they have apparently lost
in the fires, explosions, and general violence of the catastrophe. Their
seeming hopelessness is offset by the way the ritual of reciting names
holds the group together, as does their obsessive description of the
“Cape Feare” episode.
The survivors’ narration of the episode includes many comical scenes,
artfully retold and further distracting the characters from the extrem-
ity of their situation. One of the funniest descriptions is of Sideshow
Bob’s parole hearing, in which he is asked about his chest tattoo, “Die
Bart, Die.” Bob replies, in Grammer’s sophisticated voice, that the tat-
too is in German, meaning, “The Bart, The.” One parole board member
turns to another and says, “No one who speaks German can be an evil
man” (remembered by characters in the play as, “Anyone who speaks
German … [c]ouldn’t be a bad man” [18]). Some of the details Matt and
Mr. Burns 183
Jenny, another survivor, review from the episode include editing tech-
niques, such as reveals, smash cuts, overhead shots, and montages. The
play calls attention to the radical break between animated television,
whose anti-realist form contrasts but is in conversation with staged
theater, as well as film. For example, in recalling “Cape Feare”’s parody
of Mitchum’s perverse “story of good and evil” tattooed on his knuckles
as “L-O-V-E” and “H-A-T-E” in Night of the Hunter, Matt notes that on
Bob’s hands “L-U-V” and “H-Ā-T” are written because “the Simpsons
characters only have three fingers” [17]).
In Act 2, which takes place seven years later, the survivors in the first
act are now a troupe mounting productions based on “Cape Feare” and
other Simpsons episodes, and vying with other post-disaster traveling
theater groups to stage the best episodes. The troupe’s productions also
include vibrantly performed commercials, which satisfy different forms
of audience stimulation. Unlike the avant-garde theater represented
by Mr. Burns, “the point of a commercial,” as Jenny says, “is to create
a reality which is welcoming, not challenging” (53). The commercials
include nostalgic references to familiar consumer venues, items, and
domestic experiences no longer available or possible, such as Pret a
Manger (where the “sandwiches are so cute” [51]), grape Fanta, Sarah
Lee coffee cakes, and Chablis. The group also choreographs a capella
musical performances of commercials that string together pieces of
recognizable popular songs (including by Lady Gaga and Eminem) in
a celebratory imitation of the form and commodity thrill of television
consumerism. Such fervor taps the sources of theatrical performance
available to the characters, i.e., what they remember from prelapsarian
society. The meaning’s form replaces its content, since it seems to only
matter—though it matters desperately—that members of the group
express themselves.
The success of these makeshift theater companies competing to
mount other shows from the Simpsons canon—like “A Streetcar Named
Marge” from the fourth season and “Much Apu About Nothing” from
the seventh—hinges in part on individual memory. In Act 1, memory
serves to memorialize lost family members and friends in the reading
of their names, the survivors hoping that others they meet will have
encountered these lost loved ones. In Act 2, memory has become a
traded commodity, as the troupes buy lines from those they encounter
who can remember episodes, or persons coming forward with lines.
Quality control then becomes an issue—Gibson argues with the oth-
ers in the troupe that they take a pass on “Heretic Homer,” which he
says is “a wildly inaccurate show” (57). The charge of “[inaccuracy]”
is deeply ironic, given that all of the shows are based on imperfect
memory, mirroring the process of creating the play Mr. Burns overall,
since Washburn transcribed much of the dialogue from the actors’ own
reconstruction of the “Cape Feare” episode based on their individual
memories during the play’s experimental early stages. Here the title of
the episode the characters are adapting is, in fact, “Homer the Heretic”
from season four. Fellow troupe member Colleen agrees with Gibson
that “Heretic Homer” is a “shitty show,” but she adds that “we may be
able to improve it. Matt has a line.” Gibson is not only anxious about
the quality of “Heretic Homer” but also that there are not enough shows
featuring Mr. Burns: “they really love him, someone is going to remem-
ber, someone is going to come forward.” (58).
The troupe discusses gaining the rights to shows. That permissions
and copyright have survived the apocalypse brings out the absurdity
of owning the rights to artistic production and dialogue and the per-
sistence of capitalism. While analysis of intellectual property law in
relation to adaptation falls outside the purview of this project, it is the
case that the more elastic we imagine texts to be, as sources and adap-
tations, the more difficult it is to establish intellectual property lines.
The protection and ownership of artistic production is in some sense
pitted against adaptation, and it may be the case that those adaptations
caught in the process of permissions may necessarily be less creative
because they are contractually beholden to sources. In the context of
the avant-garde, the creative arts must navigate difficult waters when so
much cultural production relies on previous art. One of the virtues of
Washburn’s project is that in taking a popular culture text as its main
source, it carries on the idea of the avant-garde to democratize art-
making and notions of its sources.
In his analysis of the 1973 Paul Morrissey film Andy Warhol’s
Frankenstein and the avant-garde, James Harding references Arthur
Danto’s understanding of Warhol, that his “images enact a ‘celebration
rather than a criticism of contemporary life’ belonging to common
experience of every day, ‘so familiar that “stealing” them was impos-
sible’” (Harding 100). Harding observes the disavowal of authorship in
Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein, which contrasts with more conventional
contemporary adaptations like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or Bram
Stoker’s Dracula (1992). Unlike the collaborative anti-authorial identi-
ties of avant-garde art, these two films prominently announce their
“original authorship,” while also calling attention to their latter-day
auteurist directors Kenneth Branagh and Francis Ford Coppola. While
on a practical level, these filmmakers aimed to distinguish their works
Mr. Burns 185
from copyrighted Universal film titles, it is no surprise that both of

these films are primers in Romantic ideology, celebrating origins, genius
artists, radical individuality, and the transcendence of boundaries.
Those who evaluate adaptations in comparison with their sources do
not explicitly charge that adapting sources is a form of theft (“steal-
ing”). However, if we return to Danto’s and Harding’s references to how
avant-garde art elides the notion of single authorship (or, I would add,
single sources), a reconsideration of adaptation as the avant-garde may
further dispel the tone of violation that, outside of scholarly discourse,
still attends to discussions of adaptation.
Mr. Burns plays with the recherché quality of avant-garde art but turns
its conventional class affiliations upside down. The play inverts tradi-
tional hierarchies: it is not the audience member unfamiliar with, say,
19th-century fiction who does not get the references, it is the person
unfamiliar with contemporary popular culture, most notably here The
Simpsons and its particular brand of irony, who is outside the cultural
conversation. This frustration also demonstrates the cognitive disso-
nance associated with the avant-garde, whose effect on viewers and
audience members is often disorientation and anxiety. The memorable
scenes from The Simpsons “Cape Feare” episode are reveled in not only
by the characters on stage but the audience, as well, who either would
know the episode or find the simple wryness and irony of the humor
entertaining, even on a first hearing.2 In Act 2 of Mr. Burns, for example,
only members of the audience who know the television episode will
recognize a context for the references to rakes. Colleen the director asks
Sam, a member of the troupe, if he has “[adjusted] the padding on the
rakes,” an allusion to the very funny sequence in the episode when
Sideshow Bob steps on the teeth of one rake after another and their
handles snap up to hit him in the face.3
Beyond the actual written dialogue, then, there is an implied dia-
logue among cultural texts that enriches our experience. Mr. Burns, A
Post-Electric Play investigates the importance and shared knowledge of
cultural production to sustain the values of human identity in the face
of trauma, but also a postmodern belief in the power of ritual telling and,
as the play progresses, of “performance,” to bind communities together.
In his article about the 2012 world premiere production of the play at
Woolly Mammoth Theater Company in Washington, D.C., Eric Grode
describes Mr. Burns as a post-apocalyptic morality tale: “performances
of the [‘Cape Feare’] episode become a copy of a copy of a copy, render-
ing the original unrecognizable as it morphs to address the needs of
its listeners.” Grode is referring to the listeners within the play, who
compulsively recount and enjoy hearing the story of “Cape Feare”

and are tantalized by the acute efforts they must make to remember
its details (“oh this is torture,” says Matt; “I know this is really funny”
[21]), but his comment captures the paradox of the play’s use of pas-
tiche to “address the needs of its listeners,” in the audience, as well. Mr
Burns audiences have the unique experience of summoning to mind a
past text they likely did not take too seriously at first viewing but are
now invited to see as significant, situated in a radically different con-
text. The story, as Henry James’s narrator in The Turn of the Screw (1898)
insists, “will tell.” Indeed, Washburn’s play suggests the dire importance
of stories and the value not only of a collective required to conjure them
up but also of the imaginative energy it takes to retell them. Adapting
to radical change, Washburn’s characters use stories to define their new
community, just as adaptation, as has been argued throughout this
study, provides opportunities to celebrate the pleasures of stories pre-
sented in new contexts and the creative effort required to participate
in that activity—in Robert Stam’s words, the “ongoing whirl of inter-
textual reference and transformation” (66). In this regard, the seeming
funhouse cross-referentiality of Washburn’s play may be particularly
appropriate in a post-apocalyptic world, in which adaptation becomes
part of culture-making, telling and retelling stories and in some ways
severing them from their original sources.
The twin identities of Mr. Burns—mourning the loss of experiences
now only attainable through performance while celebrating the creative
abilities to survive through storytelling and theatrical expression—are
about adapting, and mirror theatrically the show’s status as itself crea-
tive adaptation that intends to converse with multiple high and low
culture works. The heroic theatrical perambulations of the characters in
this show represent human survival in the face of horrific antagonists
(post-apocalytic thugs, murderers and robbers resorting in their despera-
tion to guns instead of theater). The characters embark upon a psycho-
social adaptation that relies exclusively on past cultural production, The
Simpsons serving as a metonymic reference to the stuff of culture that
feeds our creative drive, sometimes in surprising ways. The show makes
reference to a kind of pastiche that Frederic Jameson most objected to,
the ahistoric reference—“parody with blind eyeballs,” as he put it (17)—
that beguiles us into forgetting our agency in a sociopolitical world.
Gibson’s spot-on impression of Grammer voice-acting Sideshow Bob
intoning in the movie theater to the Simpson family, “Oh I’ll stay away
from your son, alright. I’ll stay away … forever” (37) is no less impres-
sive when we find out he has never seen The Simpsons; he is mimicking
Mr. Burns 187
his old girlfriend’s impression (“she’s the one you really need, seriously,
she knows all of them, she was always quoting from them” [37]) and so
is once removed from the source of his “art.” Despite the metaphoric
ahistoricity of Gibson’s impression—its source is mediated by other
conversation and thus represents another “hideous progeny”—its effect
is pleasurable, interesting, and finally as valuable, I want to suggest, as
a closer and more direct “impression” of its source material.
Indeed, by Act 3 of Mr. Burns, the play has moved far away from its
“source,” such that the characters have become the Simpsons figures
they have been playing. The time is now 75 years later, when the char-
acters themselves have surrealistically disappeared into the Simpsons
characters, and no life appears outside of what is now an operatic per-
formance of the final scenes of the “Cape Feare” episode taking place
on a boat at “Terror Lake.” No longer an itinerant troupe as in Act 2,
the actors have become the characters, who appear at a fixed theatri-
cal site that is apparently devoted solely to hosting performances of
The Simpsons. The scenes are framed by a pastiche of Greek choral and
African-ritual refrains of a sung narrative that includes measures of
Bernard Herrmann’s 1962 Cape Fear score and Danny Elfman’s Simpsons
theme song.4 Worlds away from the original “source” text of the 1993
television episode, the final act blends cultural matter into a fascinating
performance of loss and redemption.
In Act 3, Mr. Burns, the evil owner of the nuclear power plant where
Homer works on The Simpsons, has replaced Sideshow Bob as antagonist,
constituting an adversary significantly more lethal than the original
hapless villain. Mr. Burns kills the female Simpsons and Homer, and
Bart is left to save the world. The melodrama of good versus evil is
represented in the operatic form of Act 3; in the dialogue and libretto,
Mr. Burns’s villainy directly references Max Cady’s perversity and can-
nibalism—Burns tortures Bart’s sister, Lisa, by pretending to suck on her
fingers and threatens to eat Bart’s face, just as Cady had sucked on the
fingers of Sam Bowden’s daughter Danielle (Juliette Lewis) and bit the
face of Sam’s colleague Lori Davis (Illeana Douglas) in Scorsese’s Cape
Fear (these plot points in the film were earlier recapped by the characters
at the beginning of the play). The Act 3 operatics are also a reference
to the music of Gilbert and Sullivan in “Cape Feare”: not only does the
family sing “Three little maids from school are we” from The Mikado
on their way to witness relocation but Bart, stalling for time after being
cornered by Bob, makes a last request that Bob sing the entire score
of H.M.S. Pinafore. The latter memorably tells Bart before beginning,
“I shall send you to heaven before I send you to hell.” Act 3 of Mr. Burns
Figure 9.2 Mr. Burns, A Post-Electric Play: A pre-production model rendering of

the stage/set
Source: Courtesy of Walter McBride Photography.
is also almost entirely sung, full of popular cultural refrains, such as

singer Ricky Martin’s 1999 hit “Livin’ la Vida Loca” and, in the 2013
Off-Broadway production in New York, the theme music to the 1966 ani-
mated television special Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas (“You’re
a bad one, Mr. Burns …. Oh, you’re a tricky one, Mr. Burns/Full of cellular
twists and turns”). In the third act, Itchy and Scratchy, the mouse and
cat in the animated cartoon The Itchy and Scratchy Show, a violent parody
of Tom and Jerry featured on The Simpsons, assume the role of Mr. Burns’s
evil assassin sidekicks, the ritual violence they represent in the cartoon
within the cartoon transposed into the ritual violence in Act 3.
Washburn has observed that Act 3 echoes Greek theater. The perfor-
mances occur under a proscenium arch that has the Simpsons figures
etched in stone, suggesting that these “weathered” performances have
been around for a while (Figure 9.2).
According to Washburn, the etchings reflect a “faded” narrative that
still attracts audiences, like “a carny ride” or a popular narrative. Still
with no electricity, society remains lost, but in a post-traumatic cultural
space, going to see the Simpsons on stage becomes the ritual family out-
ing, a theatrical event—like going to see A Christmas Carol at holiday
season, Washburn notes—that provides the communities (Simpsons
avatars, in a sense) with a release from the burdens of existence.
Mr. Burns 189
The conclusion of the play is a celebration of community: in particular,

personal relationships and a communal experience of art. The Simpsons
family emerges as a profoundly supportive force in life and death, and
the theater appears as the only source of creative nourishment in a
demolished post-electric landscape. The existing world at the end of Mr.
Burns relies on adaptation and elastextity; the universe thrives at all only
because its popular art can provoke—as the play itself does—rather than
simply sate its audience. The show’s climax casts Bart as redeemer.5 After
his family is killed, he battles with Mr. Burns and eventually stabs him
to death. He sings,
And now that I’ve lost everything

