The overlap between the formal narrative properties of the novel and the formal narrative properties of the cinema makes film adaptations of novels possible. According to The Film Encyclopedia, an adaptation is:

This definition is as good as any to be found in any number of discussions of film theory. Yet although they share some narrative capabilities, the differences in the formal properties of the novel and the formal properties of the cinema make film adaptations of novels difficult. Adaptation is not mechanics. A vector of X in the novel may or may not be able to be represented by a vector of X in a film, and a vector of Y in the novel may or may not produce a vector of Y in a film. Neither is adaptation mathematics. There is no formula that prescribes how a film-maker must precisely translate a word, a paragraph, a chapter, an idea, a description, or any of the constituent parts of a novel into a corresponding constituent element of film that expresses precisely the same thing. No function maps novel onto film, hence the frequent failures mentioned by Katz. But there is nonetheless no logical or physical law that prevents successful film adaptations of novels.

This study seeks to analyze and compare the differences in the ways that alienation and responses to alienation are depicted in films and in the novels upon which those films are based. Discourses on film adaptation generally treat the novel as privileged and the film as derivative, thus judging the film on the basis of how truthful it remains to the literal text, to the "spirit" of the text, or to both, as Christopher Orr has suggested (Orr, p. 72). Bluestone says much the same thing. But both Orr and Bluestone suggest that adaptation criticism that focuses strictly on the fidelity of the filmed adaptation to the source novel limits the usefulness of adaptation criticism because of the differences between the mechanisms by which novel and film create narrative meaning. In other words, most critical analyses of film adaptations ask and answer the wrong questions. Thus, the critical study of film adaptations requires a new methodology.

In the introduction to this study, I proposed to write a comparative study of the expression of alienation as a theme in four source novels and in the four films that have been adapted from them, not wanting to demonstrate which is better than the other, not necessarily wanting to judge how successful the films are in portraying the alienation that the novels portray, that is, how truthful the adaptations are to the original. I proposed rather to examine the image and concept of alienation in the source—the novel—and compare those to the image and concept of alienation in the receiving factor—the film—much as a comparatist might study the influence of a genre in one body of literature on that genre in another body of literature. By limiting the discussion to that single characteristic, the portrayal of alienation, I hoped to simplify the study of adaptation in an attempt to look for a more useful form of adaptation criticism. Applying the simplest of binary metrics, that is, asking whether the alienation in the source appears in the receiving factor and answering "yes" or "no," all four films are successful because all four portray alienation. Yet, I have judged Swann in Love to be stunningly unsuccessful, Under the Volcano to be a valiant failure but nonetheless unsuccessful, and only Death In Venice and Last Exit to Brooklyn to be successful. If all four films portray alienation but if two of the films are unsuccessful adaptations, success or failure must be the result of more factors than simply whether the theme of alienation is expressed or not, must be the result of more factors than simply whether the adaptation faithfully reproduces the letter and the spirit of the novel faithfully. The difficulty in refining adaptation criticism is in discovering what constitutes those additional factors. The process of that discovery depends first upon a close reading of both the novels and the films.

Thomas Mann’s novella Death in Venice depicts Gustave von Aschenbach’s journey towards inevitable death, directed by a series of grotesques—the traveler in the cemetery, the ticket salesman, the aged homosexual dandy on the steamer, the gondolier, the various functionaries at the hotel and the train station. The grotesques provide a counterpoint to Aschenbach. We see how he is alienated partly through his difference from and his response to them. But Death in Venice is also the story of a man so intent upon creating and maintaining an inauthentic self that he ignores the needs of his authentic self. Aschenbach has crushed the life and the joy of living out of himself so completely that he no longer knows how to respond to beauty and his attraction to it. He may or may not be a latent homosexual; whether he is or is not is not irrelevant, but it is not nearly as important as the fact that he responds to the beauty of young Tadzio inappropriately. Perhaps it is because Aschenbach has lived his entire life in the pursuit of the rewards that come from holding fast (durchhalten) and now can do nothing but hold fast to his obsession with Tadzio despite the danger to Aschenbach’s own health. Perhaps it is because he has been cut off from humanity so long and so completely that in reaching out in spite of his severe alienation he tries too hard and so becomes obsessed with Tadzio to the point that he fails to pay attention to himself. In either case, it is both his alienation and his obsession that ultimately kill him.

