intellect Book Focus
6 | Thinking in Colour
Film Studies
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“If my film makes one more person miserable, I’ve done my job.” – Woody Allen
For more than 25 years, Cana-
dian director David Cronenberg has
adapted the literary works of others,
including Naked Lunch (1991) from
William Burroughs’ 1959 experi-
mental novel, Crash (1996) from J. G.
Ballard’s 1973 cult text, Spider (2003)
from Patrick McGrath’s dark 1990
account of a mental patient’s subjec-
tive universe and A History of Violence
(2005), based on John Wagner and
Vincent Locke’s 1997 graphic novel.
Even films not seemingly adaptations
draw on previously-written mate-
rial, for example, Dead Ringers (1988)
derives directly from Jack Geasland
and Bari Woods’ novel Twins (1977).
Cronenberg’s literary awareness is
present in abandoned projects, such
as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Brett
Easton Ellis’ American Psycho and Total
Recall, based on Philip K. Dick’s short
story ‘We Can Remember It For You Whole-
sale’. It is also apparent his own acting
career, in films such as Nightbreed
(1989), where he shares Clive Barker’s
celebration of monstrosity and in po-
tential future projects, such as Martin
Amis’ London Fields (1989). Looking
closely at such texts reveals fascinat-
ing features of Cronenberg’s work,
e.g. his frequent use of a perpetual
present tense, narrative structures
that might be described as spiral
or centripetal and the direct and
unattributed ‘borrowing’ of images,
plotlines and dialogue from a range
of literary texts.
The idea of using literary texts
to illuminate film is not new. In
1969, Peter Wollen asserted that ‘we
need comparisons with authors in
the other arts: Ford with Fenimore
Cooper, for example or Hawks with
Faulkner’ and it could be argued
that, as Leonard Bernstein believed,
‘the best way to “know” a thing is in
the context of another discipline’.
However, there remains a stubborn
Leavisite tendency that implicitly
values literary works as superior on
the grounds of being the more estab-
lished art form, that film can only be
visual, whilst literature is linguistic,
and that film cannot emulate fiction’s
ability to convey the profundity of hu-
man thought. Theoretical discussion
of adaptation is often bogged down
in repetitive case studies, partly due
to what Brian McFarlane terms ‘the
fidelity issue’. Notions of remaining
faithful assume that there is an ir-
reducible core meaning to an original
source text but it is not always obvi-
ous as to precisely what the film-mak-
er should be faithful. More precisely,
as Neil Sinyard reminds us, ‘adapting
a literary text for the screen is es-
sentially an act of literary criticism’,
which should serve to illuminate both
source text and filmic version drawn
from it. By drawing on literary texts
that are by reputation infamous and
experienced primarily on Higher
Education courses, and by choosing
to retain their titles, Cronenberg ap-
pears to seek the endorsement of the
Below
Naked Lunch
Novel by William Burroughs
Bottom
Naked Lunch (1991)
By Hillary Mushkin and S. E. Barnet
‘By drawing on literary texts that are by
reputation infamous and experienced
primarily on Higher Education courses,
Cronenberg appears to seek the endorse-
ment of the very cultural establishment
against which he seems to rebel.’
David Cronenberg
An Author Looking for a Text
By Mark Browning
