Adaptation and Dogrib Midnight Runners

This lesson was an attempt to address some of the common concerns of adaptations that have crept into wider cultural understandings of adaptations ... most people still understand there to be an inherent hierarchy of the original taking precedence over its "lowly" copies. My students of all ages still often say "the book is better," and I wanted to address that notion and why they might feel that way. Plus, I happened to be reading Hutcheon for fun, and I couldn't wait to engage with her scholarship :)

In this exercise, I wanted them to become familiar with an example of literary criticism, and then to become comfortable responding to it. Most of their responses to the kinds of "myths" of adaptations were largely repetitive - due to the overlapping nature of some of the myths - but it also gave them an opportunity to consider the short story, "Dogrib Midnight Runners" in comparison with the film, Mohawk Midnight Runners. 

This lesson is dedicated to Adar Charlton. Thanks for the inspiration, friend!

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The following article is an introduction to a journal that was first released in 2008 (which isn’t that long ago!). The authors were attempting to explain why adaptations had not previously had any literary credibility.

You have just taken a short story, “Dogrib Midnight Runners,” and watched its adaptation to film, “Mohawk Midnight Runners.” According to literary tradition, we should take the latter less seriously, both because it is a film and because it is “second” chronologically. Whelehan’s list will go into that further.

Your job today is to defend adaptation as a worthwhile area of study, given what you have learned by both reading the short story and watching the film. You may work in pairs, in groups, or by yourself: it is completely up to you!

*** If you were absent from the classes that Adar taught, you will have to speak more broadly towards adaptation in general, so use other examples if you must.

I have given you two examples of potential responses from literary theorist Linda Hutcheon (numbers 2 and 4), so you can see what kinds of counter-arguments you can give to the ideas presented by Cartmell, et al.

“Introduction to Adaptation”

by Deborah Cartmell, Timothy Corrigan, and Imelda Whelehan

Although screen adaptations of literature have been around since the beginning of cinema and have provoked the most intense debates among the public at large, the subject has been long neglected in literary and film studies. So why has it taken so long for a journal, such as this one, to be launched? We have come up with ten reasons.

1.     Champions of film, especially in the first half of the twentieth century saw the adaptation as ‘impure cinema’ and resented the dependency of film on literature, especially during the period in which film was struggling to be regarded as ‘the new literature’, an art form in its own right.

2.     Writers and literary critics in the first half of the twentieth century considered film adaptations as abominations, crude usurpations of literary masterpieces that threatened both literacy and the book itself. …

Response Example: “And yet there is another possibility: our interest piqued, we may actually read or see that so-called original after we have experience the adaptation, thereby challenging the authority of any notion of priority. Multiple versions exist laterally, not vertically” – Linda Hutcheon, 2008

3.     Academia's institutional history has contributed to the problem: film studies arrives in the 1960s often as the adopted child of literature departments and so has, from the start, a kind of secondary status. There is an unspoken assumption which remains alive and well in some corners of academia that film is not a ‘real’ discipline and ‘anyone can teach it’. …

4.     Most of the criticism, until the twenty-first century, was woefully predictable, judging an adaptation's merit by its closeness to its literary source or, even more vaguely, ‘the spirit’ of the book. Logocentricism or a belief that words come first and that literature is better than film has been prevalent.

Response Example: “One lesson is that to be second is not to be secondary or inferior; likewise, to be first is not to be originary or authoritative. Yet, as we shall see, disparaging opinions on adaptation as a secondary mode – belated and therefore derivative – persist.” – Linda Hutcheon 2008

5.     Prejudice that money and art cannot mix prevailed, primarily in literary studies.

6.     Related to the above point, the necessity of and continual romance with the author and the fetishization of individual genius was and still is persistent.

7.     The resemblance of film to Plato's cave dwellers’ flickering lights was often behind the notion that an adaptation was merely a copy of a literary text (and nothing else), thereby dooming all adaptations as inferior, diluted versions of an ‘original’ (something akin to a Platonic form). Thus, an adaptation in these terms can only be regarded as a pale version of a reality that is itself pale.

8.     ‘Adaptation’ has historically had negative connotations, emphasizing what has been lost rather than what has been gained. Criticism has been bedevilled by emotive words such as ‘violation’, ‘vulgarization’ and ‘betrayal’.

9.     The study of literature on screen has largely concentrated on canonical texts, giving the screen adaptation a very difficult act to follow and skewing debates about the ‘purpose’ of adaptation. Adaptations that have usurped their ‘originals’ in the minds of their audience—films like The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939), To Have and Have Not (Howard Hawks, 1945) or Mary Poppins (Robert Stevenson, 1964)—have failed to receive critical attention as adaptations. ‘Bad adaptations’ receive more coverage than ‘good’ ones with the judgement of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ being generally based on ‘literary’ principles which seek out ‘failure’ to justify preconceived aesthetic judgements.

10.  Adaptations are assumed too often to be based on a single ‘sourcetext’, ignoring shifting social and cultural concerns, other films, genre considerations or even financial and production considerations.

Works Cited:

Cartmell, Deborah, Timothy Corrigan, and Imelda Whelehan. “Introduction to Adaptation.” Adaptation 1.1 (2008): 1-4. Print.

Hutcheon, Linda. “Introduction.” A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Routledge, 2013. Print.