Jørgen Bruhn

Parallel worlds of possible meetings in Let The Right One In

Among adaptation scholars it is well known that adaptation studies have been caught in a ‘trap of fidelity’ for way too long. In particular, this ‘trap of fidelity’ has caused an unfortunate and exaggerated focus on plot and character, as they are the easiest parts of narratives to compare. Furthermore, this notion of faithfulness or accuracy has led to an evaluative tendency that almost invariably considers the film adaptation a less dignified ‘copy’ of the literary original. The criticism of the ‘fidelity trap’ is close to being a truism these days, but it still needs to inform any serious investigation of the question of adaptation. At the same time one cannot ignore the question of fidelity altogether, as it entails the all-important question of similarities and differences between the adapted text and the adapting text. It is therefore necessary to pursue a comprehension of similarities and differences that avoids the unfruitful and simplifying discourse of ‘fidelity’ that has dominated adaptation studies. Looking back at the history of adaptation studies, one can distinguish two main perspectives on the adaptation process between novel and film. The first perspective states that both novel and fiction film are narratives, and that accordingly there is a shared essence which can be transferred between media without getting lost. The second perspective follows the idea that the two media are so fundamentally different that a transferral from one to the other would necessarily turn the adapted text into something completely different — in terms not only of form, but also of content. Whereas the first line of thought may be traced back to Horace’s ‘Ut pictura poeisis’, the other line resembles Lessing’s boarder-establishing gesture in his text on Laokoon. Recently, Kamilla Elliot terms these two (pseudo-)alternatives the ‘analogy’ perspective vis-à-vis the ‘category’ perspective. In this article we shall try to escape the most common traps of adaptation theory by widening the range of comparison of the works in question. We further intend to evade essentialist media definitions masked as value judgements, and value judgements disguised as media essentialism. Fidelity in adaptation studies has traditionally been limited to a comparison of easily comparable traits of narratives. Our approach aims at finding a way of comparing novel and film that widens the range of comparison, opening up the possibility of speaking of a wider concept of fidelity that we believe might be useful for adaptation studies. It is not uncommon that an adapting text may resemble the adapted text on the plot and character level, while at the same time being significantly different on other levels of the text’s meaning production. Likewise, adapting texts that on the level of narrative seem profoundly different, may on other levels end up producing meaning that resembles that of the adapted text. It is therefore necessary to distinguish between a ‘surface’ fidelity concerning plot and character, as opposed to other possible ways of finding, comparing and interpreting likenesses and differences in the adaptation process. Furthermore we want to redirect the one-way tendency in most adaptation studies, where the only change discussed is that of a primary text as it enters a secondary one. Our approach accounts for a dialogue between the texts that, like the texts themselves, is open to both transmedial similarities and differences, while the adaptation process may illuminate media-specific characteristics. We wish to show that the adapting text, in our case a film, may very well influence and alter the adapted text, and that the relation between the adapted text and the adapting text may best be described as dialogic. Finally we have chosen to let the works themselves dictate ways of comparing them, instead of separately finding methods appropriate for all possible adaptations. Still, or perhaps most of all as a consequence of this, we hope that our way of approaching the vexed question of adaptation may have wider implications than solely for our example. Our case study is the vampire novel Let the Right One In, written by the Swedish author John Ajvide Lindqvist in 2004, and the film directed by Thomas Alfredson, based on the novelist’s own script, in 2008. We do consider the fact that the writer himself wrote the film script as an interesting part of the transformation process, but we have not investigated to what degree this has influenced the final result, as we are most interested in the two texts themselves. Vampirism is the obvious content in our chosen case study, and this particular theme also seems to play an important role in contemporary adaptation studies (at the 4th Annual Association of Adaptation Studies Conference in London, September 2009, it was remarked that at least five papers dealt with vampires!) The vampire theme offers itself to contemporary adaptation studies for two main reasons. First, from a cultural studies and a gender studies point of view, the mere popularity and therefore social and political impact of a number of vampire-related cultural products (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, True Blood, Twilight and the ever present count Dracula) must be confronted.

Ecology as pre-text? The paradoxical presence of ecological thematics in contemporary Scandinavian quality TV

ABSTRACT The Scandinavian middle classes have been trained in feeling guilty and shameful about their social and economical privileges as well as these privileges in combinations with gender and/or ethnicity. But “eco-guilt” or “eco-shame” has hardly been represented properly in cinema and TV series to this day. In this article, I want to offer a kind of prediction, rather than a description, of what may be an upcoming major theme in Scandinavian visual narratives: eco-guilt and eco-shame. I see signs of this in the recent TV series Jordskott from Sweden, the Norwegian Okkupert and the Danish Bedrag, but my point will be that the ecological issues here are used as a useful background or a dramaturgical starting point rather than as a major theme: as pretexts, in the double sense of the word. The use of ecology as pretext in Scandinavian TV series will be the subject of this article where I intend to focus on the way that the question of eco-guilt seems to be an alluring and tempting as well as repressed thematic, a fact that can be read out of the three series’ paradoxical opening sequences.