Mann’s novella depicts Aschenbach’s alienation via careful description and carefully chosen words. Mann’s use of words changes with Aschenbach’s growing obsession with Tadzio. Visconti’s film does what Mann cannot do; it shows Aschenbach’s growing obsession with Tadzio by assigning a particular ownership of visual point of view in the film to Aschenbach, and then it inviting us to identify with Aschenbach and to share that point of view. Moreover, Visconti, the aging homosexual director, provides the visual beauty in the selection of Bjorn Andresen to play Tadzio, and the film as guided by Visconti rejoices in the boy’s perfect, youthful beauty in a visually, intellectually, culturally, and sexually sophisticated way. The film shows whereas the novella suggests, and these differences are not only the result of there being 60 years between the novella and the film, although certainly the sexual liberation that became evident as a social force in the 1960s helped to make the subject matter that perhaps includes latent homosexuality more acceptable, more likely to get financed. The differences are Visconti's means of making the film "become something else," in Bluestone’s terminology, when it changes the novella’s dependence on words for the film’s dependence on the visual. In showing us Aschenbach, the film visually separates him from the people around him. He does not exist in the same world as that of the people moving around him. And in showing us Tadzio, Visconti also invites us to participate in the visual worship of the beautiful, slightly erotic boy. Even in the logic of the novella, it is Tadzio’s appearance, his visual aspects that first attract Aschenbach. The film merely emphasizes and expands upon that visual element from the novella. In showing us Tadzio, the film allows us to experience as well what Aschenbach might have felt. It is unlikely that any of us has lived our lives precisely as Aschenbach has, and so we will not likely think precisely the same thoughts that he does, that is, even though we are not likely alienated or at least not likely alienated in the same way that Aschenbach is, we are invited to become obsessed with beauty. The Alienation is visual, the Obsessions visual.

So Visconti chooses to let the visual nature of film dominate his telling of Aschenbach’s story. The image and concept of the source factor was the long internal discussions that Aschenbach has with himself in responding to Tadzio’s beauty, the image and concept of the receiving factor the visual appeal of Bjorn Andresen, the seduction into sharing Aschenbach’s point of view and with it the increasing appreciation of the object of his desire. The mutation of the novella into the film is successful inasmuch as the story, to use Genette’s term, remains the same though the narrating has changed.

On the other hand, Volker Schlondorff’s film version of Marcel Proust’s Swann in Love, although also the story of alienation and obsession, is far less successful than Visconti’s version of Death in Venice. There are perhaps several possible reasons for the film’s lack of success. The novel, after all, is a small part of an immense roman fleuve, and excising the small part from the whole perhaps diminishes the impact of the part, in spite of Schlondorff’s reassurances to the contrary. Proust’s novel has the benefit of extraordinary length to reiterate the themes of alienation, obsession, and involuntary memory thousands of times, whereas the film of not quite two hours does not have that abundance of opportunities thus to repeat themes.

But there is likely a simpler reason that the film version of Swann in Love is less successful than the film version of Death in Venice. Although Schlondorff’s film recreates a historical time and place with admirable accuracy and is thus beautiful to see, it does not develop a visual plan that portrays Swann as alienated from his fellow human beings, a visual plan that depends on identification with the protagonist and his visual experiences to demonstrate his obsession, nor does it try to provide a cinematic equivalent to Proust’s writing style. Nor does it seek to take advantage of any of the other inherent formal qualities of film. Rather, it relies upon the performance of the actor (Jeremy Irons) to demonstrate Swann’s psychological state, and the effort is unsuccessful. Proust’s novel is a psychological novel, and there are methods in which psychology can be depicted on the screen as evidenced by Visconti’s Death in Venice and other films, but the methods used in the Schlondorff film are not among them. It fails because it does not try to become something other than what the novel is.