Now that everyone I love is gone
All I have left is everything … the world is filled with everything
I’m a boy who could be anything
And now I will do everything
The whole world unfurls before me
A Great adventure lies before me…. There’s nothing I’m afraid to be
The world is new and glittery
I run to meet it hopefully
Love never dies in memory
and I will meet life gloriously. (95)
The poignancy of Bart’s redemption, as the rest of the Simpsons hover

as angels above the stage, is accompanied by a culminating critique of
capitalism and nuclear power that has brought about the catastrophic
end of civilization, as a ragtag pile of Christmas lights and lamps are
illuminated on the stage at the very end, fueled by the actor who plays
Mr. Burns riding a bicycle maniacally.
In Washburn’s play the hapless characters of The Simpsons are figures
of resilience. Outrageous as they may be, the Simpsons represent com-
munity and family. Adapting their television roles in which dialogue
and actions are often inappropriate (especially those of Homer and
Bart), their response to terror and doom is seen in this play as theatri-
cal, sustaining, and redemptive. Cultures produce the kind of art that
addresses the needs of audiences, as Washburn has observed. She is
interested in “what culture produces what kind of theater,” exploring
the idea in Mr. Burns that popular narrative can serve unlikely needs,
since changing and in this case a radically changed culture calls upon a
new art, a Sophoclean Simpsons event, to emerge. The Simpsons and a
new form of adaptation become figures for human reconstruction and
imaginative energy in the face of cultural decay and a constant threat

of catastrophe.
As suggested earlier, the play mirrors these characters’ adaptation
to terrifying new situations in the world in the play’s own adaptation
of past cultural material to navigate trauma. Allusions hum alongside
the action on stage, demonstrating the pleasure and value of cross-
pollinated cultural dialogue. Mr. Burns’s villainous threat to Mr. and
Mrs. Average American represents a culture “breaking bad,” wreaking
vengeance, as Cady did on the Bowden family, to bring into relief the
large-scale hubris of a form of lethal capitalism. In Act 3 of the London
production, the actor playing Burns affects a Cady/Mitchum-like swag-
ger to emphasize the seductive arrogance of his illicit power.
Mr. Burns, A Post-Electric Play challenges audiences to embrace the
imaginative (if strange and alienating) scions, or adaptations, of cultural
matter. There are no sacred cows in the world of creative adaptation. As
Washburn has said, like her own play, “The Simpsons is a repository for
anything, high and low.” Her membership in The Civilians, an experi-
mental theater collective that investigates new modes of creative inquiry
and expression, in part explains the openness with which the play fixed
upon its sources: as alluded to earlier, actors in the theater group were
charged with trying to reconstruct an episode of The Simpsons and much
of the plot and dialogue in the first act of Washburn’s play is drawn
directly and organically from the show’s imaginative and collaborative
beginnings.
I have argued throughout this project for a more thoroughgoing
embrace of an elastic literary and cultural landscape, in which the
textual “hideous progeny” that have inherited popular and high-art
narratives are greeted generously. Adaptations may reimagine their
sources and their own cultural moments through what can be perceived
as “hideous” perspectives, but they also celebrate the persistence and
flexibility of storytelling and the value of wide-ranging cultural engage-
ment. In their resilience, adaptations are like Sideshow Bob, who (him-
self morphed from Max Cady), as one in the troupe puts it, “cling[s] to
the underbelly of the car, hot engine oil, in his face uh but he holds on,
he perseveres. Like that’s what makes him scary” (69).
If assassins Itchy and Scratchy, and the rest of the rascally “scamps”
in Act 3, are the “hideous progeny” of Acts 1 and 2, as well as both
Cape Fears, The Simpsons, and the work of the actors, director, and other
collaborators involved in this ingenious production, Anne Washburn’s
morality tale itself represents how a recombination of source materials
can affirm an abiding humanity in our will to adapt.
Epilogue
In his book Hollywood Remakes, Deleuze and the Grandfather Paradox,

Daniel Varndell reminds us that “One cannot watch a film for the first
time twice” (5). In every subsequent reading or viewing of a book, film,
play, or work of art, the text will always be a figure of adaptation, since
stories change over time in our personal and cultural imagination, even
without an “adapter” there as a catalyst for such evolution. The changes
in the individual and cultural reception of a work suggest that agency
in the process of adaptation is shared and shifting, just as the identity of
a text shifts as it is read, viewed, and performed differently over time.
The broad view of adaptation this study has argued for embraces the
vast potential in adapting stories, which are always already rewritten
by virtue of changing reception habits, practices, and desires. Meeting
that potential depends upon the openness of readers, viewers, art-goers,
audience members, and creative artists to the changing—often radically
mutating—emphases in the content and form of texts and media.
While texts extend to different cultural moments with an altered
impact, creative artists may also assert their own distinct readings of
texts that pull at their elastic borders in often surprising ways. Victor
Erice meditated on historical trauma through an appropriation of
Frankenstein’s Creature in El Espíritu de la Colmena (The Spirit of the
Beehive). One year later, Rainer Werner Fassbinder explored gender,
class, and racial prejudice by means of Douglas Sirk’s melodramas in
Angst essen Seele auf (Ali: Fear Eats the Soul). Both films resituate stories
in new socio-historical contexts, affirming the elastic life of a text whose
twisted journeys ensure not only the story’s own survival but also, as
Anne Washburn’s play Mr. Burns suggests, the well-being of a vibrant
culture invested in critical inquiry and the arts.
191
This book was written to engage not just fiction and film scholars but
others who are passionate about literature, cinema, and the arts. The
immersive theater discussed in Chapter 7 speaks in some sense to audi-
ences craving participation in the arts: readers and viewers who carry
a deep investment in and identification with the creative refashioning
of stories and the multiple forms through which they are remade. One
creative reader, writer, and composer whose love of the arts, like Orson
Welles, makes him a consummate adapter, is Lin-Manuel Miranda. In
the summer of 2015, after an earlier debut at New York City’s Public
Theater, Miranda brought his musical theater adaptation of Ron
Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton to Broadway. With the
author of its source, Chernow, serving as the show’s dramaturge, the
hip-hop musical Hamilton adapts the book’s vision of a restless founding
father, whose famous duel with Aaron Burr represents both men’s tragic
ambition. Like Chernow’s biography, the musical is about America as
well as these individual men: its founding, its ideals, and its short-
comings. But like many of the richest adaptations, Hamilton redraws
Chernow’s story in a unique form, a musical style that not only updates
the story but also revivifies the conventions of its medium. Hamilton, in
short, perfectly exemplifies elastextity and the stunning “hideous prog-
eny” of an adaptive view of art and culture.
Like the so-called boy genius Orson Welles, Lin-Manuel Miranda was
a prodigy who, in his 20s, wrote the Tony-award winning musical In
the Heights. Morphing rap, R&B, and jazz with conventional Broadway
themes, Miranda explored the American Dream through the voice of
Usnavi, a bodega owner from the Dominican Republic resettled in
Washington Heights. In her comprehensive story about Hamilton in the
New Yorker, Rebecca Mead quotes Chris Hayes, the MSNBC newscaster
who went to college with Miranda when the latter began writing musi-
cals as a teenager. Noting the young composer’s precociousness, Hayes
says of Miranda’s early success, “Who does he think he is?” The ques-
tion echoes Scorsese’s description quoted in Chapter 2 of Hollywood’s
initial reaction to Orson Welles (“Who the hell is that? How dare he
take credit for everything” [quoted in Leaming 169]). Here, Hayes goes
on to answer, “a once-in-a-generational musical talent.” Like Welles,
Miranda demonstrates a wide-ranging knowledge of cultural history, a
breathtaking inventiveness, and an astounding intellectual and creative
energy, all of which contribute to his role as a quintessential adapter.
Unlike the conventionally solipsistic “auteur,” as discussed in Chapter 2,
the consummate adapter regards her or his viewers and audience mem-
bers as part of the creative process.
Epilogue 193
In Hamilton, Miranda resituates the story of the founding fathers

and the Caribbean-born Hamilton in the context of an immigrant’s
view of the dream of American freedom and individualism: “Miranda
saw Hamilton’s relentlessness, brilliance, linguistic dexterity, and self-
destructive stubbornness through his own idiosyncratic lens. It was, he
thought, a hip-hop story, an immigrant’s story” (Mead). As Mead notes,
the line “I’m not throwing away my shot” reverberates throughout the
musical. These words represent Hamilton’s virtue and his flaw, a com-
mitment to realizing his vision, to pursuing what he believes in, without
compromise. Expressing a drive, energy, and ingenuity embedded in an
idealist vision of the American Dream, on the one hand, Miranda’s use
of the line as a leitmotif also refers, on the other hand, to the literal duel
that kills Hamilton and, earlier, another that ends his son Philip’s life.
Hamilton did indeed intend to “throw away his fire [in his duel with
Burr]—that is, purposely miss his opponent” (Chernow 689). Miranda’s
adaptation summons up this historical critical crux—what happened at
the famous duel in Weehawken, New Jersey in 1804—to explore a story
of unremitting ambition and its culmination in a poignant act of with-
holding or diverting his shot, as Hamilton in fact seems to have “fired
way off the mark” (Chernow 704).
Hamilton features a rapped libretto that also includes show-tuney
refrains and jazz numbers, such as Thomas Jefferson’s catchy song
upon his return from France, “What’d I Miss?” Notably, Washington,
Madison, Jefferson, Hamilton, and Burr are played by Latino and African-
American actors. The multicultural casting, as well as the centrality of
Hamilton’s wife Eliza Schuyler in the performance, presents history as
a story predicated upon class, race, and gender assumptions. Who tells
the stories adopted as the most prominent ones, and whose stories are
being told? Miranda may be narrating the story of early America, but he
is also telling a story about our own time and its inequalities, our strug-
gles with race and with marginalization based on difference. The rapper
Daveed Diggs, who plays Jefferson, says that the show
“allows us to see ourselves as part of history that we have always

thought we were excluded from ... Rap is the voice of the people of
our generation, and of people of color, and just the fact that it exists
in this piece, and is not commented upon, gives us a sense of owner-
ship.” (Qtd. in Mead)
Diggs’s comment reflects a central feature of the adaptations dis-

cussed in this book, their reworking of myriad sources, a kind of jazz
“riffing,” to show not only how stories change over time as a result of
shifting reception habits but also how an emphasis on different narra-
tive perspectives can radically change the stories themselves.
Hamilton’s relevance to theories of adaptation can be seen most richly
in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s exploration of what it means to be a “found-
ing” body—a founding text or a founding father, which resonates power-
fully with this book’s deconstruction of “originality” in favor of models
of adaptation that privilege, instead, animated conversation among
texts and works of art. Rewriting the stories surrounding America’s first
political leaders as multicultural and as rapping or singing in the hip-
hop style, the musical demonstrates a flexibility in notions of “origins”
and an openness to new viewpoints and new ways of telling stories. The
show adapts history—its content and its mode of delivery—making new
history and showing that adaptation does the same.
Every adaptation extends artistic molds, drawing them out to encom-
pass new forms, new ideas. Hamilton’s powerful allusiveness—Miranda’s
musical references to artists from Gilbert and Sullivan to Rodgers and
Hammerstein to the Notorious B.I.G., with all of the various cultural
resonances these sources carry—speaks to the richness involved in
unconstrained cross-textual conversations, a richness that makes adap-
tation fundamental to cultural production.
The “hideous progeny” of the story of Alexander Hamilton, Miranda’s
work insists not only on the elasticity of stories but on the strange and
exciting renewability of art forms, such as musical theater: their adapt-
ability and potential intermediality. Many will find in Hamilton proof
that musical theater is not chained to only what has worked before, or
to works that have made profits, but eminently adaptable to new voices,
new forms and media, and new ideas. And the renewal of musical
theater in this case reflects a kind of optimism at the heart of adaptation
that reconceives the practice and analysis of it not simply as harking
back to fixed and known sources—an abiding longing for “home”—but
as forward-moving and adventurous.
Notes
Introduction
1. Relational aesthetics helps here, since relational art conceives of artistic
production in the contemporary art world as dependent on relations
among texts and human interaction. As the critic and art historian Nicolas
Bourriaud describes it, relational aesthetics is “a set of artistic practices which
take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human
relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private
space” (113).
2. I am especially indebted to the work of Dudley Andrew, David Boyd, Sarah
Cardwell, Deborah Cartmell, Kamilla Elliott, Christine Geraghty, Linda
Hutcheon, Thomas Leitch, Brian McFarlane, James Naremore, R. Barton
Palmer, Laurence Raw, Julie Sanders, Robert Stam, and Imelda Whelehan.
3. More recently, in her book Hideous Progeny: Disability, Eugenics, and Classic
Horror Film, Angela M. Smith also employs Shelley’s metaphor, though the
“hideous progeny” in Smith’s title refers to 1930s horror films and their
“grappling with the politics and aesthetics of disability representation” (29).
Smith is drawn to Shelley’s phrase, in part, as I am, because it “asserts the
impossibility of recuperating a singular or authoritative source for monster
or text” (22), and I share Smith’s understanding of the “monstrous” as a
means of generating sympathy for the “Other.” Her specific aim, however,
is to recast scholarly focus on the metaphor of impairment in the horror
genre as reactionary, seeing it instead as a means of critique, to “question
the eugenic logic that visible impairment must either mean something other
than itself or remain a reductive and material ‘fact’ used to consolidate con-
servative and eugenic narratives” (28).
4. This can happen more broadly when we have moved more fully away from
a comparative (and thus so often hierarchical) analysis of adaptation cases.
At that point, we may be in a better position to see the primary role of adap-
tation in cultural production and change, for, as Thomas Leitch observes,
“Mutations survive not because they are just as good as their progenitors but
because they are better at the kinds of skills their changing environments
demand” (“To Adapt or to Adapt To” 99).
Extending Gary R. Bortolotti and Linda Hutcheon’s intriguing discussion
of the evolutionary “nature” of stories in their 2007 article “On the Origin
of Adaptations: Rethinking Fidelity Discourse and ‘Success’—Biologically,”
Leitch addresses the power of adaptations to enact the process of cultural
change in their marshaling forward of familiar texts into new contexts. Leitch
develops Hutcheon’s and Bortolotti’s application of a biological model of
evolution to adaptation (i.e., that stories are subject to the same process of sur-
vival of the fittest as are species in the natural world), astutely observing that
the idea of change central to evolutionary adaptation may be best understood
as an intransitive process/relation. In other words, rather than a transitive
195
196 Notes
model implying a subject (adaptation) that adapts an object, an intransitive

model might shift emphasis from what is being adapted by whom to how the
adaptation itself is a changing form, intransitive in its mutation: “a kind of
change involving an organism that evolves in order to achieve a longer life,
reach a new audience, or demonstrate its viability in a new medium or a new
set of cultural circumstances” (“To Adapt or to Adapt To” 97). Adaptations
require not only the critical acumen to recognize their active interpretation of
source texts but also the reader/viewer flexibility to see such agency as produc-
tive rather than regressive, as protracting the life of earlier texts, rather than
simply exploiting them.
5. While Frederic Jameson’s influential analysis of pastiche ignited an impor-
tant debate in the 1990s about relations among history, authorship, and
genre, it may be time to move away from his critique of pastiche and his
concern with the emptiness of cultural referencing (“random stylistic allu-
sion” [18]) that may ignore history and historical context. The way we do
art now is very often through textual conversation, cultural rehearsals of
narrative that are re-visioned and that offer new insights in every instantia-
tion. In its most interesting forms, pastiche is creative and provocative, often
political, because it reorders ideas and texts to ignite new ways of thinking
about them and the cultures that produce them. Such engagement refigures
the spirit of pastiche inherited from Jameson’s critique. As Brooker observes,
history, pace Frederic Jameson, turns out to be less lost than out of joint,
suspended or running in reverse. Not only, then, are the author/auteur
and the text decentered, as announced by post-structuralism, but so too
is the reader/viewer. That this indeterminacy, or “endless permutation
of textual traces” has acquired an extra-textual reach into our lives and
destinies is surely a feature of the continuing postmodern. (119)
Following Hutcheon’s affirmative view of the critical engagement possible

in parody, Brooker calls for the “multi-relational critical perspective” (109)
opened up by creative adaptations. Further, Brooker’s claim that adaptations
can be “original,” or, following my own interests here, even avant-garde in
the way they reimagine stories, is particularly helpful. This counters Jameson’s
concern that in “nostalgia films,” history is lost and meaningful artistic inven-
tion becomes impossible. Instead, Brooker affirms that adaptations can
restore the possibility of “originality,” understood as the practice of an

