Three-Worlds Theory Chutney: Oliver Twist, Q&A and the Curious Case of Slumdog Millionaire

This concluding chapter discusses Danny Boyle’s Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire as both an adaptation of Oliver Twistand—along with Anthony Minghella’s adaptation of The English Patient (1996)—the most famous example of a postcolonial novel reabsorbed into a global imperial context. Excising Vikas Swarup’s subversive rewriting of Oliver Twist in his source text, Q&A, Boyle’s film streamlines the narrative into Hollywood genres accented with Bollywood conventions while presenting India as a nation of others, far removed from the ramifications of British imperialism and benefiting from the structures of the globalized world such as the transnational quiz show that fuels its lead’s rise from the slums. Through examinations of Swarup’s novel and Boyle’s film, this chapter demonstrates the importance of interfidelity to the adaptation process, especially as Hollywood and other national film industries operate under an ever evolving globalized business model that controls representations of postcolonial nations.

Imperial Vanities: Mira Nair, William Makepeace Thackeray and Diasporic Fidelity to Vanity Fair

Mira Nair has built her career on films that contribute to the Indian identity in diaspora and attest to the prominence of Indian filmmakers in international cinema. For a filmmaker so concerned with the relationships between American and Indian heritage, Nair’s adaptation of William Makepeace Thackeray’s 1847-1848 novel Vanity Fair (2004) appears as an outlier. However, this chapter argues that Nair’s film maintains overarching fidelity to the source text’s plot as a strategy to imbue the narrative with an Indian perspective. Nair subtly rewrites the text by eliminating the novel’s omniscient narrator and his complicity with the imperial project in favor of her own postcolonial Indian position through her use of cinematic style and the camera’s point-of-view capabilities. In asserting India’s physical presence in her adaptation, Nair also incorporates elements of Bollywood cinema into the production, including an item number dance sequence that brings Hollywood and Bollywood convention in dialogue. As a result, Nair embeds images into the narrative that directly challenge the power of the British Empire and its agents as well as Hollywood’s continuing influence over Indian cinema.

Those Other Victorians: Cosmopolitanism and Empire in Jane Campion’s The Portrait of a Lady

Jane Campion’s adaptation of Henry James’ 1881 novel The Portrait of a Lady met with mixed reception upon its release in 1996. While scholars continue to view the film in a postcolonial context, little attention has been paid to its examinations of settler colonial identity in the wake of the 1992 Mabo decision that served as the first official acknowledgement of Indigenous land rights in Australia. Hailing from New Zealand, but working in Sydney, Campion has often meditated on her own transnational settler status in films such as The Piano(1993) and Holy Smoke!(1999). As the first film Campion made afterMabo, The Portrait of a Lady engages in the process of “backtracking” through Australian history via comparative analysis of its settler colonial characters as they inherit fortunes and form family alliances throughout England and Italy. In addition, it serves as a unique example of a postcolonial adaptation of an American Victorian novel, opening a space for Campion to address the Americanization of Australia’s film industry as Hollywood productions increasingly shoot on location in the nation and Australian talent such as Nicole Kidman continue to transition to Hollywood.

Epic Multitudes: Postcolonial Genre Politics in Shekhar Kapur’s The Four Feathers

Despite its pedigree as a 2002 awards contender, Shekhar Kapur’s The Four Feathers became one of the biggest critical and box-office failures in Hollywood history. In choosing an adaptation of A. E. W. Mason’s 1902 novel to probe the legacy of colonialism, Kapur situates his political concerns within the tradition of the late-Victorian adventure fiction that was vital to maintaining the colonial project’s fundamental role in the British imagination. Yet, the novel’s six previous film adaptations also provide Kapur the opportunity to expose the pervasiveness of imperial ideologies in the wake of World War I through his critique of the Empire Cinema genre for which Zoltan Korda’s 1939 version of Mason’s novel serves as a touchstone. Kapur extends the imperial politics of Mason’s novel beyond its setting in the Sudan and into other postcolonial national contexts through subverting genre conventions and working on a Hollywood project with other diasporic artists, including Iranian screenwriter Hossein Amini, Beninian actor Djimon Hounsou, and Australian actor Heath Ledger. As a result, the adaptation interrogates the shared mechanisms of imperial discourse while comparing the totality of British rule to the global reach of Hollywood from a variety of national perspectives.

An American Kipling: Colonial Discourse, Settler Culture and the Hollywood Studio System in George Stevens’ Gunga Din

Serious scholarly attention to Gunga Din(1939) has largely been neglected as allegations of condescending and one-dimensional depictions of its Indian characters have disrupted its reputation as one of the greatest epics of the studio era.However, George Stevens’ adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s poem extends its source text’s colonial ambivalence to American anxieties stemming from the death rattle of Manifest Destiny and the traumas of the Great Depression. Seizing upon the popularity of late Victorian Empire narratives, Hollywood integrated its own ideology into a final product that was a hybrid of imperial narrative and American western. This chapter argues that the film’s loose resemblance to its source material demonstrates a fissure in the American valorization of British culture. Gunga Din completely dismantles Kipling’s poem, recreating it as an example of a uniquely American form: the seamless studio system product that led to Hollywood’s international dominance in cultural production. While the politics of the adaptation resemble textual strategies of resistance common in postcolonial texts, the film’s retention of colonial literature’s representations of its native characters addresses an America beginning to assert a distinct national culture while positioning itself as a future imperial power in the tradition of the faltering British Empire.