Schlondorff tries to take advantage of the visual and plastic dimensions that acting brings to cinematic adaptations of novels. That is, a film can attempt to recreate the places and the events that occur in a novel reasonably well. Physical description in novels can be translated into physical realities on screen with relative ease, given enough creativity, time, and budget. Film can even provide actors portraying the characters in a novel, can have those actors say the same words and move through the same actions as those words and actions are recorded in the novel. But the one advantage that film portrayals of the characters have and that the source novels lack is that the actors bring their talents and skills as interpretive artists, the physicality and expressiveness of their bodies and especially their faces, as well as their life experiences and sense memories to the role of the character. In this case, it is Schlondorff’s apparent hope that Jeremy Irons can somehow express, portray, or connote alienation and obsession without relying on specific words, thoughts, or actions taken from the novel to express, portray, or connote that alienation and obsession. But how does an actor "act" alienated? Without the help of a strong denotative script, a visual plan, strong directing, or creative editing, Irons is incapable of portraying either alienation or obsession. True, he has one scene in which he thrashes about with his walking stick at flowers along the sidewalk during his search for Odette, berating himself for his contradictory feelings for Odette. He has another scene in which he peremptorily attacks what he believes is her home, and another (discussed in some detail in Chapter 3) in which he visually becomes the object of his own obsession as a result of some mild directorial and editing cleverness, but these are literal scenes, unsubtle, included in the film solely for the purpose of moving the story along, not for the purpose of exploring to any extent the alienated and obsessive nature of Swann’s psyche. Perhaps these sorts of scenes, repeated in a longer film, would serve that purpose and would not need to bear the burden of carrying the narrative forward, but would slowly peel away the layers of Swann’s character and explore him in a manner similar to that in which Proust dissects him.

Moreover, one of the great purposes and achievements of Proust’s novel is its fluid approach to time, yet the flashbacks in the film are poor substitutes. Schlondorff’s film of Swann in Love is not bad film, but neither is it a good film. It is at best a mediocre abridged version of an outline of the action rather than an exploration in cinematic language of the meaning and importance of the novel. Although alienation is portrayed in the film, the film is a failed adaptation. Although the formal qualities of novels and films overlap, Schlondorff has found no way to take advantage of that intersection in portraying Swann’s alienation and obsession.

John Huston’s film version Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano suffers from a similar problem. It tries to reduce the complexity of Malcolm Lowry’s novel to the simple story of a drunk whose alienation is portrayed by his rejection of the world around him, most immediately represented by his wife and his brother. Yet the novel is layered with references to other works of literature, to films, to historical people and political events, to myth and ritual, to buildings, cities, towns, villages, and natural features, especially the two volcanoes, Poppocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl, and the ravines. These layers of interwoven complexity add significance and depth to the novel. Most notably the novel uses the furious mix of this tangled mesh of complexity to convey the notion that all of them together—history, politics and political intrigue, literary recapitulation and homage, journey, myth and ritual, autobiography, and sexual inadequacy and infidelity—bear down upon the Consul more than the sum of each, causing his alienation from his wife, his brother, his friends, and from life in general, and cause his alienation from himself and any notion of redemption by causing his obsession with alcohol and self-destructive behavior. The concept and image of alienation in the source novel is not just the sum of all these influences on the sensitive soul of the Consul but also the extra weight of the countless ways in which these influences combine and interact. Little if any of this combined weight makes the transition to become the concept and image of alienation in the film. The concept and image of obsession in the novel is portrayed by the Consul’s alcoholism, his desire to reconcile and reunite with Yvonne, his ruminations about himself, his life, and how he has made a botch of them both, and his determination to get to El Farolito, the Little Lighthouse, the cantina in Parian. Some of this obsession makes its way into the film. We are impressed with his prodigious drinking, and we are touched by his sensitivity as shown by his genuine but flawed attempts to reconcile with his wife.

