DOWNLOAD ~ Adaptation As Forgery: The Case of the Talented Mr. Ripley. by Post Script ~ eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Adaptation As Forgery: The Case of the Talented Mr. Ripley.
- Author : Post Script
- Release Date : January 22, 2004
- Genre: Business & Personal Finance,Books,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 275 KB
Description
Patricia Highsmith's chilling novel of usurped identity and murder for gain, The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), freely adapted from Henry James's The Ambassadors, has appeared twice on the screen: first as Plein Soleil (Purple Noon) in 1960 by Rene Clement, starring an icy Alain Delon, and more recently in 1999 by Anthony Minghella with Matt Damon as an eerily goofy Ripley sporting Clark Kent glasses and a sycophant's smile. In such a complex lineage, which includes not only temporal distance, but cross-cultural migrations as well, the questions of adaptation--fidelity to an original, transposition and restructuring--are particularly intriguing. The issues raised by adaptation are also extremely relevant in this case since Tom Ripley is himself a forger, of both documents and identities. (1) In a certain sense, all adaptation can be considered a type of forgery in the dual meaning of the word "to forge": to copy, imitate, counterfeit, or to create or produce something new. A writer or director signs his or her name to a work that has a previous existence, often using the same title, and that work by its very progeny cannot help but be to some extent a copy, while at the same time it stands on its own as a newly forged creation. Writers and directors display varying degrees of interest in this conundrum, and their works are more, or less, involved in some type of reflection on the status of the potentially derivative nature of the "copy". Some adaptations clearly signal their difference from a preceding work and play with the notion of forgery, while others seem caught in a fidelity bind in which deviation may be great, but the original work still stands as an ur-text that must be acknowledged and against which the adaptation must be measured. In this essay, I would like to explore why and how Minghella and Clement have produced such radically different versions of Highsmith's novel. Of course, these differences are in some way simply the product of who they are, but there are also more objective reasons why their "forgeries" are so strikingly dissimilar. The films were made in very different periods, with all that this implies in terms of production trends and ideology, and this, in turn, dramatically affects the characterization of the identity of Tom Ripley and the world around him. In addition, beginning with Highsmith and her protagonist, the particular slant that each work puts on the practice, problems, and implications of copy, imitation, and forgery, has intriguing implications with regard to each artist's stance on adaptation.