“Great script, eh?”: Medialities, Metafiction, and Non-meaning in Tobias Wolff’s “Bullet in the Brain”

Tobias Wolff’s short story “Bullet in the Brain,” a deeply ironic version of a near-death experience, can be read as a modernized version of Hemingway’s “The Killers,” and it has also been read as an optimistic—but at the same time sentimental—tale about the unspoiled roots of a cynical critic. However, when focusing on the presence and function of medialities in the text, another plot becomes visible. In this chapter, I attempt to demonstrate that sound and music (surprisingly perhaps, in a short story about a literary critic), actually play the leading roles in the text. The strange musicality inherent in the faulty grammar of a child in the critic’s childhood carries the symbolic weight of the story. In order to try to offer a plausible contextual background to the presence of medialities, I mention Wolff’s engagement in an attempt to revive realist poetics (what has been termed “Dirty Realism”), but end up suggesting that a deeper meaning of the protagonist’s childhood memory has to do with the unexpectedness of unmediated presence.

Between Punk and PowerPoint: Authenticity Versus Medialities in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad

Jennifer Egan’s 2011 novel A Visit from the Goon Squad is my concluding, but also most problematizing, case study. The novel presents aspects of 50 years of US history by means of an intricate web of represented technical and artistic medialities. Despite being a novel, which poses some quantitative challenges to my analytic model, my proposed three-step analysis does work for Goon Squad—but only to a certain point. This will be discussed in the opening section of the chapter.

“This Beats Tapes, Doesn’t It?”: Women, Cathedrals, and Other Medialities in Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral”

In this second case study, focused on Raymond Carver’s short story “Cathedral,” attention is focused on the apparent contradiction between Carver and his critics’ argument that his style is “hyperrealist,” as opposed to the fact that at least this short story engages in complex representations and discussions of medialities. The blatant improbability of the final and crucial scene also testifies against the idea of Carver’s “realism.” This chapter also argues that the theme of blindness, which is well established in studies of the short story, actually covers other and more important dimensions, leading to, for instance, an interpretation stating that the idea of the mature Carver’s writing as being more “humanist” and optimistic than the younger writer; however, this is definitely not the only possible interpretation. In order to show this, both a real woman and a cathedral as depicted in a TV show must be taken into consideration as possible mediating instances, in addition to the rather obvious role of the epiphany in the final part of the text. My main argument, however, is that “Cathedral” is first and foremost expressing anxiety toward mediation in itself.

Speak, Memory? Vladimir Nabokov, “Spring in Fialta”

In this first case study—on Vladimir Nabokov’s “Spring in Fialta”—the problematic love affair between two post-Russian exiles turns out to be deal with the difficult relationship between art and remembrance. The methodological argument underlying my analysis is that this thematic can only be revealed by way of an intermedial perspective on the text. I discuss visual medialities, literature, cinema, and finally music as ways of comprehending the story as a kind of metaphor for its own representation., Consequently, the case study clearly illustrates the methodological point—that despite the fact that the basic three-step model is useful, it also needs to be applied with a certain sense of respect for the text’s unique setup, which demands, in each and every reading, a creative reframing of the method.

What is Mediality, and (How) does it Matter? Theoretical Terms and Methodology

In the first, and longest, part of this chapter I offer an introduction to the field of intermediality studies, as well as major concepts in the field such as the concepts of medium/media and mediality/medialities; basic, technical, and qualified artistic medialities; and media combination and media transformation. Furthermore, I describe some of the crucial terms necessary for conducting a mediality analysis of narrative literature. I even delimit my study toward other media-sensitive approaches to literatur.

Ginsberg’s animating typewriter: mixing senses and media in Howl (2010)

Abstract Epstein and Friedman’s 2010 movie Howl is partly a portrait of Allen Ginsberg, author of the poem ‘Howl’, and partly a documentary about the 1957 obscenity trial against his publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti. The film thus follows the ‘biopic’ trend of the last decades, where authors and their work are made the subject of feature films (Finding Neverland, Becoming Jane, Capote, Bright Star, etc.). This particular case, however, is more complicated and perhaps more demanding than the conventional biopic, because the movie also adapts Ginsberg’s Howl from poetry to animation film. Consequently, the beat poem exists in several medial forms in the film: it is represented through poetry reading as performance; it is read aloud as evidence in court; it is shown as written text; and, finally, it is transformed into the visual animation work of artist Eric Drooker. This article demonstrates how complex media relations in cinema, in this case Howl, can be discussed using perspectives developed in intermedial theory. By way of a formal and sensorial analysis of selected scenes the article also discusses the views on the artist and artistic creation constructed in the film, in order to reframe the formal analysis as an ideological interpretation.

Post-Medium Literature? Two Examples of Contemporary Scandinavian

Abstract This article discusses two contemporary Scandinavian literary texts: Ursula Andkjaer Olsen’s Danish book of poetry called Havet er en scene [The Sea Is a Stage], and Abo Rasul’s (pseudonym for Matias Faldbakken) Norwegian novel Unfun. I intend to show that these texts exemplify two very different but nevertheless comparable positions in contemporary Scandinavian literature. Despite the differences, they resemble each other in that they actively mix medial constellations to offer social critique, and the aim of this article is thus to investigate the specific relation between medial mixture and social critique.

The Wire og kriminalitetens afkroge

This article argues that the American TV-series The Wire poses complicated political and ideological questions rather than attempting to deliver clear-cut answers or solutions to the problems repre ...