At the time of posting this blog, I just finished a week of exams and doing the final things for a few deadlines I have for my courses next week. We're almost halfway through the school year and this again reminds me of how time flies. I'm finishing up a course I had on adaptation, focussed on book adaptation into film. I can say that this is the most fun course I have taken so far, even though I did not like all of the books and films we read and watched. The process of film adaptation opened my eyes and changed my perspective. Here's why.
First a little about the course, it's called: Adapting to the Novel, and it kind of speaks for itself. During the 7 weeks of classes, I had to read 7 books and watch one (or sometimes 2) film based on the novel. From Peter Pan to Trainspotting, we looked at a lot of different genres. As I said, not all books/films were to my taste. The thing that made this my favourite course so far though, was the fact that I was introduced to new ideas and perspectives. During these weeks I even saw a change in perspective by myself, which is awesome!
When I think about how I started these studies 1,5 years ago, I suddenly feel like I did not know much back then. It is weird to see how fast I've grown my skills and learned new things. If I compare one of my first essays to the ones I write now, I cannot believe the change. I am interested to see how my skills will have developed after the full 3 years of my studies.
The reason I wanted to write and share this post was that I have learned new things and I wanted to share this. For the longest time, I've looked at book adaptation into film as a process that had to be as faithful to the novel as possible. If it wasn't, I didn't like it. Why? Well, I've always thought of books as the original and the 'better' version, so films had to stay as close as possible to also try and achieve this. That's what I was convinced of at least. However, I'm here today to tell you (and my past self) to think about it differently.
As my teacher told me, adaptation is a process. Nowadays, so many stories are adapted, and adaptations are adapted again and again. For some works, it is almost impossible to see one as the original because not always are adaptations based on the original. Think about a story as Cinderella. Cinderella started as a folk tale, but nowadays I don't think that many know the "original" version of the story (I didn't myself and Wikipedia tells me that the story of Rhodopis is considered to be the earliest version of the Cinderella story). I am sure that when people are asked for the original for the Cinderella story the answer will either be the Disney version (film or book) or the version of the brother's Grimm. For a long time, I believed that the brother's Grimm created the original until I did some research last year and found out that that wasn't the case. Okay, so now we know this for Cinderella. Cinderella is still adapted in many ways, think about the book Cinderella is Dead, that I reviewed a while ago. Or all the version of Cinderella stories in films. Is it clear from which "original" they adapt from? I don't think so.
Nowadays, critics do not just look at faithfulness when a story is adapted. Faithfulness itself is very subjective because what you think is a critical element in the story can be disregarded by me. For a director, or someone wanting to adapt a story, it is impossible to take all the considerations by all the readers or viewers into their works. They have to make a choice. Besides, nowadays we also see that directors or writers take one element of a story but make it completely their own. These Violent Delights by Chloe Gong is a great example of this. She used the Shakespeare play Romeo and Juliet, yet set it in 1920s Shanghai where a monster is roaming the city. The story still contains the enemies-to-lovers trope, the different gangs and characters with similar names. She made it her own story. As a reader, I recognise the elements of the story it is adapted from, but I also appreciate it as it's own work. Besides, comparing this to Shakespeare's play is impossible to do right. Even though they have similar elements, Gong's story is very different.
When we look at film adaptation, we do need to take a few things into consideration. We often see that popular books are quickly adapted into films (or even series). Think about Harry Potter, these books were so immensely popular from the start. As a film director, it is up to you to decide what to "do" with the book. However, the audience also plays an important role. At such a time, when the readers are still in the middle of reading the series. Most will not appreciate it if the director already changes the entire story. This audience wants faithfulness. They want to see on screen what they've read in the books. The director makes the choice (together with others of course) what to take into the film, but often we do not see them immediately changing the books. Another great example is Game of Thrones. The first seasons were based on the books and (if I can believe others) adapted faithfully. Until the last season, which immediately received a lot of comments from the audience and critics.
A currently popular series is Bridgerton, these books are already a bit older and not shared a lot on the internet at the time of adapting. In such a case, a director can do freely what they want with it. Here, the audience of the series will (probably) have fewer (or no) comments because they are not familiar with the stories, or they don't put much pressure on faithfulness. This is also the case for stories (mostly classics) that have been adapted so many times that people want to see something new.
It is depended on the story and the time to decide how to adapt it. I already wrote two posts about classics, but some classics are very outdated (in beliefs or settings), a way to give it new life is to change it to our modern society. By changing the setting, or adding subtle hints to the way the characters behave or what they say, classics can become appreciated again even though the "original" contains outdated beliefs.
With this enormous post haha, I hope to share the view that we should not put much pressure on adaptations of stories. Yet, I think that we should view all as independent works, but can of course also look at them in their network with other versions. For myself, I'm learning to not just use faithfulness as a critique because that is just subjective and not a good way to review a story. I enjoyed this course a lot and I wanted to share my opinion and what I've learned here. I'm certain that I forgot something, I might update it later or write a follow-up post (eventually). Let's discuss this topic further in the comments! I would love to hear your views and perspectives on this topic. If anything was unclear, please let me know!
With love,
Julia
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