The Subtle Art of Adaptation
Revealing an artist through what they see in another
Adaptation is a funny thing. Taking a work between mediums is a process which will require at least some adjustment in order to make sense. A film is going to be different from a novel, even if you have the base elements you’re going to need to remix them just because of the inherent differences between the screen and the page.
We are also often talking about different artists. What one person sees as resonant or meaningful in a text can often change the meaning dramatically when they do their interpretation. Artists can’t control what the audience finds meaningful, and the way their work is pulled apart and put together can occasionally result in something dramatically different and yet thematically linked.
A fantastic example of this are the films All of Us Strangers and The Discarnates. Adapted from Taichi Yamada’s novel Strangers, both start in the same place, and share many of the same beats - a lonely man meets someone else in an otherwise abandoned apartment building, and also finds people who resemble their parents who died years ago. The bones of both works are the same, but directors Andrew Haigh (for All of Us Strangers) and Nobuhiko Obayashi (The Discarnates) take completely different approaches to the material. Obayashi plays it straight, Haigh plays it gay, and these changes fundamentally change the central characters’ relationships with their parents, with the other person in their building, and the world around them at all. The core of both films is the importance of connection, but because of the differences between both artists - in culture, in sexuality, in approach - we get entirely different expressions of that theme.
Yet, it’s clear that both directors have respect for the source material. The events are broadly the same, and the characters start from a very similar emotional space. The adaptations diverge, but remain similar, and we can see what each artist found to be the most resonant part of the original material.
But what if you straight up do not give a shit about the original source material?
To say that the 1925 version of The Wizard of Oz is a loose interpretation of the source material is understating it. I will now outline everything consistent between the book and film:
There is a character named Dorothy.
The film begins in Kansas.
There’s a wizard.
There’s a tornado.
While people dress as a scarecrow and cowardly lion, those aren’t characters - it’s just people in disguise. Someone is also briefly a tin man after falling into a scrap pile, but he takes that off pretty quickly - and then he becomes a corrupt cop. Dorothy is a secret monarch who was sent to Kansas to stop her from being killed in some succession drama. There’s a drag performance, which is neat. There’s a ton of racism, which is not.
Even if it was a good movie - which it very much isn’t - the fact remains that it’s a very bad adaptation. But that’s also why it’s so interesting - adaptations are still about what the artist finds valuable in the original work, and what themes resonated with them. In the case of The Wizard of Oz, what resonated with director and star Larry Semon, beyond the names of the characters, was the idea of someone in a rural environment being transported to a magical land. The contrast between the land of Oz and Kansas is the biggest lift from the original source.
Just as we understand a bit more about Haigh and Obayashi by how they interpret Strangers, we understand a bit more about Semon by how he interpreted The Wizard of Oz. He isn’t interested in the actual story, but the contrast. The magic of the story, for him, is that they leave Kansas, and that there’s an exciting world beyond it. It’s telling that at the end of his version Dorothy doesn’t return to Kansas, and that we don’t hear that there’s no place like home. With Semon, we have a film about escape, about finding a way to transcend your upbringings, that your true place might not be where you grew up.
What resonated with Semon about the book was the idea of going to a different world. He discarded the rest of the novel because the magical realm was the hook.
It was bad, it was a failure, and people have argued that the stress of this failure killed the director. But it still told you something as a separate work of art.
Everyone finds something different in a work of art. Through adaptation, we can understand more about the artist who created it.