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In the field of adaptation studies, much critical energy has been expended in the name of fidelity in order to judge the supposed 'faithfulness' of the adapted text to its source. In this essay, I seek to trouble this methodology by offering a more dialogic approach, one in which literary and cinematic works are reconceived as textual engines generating and circulating affect, and the adaptive process is conceptualized as a generative drifting of those intensities from one medium to another. I examine Susanna Moore's 1995 novel In the Cut and Jane Campion's 2003 filmic adaptation of the same name not with an eye toward commonalities and divergences in storyline or character motivations, but rather with a focus on the affective forces fostered by Moore's text and the ways they are tapped into by Campion's adaptation. In particular, I shall illustrate how Moore's novel is a carefully calibrated exercise in discomfort and dread, a work formally configured to unsettle readers through the continual invocation and subversion of noir tropes and expectations. I then examine how the equally self-reflexive and intertextual aesthetic employed by Campion is able to redirect the affects generated by Moore's prose in the passage from page to screen. In the process, I intend to demonstrate how each text sets up a unique dialogue with and deconstruction of prior styles and genres within the terms of its own medium, so that both function as critical meditations on the seemingly fragmented nature of postmodern identity. By engaging with these two works in this manner, I hope to model a more fluid and flexible strategy for analyzing cinematic adaptations of literary precursors. This strategy is less concerned with offering judgment than with contemplating what is productive and revealing about the adaptive process, and should therefore hold promise for the constructive explication of more overtly and self-consciously 'unfaithful' film adaptations.
Modernism, Postmodernism, and "Noir Vision"
In her New York Times review of Susanna Moore's In the Cut, Michiko Kakutani described the novel as a "noir thriller," and she was far from being the only reviewer to employ this terminology (1995). In light of such critical accord, it is worth considering for a moment what exactly reviewers mean when they characterize a work as 'noir,' and why they...