“there is some shit I will not eat”: Indignation in <em>Indignation</em> and its Film Adaptation

Abstract

James Schamus's 2016 film adaptation of Philip Roth's 2008 novel Indignation stands out among adaptations of Roth novels in that it is actually a good film. Goodbye, Columbus, Portnoy's Complaint, American Pastoral, The Human Stain, The Dying Animal, and The Humbling have all made it to screen, and while some adaptations have been better than others, none has exactly set world alight. Schamus's film, by contrast, received almost unanimous critical praise. The actors, led by relative newcomers Logan Lerman and Sarah Gadon, put in strong performances, direction is assured, and script, written by Schamus, manages to keep much of Roth's distinctive dialogue. As previous sentence makes clear, I am no film critic. And so what follows is not a review or critique of film, but rather a look at how film's sense of Marcus Messner's story differs from Roth's novel, and how those differences might illuminate our understanding of both book and movie.Robert Stam, in his essay Beyond Fidelity, argues that when we ask if a cinematic adaptation is faithful to its literary source, we fall into a black hole of further, unanswerable questions:Fidelity to what? Is filmmaker to be faithful to plot in its every detail? [. . .] Should one be faithful to physical descriptions of characters? [. . .] Or is one to be faithful to author's intentions? But what might they be, and how are they to be inferred? [. . .] Or is adapter-filmmaker to be true to style of a work? To its narrative point of view? Or to its artistic devices? (57-58)The problem is not just that there's no there there-that there is no reading of source text to be faithful to-but that it is unclear what a faithful adaptation in a different medium would look like. How can a story told with images, sound, actors, and special effects be same as one told only with words? And if it's inevitably different, how different can it be and still be faithful?Among other possibilities, Stam suggests translation, rather than fidelity, as a more appropriate trope to describe adaptation. He writes, the trope of adaptation as suggests a principled effort of intersemiotic transposition, with inevitable losses and gains typical of any translation (62). This strikes me as an accurate description of what most adapters are up to when they undertake what we might call a mainstream Hollywood adaptation: I'm going to do my best to translate this novel to screen, but I understand that final product is going to end up a different animal.But when discussing Schamus's adaptation of Roth's Indignation as a translation, it's worth keeping in mind distinction between two kinds of translating he must undertake. The from one medium (a book) to another (a film) can be discussed separately from from one genre (a literary novel) to another (a Hollywood movie). Not all possibilities of books are available to every genre of book; likewise, Hollywood movies have conventions that restrict filmmakers above and beyond restrictions imposed by medium of film.Stam calls attention to one of essential differences between films and books as media, the synthetic multiplicity of signifiers available to versus book's single material of expression, written word (62, 59). The cinema has a much greater capacity for specificity, simply because filmmaker has so many more tools at his disposal than novelist. Early in Roth's novel, book's protagonist, Marcus Messner, and his father argue in their family home; only visual description in five-page scene is a sentence that indicates in passing that house has a back door (9-14). The same scene in Schamus's film includes interior of a number of rooms in a specific house (complete with furniture, window dressing, and pictures on wall), low lighting, sound effects, and actors Logan Lerman and Danny Burstein. …