imaginative re-making which edits, echoes, borrows from, recomposes and
“re-functions” existing narratives or images; that is to say, makes them work
in a different medium with an invigorated social and artistic purpose—what
Brecht termed art’s “critical attitude to the social world.” (114)
Brooker’s analysis thus points toward a more constructive way of reading

history through pastiche and adaptation (119), as we see in a volume such
as Second Takes: Critical Approaches to the Film Sequel (2010), in which editors
Carolyn Jess-Cooke and Constantine Verevis explore the sequel as a text
that “does not prioritize the repetition of an original, but rather advances an
exploration of alternatives, differences, and reenactments that are discretely
Notes 197
charged with the various ways in which we may reread, remember, or return
to a source” (5).
6. Three points here, the first about intertextuality, the second about the role
of creative adaptation in pedagogy, and a third about creative figures for
adaptation itself. First, though intertextuality was made a hallmark of post-
structuralism by Julia Kristeva in the 1960s, followed by Roland Barthes’s
landmark writings about “the death of the author” and the plurality and
multiplicity of texts (influenced by Kristeva and Bakhtin’s notion of dialo-
gism), Jonathan Culler’s observations about intertextuality in The Pursuit of
Signs remain a useful guide for adaptation studies.
Intertextuality … becomes less a name for a work’s relation to particular

prior texts than a designation of its participation in the discursive space
of a culture: the relationship between a text and the various languages
or signifying practices of a culture and its relation to those texts which
articulate for it the possibilities of that culture. (114)
This book subscribes to such an understanding of adaptation in Culler’s

terms, as an intertextual practice whose centrality is seen in its “participa-
tion in the discursive space of a culture.” Second, I believe that the creative
“possibilities” for adaptations themselves, as well as the critical practice of
reading adaptations, should play a central role in pedagogy. This is a point
that I think is at the heart of Dennis Cutchins, Laurence Raw, and James M.
Welsh’s volume The Pedagogy of Adaptation (2010), though two essays in this
collection (Welsh’s and Peter Clandfield’s) do register a degree of nostalgia for
fidelity criticism that more fully characterizes the 2011 collection of essays
on adaptation, True to the Spirit: Film Adaptation and the Question of Fidelity,
edited by Colin MacCabe, Kathleen Murray, and Rick Warner (and notably
with an afterword by Jameson), and the 2008 volume In/Fidelity: Essays on Film
Adaptation, in which editors David L. Kranz and Nancy C. Mellerski claim that
“fidelity has taken a beating” (3). The most thoroughgoing attempt to incor-
porate post-fidelity insights in adaptation studies into the practical realm of
pedagogy is the recent volume Teaching Adaptations (2014), edited by Deborah
Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan. Third, the field significantly benefits, I think,
from the generating of creative figures for the activity of adaptation. For exam-
ple, Laurence Raw writes about the “Silk Road,” whose trading routes become
an ingenious metaphor for cross-cultural, interdisciplinary and intermedial
textual conversation: The “Silk Road” “not only refers to textual transforma-
tions (literature to film, film to fanflic, and so on), but also describes a process
of coming to terms with new material and new phenomena.” Raw continues:
“Through dialogue, members of different trading nations, as well as scholars,
forge new partnerships through adaptation, just like the Chinese and Xiongnu
peoples” (Silk Road 3). Alongside investigation of the multiplicities embed-
ded in adaptation studies—sequels, prequels, reboots, remakes, intertextual
conversations, and other forms of interdisciplinary, intermedial, and interart
recycled cultural material—Raw’s invention of new metaphors for adapta-
tion and his view of adaptation as “a continuous process in which individuals
continually have to adjust themselves to new ideas and new material” (3)
represent, in my view, the future of adaptation studies.
198 Notes
7. The images also exemplify Eckart Voigts-Virchow’s notion of “metadapta-

tion,” “texts that foreground not just the film-making process or other
processes of text production, but also the adaptive processes between media,
texts and genres” (146).
8. I am indebted to Kamilla Elliott for this insight that ties these instances
together.
9. Mary Shelley was the wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley, the famed Romantic poet,
and the daughter of William Godwin, the progressive political philosopher,
and Mary Wollstonecraft, the philosopher who laid out the major founda-
tions of modern feminisms and who died just days after giving birth to
Mary. William Godwin was a failed father figure for Mary, who—as a result of
strained relations with her father and stepmother, the traumatic early deaths
of three children, and an anxiety about influence in relation to Percy Shelley
and his paternalism—developed extreme anxiety about birth, creation, and
influence and authorship (see Anne K. Mellor’s Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her
Fiction, Her Monsters [1989]).
10. Glenn Jellenik is also interested in Shelley’s novel and creature as a means of
theorizing adaptation. In his forthcoming essay “A Frankenstinian Model for
Adaptation Studies, or It Lives!: Adaptive Symbiosis and Peake’s Presumption,
or the Fate of Frankenstein,” Jellenik rejects “an oversimplified one-to-one
compare/contrast” approach and argues that adaptations are, like Shelley’s
novel, “hyper-textual.” The “Frankenstinian model” “explores the ways that
an adaptation-cycle such as Frankenstein’s not only reflects the concept of
cultural intertextuality ([García] 240), it accounts for the simultaneous exist-
ence of multiple versions, evidences the symbiotic nature of postmodern
cultural production, and questions traditional notions of originality and
derivation” (in Cutchins and Perry).
11. In Home in Hollywood: The Imaginary Geography of Cinema (2004), Elisabeth
Bronfen devotes her second chapter, “Home—There’s No Place Like It: The
Wizard of Oz,” to a psychoanalytic reading of “home” as a place in which
the illusion of belonging represses not only the “unease and dissatisfaction”
(68) in Dorothy’s real experience but also her longing for fantasy and escape
“over the rainbow,” in/to “Oz.”
12. Hutcheon uses the language of haunted landscapes when she says that
adaptations are “haunted at all times by their adapted texts. If we know that
prior text, we always feel its presence shadowing the one we are experiencing
directly” (A Theory of Adaptation 6).
13. Bronfen observes that “what the uncanny articulates is an originary fissure
in what is believed to be familiar” (23). Her exploration of narratives about
the home (“home romance”) is intriguing and provides a psychoanalytic
parallel to my discussion of the process by which readers and viewers experi-
ence adaptations as violations or interruptions of their “home texts,” which
may, like the cinematic narratives Bronfen investigates, engage a “desire to
recoup an allegedly originary state of plenitude” (21). Bronfen’s purpose,
however, in “crossmapping” psychoanalytic and cinematic discourses is
different in content and methodology from my social-psychological and
literary-critical approach to adaptations in dialogue with source texts.
14. This fusion echoes the end of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, when Prospero
reluctantly acknowledges of Caliban: “this thing of darkness I/ Acknowledge
Notes 199
mine.” After many years together with Caliban, the Prospero in Aimé
Césaire’s 1969 play Une Tempête says, “Ah well, my old Caliban, we’re the
only two left on the island, just you and me. You and me! You-me! Me-you!”
In his 2014 essay “Identity and Difference: Coleridge and Defoe, Crusoe and
Friday, Prospero and Caliban,” Patrick J. Keane quotes Joan Dayan’s 1992
essay, “Playing Caliban: Césaire’s Tempest,” on this mingling of identities.
That fusion,
undermines the idea that either the “original” Shakespeare play or Césaire’s
“adaptation” have priority. By having Prospero cry out “You-me! Me-you!”
Césaire “recognizes the force of mutuality, the knot of reciprocity between
master and slave, between a prior ‘classic’ and his response to it” [Dayan]. This
“labor of reciprocity” accounts for the “complexities of Césaire’s transforma-
tion: a labor that defies any simple opposition between black and white, master
and slave, original and adaptation, authentic and fake.” (Dayan, qtd. in Keane)
15. Here we might recall Hutcheon’s claim that “[in] a very real sense, every
live staging of a printed play could theoretically be considered an adapta-
tion in its performance” (39). I observed an illustration of this point when
I saw Al Pacino play Shelly “The Machine” Levene in Daniel Sullivan’s 2012
Broadway revival of Glengarry Glen Ross. Inviting audience members to read
the performance intertextually with Pacino’s earlier film role as Richard
“Ricky” Roma in the 1992 film adaptation, the production poignantly stages
Pacino’s star text and aging (with its implied mortality) in relation to the
devolution of Levene into a desperate and failed salesman.
16. The almost naked figure of the Creature calls to mind many of Blake’s naked
male figures, perhaps most vividly the naked image of the author of Paradise
Lost in the frontispiece to Blake’s epic poem, Milton: a stunning “adaptation,”
engraved in 1808–09, in which the historical Milton sets off on a journey in
which, realizing and transcending the human error that had limited his genius,
he is transformed by Blake into the voice of Romantic and spiritual prophecy.
17. Again, one recalls Blake; this time, his “dark Satanic Mills” (from the prefa-
tory poem to Milton): a graphic and complex image popularly reduced to the
mechanized evils of the Industrial Revolution, especially since the poem was
adopted, or, rather, adapted, as the hymn of the Labour Party in Britain. I am
grateful to Patrick Keane for his observations on the intriguing resonances of
Blake in Danny Boyle’s Frankenstein.
18. In Once Upon A Time, fairy-tale characters such as Snow White, the Evil
Queen, Pinocchio, and Rumpelstiltskin are recontextualized with multiple
identities in a town in Maine called “Storybrooke.” In thinking about Emma
Swan, Snow White’s daughter and “a badass bail bondsperson,” editor and
writer Genie Leslie wonders if “TV’s representations of women are getting
just a little bit better.” Television critic Verne Gay says about the show that
it “[challenges] viewers to think about TV drama as something other than
boilerplate.” Recent seasons and a 2013–14 spin-off series, Once Upon a Time
in Wonderland, adapt Alice in Wonderland and the 2013 film Frozen.
19. Sarah Cardwell aptly likens television series adaptations to Victorian seri-
alization of novels in the 19th century: “When audiences gathered to hear
Dickens read the latest installment of one of his tales aloud, they took part
200 Notes
in a form of ongoing, communal engagement with the work that is most

clearly approximated today by the audience of a television serial” (187).
20. Mellor notes that Shelley’s tone in the novel is fundamentally conservative;
she favors the “gradual evolutionary” approach of the 18th-century English
physician and natural philosopher Erasmus Darwin rather than the radical
chemical engineering scientists who may be seen to interfere with natural
processes.
21. As Anne Mellor tells us, it was Percy Shelley who introduced the oft-quoted
description of the monster as “an abortion” in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
That Mary Shelley’s attempt to show the Creature as in many ways more
“human” than its creator suggests the importance of perspective in how we
“cast” artistic creations that “adapt” a progenitor text.
22. Ian Balfour notes two fairly well-known cases: Vladimir Nabokov’s failed
effort to adapt his novel Lolita (1955), when, “with breathtaking naïveté, he
turned in a manuscript of some four hundred pages [indicating] how little
he thought could be sacrificed to maintain the integrity of a text dependent
on verbal density and dexterity,” and Stephen King’s ire at Stanley Kubrick’s
1980 adaptation of his novel The Shining (1977), “so much so that he helped
finance a longer, more faithful miniseries for television as if to correct the
Kubrick version” (971).
23. The notion of the surrogate has been most insightfully applied to a nonhier-
archical view of adaptation by W. B. Worthen, who uses Joseph Roach’s idea
of “surrogation” to discuss Baz Luhrmann’s controversial 1996 film adapta-
tion of Romeo and Juliet:
The surrogation of the drama, the performing of the text within the
regimes of contemporary behavior, is not a betrayal of the play; it marks
the ways—as Luhrmann’s film [Romeo + Juliet] demonstrates—that dra-
matic performance, far from being authorized by its script, produces the
terms of its authorization in performance, raising (as all acts of citation,
reiterature, and surrogation do) these terms for inspection at the moment
it acts to conceal them. (Worthen 1104)
“[Marking] a move away from what the performance is not, what no perfor-
mance can be: Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet,” such surrogation in the film
adaptation illuminates the central concept that adaptations exist on their
own terms.
24. For a revisionary look at the relationship between Romanticism and adapta-
tion, see Glenn Jellenik’s “On the Origins of Adaptation, As Such: The Birth
of a Simple Abstraction” (in Leitch, Handbook). Jellenik seeks to rehistoricize
adaptation, showing its importance in the Romantic period as a complex of
often contradictory attitudes toward “origins,” “copies,” and processes of
cultural production: “The shifting of social, cultural, and economic struc-
tures; the expansion and splintering of audiences and literary markets; and
the massive influx of literary texts occasioned the rise of the productive
and systematic recycling, reworking, and repurposing of texts.” Seeking to
“unwind the ethos of Romanticism, so often used to marginalize adapta-
tion,” Jellenik interestingly charts how Romanticism as we know it was in
some sense a reaction to a rich adaptation culture.
Notes 201
25. I am thinking here of Kyle Meikle’s reformulation of George Bluestone’s lan-

guage of mining: “As per Leitch, Bluestone and McFarlane imagine adapta-
tion as a hierarchical process in which adapters convert crude materials into
more refined objects—a process that casts books as natural resources and
adapters as drillers, miners, and quarriers employed in the business of natu-
ral resource extraction. Some raw materials may be scarce, others abundant.”
26. See, for example, Lawrence Venuti’s “Adaptation, Translation, Critique,” in
which Venuti posits “interpretants” as texts that serve to mediate among
other texts in translations or adaptations.
27. Leitch’s essay “Adaptation and Intertextuality” concludes suggestively with
the idea that new “disciplinary constraints” may inhibit the field of adapta-
tion studies from thriving (103).
1 “It’s Alive!”: The Monster and the Automaton as

Film and Filmmakers
1. It is interesting that web comments and reviews of Hugo lament what they see
as false advertising in the film’s marketing:
The words like “quest” and “mystery” are a part of . . . Hugo’s brief descrip-
tion on each and every site, just read what it says on IMDb. Furthermore
the word “adventure” is lavishly sprinkled throughout the Hugo’s first part.
And yes, great Martin Scorsese is behind all of it, so what should you expect
but a magical adventure on a grandeur scale? Sorry, you will get none of
that. (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0970179/reviews?ref_=tt_urv)
But the film’s adventure is a more cerebral cinematic one. Expecting from the
film’s marketing to see exciting activity, viewers aren’t always attuned to the
fact that the film’s adventure is really best understood as happening within
the world of cinema, past, present, and future.
2. Scorsese’s venture into computer digitalization, as Therese Grisham recently
observed, establishes him as the trumping auteur, a new “father of film,”
proclaiming his role as the ultimate “seer” in his use of 3-D.
3. One thinks here, too, of The Education of Henry Adams, in which, on the dawn of the
20th century, Adams expresses his awestruck reaction to the dynamo at the Great
Exhibition, where “he could see only an absolute fiat in electricity as in faith.”
4. The grace of the cinematized machine is certainly present in Modern Times
in the famous sequence in which Charlie enters the machine and is worked
through its gears. The content of the film lambastes modern technology,
including the sound technology that intruded upon the art of silent film. This
might be contrasted with Daniel Moews’s reading of Johnny Gray in Buster
Keaton’s The General. Keaton’s film elides the differences between the human
and the mechanical, indicated in the anthropomorphizing of the train, which
is called “The General.”
5. Noah Tsika sees in Clay’s gestures in the rain a reference to Gene Kelly’s
“ecstatic self indulgence” in Singin’ in the Rain (1952), an intriguing way to
pinpoint Clay’s passionate connection to Whale. For Tsika, this constitutes,
at least potentially, a kind of coming out for Clay, “a libidinous awakening”
202 Notes
(100). Tsika’s observation suggests the freedom to become another figure, the
extent to which the film “celebrates the blurring of distinctions.” For Tsika,
“[t]hat’s what makes [the film] a queer classic” (158).
2 Lightening Up: Reappearing Hearts of Darkness