Perhaps because of the difficulty in layering so much complexity into the film, perhaps because of the tight budget and shooting schedule for the film, perhaps because of Huston’s predilection for straight, direct plots, the film does not attempt to portray these layers of complexity. Thus the concept and image of alienation in the novel becomes a hole in the film, for we are not entirely sure why the Consul of the film is alienated. Without that understanding of why he has become who he has become, we have no appreciation of the Consul as a sensitive everyman who, burdened with the weight of the history of the world and the history of his life, forcibly shuts himself off from that world. The concept and image of obsession in the novel is similarly portrayed in the film only by a shadow of the original. What remains in Huston’s film is the story of a drunk and his struggle with himself and the world around him that terrifies him, a world in which he does not want to participate. Unfortunately, we do not know why the world terrifies him nor why he chooses not to participate in it. As an attempt to portray the entirety of the novel, the film is a failure, but as a portrayal of one man’s alienation, which he seeks to attenuate through drink and which ultimately leads him to alcoholism and self-destruction, the film does a reasonably good job. A great deal of the credit for this goes to Albert Finney for his stunningly good performance of a man at odds with the world who responds to his anguish with the flight of alcohol. Thus, except for drawing an extraordinary performance out of Finney, Huston makes little if any attempt at using the inherent qualities of cinema to portray the alienation and obsession that Lowry portrays via the inherent qualities of the novel. Yet, without those extra dimensions, especially the political, historical, and personal, the film does not even begin to portray the Consul as the cosmos that Stephen Spender suggests he is.

Hubert Selby, Jr., makes no attempt to create a cosmos in the characters that he describes in Last Exit to Brooklyn. These characters are specific people with specific problems and situations found in the hard-scrabble hand-me-down working class neighborhoods that leave them alienated from themselves and from the world around them. The novel gives us the sense that there are many others like them in their neighborhood, but they are unique, nonetheless. In adapting their stories to the screen, director Uli Edel and screenwriter Desmond Nakano take some liberties with the novel, but mostly succeed by portraying the ugly, naturalistic, violent, repressed people in the film much the same as they are portrayed in the novel.

Selby uses language, especially the vulgarities and slang of the neighborhood, and a stream-of-consciousness style to depict the violent and the shocking nature of the way that they live, to portray the limitations in their lives. These limitations are partly a metaphor for and partly the result of the limitations prescribed by the neighborhood in which they live. We get no sense that the characters in the novel will ever successfully escape the neighborhood and the lifestyle that define them. The concept and image, then, of alienation in the source novel is the result of the vulgar dialect that the characters speak and the typography that Selby uses to record it, the violence in their relationships with other people, their pointless flailing against the social and economic strictures that confine them, and their outre sexuality. Edel and Nakano successfully represent most of this alienation in the film. The vulgar language of the characters in the film comes directly from the novel, as does the violence, the crime, and the portrayal of drug use, homosexuality, and prostitution. Moreover, Edel and his cinematographer Stefan Czapsky have created a visual plan that emphasizes the grimy darkness, the limitations, and the sense of inescapability of the neighborhood that not only defines but constrains the characters. Edel also takes advantage of the ability of actors to portray alienation and obsession more than any of the other directors examined in this study. The alienation is shared among many characters, giving it a weight that it does not have in the other portrayals of alienation. Although Visconti’s direction of Bogarde as Aschenbach is more refined and delicate, the characters in Selby’s novel are the opposite of refined and delicate, making Edel’s coarse naturalistic directorial decisions logical. The novel and the film both focus on the obsession of Harry Black for his homosexual companions, of Tralala for rampant and vulgar sexual encounters, and of Georgette for drugs and sexual thrills. All of these are portrayed as outlets for frustration and alienation caused by the dismal surroundings and limited options that cause the characters’ alienation.