Conclusion

As the 2008 global recession irrevocably changed entertainment financing, films beyond blockbuster or microbudget production methods became anathema to studios. However, adaptations of Victorian literature did not die in this climate; they merely conformed to market demands whether in the form of Disney adaptations of Alice in Wonderland or a new iteration of BBC prestige drama. The last decade has seen a reduced, albeit largely well-received, series of 19th century-set stories and literature adaptations in theatres and on television, largely bolstered by the rise of streaming. Within this context, interfidelity’s holistic approach and negotiation of specific relationships between texts as well as the production and industrial contexts in which films are produced is all the more vital. In bridging a contrapuntal reading of Victorian works with recent advances in adaptation studies, interfidelity fosters a space in which fidelity is a fundamental tool in tracing the development of Empire from colonial discourse to global capital’s post-recession evolution and its effect on Hollywood production. Though best illustrated by direct application to films that share the context of those discussed in this study, interfidelity is applicable to the host of current adaptation situations that result from Victorian texts’ continuing appeal and Hollywood’s increasingly transnational make-up.

Indie Dickens: Oliver Twist as Global Orphan in Tim Greene’s Boy Called Twist

These final chapters discuss how two vastly different reworkings of Dickens’s Oliver Twist serve as distinct examples of the problems of adaptation as a method of resistance. Viewing Oliver’s marginalized status within the context of postcolonial theory highlights parallels between domestic orphans and populations colonized by the British imperial project. Turning to Tim Greene’s independently financed, internationally distributed adaptation Boy Called Twist (2004), I highlight the director’s use of orphanhood to address both the poverty and AIDS epidemic that erupted in the wake of Britain’s imperial control of the region as well as the contemporary cooption of the “global orphan” by foreign governments and non-governmental aid organizations (NGOs) that frames transnational aid discourse. Applying Dickens’s social concerns to the orphans of post-Apartheid South Africa and appropriating Dickens’ racial depictions of characters such as Fagin to represent South Africa’s black and Muslim communities, Greene’s film exposes ties between Victorian England’s domestic and imperial policies, making parallels to the contemporary dynamic occurring between industrialized countries and developing nations.

Gentlemanly Gazes: Charles Dickens, Alfonso Cuarón and the Transnational Gulf in Great Expectations

Mexican filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón has remained preoccupied with questions of how globalization shapes identity from his art-house success Y Tu Mamá También(2002) to his Hollywood-financed films Children of Men(2006) and Gravity(2013). Perhaps the most overlooked project in Cuarón’s filmography is his 1998 adaptation of Great Expectations, which shifts the narrative to the Gulf Coast and New York City in the 20th century. Though failing to connect with critics and audiences upon its release, the film’s renegotiation of the imperial centre and focus on a setting once colonized by Spain makes the adaptation a cogent commentary on immigration and class mobility within a globalized United States. By paring down the narrative to focus on Pip and Estella’s romantic and sexual liaisons, Cuarón exposes how the waning Empire embodied by Ms. Havisham (now Dinsmoor) uses the young people’s emotions and sexuality to further its agency. Employing the camera’s seemingly objective gaze to dilute Pip’s first-person narration, Cuarón depicts his protagonist as a powerless spectator in the world around him whose status and sexuality are defined by Empire’s authority.1010

‘He Is Not Here by Accident’: Transit, Sin and the Model Settler in Patrick Lussier’s Dracula 2000

This chapter examines Dracula 2000 as both a resistant text of settler colonial identity and an example of Hollywood’s influence on the Canadian film industry. Seen by Miramax cofounder Bob Weinstein as a potential franchise successor to the recently completed Scream trilogy, the film reunited much of that earlier franchise’s creative team with horror legend Wes Craven assuming the role of producer and passing directorial reigns to longtime Dimension editor and Canadian filmmaker Patrick Lussier. Focusing on a Dracula who is revealed to be an undead Judas Iscariot and a Van Helsing sustained through the 20th Century by injections of Dracula’s blood, the film engages with a poststructuralist cycle of the settler/subject/colonial dynamic. Likewise, the film’s relocation from the imperial centre of London to New Orleans not only positions America as a contemporary imperial power but also harkens back to the port city’s legacy as a hub for slavery and global trade during Stoker’s time. Shot primarily on Canadian sound stages that doubled for London and New Orleans, Dracula 2000 also embodies contemporary production politics in which Hollywood’s relationship to settler nations such as Canada provides economic support for national cinemas while still dominating domestic box office.

Introduction

This introduction discusses trends in late 20th and early 21st century cinema that have opened a space for international directors to extend the postcolonial critiques of their native national cinemas to an international scale. Increasingly, filmmakers from postcolonial nations have opted to undertake film adaptations of British literature, frequently choosing the Victorian literature of Britain’s imperial century as their source texts as a way to integrate the perspectives of their homelands into works that stereotype or ignore the presence of the colonized. Through tracing the evolution of adaptation theory over the past decade, this overview highlights the need for a hybrid adaptation model that takes into account the increasingly globalized nature of Hollywood and postcolonial adaptation. Introducing the interfidelity approach to adaptation, I examine how it attempts to bridge the field’s rich history of criticism with a politically relevant analysis informed by postcolonial theory. Applying this approach to Peter Jackson’s 2005 remake of King Kong, I consider the film as a rewriting of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and the 1933 original King Kong that negotiates a Kiwi settler colonial identity built on Victorian colonialism and contending with Hollywood’s global scope.