1. Raw and Gurr identify four basic characteristics of “21st-century learning”—
“openness, continuity, resilience, and transdisciplinarity” (32)—that they
see as fostered by non-text-based collaborative approaches to adaptation.
2. As Kim Worthy notes, Coppola is “regarded as a deity” in the film (1).
3. An exception is J. Hoberman’s review in the Village Voice: “the film is less an
expose of Apocalypse Now than a trailer for its rerelease” (“Lost in the Jungle”
61). While Coppola’s aversion to studio intervention seems to place him
outside a market-driven understanding of his motives, Hoberman’s minority
view of the documentary suggests otherwise.
4. Such a reading is supported by Peter Biskind’s admittedly non-scholarly 1998
book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ‘N Roll Generation
Saved Hollywood about the era of self-indulgent and drug- and sex-obsessed
self-proclaimed auteurs of the 70s, in which Coppola is presented as philan-
dering and self-absorbed and is reported to have provoked Eleanor, through
a series of affairs, to a family crisis—“Coppola didn’t much bother to conceal
his dalliances from [Eleanor], nor did he treat her with much consideration”
(Biskind 357).
5. Strangely, from a critical vantage point, the movie provides an example of
Marlow’s feeling about women in Heart of Darkness —“It’s queer how out of
touch with truth women are” (10)—since Eleanor seems unconcerned with the
familial and financial consequences of Coppola’s pursuing his vision at all cost.
6. The reference “Bram Stroker” is a sardonic allusion to Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s
Dracula, which had come out the year before Abrahams’s parody was made.
7. I should note, also, that in 1993, the television cartoon Animaniacs broadcast
an episode called “Hearts of Twilight,” in which Wakko, Yakko, and Dot
Warner are sent to the studio to terminate the command of “Mr. Director,” a
studio director gone insane (and over budget). The series was a collaboration
between Warner Brothers and another auteur, Steven Spielberg.
8. Basquiat fits in here, too, though he, like Pollock, became in some sense a
victim of Modernism.
9. Defining the auteur figure in the very terms of overreaching, fear of failure,
will to power, and disdain for authority, Welles told the story of William
Randolph Hearst (transposed into the character of Charles Foster Kane,
played by Welles himself) and exposed the media magnate’s obsessive narcis-
sism and the failure of the country’s American Dream. He risked sabotaging
his own career in the service of telling what he saw as the truth, a “choice
of nightmares” invoked by Charles Kane himself when he insists to Walter
Parks Thatcher (George Coulouris) in youthful if confused idealism that
he’ll sacrifice all of his money for the sake of protecting “the little people.”
Welles took Hearst on, taking particular aim at the latter’s manipulation of
actress Marion Davies’s career in the character of Susan Alexander (Dorothy
Comingore). Hearst fought back by marshaling his media forces and
Notes 203
destroying the film’s chances to succeed. He “did serious damage to the film
financially and its lack of box-office success probably hammered the first
nail into the coffin of financial catastrophe that increasingly soured Welles’s
relations with Hollywood” (Mulvey, 29).
10. As Naremore has observed, Welles was “attracted to stories about the
Faustian temptations of political power, and he sometimes used these stories
as a form of indirect self-criticism” (True to the Spirit 62).
11. This use of cinematic first-person narration was later employed by Robert
Montgomery in his noir film Lady in the Lake (1947).
12. This quote is from Rippy (99). Other problems would have beset Welles’s
adaptation, however, had it been completed. A critical stance on Heart
of Darkness, as Naremore astutely observes, might have been difficult to
achieve cinematically because of the racism of Conrad’s novella, illuminated
most notably by Chinua Achebe in his 1977 essay “An Image of Africa:
Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” As eminently “adaptable” as Heart of
Darkness seems, its existential meditation and anti-colonialist critique bury
its racist stereotypes. Naremore suggests that Welles “doesn’t avoid Conrad’s
primitivism” (True to the Spirit [72]) either, and would have made a politi-
cally problematic film in terms of its representation of race and women.
Marguerite Rippy also suggests that “while it is true that Welles was averse to
racism and fascism politically, the material conditions of his art reproduced
patterns of both racism and oppression” (93).
13. I note here that in ending the chapter with a comment about Welles’s unfin-
ished groundbreaking project alongside its incompleteness, I potentially
participate in the Romanticization discussed throughout. I want to be sure
to distinguish between the Romantic incompleteness that is tied to a notion
of the ineffable and Welles’s conception of incompleteness to engage the
audience to participate in the work.
3 Hideous Fraternities: The Coen Brothers Hit the Road

1. Siegel also recounts this motif in the film.
2. Billy Wilder may be another anti-authorial forerunner for the Coens (in
addition to John Huston, as R. Barton Palmer notes [55]).
3. Though Coppola’s film obviously interprets Heart of Darkness through a lens
of the Vietnam War, in a sense one could say that Coppola did something
similar in making the movie that Welles never made, a perspective embed-
ded in Hearts of Darkness’s preoccupation with Welles.
4. This funny and absurd episode is replayed in O Brother when Boy Hogwallop
plans to follow his mother and “R-U-N-N-O-F-T” from the family farm. In
a zany getaway, he drives Pete, Delmar, and Everett out of a burning barn
where they are in a “tight spot,” the repeated phrase throughout the film
constituting an ironic reference to Odysseus’s many dangerous encounters
on his journey.
5. R. Barton Palmer’s comment that “[i]n a sense … all Coen films are adapta-
tions of other texts” (57) thus seems to me exactly right.
6. For an excellent discussion of this critical crux, see Palmer’s Joel and Ethan
Coen.
204 Notes
7. This is a version of what I will discuss in Chapter 5 as the Gumpification of

American cinema.
8. Film Quarterly’s review observes the film’s satire of education in the character
of Big Dan, who “represents the educational system, first talking his way into
power over Everett and Delmar with his ‘gift of gab,’ then isolating them
from outside support, and finally delivering them an ‘advanced tutorial’ via
the corporal discipline of a tree limb” (46).
9. “One of my favorite shots in the film is strongly reminiscent of The Wizard
of Oz. It’s a shot of George Clooney, Tim Nelson, and John Turturro peering
throughout some bushes while looking down on a Ku Klux Klan meeting”
(McKenna 179).
4 Imitations of Life and Art

1. This story was adapted into the narrative of the excellent Hollywood noir
film L.A. Confidential (Curtis Hanson, 1997).
2. The exploration of masks resonates with Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem “We
Wear the Mask” (published in 1896) about African Americans’ concealment
of identity.
We wear the mask that grins and lies,

It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.
Why should the world be over-wise,

In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.
We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries

To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
We wear the mask!
3. Louisa May Alcott wrote a fascinating story called “Behind a Mask, or A

Woman’s Power” in 1866. In it, Jean Muir, a 19th-century literary femme
fatale pretends to be a sweet innocent governess to manipulate the Coventry
family and eventually marry its head, patriarch Sir John Coventry. The
penniless Muir dons a mask to negotiate an impossible position for women
of the period without means; under the mask of ingenue is revealed a ragtag
“woman of thirty.”
4. In 1938, Langston Hughes wrote the Limitation of Life for the Harlem Suitcase
Theatre. Bea Pullman’s character becomes the white servant, a “pretty blond”
Notes 205
named Audette and Delilah becomes Mammy Weavers (playing on the actress
Louise Beaver’s name), a “colored lady, in trailing evening gown, with tiara
and large Metropolitan Opera program … [who] speaks in a British ‘Oxford’
accent” (quoted in McLaren 128). Despite the scathing parody of Hurst’s
racial stereotypes, Hughes himself celebrated the novel when it was first
published.
5 The Quiet Presence of “The Yellow Wallpaper”

in Todd Haynes’s film [Safe]
1. I came to this conclusion independently of Gaye Naismith, whose essay
“Tales from the Crypt: Contamination and Quarantine in Todd Haynes’s
[Safe]” in The Visible Woman: Imaging Technologies, Gender, and Science, ed.
Paula A. Treichler, Lisa Cartwright, and Constance Penley (1998) also refer-
ences “The Yellow Wallpaper” and explores the meaning of environmental
illness in the film and the culture at large.
2. For this reason, I think that the parallels Roddey Reid draws between
Emma Bovary and Carol White are somewhat misleading. On one level,
the comparison does help underscore an idea of women rebelling against
oppressive cultural surroundings: “Like her predecessor, White discovers
to her distress that her body and then her mind no longer fit her environ-
ment … and has few means at her disposal to articulate her predicament”
(Reid 36). And yet, while Flaubert’s emphasis is more explicitly placed on
Emma’s flawed perspective than on the anti-feminist society she rebels
against, [Safe] seems primarily invested in a feminist critique of the poi-
sonous social environments depicted in the film. Madame Bovary is ulti-
mately more critical of Emma’s Romanticism—despite Flaubert’s famous
articulation of his ressemblance to Emma—than Haynes is critical of Carol’s
impotence. The tone of Bovary, in the end, judges Emma’s individual fool-
ishness, while [Safe] despairs—as does “The Yellow Wallpaper”—over the
failure of social systems to nourish and protect those trapped or vulnerable
within them.
3. See Edward O’Neill’s excellent essay on Haynes’s Poison, which argues that
his “subject is how identity is constructed by discourses and institutions—
including the cinema—this includes both what is represented in the film and
the very diversity of cinematic styles mobilized by the film …” (18).
4. Carol’s surname “White” marks an illusion of “safe” identity that the film
destabilizes. See Richard Dyer’s fascinating discussion of “white” in his 1993
book The Matter of Images: Essays on Representation: “This property of white-
ness, to be everything and nothing, is the source of its representational
power” (142).
5. See Lynch, for example.
6. Reid explains the failure of scientific models in [Safe] as Haynes’s explora-
tion of “regimes of visibility”: “[Safe] plays with our need to see and to
know illness and, consequently, with our desire to name health threats,
erect barriers, eliminate vulnerabilities, and ‘other’ the sick and the poten-
tially ill” (40).
206 Notes
7. Haynes reinforces his association between the failure of male authority fig-
ures and the more systemic failure of cultural disciplines in a scene in which
a restless Carol walks in her garden in the middle of the night, only to be
frightened back into her house by the spotlight of a patrolling police car.
8. See Jonathan Rosenbaum, “Stupidity as Redemption (Forrest Gump),” in
Movies as Politics 166–170. See, also, Rolling Stone magazine’s 2015 review of
American Sniper:
This is the same Hollywood culture that turned the horror and divisiveness
of the Vietnam War era into a movie about a platitude-spewing doofus with
leg braces who in the face of terrible moral choices eats chocolates and plays
Ping-Pong. The message of Forrest Gump was that if you think about the
hard stuff too much, you’ll either get AIDS or lose your legs. Meanwhile,
the hero is the idiot who just shrugs and says “Whatever!” whenever his
country asks him to do something crazy. (Taibbi)
9. Quoted in Rosenbaum, “The Functions of a Disease (Safe),” in Movies as

Politics 208–212: 212.
10. See Naismith:
The brackets that enclose the word ‘safe’ in the film’s title point to the
way Carol seeks to secure a sense of identity by conforming to the roles
expected of her within such closed systems as patriarchy, medicine, and
alternative therapies—discourses that seemingly offer orderly, rational,
and complete answers. (363)
11. Reid 37; Janet Maslin, “Life of a Hollow Woman,” The New York Times, June
23, 1995. Maslin misreads the film’s Wrenwood scenes when she says that
Haynes “makes fools of these New Agers while possibly embracing some
of their views.” As the film and Haynes’s comments demonstrate, [Safe]
ultimately wants us not only to sympathize with Carol, whose “process
of figuring out who she is,” says Haynes, “gives us a sense of how to care
about her” (Schorr 88), but also to strongly criticize the exploitative New
Age institution that works her over merely in a different manner and
language than the way she has been guided by the values associated with
upper-class affluence.
12. See, for example Susan Faludi, “Don’t Get the Wrong Message,” Newsweek,
January 8, 2001, which comments on the misguided and, for Faludi, “deeply
antifeminist” cultural habit of reading women’s well-being or happiness as a
“product” or function of contemporary consumer culture. See, also, Francine
Prose, “A Wasteland of One’s Own,” The New York Times Magazine, February
13, 2000, an excellent critique of “women’s culture” and its limits in pro-
moting feminisms; or Tania Modleski’s Feminism Without Women: Culture and
Criticism in a “Postfeminist” Age (1991), which explores some of the ways in
which appropriations of feminism aren’t primarily concerned with the lives
of women.
13. In 2005, the Battersea Arts Centre premiered an avant-garde adaptation
of “The Yellow Wallpaper” produced by Punchdrunk, the British theatre
company, and directed by the Cabinet of Curiosity. The production was a
Notes 207
one-to-one performance that relied on dance, architecture, and a stage set

in which an actress performed scenes rendered from the story. See http://
cabinetofcuriosity.org/yellow-wallpaper/4574257400.
14 The musical’s 2014 production as a reading with the Gallery Players
in Brooklyn following the Pallas show likewise demonstrated the adapta-
tion’s creativity and power, though the treatment was less gothic. As dif-
ferent theatrical productions function as adaptations in their own right
(as Hutcheon has observed [A Theory of Adaptation 39]), the performers
in the Gallery Players merged a more naturalist acting style with the
melodrama embedded in the story to produce a rather stunning theatri-
cal event.
15. Rosenbaum quotes a filmmaker who “champions” [Safe] but says of Carol,
“Nobody is that empty” (Movies as Politics 210).
6 Musical Theater and Independent Film

1. A similarly clever use of the stage set in Dogfight is seen in dramatizing
Eddie’s initial sight of Rose Fenny. Symbolizing Eddie’s aggressive sight of a
good “catch” for the dogfight, the scene is directed with Derek Klena as Eddie
revolving around on his diner stool as he “catches” sight of Rose. The image of
Birdlace spinning on the stool is a dynamic representation of Birdlace taking
charge and also the dramatic significance of his first glimpse of his prey in
Rose Fenny. After the revelation of the dogfight to Rose, when she agrees to
go out with Eddie later in the evening, the direction and staging also cleverly
make use of a moving circular floor panel on which Rose and Eddie saunter
as their inner thoughts and suspicions about their “date” are expressed in
a duet:
Both: And we go bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum. Don’t know
why I decided to come.
Rose: You’d be sleeping …
Eddie: You’d be drunk …
Both: … if you had stayed. And you might miss any good that could come
after this.
The duet is a musical representation of their growing intimacy, and the mov-
ing floor panel takes the place of a tracking camera to condense space and
follow the movement of the couple.
2. While beyond the purview of this project, Here Lies Love, David Byrne and
Fatboy Slim’s wildly inventive 2013 rock musical, adapts the life of Imelda
Marcos and the medium of theater into an immersive musical biography,
presenting Marcos as fully constructed by cultural obsessions with celebrity.
The story is set in a discotheque (which she has famously fetishized), in
which destabilized audience members play the role of her and her husband
Ferdinand’s adoring public. I take up this show in a forthcoming double
issue of South Atlantic Quarterly devoted to adaptation.
208 Notes
7 Adapting Time and Place: Avant-Garde Storytelling

and Immersive Theater
1. After its run in the meatpacking district, Kazino rebuilt its set and tent struc-
ture in the theater district, remounting Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet
of 1812 for a second New York City run beginning in the fall of 2013.
8 Time Will Tell: Adaptation Going Forward and Film at

the Art Museum (Christian Marclay’s The Clock)
1. In a recent essay in Cinema Journal, Julie Levinson describes the effects of
Marclay’s editing and his unique treatment of time: Marclay “subverts the
aims of continuity editing, which presumes to offer a seamless narrative that
reflects unmediated reality” (98). Rather than a unified narrative, The Clock
represents “the database logic of new media” (100). But at the same time,
as Levinson observes, the viewer finds her/his own meaning in the film’s
juxtapositions; “spectators seek their own narrative threads” (102). Levinson
argues that the film’s power derives from its philosophical reflections on
time in relation to the cinematic image. In its exploration of the possibilities
inherent in the image, The Clock exemplifies Bergsonian “duree” and, also,
Deleuze’s notion of the “time-image,” which “[goes] beyond a simple sense
of time as chronology to blur temporal distinctions” (96).
2. Levinson similarly observes that “[a]s putatively immortal stars are revealed
to be all too mortal, we are simultaneously dazzled by their aura of stardom
and pensive about the ravages of time. . . ” (106).
3. For further discussion of allegedly “unfilmable” literature, see Voigts-
Virchow (141) and Elliott’s “Unfilmable Books” in a forthcoming double
issue of South Atlantic Review devoted to adaptation.
9 Cape Fear, The Simpsons, and Anne Washburn’s

Post-Apocalyptic Mr. Burns, A Post-Electric Play
1. As critics have noted, there is also a hint of anxiety about the civil rights
movement in the film, with Cady repeatedly insisting on knowing “his
rights” (Hoberman, “Sacred and Profane” 8).
2. I had a singular experience directly illustrating this point when I saw the
show during its 2013 production at Playwrights Horizon in New York. Early
in Matt’s funny recitation of the “Cape Feare” episode in Act 1, a woman
sitting behind me asked in her speaking voice, “Why are they laughing?”
about the audience’s reaction. Minutes later, she again asked, “What are they
laughing at?” Further on in the play, Matt gets to one of the funniest parts of
the episode—the supreme dull-wittedness of Bart’s dad, Homer, who cannot
grasp the fact that in the witness protection program he and his family must
take on new identities. One of the agents wants Homer to practice his new
name, Homer “Thompson” (46):
FIRST AGENT: “Excellent. Let’s just practice this a moment shall we? How
are you, Mr. Thompson?”
Notes 209
HOMER: (Blink. Blink.)

