Reading in Public No. 105: What are your favorite literary adaptations?
I finally saw The Odyssey yesterday. We’d been about to purchase tickets last week when we learned that the only 70mm IMAX projector in Denver was broken and decided to wait until it was fixed. I’m not a film snob and am unsure if I would actually be able to tell the difference between formats, but tracking down the “right” theater was part of the fun of the entire experience.
I really enjoyed the movie. As many have commented on, the sheer scope and spectacle was incredible to behold—I felt truly surrounded by the ocean in our IMAX screening and the sound infiltrated my being (maybe too much at times?). When we left the theater, my husband and I both remarked on what a good story it is. Of course we both knew the story going in, but I have to admit that the plot was much more gripping seeing it play out on a giant screen than reading a 12,000 line epic poem. Seeing it, I really understood for the first time how exciting and adventurous the story is and why it would have been a mega-hit in the ancient world.
The other aspect that really came across well was, to me, was how fully reliant on the concept of xenia (hospitality or guest rights, turned into “Zeus’s law” in the movie) this entire society was. Of course, reading and teaching The Odyssey, this was a theme I had discussed at great length. But watching the movie really gave me some sense of how isolated these kingdoms were—how reliant on news from abroad and how much trust was required between guest and host to accomplish anything at all. Clearly this was the theme Nolan pulled out to focus on and while I thought the dialogue about Zeus’s law got a little heavy handed, the depiction of how it upheld this world was very well-executed.
Of course I had complaints as well and it’s hard for me to avoid thinking about everything Nolan changed. Mostly, this Odysseus was simply not the Odysseus of the poem. He wasn’t charming and wily and arrogant—he was a much simpler, loyal, palatable hero. I think I see why Nolan might have done this. When bringing something steeped in the values of antiquity into the modern world, you have to decide what to familiarize and what to defamiliarize to your audience. Perhaps he thought creating a more familiar hero would help him achieve his thematic aims, but I wish he would have trusted audiences to handle a more complex Odysseus.
But I’m mostly okay with these changes because I’m on board with changes in adaptations more broadly. The way we talk about “faithful” adaptations is strange and loaded. I think an adaptation should include changes, otherwise what’s the point? The original exists and is available to us so an adaptation, in my view, ought to offer something new and different. I’m not a film expert at all, and I’m thinking of adaptations broadly considering retellings as well, but here’s what I think makes a good adaptation:
It has to understand the source material. Sometimes I encounter an adaptation or retelling and feel like the creator didn’t understand the original text—or at least interpreted it wildly differently than I did. While I’m all for changes, they have to feel purposeful, not like misreadings. It’s impossible to say what makes an adaptation feel intentional as compared to a glaring misunderstanding, but I think it might come down to the balance between change and exactitude. I have to feel like they got enough “right” that the changes exhibited are purposeful.
It has to have a point of view. I want adaptations to have something to say, not just to make use of beloved IP to make money. Clearly both the film and publishing industries are businesses and that’s a huge part of it, but one of the reasons I don’t watch a lot of adaptations of contemporary fiction is they don’t often have anything to say, they’re just transferring mediums. But good adaptations can hone in on a theme of the original text or even use an original text to say something about the present with careful tweaks and recalibrations. I want to leave any adaptation wondering why the creator chose this story to communicate this idea.
It has to be aware of its audience. An adaptation cannot exist solely to appeal to the people who already loved the source material; it needs to draw other people in. I think this is often what frustrates us readers, but the best adaptations consider who their audience is not just to draw in more people, but to determine points one and two. By having a clear sense of the audience, an adaptation can be adjusted so that it communicates its understanding of the source material while making the appropriate changes to enhance a theme and establish its point of view.
So, readers, I’m dying to know!
What makes a great adaptation in your eyes?
What are some of the best literary adaptations you’ve encountered?
What book(s) would you love to see adapted and what would be your “don’t-change-this” sticking points?
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Happy reading!
