Film Adaptation and Its Discontents: From Gone with the Wind to The Passion of the Christ

6. Exceptional Fidelity

c h a p t e r s i x Exceptional Fidelity Despite innumerable exceptions to the rule,adaptation theorists have persisted in treating fidelity to the source material as a norm from which unfaithful adaptations depart at their peril. Yet it should be clear by now that fidelity itself , even as a goal, is the exception to the norm of variously unfaithful adaptations . Instead of constantly seeking answers to the question, “Why are so many adaptations unfaithful to perfectly good sources?” adaptation studies would be better advised to ask the question,“Why does this particular adaptation aim to be faithful?” One benefit of exchanging the first question for the second is that it properly treats fidelity as a special case rather than a rule more often honored in the breach than in the observance. Another is that it pointedly implies that the main reason adaptations rarely achieve anything like fidelity is because they rarely attempt it. A third, perhaps the most important, is that it acknowledges that every case of attempted fidelity is exceptional not only because faithful adaptations are in the minority but because they are so likely to be different from one another. Renouncing the unsupported assumption that all adaptations are, or ought to be, faithful reveals more clearly that the motives for un- dertaking a particular faithful adaptation are likely to be as distinctive as the results. This is true even though the primary motive for fidelity in the most widely known adaptations is financial, not aesthetic. Because a well-known literary property has considerable power to presell spin-offs like adaptations and sequels even to viewers who have never read the property,1 economic propriety long forbade adapters from tampering with speeches and characters and scenes these viewers were presumably expecting to see onscreen. In a letter to Sidney Howard, the principal screenwriter responsible for the adaptation of Margaret Mitchell’s best-selling 1936 novel Gone with theWind, David O.Selznick,the independent producer who had purchased the adaptation rights to the novel, noted that “people simply seem to be passionate about the details of the book. . . . I don’t think any of us have ever tackled anything that is really comparable in the love people have for it,”and added that“the ideal script, as far as I am concerned, would be one that did not contain a single word of original dialogue , and that was one hundred percent Margaret Mitchell, however much we juxtaposed it.”2 He commanded costume designer Walter Plunkett:“Do not vary anything from the book. The book is law; the book is the Bible.”3 The author herself, repeatedly prodded by Selznick to participate in the adaptation, declined on the grounds that “if news got out that I was in even the slightest way responsible for any deviations from the book, then my life wouldn’t be worth living.”4 When Peter Jackson approached the adaptation of J. R. R. Tolkien’s epic fantasy The Lord of the Rings—originally published in three volumes, The Fellowship of the Ring (1954), The Two Towers (1954), and The Return of the King (1955)—his motives were profoundly different.As his supernatural thriller The Frighteners neared completion in 1996, Jackson realized that Weta Limited, the visual effects facility he had founded with Richard Taylor and Jamie Selkirk to provide digitized effects for Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures (1994),would have no more work to do, “and we were wondering what would come next. I began thinking that I’d love to do a Ray Harryhausen–type fantasy, with fantastic creatures and extraordinary worlds—a ‘Lord of the Rings type of film’ is how I envisioned it. It was then that we began looking into the rights for The Lord of the Rings.”5 Although the project was special effects driven literally from the moment of its inception, Jackson was as determined as Selznick to remain faithful to his well-loved source.Executive producer Mark Ordesky has recalled that “virtually everyone in a significant position on the movie knew the books 128 Film Adaptation and Its Discontents inside out—had been obsessed with them for years.”6 This obsession translated into a passionate desire to recreate Tolkien’s world as fully and faithfully as possible . Yet Selznick’s project and Jackson’s, both rooted in the desire to produce an adaptation that would justify...