It might be the case that filmed adaptations must be judged on two questions, that is, on how successful they are as stand-alone films as well as how successful they are as adaptations. Having to face these two critical hurdles rather than only one may help explain why some adaptations "work" and some do not. As an adaptation, Swann in Love is a disaster, and as a film qua film, it is unremarkable and almost boring. Yet, Under the Volcano, though a failure as an adaptation has merit as a standalone film. Why the difference? In this specific case, the difference is likely due to the difference in casting choices and directorial style. Schlondorff has chosen to put most of the burden of portraying the "story" of Swann's love on Jeremy Irons, who seems incapable of handling the task. Moreover, Schlondorff has pared down the narrative to the point that there is almost no "story" for Irons to depict. Although Huston has similarly limited the scope of his version of Under the Volcano, he has chosen to emphasize the Consul's alcoholism, the one burden that the Consul bears that is suitable for portrayal in a film of limited length, and Huston has chosen to have that burden born by Albert Finney, an actor whose skills are considerably broader and more mature than those of Jeremy Irons. On the other hand, both Death in Venice and Last Exit to Brooklyn are successful as stand-alone films. It is not necessary to be familiar with the source for a viewer to understand and appreciate the film. This success might help explain why they are considered successful adaptations.

Thus, some of the adaptations are successful, some not. Yet, in seeking to find a new methodology and new language for adaptation criticism, I have been unsuccessful. I have found myself using broad and imprecise terms such as cinematic equivalent, visual equivalent, visual plan, and the like. This methodology and language have allowed me to posit success or failure in adaptation, but not to explain on any deeper level why the adaptation is a success or a failure. But this failure is mine, not the fault of the adaptations. I am still looking for a critical theory with its own appropriate methodology and language to analyze film adaptations of novels. Although Orr and Bluestone suggest that such a theory exists, they, too, have been unsuccessful in finding it.

Pushing the limits of film theory and film practice is often met with such resistance. For example, after having defined what he believes to be the intrinsic formal qualities of the cinema, Siegfried Kracauer insists that "the novel, then, is not a cinematic literary form. This conclusion immediately brings into focus the issue of adaptations, an issue so complex that there is no purpose in discussing every facet of it" (Kracauer, p. 239). Perhaps, but Kracauer is a bit disingenuous with his tautological manipulations and definitions. Kracauer reasonably suggests that the issue of film adaptations of novels is complex, and his assertion that it is difficult to discuss all aspects thereof is also reasonable, but in doing so he begs the question of why there are so many counter-examples to his assertion that the novel is not a cinematic literary form.

Moreover, Kracauer insists that

Thus, Kracauer and other theoreticians see little hope for the adaptation of a novel into a film in spite of their overlapping formal characteristics. Yet this resistance ignores the reality that novels are regularly adapted into films. As such, other scholars are not so negative. Horton and Magretta recognize both points of view when they propose that

I agree. If we are going to investigate what film can do, I believe that we learn more by looking at both the successful and the less successful cases and by learning from each than by looking solely at the obvious failures. Starting with the premise that novels cannot be adapted into films ensures that the subsequent discussion will support the tautological conclusion that novels cannot be adapted into films.

Genette’s division of the parts of a literary event into story, narrative, and narrating imply that the story exists as separate from the means by which that story is told, by which the narrating creates a narrative. Robert Scholes says much the same thing when he writes:

Here, though, Scholes uses narrative to mean what Genette calls story, method of narration for narrative, and narrative utterance for narrating.

Thus this study suggests that two of the adaptations examined here are successful and two unsuccessful in bringing to the screen the alienation and obsession that are central to the novels. Both successful adaptations, Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice and Uli Edel’s Last Exit to Brooklyn, are successful at least in part because their makers have found a way to express that alienation by means of the inherent nature of film. Both successful adaptations, moreover, are good films as films and not just as adaptations. Both draw the viewer into the interior worlds of the protagonists as well as depict the outer world of things and people that surround them.