FIRST AGENT: “Now that’s you, remember. You’re Mr. Thompson now.
HOMER: Right. Right. Got it.
FIRST AGENT: Good. Let’s just run through that one more time.
Good morning! Mr. Thompson. How are you today,
Mr. Thompson.
HOMER: -----
FIRST AGENT: So when I say Mr. Thompson, you respond, as Mr. Thompson.
HOMER: Sure.
FIRST AGENT: Certain you’re clear on this?
HOMER: Piece of cake.
FIRST AGENT: Really?
HOMER: Sure thing.
FIRST AGENT: Mr. Thompson!
HOMER: (Blank.)
The blinking of Matt as Homer adds to the comedy, since the involuntary
movement seems to register something and nothing simultaneously. The
woman behind me again showed her impatience, asking loudly, “Why
the hell are they laughing?!” I found her vocal frustration fascinating, as
it seemed to speak to the anxiety of not understanding the references,
about being on the outside of a pop-culture literacy that marginalized her.
Interestingly, according to Washburn, the “Cape Feare” episode is distinctive
in The Simpsons canon because a cardinal rule of writing for the series has
been that each episode should reference multiple texts so that viewers would
not feel out of the loop if they did not “get” any one reference.
3. On The Simpsons DVD commentary track, the show’s writers reveal that this
scene was originally much briefer but because the episode was too short, the
sequence was extended (adapted), as it turns out, to great comic effect.
4. In the 2013 Off-Broadway production of Mr. Burns at Playwrights Horizon in
New York, actors simply wear Simpsons character masks, covering only the
tops of their faces, to designate their roles. The 2014 European premiere pro-
duction at London’s Almeida Theatre did not use masks, adapting the show
to a more flexible notion of character identity than the literal masks suggest.
5. Courageous Bart becomes a redeemed version of the guy in Maria’s story in
Act 1 who had failed to enact his plan to refuel the generators at the nuclear
power plant to keep the radioactivity from spreading once the generators
died.
Works Cited
Abbott, Traci B. “Every Woman‘s Share: Female Sexuality in Fannie Hurst‘s

Imitation of Life.” Women’s Studies 37 (2008): 634–660.
Ades, Dawn, Neil Cox, and David Hopkins. Marcel Duchamp. New York: Thames
and Hudson, 1999.
Allen, William Rodney, ed. The Coen Brothers: Interviews. Jackson: University Press
of Mississipi, 2006.
Aragay, Mireia, ed. Books in Motion: Adaptation, Intertextuality, Authorship.
Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2005.
Balfour, Ian. “Adapting to the Image and Resisting it: On Filming Literature and
a Possible World for Literary Studies.” PMLA 125.4 (2010): 968–976.
Bennun, David. “This is a True Story.” In Allen, 81–83.
Berlant, Lauren Gail. The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality
in American Culture. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008.
Biskind, Peter. Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock-’n’-Roll Generation
Saved Hollywood. Ed. Touchone. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999; 1998.
Bluestone, George. Novels into Film: The Metamorphosis of Fiction into Cinema.
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1957.
Bourriaud, Nicholas. Relational Aesthetics. France: Les Presses du Reel, 1998.
Bram, Christopher. Father of Frankenstein. New York: Plume, 1995.
Branham, Kristi. “ ‘Thrown on their Own Resources’: Collaboration as Survival
Strategy in Imitation of Life.” Literature/Film Quarterly 40.4 (2012): 258–273.
Brantley, Ben. “It’s (Gasp) Alive, Not to Mention Peeved.” The New York Times
February 24, 2011, sec. C: 1.
———. “Stand Up, Survivors; Homer is with You: ‘Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play,’
at Playwrights Horizons.” The New York Times September 15, 2013, Web ed.
Bronfen, Elisabeth. Home in Hollywood: The Imaginary Geography of Cinema. New
York: Columbia University Press, 2004.
Brooker, Peter. “Postmodern Adaptation: Pastiche, Intertextuality and
Refunctioning.” In Cartmell and Whelehan, Cambridge Companion, 107–120.
Brown, Sterling. “Imitation of Life: Once a Pancake.” Opportunity 13 (1935): 87–88.
Callow, Simon. Orson Welles. New York, USA: Penguin Books, 1997.
Caputi, Jane. “‘Specifying’ Fannie Hurst: Langston Hughes’s ‘Limitations of Life,’
Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Toni Morrison’s The
Bluest Eye as ‘Answers’ to Hurst’s Imitation of Life.” Black American Literature
Forum 24.4 (1990): 697–716.
Cardwell, Sarah. “Literature on the Small Screen: Television Adaptations.” In
Cartmell and Whelehan, Cambridge Companion, 181–95.
Carroll, Lewis. Alices Adventures in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass. 1865.
New York: Penguin, 1962.
Cartmell, Deborah, ed. A Companion to Literature, Film, and Adaptation. Chichester,
West Sussex; Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.
Cartmell, Deborah, and Imelda Whelehan. Screen Adaptation: Impure Cinema.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
210
Works Cited 211
———, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2007.
———. Teaching Adaptations. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
Chernow, Ron. Alexander Hamilton. New York: Penguin, 2004.
Chiu, Tony. “Coppola’s Cinematic Apocalypse is Finally at Hand,” Francis Ford
Coppola: Interviews, ed. Gene D. Phillips and Rodney Hill. Jackson: University
Press of Mississippi, 2004: 44–52.
Chopin, Kate. The Awakening. Mineola, New York: Dover, 1993.
Clement, Jennifer, and Christian B. Long. “Hugo, Remediation, and the Cinema
of Attractions, Or the Adaptation of Hugo Cabret.” Senses of Cinema 63 (2012).
Web.
Colebrook, Claire. Understanding Deleuze. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2002.
Collins, John. “Elevator Repair Service’s Gatz, Interview.” Walker Arts Center,
http://visualarts.walkerart.org/oracles/details.wac?id=3175&title=Lexicon
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1990.
Content, Rob, Tim Kreider, and Boyd White. “Review of O Brother, Where Art
Thou?” Film Quarterly 55.1 (2001): 41–48.
Corrigan, Timothy. Film and Literature: An Introduction and Reader. Upper Saddle
River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1999.
Cortázar, Julio. Interview with Rita Guibert. Seven Voices, ed. Rita Guibert. New
York: Knopf, 1973.
Crane, Cheryl, and Cliff Jahr. Detour: A Hollywood Story. New York: Arbor House/
William Morrow, 1988.
Culler, Jonathan D. The Pursuit of Signs. London: Routledge, 1981, 2001.
Cutchins, Dennis R., Laurence Raw, and James M. Welsh. The Pedagogy of
Adaptation. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2010.
Dargis, Manohla. “Endangered Zone.” Village Voice July 4, 1995: 38.
Davis, Glyn. Far from Heaven. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011.
Dayan, Joan. “Playing Caliban: Cesaire’s Tempest.” Arizona Quarterly 48 (1992):
125–145.
De Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. New York: Bantam, 1961.
DeBona, Guerric. Film Adaptation in the Hollywood Studio Era. Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 2010.
Dinh, Linh. “Apocalypse Lies.” The Guardian November 1, 2001, online ed., sec.
Movies.
Diski, Jenny. “The Shadow Within.” Sight and Sound 1.10 (1992): 12–13.
Dubois, W. E. B. “Passing (1929).” Passing. Ed. Carla Kaplan. New York and
London: W. W. Norton and Company, 2007. 97–98.
Duchan, Peter. Personal Interview, September 28, 2012. New York City.
Dunbar, Paul Laurence. “We Wear the Mask.” Poetry Foundation. Web.
Dyer, Richard. “Four Films of Lana Turner.” In Fischer, 186–206.
———. The Matter of Images: Essays on Representations. 2nd ed. London:
Routledge, 2002.
Ebert, Roger. “Review of Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse.” Chicago
Sun Times January 17, 1992.
Edelstein, David and Jerry Saltz. “Ticktock Film Critic vs. Art Critic on Christian
Marclay’s The Clock.” New York Magazine 45.24 (July 30, 2012): 70.
Ehrenreich, Barbara, and Deirdre English. Complaints and Disorders: The Sexual
Politics of Sickness. Old Westbury, NY: Feminist Press, 1973.
212 Works Cited
Elliott, Kamilla. Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate. Cambridge, UK; New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2003.
———. “Unfilmable Books.” South Atlantic Review (special issue devoted to adap-
tation, ed. Julie Grossman and R. Barton Palmer), forthcoming.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Self-Reliance.” Essays: First Series (1841).
Faludi, Susan. “Do Not Get the Wrong Message.” Newsweek January 8, 2001: 56.
Fassbinder, Rainer Werner. “Six Films by Douglas Sirk.” In Fischer, 244–50.
Fischer, Lucy, ed. Imitation of Life: Douglas Sirk, Director. New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers, University Press, 1991.
Finke, Laurie A. and Susan Aronstein. “Got Grail? Monty Python and the
Broadway Stage.” Theatre Survey 48.2 (2007): 289–310.
Flaherty, Jennifer. “Dreamers and Insomniacs: Audiences in Sleep No More and
The Night Circus.” Comparative Drama 48.1/2 (Spring 2014): 135–154, 187.
Forry, Steven Earl. Hideous Progenies: Dramatizations of Frankenstein from Mary
Shelley to the Present. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990.
Freer, Ian. “Once: Talk of the Town.” Empire November 2007: 92–96.
French, Philip. “From Nighthawks to the Shadows of Film Noir.” The Guardian
April 24, 2004, sec. Art.
Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. 20th anniversary ed. New York: Dell Pub.
Co., 1984.
Friedman, Lester and Allison Kavey. The Frankenstein Narratives: Histories,
Adaptations, and Transformations. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press,
forthcoming.
García, Pedro Javier Pardo. “Beyond Adaptation: Frankenstein’s Postmodern
Progeny.” In Aragay, 223–42.
Gatiss, Mark. James Whale: A Biography, Or, the Would-Be Gentleman. London:
Cassell, 1995.
Gay, Verne. “Review: ‘Once Upon a Time,’ a ‘Lost’ fairy tale.” Newsday (October
20, 2011). Web.
Gelder, Ken. Reading the Vampire. London: Routledge, 1994.
Geraghty, Christine. Now a Major Motion Picture: Film Adaptations of Literature and
Drama. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2008.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation
Between Men and Women. 1898. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1998.
———. “The Yellow Wallpaper.” A Pocketful of Prose, ed. David Madden. Fort
Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1996, 63–77.
Grahame-Smith. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Graphic Novel. New York:
Del Rey, 2010.
Grisham, Therese (with Shane Denson and Julia Leyda). “Post-Cinematic Affect:
Post-Continuity, the Irrational Camera” (Roundtable Discussion #2 on the
Post-Cinematic). La Furia Umana 14 (2012). Web.
Gritten, David. “Can We Please Stop Turning Great Films into Musicals?” The
Telegraph July 25, 2013.
Grode, Eric. “ ‘The Simpsons’ as a Text for the Ages.” The New York Times May
31, 2012, sec. Theater.
Gross, Larry. “Antibodies (Larry Gross Talks with [Safe]’s Todd Haynes.” Filmmaker
3.2 (1995): 39, 42, 52–54.
Grossberg, Lawrence, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler. Cultural Studies.
New York: Routledge, 1992.
Works Cited 213
Grossman Julie. “Staging Identities and Events in Here Lies Love: Adaptation,
Immersive Theater, and the Biopic.” South Atlantic Review (special double issue
devoted to adaptation, ed. Julie Grossman and R. Barton Palmer), forthcoming.
Grundmann, Roy. “How Clean Was My Valley.” Cineaste 21.4 (1995): 22–25.
Guthmann, Edward. “Even in Suburbia, No One is [Safe].” San Francisco Chronicle,
28 July 1995, sec C.
Halliday, Jon. “Sirk on Sirk.” In Fischer, 226–36.
Hand, Richard J. and Jay McRoy. Monstrous Adaptations: Generic and Thematic
Mutations in Horror Film. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007.
Hansen, Ron. Lecture on Adaptation at Le Moyne College, Syracuse, New York
April 4, 2013.
Healy, Patrick. “Like the Movie, Only Different: Hollywood’s Big Bet on Broadway
Adaptations.” The New York Times August 1, 2013, sec. Movie.
Heung, Marina. “ ‘What’s the Matter with Sara Jane?’: Daughters and Mothers in
Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life.” Cinema Journal 26.3 (1987): 21–43.
Heylin, Clinton. Despite the System: Orson Welles Versus the Hollywood Studios.
Chicago, IL: Chicago Review Press, 2005.
Higgin, Peter. “Innovation in Arts and Culture #4: Sleep No More and Punchdrunk.”
The Guardian May 25, 2012. Web.
Hinson, Hal. “Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse.” Washington Post
January 17, 1992.
Hitchcock, Susan Tyler. Frankenstein: A Cultural History. New York: W. W. Norton,
2007.
Hoberman, J. “Sacred and Profane.” Sight and Sound 1.10 (1992): 8–11.
Hoberman, J. “Lost in the Jungle: At Play in the Fields of the Lord Directed by
Hector Babenco/Hearts of Darkness Written and Directed by Fax Bahr with
George Hickenlooper.” Village Voice December 10, 2001: 61.
Hodgdon, Barbara. “From the Editor.” Shakespeare Quarterly 53.2 (2002): iii–x.
Homer. The Odyssey. Trans. W. H. D. Rouse. Signet Classics, 2007.
Hopkins, D. J. Review of Sleep No More. Theatre Journal 64.2 (May, 2012): 269–271.
Hughes, Robert. The Shock of the New. 2nd ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1991.
Hurst, Fannie. Imitation of Life. Durham: Duke University Press, 1933, 2004.
Hurston, Zora Neale. “Story in Harlem Slang.” Zora Neale Hurston: Novels and
Stories. New York: The Library of America, 1995. 1001–1010
Hutcheon, Linda. The Politics of Postmodernism. 2nd ed. London, New York:
Routledge, 2002.
———. A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Routledge, 2006.
Hytner, Nicholas. “Theater; When Your Characters are Speechless, Let ‘Em Sing!”
The New York Times March 10, 2002.
“Interview with Roger Deakins.” In Camera October (2000): 1–3.
Ishiguro, Kazuo, “Onscreen, Ishiguro’s Sci-Fi Novel Is No Mere Clone,” interview
with Melissa Block, in All Things Considered, National Public Radio, September
15, 2010
Jacobus, Mary. “Is there a Woman in this Text?” New Literary History 14.1 (1982):
117–141.
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham:
Duke University Press, 1991.
Jaynes, Roderick. “The Title That Wasn’t There.” The Guardian September 27,
2001, sec. Movies. Web.
214 Works Cited
Jellenik, Glenn. “A Frankenstinian Model for Adaptation Studies, or It Lives!:

