Authorship in Film Adaptation

11. Adaptable Bridget: Generic Intertextuality and Postfeminism in Bridget Jones’s Diary

This is intertextuality with a vengeance. —Molly Haskell, “The Innocent Ways of Renée Zellweger,” New York Times, April 8, 2001 in her glowing review of the film adaptation of bridget Jones’s Diary, Molly Haskell delights in the intertextuality of the film and the ways it plays with audience knowledge of the book, its author, and the film’s screenwriters and stars. Following her lead but turning it onto a broader subject , we might momentarily consider intertextuality’s ability to wreak vengeance on our expectations of adaptation studies. Much of the critical literature on adaptation continues to reflect expectations that films should simply translate their source material, and a film’s value is assessed according to how faithfully it reproduces the original text. Scholars have called repeatedly for a move away from a criterion of faithfulness because of its limitation as a mode of criticism and its implied prioritizing of the literary over the cinematic , a hierarchy that allows little room for the popular novel adaptation.¹ However, one of the reasons fidelity criticism remains prevalent in scholarly literature is the academy’s emphasis on adaptations of canonical and literary novels. When a book has sold thousands of copies to the same audience that will go to see it on-screen, there is no longer a high culture imperative for textual faithfulness, and a language of authenticity (which allows for successful adaptations that do not strictly translate the novel to film and focuses on the audience’s approval of the film) often replaces the language of fidelity. Not only does fidelity criticism limit the critic, it also limits the text, con- fining the adaptation to a compare-and-contrast analysis. Most adaptations, whether considered highly canonical or fashionably popular, resist this simplistic assessment, and from a different perspective, an adaptation could be 11 ADAPTABLE BRIDGET Generic Intertextuality and Postfeminism in Bridget Jones’s Diary ///////////////////////////////////////// Shelley Cobb 282 shelley cobb seen productively as a dynamic (if not vengeful) display of intertextuality. I propose that intertextuality is necessary for a move away from the binary of fidelity because “any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another.”² Nowhere is the notion of the absorption and transformation of another text more obvious, explicit, even self-conscious, than in adaptations. Bridget Jones’s Diary is built on multiple layers of intertextuality. Bridget originated as Helen Fielding’s “alter-ego” in a newspaper column in The Independent (one of Britain’s national broadsheet, quality newspapers); the novel is a kind of adaptation in its own right (as Fielding herself said, “I shamelessly stole the plot from Pride and Prejudice”). Moreover, the 1994 BBC adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel appears in Fielding’s novel: Colin Firth plays Bridget’s Mark Darcy in the same stiff, upper-class manner he played Elizabeth’s Mr. Darcy in the BBC version (he is also mentioned in Fielding’s novel via a tabloid story of an affair with his Pride and Prejudice co-star). Hugh Grant’s reallife liaison with a prostitute figures in the novel, and Grant stars as Bridget’s scandalous boss and love interest (a fact that crystallizes the film’s inclusion in the cycle of British romantic comedies, or Britcoms, in which Grant often stars). All of these intertextual moments are framed by the generic intertexts of the romance novel and the romantic comedy film and are reinforced by the production personnel: Helen Fielding is credited on the screenplay, as are Andrew Davies, who wrote the script for the BBC’s Pride and Prejudice, and Richard Curtis, who wrote Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill, both of which starred Grant.³ The director Sharon Maguire, as was frequently noted in reviews of the film, is one of Helen Fielding’s best friends (one of Bridget’s best friends in the novel, Shazza, is based on her). In taking Bridget Jones’s Diary as my subject I seek to foreground intertextuality as a key term in the study of adaptations. In his article “The Dialogics of Adaptation,” Robert Stam has theorized this relentless intertextuality of adaptation through Bakhtin’s notion of dialogism —the “relation between the utterance and all other utterances” or the relation between the text and all its “others,” whether texts, cultures, audiences , and more, as Stam describes in the following: [I]ntertextual dialogism refers to the infinite and open-ended possibilities generated by all the discursive practices of a...