‘I saw his wings’: Adaptation, fidelity and the question of angels in Walter Salles’s On the Road (2012)

Abstract

Fidelity is a controversial topic within adaptation studies, but one which continues to underscore analysis of film texts adapted from literature. The complex issues fidelity raises are again highlighted by the 2012 adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s 1957 novel On the Road by director Walter Salles. The film was praised by many for its authentic rendering of Kerouac’s novel. Others critiqued the adaptation, but still employed the framework of fidelity as the criterion by which the film was assessed. In this article, it is argued that Salles’s adaptation omitted elements that feature prominently within Kerouac’s text, namely the representation of the two central characters as angels. In advancing this argument, the intention is not to censure the film adaptation, but instead to highlight how the issue of the angel trope illustrates the imprecise nature of the concept of fidelity. The fact that Salles’s film was able to omit Kerouac’s angels and still be considered faithful to the source material indicates that frameworks of fidelity can be incomplete and open to interpretation. Yet at the same time, we cannot conduct such a discussion without employing fidelity as a framework. Thus, the concept remains useful when analysing adaptations from literature to film.