Adaptive Symbiosis and Peake’s Presumption, or the Fate of Frankenstein.”
Adapting Frankenstein: The Monster’s Eternal Lives in Popular Culture, ed. Dennis
Cutchins and Dennis Perry, forthcoming.
———. “On the Origins of Adaptation, As Such: The Birth of a Simple
Abstraction.” The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies. Ed. Thomas Leitch,
forthcoming.
Jenkins, Henry. “Searching for the Origami: The Matrix and Transmedia
Storytelling.” In Corrigan, 403–24.
Jess-Cooke, Carolyn, and Constantine Verevis. Second Takes: Critical Approaches to
the Film Sequel. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010.
Johnson, Brian. “Apocalypse Then.” Macleans 105.6 (1992): 82.
Judkis, Maura. “‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ Musical at Anacostia Arts Center.”
Washington Post June 26, 2014, sec. Theater and Dance. Web.
Keane, Patrick. “Identity and Difference: Coleridge and Defoe, Crusoe and Friday,
Prospero and Caliban.” Numero Cinq V.3 (2014). December 9, 2014. Web.
Kempley, Rita. “[Safe]: A Chill is in the Air.” Washington Post August 4, 1995, sec. D.
King, Geoff. American Independent Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2005, 2005.
Koumarianos, Myrto, and Cassandra Silver. “Dashing at a Nightmare: Haunting
Macbeth in Sleep No More.” The Drama Review 57.1 (Spring, 2013). Project Muse.
Kranz, David L., and Nancy Mellerski, eds. In/fidelity. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge
Scholars, 2008.
Landy, Marcia. “Storytelling and Information in Todd Haynes’ Films.” The
Cinema of Todd Haynes: All That Heaven Allows, ed. James Morrison. London &
New York: Wallflower Press, 2007. 7–24.
Larsen, Nella, and Carla Kaplan. Passing: Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and
Contexts, Criticism. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2007.
Larson, Nella. Passing. New York: Modern Library, 2002.
Leaming, Barbara. Orson Welles, a Biography. New York: Limelight, 1995.
Leitch, Thomas M. “Adaptation and Intertextuality, or, What Isn’t an Adaptation,
and What Does it Matter?” In Cartmell, A Companion, 87–103.
———. “The Adapter as Auteur: Hitchcock, Kubrick, Disney.” In Aragay, 107–24.
———. “The Ethics of Infidelity.” Adaptation Studies: New Approaches, ed. Christina
Albrecht-Crane and Dennis Cutchins. Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson Press,
2010: 61–77.
———. Film Adaptation and its Discontents: From Gone with the Wind to the Passion
of the Christ. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007.
———. “To Adapt or to Adapt to? Consequences of Approaching Film Adaptation
Intransitively.” Studia Filmoznawcze 30 (2009): 91–102.
———. “Twelve Fallacies in Contemporary Adaptation Theory.” Criticism 45. 2
(Spring, 2003): 149–71.
Levinson, Julie. “Time and Time Again: Temporality, Narrativity, and Spectatorship
in Christian Marclay’s The Clock.” Cinema Journal 54: 3 (Spring, 2015): 88–109.
Leslie, Genie. “Once Upon a (Feminist) Time.” Feministing online community.
Feministing.com. Accessed 1/15/15.
Lynch, Lisa. “The Epidemiology of ‘Regrettable Kinship’: Gender, Epidemic and
Community in Todd Haynes’ [Safe] and Richard Powers’ Gain.” Journal of
Medical Humanities 23.3/4 (2002): 203–219.
Works Cited 215
MacCabe, Colin, Rick Warner, and Kathleen Murray, eds. True to the Spirit: Film
Adaptation and the Question of Fidelity. Oxford, New York: Oxford University
Press, 2011.
Malloy, Dave. Personal Interview. September 20, 2013, New York City.
Maltin, Leonard. Movie and Video Guide. New York: Plume, 2000.
Mandel, Emily St John. Station Eleven: A Novel. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014.
Marks, Peter. “If It’s a Musical, it was Probably a Movie.” The New York Times
April 14, 2002.
Maslin, Janet. “Coppola’s ‘Apocalypse’ Then: The Making of a Screen Epic
(Review of Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse).” The New York Times
November 27, 1991, sec. C4: 1.
———. “Life of a Hollow Woman.” The New York Times June 23, 1995, sec. C.
McFarlane, Brian. Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
———. “It Wasn’t Like That in the Book.” In Welsh and Lev, 3–14.
———. “Reading Film and Literature.” In Cartmell and Whelehan, The
Cambridge Companion, 15–28.
McKenna, Kristine. “Joel and Ethan Coen.” In Allen, 163–187.
McLaren, Joseph. Langston Hughes: Folk Dramatist in the Protest Tradition, 1921–43.
Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing, 1997.
Mead, Rebecca. “Putting ‘The Great Gatsby’—Every Word of It—Onstage.” The
New Yorker. September 27, 2010. Web.
———. “All About the Hamiltons.” The New Yorker February 9, 2015. Web.
“‘Mistah Welles—He Dead.’ Review of Hearts of Darkness.” Economist December
14, 1991: 97–98.
Meikle, Kyle. “Rematerializing Adaptation Theory.” Literature/Film Quarterly 41.3
(2013): 174–183.
Mellor, Anne Kostelanetz. Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters.
New York: Routledge, 1989.
Modleski, Tania. Feminism Without Women: Culture and Criticism in a “Postfeminist”
Age. New York: Routledge, 1991.
Morrison, James, ed. The Cinema of Todd Haynes: All That Heaven Allows. London
& New York: Wallflower Press, 2007.
Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. New York: Vintage, 1970.
Morton, Timothy, ed. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: A Sourcebook. New York:
Routledge, 2002.
Mulvey, Laura. Citizen Kane. London: British Film Institute, 1992.
Naismith, G. “Tales from the Crypt: Contamination and Quarantine in Todd
Haynes’s [Safe].” The Visible Woman: Imagine Technologies, Gender and Science,
eds. P. Triechler, L. Cartwright, and C. Penley. New York: New York University
Press, 1998. 360–387.
Naremore, James. Film Adaptation. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press,
2000.
———. “Hearts of Darkness: Joseph Conrad and Orson Welles.” In MacCabe, et. al.,
59–74.
———. The Magic World of Orson Welles. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press,
1989.
O’Neill, Edward R. “Poisonous Queers: Violence and Social Order.” Spectator 15
(1994): 9–29.
216 Works Cited
Oshinsky, David M. Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow
Justice. New York: The Free Press, 1996.
Palmer, R. Barton. Joel and Ethan Coen. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois
Press, 2004.
Palmer, R. Barton, and David Boyd. Hitchcock at the Source: The Auteur as Adaptor.
Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011.
Phillips, Gene D. Hemingway and Film. New York: F. Ungar Pub. Co., 1980.
Phillips, Nathan. “Frankenstein’s Monstrous Influences: Investigating Film
Adaptations in Secondary Schools.” In Cutchins, Raw, and Welsh, 21–34.
Pohl, John. “Nuit Blanche: On The Clock.” The Montreal Gazette February 28,
2014. Web.
Prose, Francine. “A Wasteland of One’s Own.” The New York Times Magazine
February 13, 2000: 66–71.
Raw, Laurence. The Silk Road of Adaptation: Transformations Across Disciplines and
Cultures. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge UP, 2013.
Raw, Laurence, and Anthony Gurr. Adaptation Studies and Learning: New Frontiers.
Lanham: Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2013.
Reid, Roddey. “Un[Safe] at any Distance: Todd Haynes’s Visual Culture of Health
and Risk.” Film Quarterly Spring (1998): 32–44.
Rhodes, John David. “Allegory, Mise-En-Scene, AIDS: Interpreting Safe.” In
Morrison, 68–78.
Ridley, Jim. “Brothers in Arms.” In Allen, 133–36.
Rippy, Marguerite H. Orson Welles and the Unfinished RKO Projects: A Postmodern
Perspective. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2009.
Romney, Jonathan. “Double Vision.” In Allen, 127–32.
Rosenbaum, Jonathan. Movies as Politics. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1997.
———. “Orson Welles: Introductory Sequence to the Unproduced Heart of
Darkness.” Film Comment (November/December, 1972): 24–26. ProQuest Central.
———. “The Voice and the Eye: A Commentary on the ‘Heart of Darkness’
Script.” Film Comment (November/December, 1972): 27–32. ProQuest Central.
Ross, Andrew. “New Age Technoculture.” Cultural Studies. Ed. Lawrence Grossberg,
Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler. New York: Routledge, 1992, 531–47.
Rothenberg, Robert. “Review of Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse.”
USA Today Magazine September 1992: 97.
Rowell, Erica. The Brothers Grim: The Films of Ethan and Joel Coen. Lanham, MD:
Scarecrow Press, 2007.
Rushdie, Salman. The Wizard of Oz. London: BFI, 1992.
Sanders, Julie. Adaptation and Appropriation. London; New York: Routledge, 2006.
Schorr, Collier. “Diary of a Sad Housewife (Interview with Todd Haynes).”
Artforum Summer (1995): 87, 88, 126, 128.
Seeley, Tracy. “O Brother Where Art Thou?: Postmodern Pranksterism, Or Parody
with a Purpose?” Post Script 27.2 (2008): 62–72.
Selznick, Brian. The Invention of Hugo Cabret: A Novel in Words and Pictures. New
York: Scholastic Press, 2007.
Shakespeare, William. The Tempest, in The Riverside Shakespeare. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1974: 1606–1638.
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. New York: Signet, 1965.
Works Cited 217
Siegel, Janice. “The Coens’ O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Homer’s Odyssey.”
Mouseion Series 3, Volume 7 (2007): 213–245.
Sleep No More (Program Book). “An Interview with Felix Barrett and Maxine
Doyle.” Emursive Production.
Smith, Angela M. Hideous Progeny: Disability, Eugenics, and Classic Horror Film.
Columbia UP, 2012.
Smith, Valerie. “Reading the Intersection of Race and Gender in Narratives of
Passing.” Diacritics 24.2–3 (1994): 43–57.
Soloski, Alexis. “Avant-Garde, PA,” Review of Gatz. The Village Voice, September
12–18, 2007. Web.
Spiro, John-Paul. “You’re Very Beautiful: Are You in Pictures?”: Barton Fink, O
Brother, Where Art Thou? and the Purposes of Art.” Post Script 27.2 (2008):
97–106.
Staggs, Sam. Born to Be Hurt: The Untold Story of Imitation of Life. New York: St.
Martin’s, 2009.
Stam, Robert. “Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation.” In Naremore, Film
Adaptation, 54–78.
Taibbi, Matt. “American Sniper is Almost Too Dumb to Criticize.” Rolling Stone
January 21, 2015. Web.
Taubin, Amy. “Review of Hearts of Darkness.” Village Voice October 15, 1991: 54.
Tennyson, Alfred Lord. “Ulysses.” A Victorian Anthology, 1837–1895. Ed. Edmund
Clarence. Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1895; Bartleby.com, 2003. Web.
Thompson, Kirsten. “Cape Fear and Trembling: Familial Dread.” Literature and
Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation. Ed. Robert Stam, and
Alessandra Raengo. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2005. 126–147.
Tolstoy, Leo. War and Peace. New York: W. W. Norton, 1966.
Tong, Rosemarie. Feminist Thought: A Comprehensive Introduction. 2nd ed. Boulder,
CO: Westview Press, 1998.
Truffaut, Francois. Hitchcock. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985.
Tsika, Noah. Gods and Monsters. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2009.
Varndell, Daniel. Hollywood Remakes, Deleuze and the Grandfather Paradox.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
Venuti, Lawrence. “Adaptation, Translation, Critique.” Journal of Visual Culture
6.1 (April 2007): 25–43.
Voigts-Virchow, Eckart. “Metadaptation: Adaptation and Intermediality—Cock
and Bull.” Journal of Adaptation in Film & Television 2.2 (2009): 137–152.
Walsh, Enda. Once the Musical, Program Notes. The Araca Group, 2012.
Walters, James. Alternative Worlds in Hollywood Cinema: Resonance Between Realms.
Bristol, UK; Chicago, IL: Intellect, 2008.
Washburn, Anne. Mr. Burns, A Post-Electric Play. London: Oberon Books, 2014.
———. Personal Interview. January 17, 2014, New York City.
Welsh, James M. and Peter Lev. The Literature/Film Reader: Issues of Adaptation.
Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2007.
Whaley, Donald M. “Adaptation Studies and the History of Ideas: The Case of
Apocalypse Now.” In Welsh and Lev, 35–50.
Wheatley, Phillis. “On the Death of a Young Lady of Five Years of Age.” Poems on
Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. London: A. Bell, 1773. Bartleby.com, 2010.
White, Rob. Todd Haynes. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013.
218 Works Cited
Williamson, Lane. “Quick Question.” Message to the Author. December 12, 2014.
Email.
Wollstonecraft, Mary. “A Vindication of the Rights of Women.” Women’s Voices:
Visions and Perspectives. Ed. Pat C. Hoy, Esther H. Schor, and Robert DiYanni.
New York: McGraw-Hill, 1990, 443–48.
Wood, Robin. The Wings of the Dove: Henry James in the 1990s. London: BFI Pub.,
1999.
Woods, Paul. A. Joel and Ethan Coen: Blood Siblings. London: Plexus, 2000.
Woolf, Virgina. “The Cinema.” The Captain’s Death Bed and Other Essays. Orlando,
FL: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1950. 180–186.
Worthen, W. B. “The Written Troubles of the Brain: Sleep No More and the Space
of Character.” Theatre Journal. 64.1 (March, 2012). Project Muse.
Worthy, Kim. “Making Art, Making History, Making Money, Making ‘Vietnam.’”
Cineaste 19.2/3 (December 1992): 24–28.
Young, Harvey, and Jocelyn Prince. “The Politics of Lydia Diamond’s Adaptation
of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.” African American Review 45.1–2 (2012):
143–155.
Zalewski, Daniel. “The Hours: How Christian Marclay Created the Ultimate
Digital Mosaic.” The New Yorker March 12, 2012. Web.
Zinoman, Jason. “The Unadapted Theatrical Adaptation.” The New York Times
Magazine December 9, 2007. Web.
Index
ABC Movie of the Week or Superstar: Aronstein, Susan, 141

