The Anti-Adaptation: Unfaithful Hollywood and Postmodern Irony

Sometime in the late twentieth century, irony became a dominant cultural mode, perhaps because modern audiences are savvy, knowing, even detached—conscious that movies are just moving images and values are just cultural constructs. In this class, we’ll look at a strange species of irony-tinged Hollywood cinema: novel adaptations that intentionally distort their source material to formulate an ironic critique of its underlying presumptions. Starting with Robert Aldrich’s searing between-the-lines critique of the ‘50s playboy persona in his adaptation of the crass Mike Hammer novel Kiss Me Deadly (1955), we’ll move on to Douglas Sirk smuggling queer subtext and kitschy stylization into the wealth-and-impotence melodrama of Written on the Wind (1956). We’ll ask: Why does this kind of irony seem to become more common in the 1950s--is this the birth of postmodern culture? Do such films function effectively as critique, or do they simply generate cultural capital for those “in the know”? What is gained and what is lost when the spectator is asked to occupy contradictory positions in relation to the text? From there we’ll work our way forward in time toward the crown jewel of bad-faith adaptations—Paul Verhoeven’s transformation of Robert Heinlein’s militaristic novel.