On the other hand, both unsuccessful adaptations, John Huston’s Under the Volcano and Volker Schlondorff’s Swann in Love, bear the burden of their makers having made the mistake of ignoring the demands of the source novel and of not attempting to find inherently cinematic means for portraying those demands. Of the two unsuccessful adaptations, however, Under the Volcano is by far the better film than Swann in Love, not because it does a better job of adapting its source novel, but because it has a strong, logical, central story line that makes the film at least watchable and the characters interesting, and because Albert Finney’s characterization of Geoffrey Firmin is more successful at portraying Firmin’s inner torments than is Jeremy Irons’s characterization of Charles Swann. Thus Finney is more successful at using his actors skills to portray alienation and obsession than is Irons, and in at least this one inherently cinematic quality—that is, acting—that has no equivalent in the novel, Under the Volcano is the better adaptation, but it, too, is a failure when judged as a whole, when judged on how well it adapts the novel in its entirety to the screen.

Most previous studies of filmed adaptations of novels have been lists of adaptation successes and failures. In general, to prove that filmed adaptations of novels are successful, scholars have been able to make lists of such successes and point hopefully to the possibilities those films provide, as Horton and Magretta do: "If film adaptation at first produced ‘filmed literature’ that was commercially important but aesthetically uninteresting, it has become, as the essays in this volume attest, a lively and creative art" (Horton and Magretta, p. 3). On the other hand, to prove that filmed adaptations are unsuccessful, a far larger crowd of scholars makes lists of failures and on the basis of these carefully chosen failures ridicule the notion that novels can be adapted into films. What these collective strategies prove, however, is not that film adaptations are impossible, but rather that some adaptations are successful and some are not, and if some are successful, then filmed adaptations of novels are possible. The possibility of making the transition from novel to film lies in the artistic abilities of the screenwriter, the director, the cinematographer, the scenic designer, and the actors. As Vlada Petric writes, "By discovering the ‘creative road’ through which the author ‘traveled’ in making his film, the analyst becomes capable of defining the cinematic strategy by which a film is conceived and realized" (Petric, Vlada. "A Close Cinematic Analysis" in Quarterly Review of Film Studies, Nov. 1976, quoted by Horton and Magretta, p. 2.) Unfortunately, the positing of a "creative road" and the possibility of discovering it are no more useful than the imprecise language and critical methodology that I have proposed. Adaptation criticism is still waiting for someone to define them.

In a sense, writing a novel about a character is an act of ultimate alienation because that character is separated from the rest of humanity, treated differently by the writer, wrapped up and delivered to us, different from all the other people in the world, from all the other possible characters because the writer has made the effort to treat them as different by writing about them. Film can do this, too, visually as well as through cinematic representation of the words, actions, and descriptions in the source novel. After all, both films and novels are metaphors, long and complex metaphors, but metaphors nonetheless.

As for alienation as a topic or theme, neither the novel nor the cinema can claim to be superior to the other in the ability to portray that alienation. Each can be successful in its own way, and in at least the direction of travel from novel to film, it is possible for the alienation in a novel to be adequately represented in a filmed adaptation of that novel. If we are looking for a theory of film adaptations of novels that covers all novels and all film adaptations, then we are looking for the wrong thing. There is no alchemist’s elixir, no secret incantation that we can find that will allow us magically to transmute novels into films. There is likely no Grand Unified Theory for novels and films, not yet anyway. However, there might be cases covered by Special Relativity or more likely, cases covered by one of many Special Relativities that demonstrate that some novels can sometimes be successfully adapted into some films. This discovery is not a failure. It proves that literature is not mechanics, not mathematics, but we already knew that truism. Because there is no such formula, the fact that we can discover none is reassuring rather than disappointing. Nonetheless, there is no reason that moving words cannot be transformed into moving pictures.