The Karen Carpenter Story, 106 Ashford, Annaleigh, 132
About Schmidt, 172 Ashford, Brittain, 161
Abrahams, Jim, 47, 63 The Assassination of Jesse James by the
Hot Shots! Part Deux—A Filmmaker’s Coward Robert Ford, 19
Apology, 46, 48, 180 auditory innovations, 56
Abramovic, Marina authenticity, 85, 99
The Artist Is Present, 171 authorship, 67
adaptation Automaton, 26–28, 30–37, 40
“found adaptations”, 106 avant-garde, 3, 5
incursion, 128 storytelling, 147–166
as knock-offs, 20, 103 The Awakening, 91
as monster, 20
in multiple relations, 7, 16 Badalucco, Michael, 68
psychological, 152, 155 Bahr, Fax
quiet, 41, 106, 107, 125 Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s
as stillbirth, 19 Apocalypse, 41–42, 45–52, 57, 63,
transmedial, 167 68, 138
Adaptation Studies and Learning, 41 Bailey John, 19
Aeneid, 69 Bardem, Javier, 14
Aguirre-Sacasa, Roberto, 127 Bargen, Daniel von, 65
Ahrens, Lynn, 143 Barnes, George, 7
Alice in Wonderland, 15, 152, 199n18 Barrett, Felix, 150
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 15 Bartleby the Scrivener, 39, 101
alienation, 110, 111, 162 Barton Fink, 63
All About Eve, 168 Beauty and the Beast, 127
Allen, William Rodney, 66, 72 Beavers, Louise, 85
Allen, Woody, 175 “Before It’s Over”, 131, 133
All That Heaven Allows, 105 Being John Malkovich, 3, 4
All the King’s Men, 74 Bergen, Polly, 174
ameliorative art, 105 Bergman, Ingmar
American Society of Independent Cries and Whispers, 171
Artists, 66 Berkeley, Xander, 110
Andrew, Dudley, 195n2 betrayal, 17
Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein, 184 Betty Grable, 100
Angst essen Seele auf (Ali: Fear Eats the “Big Rock Candy Mountain”, 80
Soul), 102, 191 Bildungsroman, 141
anonymity, 67, 150 birthing metaphor, 12, 19
Antonioni, Michelangelo, 6, 107 Biskind, Peter, 51, 202n4
anxiety, 9 Blake, William, 11
Apocalypse Now, 42–45, 47, 50, 55, 57, The Blind Man, 27, 67
58, 60, 66, 68, 72, 170 Bloom, Harold, 32
Apocalypse Now Redux, 58 Blow-Up, 6
219
220 Index
The Blue Angel, 137 civil rights movement, 88, 89

The Bluest Eye, 7, 12, 83–87, 100, 158 Clay Boone, 25, 26, 36
Bob, Sideshow appearance and affect, 27
The Simpsons, 12, 22 in Gods and Monsters, 36
Boggs, Peg, 7 Clement, J., 38
Boyd, David, 22, 195n2 The Clock, 8, 13, 22, 157, 167–176
Boyhood, 172 Coen, Ethan, 14, 106
Boyle, Danny O Brother, Where Art Thou?, 10,
Frankenstein, 11–12, 16, 32, 35, 62–80
37, 41 Coen, Joel, 14, 106
Bram, Christopher, 26 O Brother, Where Art Thou?, 10,
Father of Frankenstein, 25 62–80
Bram Stoker’s Dracula, 184 Cohen, Sacha Baron
Branagh, Kenneth, 184 “Gustave” (film character), 29–30
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, 10, 179, Colebrook, Claire
184 Understanding Deleuze, 18
Brando, Marlon, 46, 68 Collins, John, 159
Branham, Kristi, 92 “Come to a Party”, 130
Brantley, Ben, 11, 182 Comfort, Bob, 128
Bride of Frankenstein, 25, 27, 28, 30, Comparative Drama, 148
32, 37 Condon, Bill
Bronfen, Elisabeth, 10 Gods and Monsters, 18, 25, 27–28,
Brooker, Peter, 2 32, 36–40
Brown, Sterling, 85 Conrad, Joseph, 52
Brown vs. the Board of Education, 89 Heart of Darkness, 12, 41, 42, 53–61
Burnett, T Bone, 76 Cooke, Trisha, 66
Butterfield, Asa, 25 Cool Hand Luke, 65, 74
Coppola, Eleanor, 41, 42, 44,
Cady, Max, 12 47–48, 60
Cage, John, 54, 169 Coppola, Francis Ford, 41, 43–44,
4’33”, 151 48–49, 52, 68, 184
Cage, Nicolas, 174 Corrigan, Timothy, 20
Cape Fear, 12, 170, 174, 177–87, 190, Cortázar, Julio, 6
208n2 Crenna, Richard, 46
capitalism, 83 cultural identity, 84
Cardwell, Sarah, 195n2, 199n19 cultural monologism, 74
Carradine, Keith, 14 Cumberbatch, Benedict, 11
Carraway, Nick, 159
Carroll, Lewis Damn Yankees, 137
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 15 Davis, Bette, 5, 168
Cartmell, Deborah, 106, 195n2, 197n6 Davis, Glyn, 128
“The Case of Richard Mutt”, 67 Davis, Victor
Cassavetes, John, 168 Hearts of Hot Shots! Part Deux—
Chaplin A Filmmaker’s Apology, 46–50
Modern Times, 34, 201n4 Dawley, J. Searle, 29
Chernow, Ron, 13, 90, 192 Deagan, Raymond, 128
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 31 Deakins, Roger, 77
Chinatown, 172 Deane, Hamilton, 29
Citizen Kane, 42–43, 52, 55, 56 Dear, Nick, 11, 35
Index 221
de Beauvoir, Simone Elevator Repair Service, 157

The Second Sex, 110 Elfman, Danny, 187
DeBona, Guerric, 54, 56 Elliott, Allison, 123
Dee, Sandra, 94 Elliott, Kamilla, 16, 152–153, 160, 173,
“A Defence of Poetry”, 43 195n2, 198n8
deformation, 17 Ellis, Bret Easton
DeLong, Blake, 160 American Psycho, 127
denial, 110 Ellis, Sarah Taylor, 120
De Niro, Robert English, Deirdre
Cape Fear, 12 Complaints and Disorders: The Sexual
desecration, 17 Politics of Sickness, 114
desire, 9 entrapment, 95, 110
Detour: A Hollywood Story, 94 Erice, Victor
Diggs, Daveed, 193 El Espíritu de la Colmena, 8
digital photography, 77, 78 The Executioners, 177
Disney vs. high-art films, 171
Dodgson, Charles, 15, 16, 152 Far from Heaven, 105, 128, 134–136
Dogfight, 128–134, 138, 139, 141, 160 Fargo, 13–14, 66, 75
Dominik, Andrew Farrell, Henry
The Assassination of Jesse James by What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, 19
the Coward Robert Ford, 19 fascism, 28, 55
Donahue, Troy, 88 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, 96, 102,
Douglas, Illeana, 187 106, 191
Doyle, Maxine, 150 Angst essen Seele auf (Ali: Fear Eats
Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole the Soul), 102, 191
Christmas, 188 Father of Frankenstein, 25, 36
Du Bois, W. E. B., 91 Faulkner, William, 157
The Souls of Black Folk, 135 The Wild Palms, 63
Duchamp, Marcel, 57 fear, 9
Duchan, Peter, 129 female outsiders, 32
Dunning, Peter, 115, 119 Female Perversions, 123
Durning, Charles, 65 The Feminine Mystique, 110
Duvall, Robert, 59 Ferguson, Scotty, 150
Duvall, Wayne, 63 fidelity, 64
Fierstein, Harvey, 136
Ebert, Roger, 58 Film Quarterly, 65
The Economist, 60 Finke, Laurie A., 141
Edelstein, David, 169 Fischer, Lucy, 85, 89, 99
Edison, Thomas, 29, 30 Fischer-Lichte, Erika, 150
Edison Studios, 179 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 159
Edward Scissorhands, 7 The Great Gatsby, 157–158
Ehrenreich, Barbara Flaherty, Jennifer, 148
Complaints and Disorders: The Sexual Flaherty, Stephen, 143
Politics of Sickness, 114 Fonda, Jane, 174
Ejiofor, Chiwetel, 136 Force of Evil, 7
Elastextity, 2, 13, 15, 22, 42, 84, 106, Forrest Gump, 116, 118
107, 139, 189, 192 Forry, Steven, 28
El Espíritu de la Colmena (The Spirit of found objects vs. bronze sculptures, 171
the Beehive), 8, 191 The Fountain, 66
222 Index
4’33”, 151 Grand Illusion, 160

Frankel, Scott, 134 Grane, Thomas C.
Frankenstein, 1, 11–12, 16, 25, 27, 32, Hearts of Hot Shots! Part Deux—
35, 37, 41, 179 A Filmmaker’s Apology, 46–50, 61
Frankenstein: An Adventure in the The Grapes of Wrath, 68, 74
Macabre, 28, 30 Gray, Amber, 161
Frankenstein M.D., 22 Great Comet, 156, 160–166
Fraser, Brendan, 25 The Great Gatsby, 128, 157–158
freedom from oppression, 91 Greenberg, Richard, 134
Freeman, Martin, 14 Greta Garbo, Greta, 100
French, Philip, 7 Grey Gardens, 134
Friedan, Betty Griffith, D.W., 48
The Feminine Mystique, 110 Grundmann, Roy, 119
Friedman, Lester, 28, 29–31 The Guardian, 7, 66
Frost, Sue, 126 Gunderson, Marge, 14, 75
Frozen, 127 Gurr, Tony
Adaptation Studies and Learning, 41
Gale, Dorothy “Gustave” (film character), 29–30, 33
The Wizard of Oz, 64, 65, 74, 78–79 see also Cohen, Sacha Baron, 29
Galvani, Luigi, 17 Guthmann, Edward, 118
galvanism, 17
García, Pedro Javier Pardo Hamilton, 13
“Beyond Adaptation: Frankenstein’s Hamilton, Alexander, 192–4
Postmodern Progeny”, 9–10 Hand, Richard J., 2
Gatiss, Mark, 32 Monstrous Adaptations: Generic and
Gatz, 157–159 Thematic Mutations in Horror Film, 2
Gelder, Ken, 9 Hanks, Colin, 14
gender, 84 Hansard, Glen, 142
The General, 34 Hansen, Ron, 19, 20
Geraghty, Christine, 195n2 Mariette in Ecstasy, 19
Gilborn, Steven, 111 happening, 151, 161
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins Hat, Magic, 41
Women and Economics: A Study of Hay, Louise L.
the Economic Relation Between Men The AIDS Book: Creating a Positive
and Women as a Factor in Social Approach, 116–117
Evolution, 114 Hayes, Chris, 192
“The Yellow Wallpaper”, 8, 105–125, Haynes, Todd
170, 179 Far from Heaven, 105, 128, 134–136
Ginger Rogers, 100 I’m Not There, 157
Gittes, J. J., 172 [Safe], 8, 12, 22, 93, 105–125, 140, 179
Gods and Monsters, 18, 25, 27–28, 29, Haysbert, Dennis, 135
32, 36–40 Healy, Patrick, 127
“Gonna Fly Now”, 143 Heart of Darkness, 12, 41, 42, 53–61,
Goodman, Benny 170
“A Nightengale Sang in Berkeley Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s
Square”, 149 Apocalypse, 41–42, 45–52, 57, 63,
Goodman, John, 63 68, 138
Grahame-Smith, Seth Hearts of Hot Shots! Part Deux—
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, 9 A Filmmaker’s Apology, 46–50
Index 223
Heathers, 127 Imitation of Life, 7, 12, 83–104

Hemingway, Ernest, 157 immersive theater, 13, 147–166
“The Killers”, 7 I’m Not There, 157
“Heretic Homer”, 183, 184 imperialism, 54
Herrmann, Bernard, 149, 150, 179, 187 In Camera, 77–78
Heung, Marina, 89 incompleteness, 43–44
Hickenlooper, George Indiscretion of an American Wife,
Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s 173
Apocalypse, 41–42, 45–52, 57, 63, “I Never Knew”, 135
68, 138 Inferno, 69
Higgin, Peter, 152 infidelity, 17
Hitchcock, Alfred, 59, 147 interart adaptation theory, 16
Hitchcock, Susan Tyler, 5, 17 intertextuality, 28–29, 41
H.M.S. Pinafore, 187 superficial allusiveness in, 107
Hoberman, J., 181 In the Heights, 192
Hodgdon, Barbara, 11 The Invention of Hugo Cabret, 33
Holm, Celeste, 168 intimacy, 95
home, 12 Irglová, Markéta, 142
Homer Ishiguro, Kazuo, 6–7
The Odyssey, 10, 12, 62–65, 72–74 isolationism, 56
Antinous, 63, 69
“Hometown Hero’s Ticker Tape Jackson, Mahalia, 88
Parade”, 130 Jacobus, Mary, 16
homophobia, 28, 139, 140 James, Henry, 186
Hopkins, D. L., 147 Jarmusch, Jim
Hopper, Edward, 7 Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai,
“Nighthawks”, 7 17
Horne, Daryl Van, 172 Jaynes, Roderick, 66, 67
horror genre, 2 Jenkins, Henry
Hot Shots! Part Deux—A Filmmaker’s The Matrix, 13
Apology, 46, 48, 180 Jenkins, Patty
Hughes, Robert, 5 Monster, 20
Hugo, 25, 26–27, 29–34, 37–38, 40, Johnson, Brian, 59
179 Johnson, Isaiah, 134
Hunter, Holly, 63 Johnson, Robert, 74
Hurlburt, William, 30 Jonze, Spike, 3
Hurst, Fannie Being John Malkovich, 3, 4
“Glossary of Harlem Slang”, 99
Imitation of Life, 7, 12, 83–103, 105 Kane, 42–3, 52, 55, 56
Hurston, Zora Neale, 100 Kaplan, Al, 127
“Story in Harlem Slang”, 83 Kaplan, Jon, 127
Hutcheon, Linda, 2, 50, 106, 195n2, Kaprow, Allan, 151
195n4, 196n5, 198n12, 199n15, Karl, Andy, 143
207n14 Kavey, Allison, 29–31
Hytner, Nicholas, 127 Kazee, Steve, 142
Keaton, Buster
I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, 74 The General, 34
identity politics, denial of, 90 Keaton, Diane, 175
“I’ll Fly Away”, 76 Kempley, Rita, 108, 118
224 Index
“The Killers”, 7 Macbeth, 147–149

King, Chris Thomas, 74 MacDonald, John D.
Kingsley, Ben, 25 The Executioners, 177
see also “Méliès, George” (film MacLachlan, Kyle, 174
character) Maclean’s, 59
Kinky Boots, 128, 136–141 Macy, William H., 14
Klena, Derek, 129 Mad Men, 134
Klute, 174 Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich: Homage
Kohner, Susan, 84, 95 to Photographic Masters, 3, 4, 5, 6
Korie, Michael, 134 Malloy, Dave, 156, 157, 160, 161,
Koumarianos, Myrto, 150 162–3, 164, 165, 166
Kubrick, Stanley, 107 Maltin, Leonard, 118
The Man and the Monster; or, The Fate
Lamarr, Hedy, 100 of Frankenstein, 30, 31
Lanchester, Elsa, 32 Mandel, Emily St. John
Lang, Fritz Station Eleven, 181
Man Hunt, 149 Man Hunt, 149
Metropolis, 34, 171 Mankiewicz, Herman, 52
Lange, Dorothea, 3 “Man of Constant Sorrow”, 62, 74
“Migrant Mother”, 4 The Man Who Wasn’t There, 66, 67
Larsen, Nella Marclay, Christian
Passing, 7, 12, 83, 90, 100 The Clock, 8, 13, 22, 167–176
The Last Seduction, 175 Mariette in Ecstasy, 19
Lauper, Cyndi, 136 Marlowe, Hugh, 168
Leaving Las Vegas, 174 Mary Poppins, 127, 168
Leitch, Thomas, 2, 18, 20, 50, 121, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, 1, 9–10,
157, 195n2, 195n4, 200n24, 16, 17, 30, 179, 184, 200n21
201n25, 201n27 masculinity, 14, 129
Leland, Jedediah Maslin, Janet, 58, 119, 206n11
Citizen Kane, 43, 52 The Matrix, 13
Leopardi, Chauncey, 114 Maysles brothers, 134
Levin, Gail, 7 McCrea, Joel, 62
Levy, Emanuel McFarlane, Brian, 11, 16, 178, 195n2,
Cinema of Outsiders: The Rise of 201n25
American Independent Film, 128 McKellen, Ian, 18, 25, 28, 39
Lewis, Juliette, 187 McKinnon, Ray, 63
Liddell, Alice, 15, 152, 153 “The McKittrick”, 147
Linklater, Richard, 172 McLean, Grace, 161
The Lion King, 127, 141 McRoy, Jay, 2
The Little Mermaid, 127 Monstrous Adaptations: Generic and
“Little Orson Annie”, 53 Thematic Mutations in Horror Film, 2
“Livin’ la Vida Loca”, 188 Mead, Rebecca, 158, 192, 193
Lizzie Bennet Diaries, 22 melodrama, 94
Lockhart, Gene Melville, Herman, 39
“Little Orson Annie”, 53 “Bartleby, the Scrivener”, 101
Long, Christian B., 38 Mendez, Lindsay, 129
Luhrmann, Baz, 158, 200n23 mental dissociation, 152
Lundergaard, Jerry, 14 Mercury Theater, 51
Lynch, David, 169 Metropolis, 34, 171
Index 225
“Migrant Mother”, 3, 4 Naumann, Bruce, 169

