High Fidelity: Adapting Fantasy to the Small Screen

Abstract

In an article in The Atlantic, Alyssa Rosenberg compares HBO series Game of Thrones to True Blood in an attempt to pinpoint the ways in which the first succeeds where the older series fails. In the end, the author determines that it all comes down to fidelity: Alan Ball’s show has added to the cast and the themes without building a convincing world for them to people, while Game of Thrones has remained true to the George R.R. Martin novel from which it draws its name, streamlining and adding to the characterization, rather than the character list. Of course the fact that fidelity is the core issue argued here is ironic for several reasons: not only is it at odds with everything that adaptation theory has argued for decades, but historically filmmakers originally turned to less “high literature” source texts in order to avoid the necessity to be faithful to a text made sacred by the canon, thus spawning some of the more successful if less faithful noir films. Beyond this, Ball himself has argued against fidelity, insisting that as the novel is in the first person, he has to tell everyone’s story, and that he wants readers of the original Charlaine Harris novels to be surprised. As such, I would like to examine the way that each approaches this specific issue of echoes of the source text in the finished product. Ultimately, I will argue that True Blood seeks to increase the echo, by creating a constant distance not only from its source text but also from its characters and the events its recounts. After all, True Blood recounts a world much like our own, that just so happens to be populated by supernatural creatures – by creating various defamiliarizing elements (including invented episodes, but also comic or outrageous effects to distance the viewer from the characters’ emotions), the show creators force us to pull back from the story and consider its implications. Game of Thrones, on the contrary, wants to pull the reader in, minimizing this “echo”: when creating a world more typical of the fantasy genre, with religions, languages, and political hierarchies that are familiar to the characters but not the viewer, a distancing effect would be disastrous to the suspension of disbelief necessary to enter these new worlds.I will also argue that the “source text” is not singular in either case – the two series adapt not just a novel or series of novels, but a tradition. True Blood cannot be studied separately from the long tradition of vampire texts equating vampirism with sexuality, and certainly is set up in echo (and contrast) to the more recent phenomenon of teenage vampire romances, where the “messy” aspects of sex (and its inevitable moral and political ramifications) become manifest in the death and gore characteristic of the series. Likewise, Game of Thrones clearly harkens back to that founding text of the fantasy genre, The Lord of the Rings (as well as its film adaptation), and replaces Tolkien’s nostalgia with a voluntarily “gritty” realism, where rape, murder, corruption and general injustice makes it an echo of our own imperfect society. As such, we can argue that though the two series take very different approaches to the idea of fidelity, their end goal seems to be similar: they seek to heighten the viewer’s awareness of the political ramifications of these fantasy worlds, and so acknowledge the echoes to be found in the world outside the television screen.