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Jean Baudrillard begins his Simulacra and Simulations by invoking Borges's fable of the map that was so accurate it had a one to one ratio with the territory it represented. We understand when we look at a referent - a map, say, that it is not the territory itself. However, if the referent, the signifier, simulates the sign rather than invoking it, the former can no longer reasonably be asserted to be merely a representation of the later. Baudrillard argues that because the sign and signifier are made indistinguishable, when this process of simulation occurs in society, in every realm from politics to television, history to nuclear armament, "the territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory - precession of simuhcra - that engenders the territory" (1).
Within the scope of Baudrillard's work, an adaptation may be viewed as the simulation - the map - which describes and defines the real physical boundaries of a place that was formerly a fictional abstraction. Sherlock Holmes is a particularly suitable candidate for pairing with Baudrillard's notion of simulacra. In the case of Holmes, from the visual map of on-screen depictions of his residence at 221b Baker Street, an actual flat has been established and claims to be the original; despite coming later, it claims to be the sign of which the map, the films, are signifiers. This is a clear example of Baudrillard's reversal.
This model of approaching adaptation studies is useful because it allows us to address adaptation as a process of mediation. Rather than focusing on an adaptation as a product, it becomes a method for charting the concretization of a source text, with its infinity of imagination-based authence interpretations, into the considerably more monolithic notion of that text that exists within the collective consciousness of the authence. More simply, adaptation becomes the means for decoding the process by which our myriad understandings of a text are narrowed into a single uniform vision. In decoding this process, adaptation becomes the means of undermining it, staving off the cultural collapse that Baudrillard insists is the inevitable result of the establishment of postmodern hyperrealism.
Baudrillard himself spends much time discussing cinema. In particular he accuses...