Milioti, Cristin, 142 Nelson, Tim Blake, 62, 72
Miller, Jonny Lee, 11 Never Let Me Go, 6
Miller, Sandro, 3–6 The New Yorker, 158, 169, 192
Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich: Nicholson, Jack, 5, 6, 172
Homage to Photographic Masters, Nick of Time, 171
3, 4, 5, 6 The Night Circus, 151
Milner, Henry M. “A Nightengale Sang in Berkeley
The Man and the Monster; or, The Square”, 149
Fate of Frankenstein, 30, 31 “Nighthawks”, 7
Miranda, Lin-Manuel Night of the Hunter, 178, 183
Hamilton, 13, 192–194 nihilism, 69
Mitchum, Robert, 12, 174, 177–8 No Country for Old Men, 14–15, 66, 175
Modern Times, 34, 201n4 “No One Else”, 162, 164
monster, 18, 20, 21
monstrous isolation, 28 O Brother, Where Art Thou?, 10, 62–80,
Monty Python’s Spamalot, 141 170
Moore, Juanita, 84 The Odyssey, 10, 12, 62–65, 72–74, 170
Moore, Julianne, 105, 108, 135 Odenkirk, Bob, 15
Moretz, Chloe Grace, 31 Off-Broadway, 126, 127, 134, 152,
Morgenstern, Erin 156, 188, 209n4
The Night Circus, 151 “Office Talk”, 134
Morrison, James, 125 O’Hara, Kelli, 134, 135
Morrison, Toni O’Keefe, Laurence, 127
The Bluest Eye, 7, 12, 83–87, 100, 158 Oliver Twist, 29
Sula, 124 Once, 128, 141–142
Morrissey, Paul Once the Musical, 142, 143
Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein, 184 Once Upon A Time, 13, 199n18
“Moscow”, 160 O’Neill, Edward, 108
motherhood, 83, 94 101 Dalmatians, 171
cultural ideation of, 90 “The Only One”, 134–135
Moye, James, 134 Ono, Yoko
Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play, 177–190 Voice Piece for Soprano, 171
Mrs. Dalloway, 173 oppression, 87, 91, 105
“Much Apu About Nothing”, 183 Othello, 51
Mulholland Drive, 169 Oxygen Media, 119
Mulvey, Laura, 150
Mulwray, Hollis, 172 Palmer, R. Barton, 22, 72, 75, 80,
Murphy, Kevin, 127 195n2, 203n2, 203n5, 203n6
musicals vs. plays, 171 Pandora’s Box, 172
musical theater, 126–143 Parchman Farm, 74
Mutt, Richard, 66 Pasek, Benj, 129
“My Nose Ain’t Broken”, 143 Pasquale, Steven, 134
Passing, 7, 12, 83, 90, 100
Naismith, Gaye, 108–109 Paul, Justin, 129
Naremore, James, 22, 41, 52, 55, 57, Peake, Richard Brinsley
203n12, 195n2, 203n10 Presumption; or, The Fate of
Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of Frankenstein, 30, 31
1812, 8, 156, 160, 208n1 Peck, Gregory, 178
226 Index
Penley, Constance, 119 Renoir

personal transformation, 116 Grand Illusion, 160
Philadelphia Art Museum, 143 Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate, 160
Phoenix, River, 129, 131 Reynolds, Malvina
Picasso, Pablo, 50 “What Have They Done to the
Poison, 106 Rain”, 130
Pollock, Jackson, 50 RFID (radio frequency identification),
Polonsky, Abraham 151
Force of Evil, 7 Rhodes, John David, 106–7
Pontellier, Edna, 91 Rocky, 128, 134
Porter, Billy, 137, 139 Rocky the Musical, 143
postmodernism, 77 Romanek, Mark
Potts, Sarah-Jane, 136 Never Let Me Go, 6
pranksterism, 77 Romeo and Juliet, 128, 200n23
preexisting text, as authority, 18 Romney, Jonathan, 72
Presumption; or, The Fate of Rosemary’s Baby, 168
Frankenstein, 30, 31 Rosenbaum, Jonathan, 51, 55, 124
“Pretty Funny”, 132 Rothenberg, Robert, 58
“Price and Son”, 138 Rothko, Mark, 50
Pride and Prejudice, 128 Royal National Theatre, 11, 35
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, 9 Rubes, Jan, 174
Prince, Jocelyn, 158 Rushdie, Salman, 65
The Princess Bride, 127
“The Private and Intimate Life of the [Safe], 8, 12, 22, 93
House”, 162 “The Yellow Wallpaper”, presence
Pulp Fiction, 107 of, 105–125
Punchdrunk Theater Company, 147 Saltz, Jerry, 169
Sanders, Julie, 22, 195n2
Quaid, Dennis, 135 San Francisco Chronicle, 118
Queer Film Classic, 38 Sarandon, Susan, 173
quietude, 85 Savoca, Nancy, 128, 130, 133
Schaefer, Betty, 69
race(ism), 76, 83, 84, 88, 90, 203n12 Schmidt, Warren, 172
racial degradation, 87 Schorr, Collier, 117
racial self-loathing, 86, 87 Scissorhands, Edward
racist stereotypes, 85, 88 Edward Scissorhands, 7
radical freedom, 85 Scorsese, Martin, 52–53
radical self-help, 119 Hugo, 25, 26–27, 29–34, 37–38, 40, 181
“Raise You Up/Just Be”, 140, 141 Taxi Driver, 59
Raising Arizona, 63 The Second Sex, 110
Rauschenberg, Robert, 169 Seeger, Pete
Raw, Laurence, 41, 195n2, 197n6, 202n1 “We Shall Overcome”, 130
Adaptation Studies and Learning, 41 Seeley, Tracy, 65
Rebecca, 147 Segarra, Josh, 132
Redford, Robert, 158 The Select [The Sun Also Rises], 157
Redgrave, Lynn, 28 self(hood)
relational art, 15, 56, 195n1 Romantic, 85, 156, 163, 164
relational politics, 56 transcendent, 118, 119
reminiscence, 72 true, 84, 85, 99
Index 227
self-acceptance, 91 Stella Dallas, 93

self-affirmation, 98 Stewart, James, 174
self-delusion, 110 Stewart, Kate McGregor, 116
self-help, 118 stock characters, 85
self-reliance, 118 “Story in Harlem Slang,” 83
Selznick, Brian, 33, 34 “A Streetcar Named Marge”, 183
The Invention of Hugo Cabret, 33 Streitfeld, Susan
Selznick, David O., 48 Female Perversions, 123
semper fi, 134 Stroker, Bram
sexism, 85 “Part Deux”, 47
Shakespeare, William Sturges, Preston, 67
Macbeth, 147–149 Sullivan’s Travels, 10, 63, 64, 67–69,
Sheen, Martin, 44, 45, 47 72–74
Sheik, Duncan, 127 Sula, 124
Shelley, Mary, 1 Sullivan’s Travels, 10, 63, 64, 67–69,
critique of Romantic overreaching, 72–74, 170
43 The Sun Also Rise, 157
female outsiders, 32 Sunset Boulevard, 69, 94
Frankenstein, 1, 9–10, 16, 17, 30, Swain, Jim, 130
179, 184, 200n21
Shelley, Percy “Take Me Back”, 131
“A Defence of Poetry”, 43 Tannen, Deborah, 119–120
Sherman, Daniel, 138 Tarantino, Quentin
Shue, Elizabeth, 174 Pulp Fiction, 107
Siegel, Janice, 64 Taub, Shaina, 161
The Silence of the Lambs, 127 Taubin, Amy, 51
Silver, Cassandra, 150 Taylor, Lili, 129
The Simpsons, 8, 12, 22, 170, television vs. film, 171
177–190 Tennyson, Lord
Siodmak, Robert, 7 Romanticism, 69
Sirk, Douglas, 7, 83, 134, 191 “The Two Voices”, 70
Imitation of Life, 83, 84, 85, 86, 88, “Ulysses”, 69–71
89, 94, 95–96, 97, 98, 101, 102, Thelma and Louise, 124, 173
103, 105 Then She Fell, 8, 15–16, 150, 152–155
Sleep No More, 8, 147–153, 155, 175 Thomas, Sebastian Hedges, 138
solipsism, 46, 70, 71, 163, 192 Thompson, J. Lee, 177
Solverson, Molly, 14 Thornton, Billy Bob, 14
“Some Kinda Time”, 131 Tierney, Gene, 168
“Soul of a Man”, 137–138 Tildesley, Mark, 11
The Souls of Black Folk, 135 The Time Machine, 171
The Sound and the Fury, 157 Tolman, Allison, 14
The Spitfire Grill, 123 Tolstoy, 165
Spirit of the Beehive, The, 8, 191 War and Peace, 156, 160, 166
Stage, 52 Tomlinson, David, 168
Stahl, John M., 7, 83 Tommy, 172
Stam, Robert, 2, 17, 40, 186, 195n2 The Towering Inferno, 172–173
Star Trek: Voyager, 181 transcendent self, 118
Station Eleven, 181 treasure seeking, 64
Steele, Lucas, 156 The Trial, 51
228 Index
A Trip to the Moon, 37 Welles, Orson, 41, 46, 192

Tsika, Noah, 38, 201n5 Citizen Kane, 42–43, 52, 55, 56
Turner, Lana, 94 Othello, 51
Turner, Nat, 87 The Trial, 51
Turner, Victor, 150 “We Shall Overcome”, 130
The Turn of the Screw, 185 What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?,
Turturro, John, 62, 204n9 19
The Twilight Zone, 172 “What Have They Done to the Rain”,
130, 131
“Ulysses”, 69–71 Whelehan, Imelda, 106, 195n2,
uncanny, 11, 14, 27 197n6
unheimlich, 11 When Harry Met Sally, 168
USA Today, 58 Where Art Thou?, 170
Whitaker, Cathy, 128, 134
Velez-Johnson, Martha, 114 White, Carol, 12
Vertigo, 147, 149, 150 White, Rob, 112
Vertigo zoom, 11 Wilde, Oscar, 138
Village Voice, 159 Wilder, Billy
violation, 17 Sunset Boulevard, 69
violent crime, 14 Williamson, Lane, 120
Vollack, Lia, 127 The Witches of Eastwick, 172
vulgarization, 17 The Wizard of Oz, 64, 65, 74,
78–79
Walsh, Enda, 142 Wood, Allen W.
Walt Disney Studios, 127 Karl Marx, 109
Walters, James, 78 Wood, Robin, 1
War and Peace, 156, 160, 166` Woolf, Virginia, 17
Ward, Ryan, 135 Woolly Mammoth Theater Company,
War of the Worlds, 54, 55 185
Warren, Robert Penn Worthen, W. B., 149, 200n23
All the King’s Men, 74 Wuthering Heights, 163
Washburn, Anne Wynn, Ed, 174
Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play, 8, 13,
177–190 “The Yellow Wallpaper”, 8, 101, 170,
Washington, Fredi, 89 179
Webb, Clifton, 168 presence in [Safe], 105–125
Webling, Peggy, 30 Young, Harvey, 158
Frankenstein: An Adventure in the
Macabre, 28, 30 Zalewski, Daniel, 172

Literature, Film, and Their Hideous Progeny - Adaptation and ElasTEXTity

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

You might also like

Literature, Film, and Their Hideous Progeny - Adaptation and ElasTEXTity

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Literature, Film, and Their Hideous Progeny - Adaptation and ElasTEXTity

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture

Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture

Series Standing Order ISBN 978–1–137–54205–4 hardcover

Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills,

Typeset by MPS Limited, Chennai, India.

List of Figures viii

Works Cited 210

I.1 Being John Malkovich 4

5.1 [Safe]: Lester at Wrenwood 115

My greatest thanks go to my friends and colleagues who helped me

I am very grateful to Le Moyne College: the English and Communication

A brief portion of Chapter 1 was published in the Stone Canoe Journal

Literature, Film, and Their Hideous Progeny: Adaptation and ElasTEXTity

The horror genre has itself been explored as “monstrous” in its

how the avant-garde functions, reorienting our viewing practices and

Figure I.2 Sandro Miller, “Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich”: Dorothea Lange/

Figure I.3 “Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich”: Victor Skrebneski/Bette Davis,

Figure I.4 Sandro Miller, “Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich”: Herb Ritts/Jack

creative but also fundamentally disorienting in its dispatch of sources:

[in] the classic 1946 movie version, Robert Siodmak, German-born

More than simply a study of influences or consideration of muse-like

when social-psychological survival requires shifting notions of identity

between an adaptation and its sources, other canonic figures of horror,

[my hideous progeny] would be prophetic of the cinematic afterlife of

orange-painted sun and smothers himself in a strip of green grass (“It’s

takes the shape of elastextity, moving from familiar texts to more

weaker though well-meaning characters, such as Chief Bill Oswalt (Bob

She Fell practices an idea of adaptation that nicely exemplifies Kamilla

reciprocal interart analogies differ from the usurping and rivalrous

Then She Fell literalizes Elliott’s concept of adaptation by performing

and viewers to avoid Frankenstein’s error and respond with imagination

which the label “monster” is really an insistence on a particular, usually

fragility of creations that weren’t nurtured. According to Mellor, Shelley

Hansen’s invocation of adaptation as monster underscores the

encounter “art” through new media. Beyond this dynamic ruled by

The study of adaptation needs to be joined with the study of recy-

If hideous progeny and the mutating narrative of the Frankenstein

through allusion to a string of media images and cultural memories”

The film Hugo “[rematerializes] celluloid in the form of the automaton”

in the Automaton,1 then, Gods and Monsters similarly explores a broader

Forry maintains that Webling’s play strikes different notes from

Perhaps most important, in Webling’s play, the creature is portrayed

the potentially chaotic urban space of the station. Forces of modernity

These stage adaptations had a significant impact not only on the

Harold Bloom argues that in Shelley’s novel the “monster is more

Hugo is also an abandoned child, as well as a figure for Hugo’s father

Figure 1.1 Hugo: the approaching train in Hugo’s dream

scene develops, Scorsese both enhances the idea that technology is

Figure 1.2 Hugo: Hugo becomes the Automaton in his dream

becomes the catalyst for all of the magical transformations enacted in

“monster,” Shakespeare’s perhaps redeemable Caliban, whose brutish

Hugo’s and Isabelle’s gift-of-the-magi sharing of their pastimes. As

As the Creature in Frankenstein offers a shift in perspective on Victor’s

The chapters in this book represent conversations of a sort among texts

attempting to adapt Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to the Vietnam War in

literary Romanticism’s obsessions with incompleteness in relation to

Coppola’s self-flagellating comments (Figure 2.1) reflect his reaction