Beyond adaptation: mirrors, memory and melodrama in Todd Haynes's Mildred Pierce

Abstract

Todd Haynes's Mildred Pierce (HBO, 2011) triggered a media hullabaloo about the relationship between his miniseries, the 1945 film and James M. Cain's 1941 novel, bringing renewed notoriety to one of film culture's enduring heroines.1 Viewers were urged to forget Michael Curtiz's noir classic and appreciate Haynes's respect for the melodrama at the heart of the book.2 Despite Haynes's insistence that the miniseries was not a remake of the film but an adaptation of the novel, it seems he found it difficult to erase the film from his mind: in interviews he recalled seeing the Joan Crawford vehicle as a student on a feminist film theory course at Brown University in the 1980s.3 Haynes's personal recollections played an important role in promoting the miniseries and in stamping it with his authorship, encouraging viewers to experience his version as a complex work that involved them in the activity of remembrance. Cain's story of a single mother who becomes a successful businesswoman during the Depression, only to lose everything because of her passion for her wayward daughter, has a powerful appeal across time.4 While every retelling is rooted in its social and cultural context, each one, like myth, reaches beyond that particular moment. As maternal melodrama Mildred Pierce recalls the Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone, in which Demeter attempts to retrieve her abducted daughter from Hades, obsessively pursuing her into the Underworld. I was interested in this mythic dimension when I wrote ‘Duplicity in Mildred Pierce’ for Ann Kaplan's 1978 anthology Women in Film Noir.5 The Demetrian matriarchal myth presented a challenge to film theory's focus on the Oedipus legend as the foundation of patriarchy. Since 1978 the Warner Bros. production, now a film studies classic, has inspired considerable scholarship, and Haynes's Mildred Pierce is set to do the same. Critics generally agree that he accurately reproduced the novel, a consensus that has been influential in determining how the miniseries is perceived.6 Television's serial form is suited to literary adaptation, and the miniseries follows the novel meticulously, to the extent of replicating certain passages. However, a closer look reveals that Haynes has produced something more than a faithful adaptation in homage to the literary source. His version intersects with an intertextual field in which different kinds of creative activity combine to produce a multidimensional cultural event that has no single origin.