Once upon a Time in Hollywood; or, the Commodification of Form in the Adaptation of Fictional Texts to the Hollywood Cinema

When I once asked a film composer friend if he had seen the remake of Les Liaisons Dangereuses he responded with the comment, "No, but I heard the soundtrack." It was, of course, an ironic response, but as an ironic response it makes an implicit statement on the relationship between cinematic and literary forms as well as cinematic and musical ones. The usual response to the query "have you read such-and-such a novel?" is often "No, but I've seen the movie," or vice versa, both of which imply an equivalence of art forms, so that the relationship between what one reads and what one sees, based on the same material, is somehow equal as well. However, another response that "I saw the movie and it's better than the book," or vice versa, somehow implies an inequivalence. In other words, there is something integrally superior in one that is apparently inferior in the other. Caught in between the art forms as either being equivalent or not, one is also left foundering between whether the art forms are equal or not. Obviously, they are not, but for someone to think that in some way they are equal, or may be or could be, implies a method of adaptation that is generally incumbent upon the target material adapted, which is usually, though not always, fiction. Though in fact original screenplays can be "novelized," that, in itself, is a purely commercial process of "reverse adaptation" in which the commodification is nothing more than the unmitigated attempt to expand a 120-page screenplay into a "novel-like" form of between 180 and 240 pages by merely expanding the linear narrative and the preexisting dialogue; but what we're interested in is how fiction is "cinematized." What is in question is how a work of fiction is adapted to the screen in such a way that a reader/viewer can postulate it is or isn't as good as the original text. What is a reader/viewer comparing? Metaphor? Irony? Style? Is it something that is fundamentally rooted within the structure of the text that is being compared or is it something else? Is it the symphony of the sentence, its rhythm, the ability of the writer to master his/her material that is translated for the reader/viewer to synthesize? Is it, perhaps, the power and expression of the dialogue? Or is it merely the beauty of the written word? Actually, it is none of these. What reader/viewers tend to compare consciously or unconsciously are the veritable cornerstones of traditional "Realistic" fiction; that is, story line and character, and how these fictional idioms are conveyed; namely, through a linear narrative that has the correct proportions of agitation and resolution coupled with a dialogue that propels the story line toward its inevitable, and usually obvious, conclusion. In other words, how the story is told and with what efficacy the characters are realistically presented become the standards on which the work is evaluated. This form of adapting material often tends to undermine the effusive nature of a work of fiction by transforming it, transfiguring it, into a linear narrative that pays homage to the "state of realism," or the "state of storytelling" that was founded upon the principles of narration doubtlessly begun with Aesop, if not Moses, and polished by Walter Scott and Balzac. But the question still lingers: "Why is this aspect of Aristotelian poetics, of telling a story in a particular manner, so appealing to Hollywood?" Presumably, it is because that particular movement is familiar to the public. Of all the elements Aristotle analyzes in the Poetics, plot "holds first place" and plot, "in its fullest sense is the artistic equivalent of 'action' in real life" (Butcher 334). In other words audiences are shown a film the plot structure of which somehow resembles stories they have been told in the past, which has an element of action, mainly external, that propels the plot forward. It is not that the story itself is similar in content (though Hollywood thrives on the iterative), but the manner in which it is told is familiar. …