On Leitch's Twelve Fallacies of Adaptation

Leitch's Twelve Fallacies provides a deeper dive into the study of adaptation, predominantly the adaptation of a novel to film. He leads with an eye opening critique on contemporary adaptation study itself, which has been “so largely ineffectual” due to practice “in a theoretical vacuum.” Though individual works may be studied, what actually happens when a film is adapted from a literary text remains relatively unobserved. Our only glimpse (thus far) has been relayed through Katrina Onstad’s NY Times article in which Sarah Polley’s long-time fixation with Grace Marks was relayed. Nevertheless, novels are generally the effort of a single person, and movies are collaborative, but the heavy lifting to adapt the former to the latter remains a mystery. Further, since screenplays are written texts used in film production, an adaptation’s relation to a source or home-text is technically comparable to that of the script. As source texts are concerned, why are novels adapted more than any other form of literature? We, as critics and scholars of contemporary adaptation study, are encouraged to follow Stam’s suggestion and pay more attention to the “dialogical responses” which lead to an educated appreciation of “the difference among the media.” Additionally, as per Grossman, the concept of Elasticity must be contemplated in order to link all associated works that precede or follow a text in order to fully comprehend the “fundamentally creative activity” of adaptation.

This brings us to the fourth fallacy; novels are better than film. As Leitch states, “literature carries an honorific charge cinema does not.” This general assumption (usually from critics who believe that literature is richer and more sophisticated) is based in part on an outdated prejudice against the Hollywood mogul star system. Their spray and pray movie making style, intended for an undifferentiated target audience, did not generally encourage works known for their subtleties, nor were (are) most films created for in-depth analysis. This negative impression lingers on long after the film industry has evolved beyond a shallow popular culture money-maker. Consequently, it’s safe to assume that critics are ignoring that the novel too was once new. As the novel rose to popularity two centuries ago “entrenched representational forms” similarly greeted the new comer with suspicion and hostility. The same was true for the Broadway musical challenging the Metropolitan opera. The business-minded would describe these media devotee conflicts as a battle for market share, but economics do remain a driving force. Nevertheless, per Linda Hutcheon's chapter on adaptation, as long as the adaptation’s theme remains aligned with the source text, the media in which it is presented should be appreciated for its own merits.

The other, and perhaps the most frequently argued fallacy, is addressed in Leitch’s eighth point. The “near-fixation with the issue of fidelity” has put metaphorical blinders on adaptation studies. Since recreating a written text perfectly is only possible with a Xerox machine, and comparing an apple to an orange is an exercise in futility, why do some adaptation scholars still judge a film’s success by its adherence to a home-text’s specific textual details? A novel will always be the best version of itself - if that self is the standard by which it is being judged. If one is maintaining that a predecessor is always by definition better than an adaptation, they are not studying adaptation. Instead, they are seeking resources and examples to prove preexisting notions of source text superiority. Leitch highlights that only adaptation study “remains obsessed with asking whether a given film is any good as a preliminary, a precondition, or a substitute.” Stam agrees that a film cannot be 100% faithful to a text, but he suggests that the term “unfaithful” be used only to describe a film viewer’s disappointment in comparison with their “imaginative reconstruction” as readers.