Spectres of film adaptation : a hauntology of relational hybridity

Abstract

Jacques Derrida鈥檚 trenchant reflections on Hamlet as a Shakespearean psychic detective wrestling with his paternal phantom could be profitably appropriated to illuminate the parallel trajectory of the film adaptor contending with the spectre of ancestral authorship. Like Hamlet, in fact, the film adaptor is a haunted haunter whose aesthetic stalking of the Other transmutes him/her into a doppelg盲nger of Harold Bloom鈥檚 spectralized poet who likewise struggles to deflect influential textual wraiths from constricting his/her creativity, thereby achieving 鈥減ositive apophrades鈥� (142). Being anything but the slavish imitator of pre-structuralist adaptation theory, the film adaptor embarks on the Bloomian poet鈥檚 undertaking of compelling inspiring spirits to 鈥渞eturn in our colors, and speak 鈥� in our voices, at least in part, at least in moments鈥� (141). Nor is the film adaptor, however, the totally independent creator of poststructuralist adaptation studies. True, in fact, to what Derrida states in Ken McMullen鈥檚 1983 film Ghost Dance, that 鈥渃inema is the art of ghosts, a battle of phantoms,鈥� the filmmaker as adaptor constantly grapples with the umbilical thread that intertwines him/her with the creative undead. Adaptation is aesthetically haunted, and no eclipsing of what Robert Stam calls its 鈥渃lear point of origin鈥� (31) can exorcize every trace of its spectral genesis.