The theoretical issues exposed from studying Faulkner’s screenplay, Turnabout, demonstrated that critical analysis of a screenplay is fraught with problems. We first consider how we will even conceive of such a text? Do you think about it as you would a published literary work, or should it be treated like the broad outline of some greater work? The screenplay’s form is utterly unusual. It reads like a play, but in its final form, it’s a fleshed out film. As a first copy, this screenplay isn’t even designed for an inexpert audience to read. The fact this version was never used as the shooting script eventual film, Today We Live (1933), further limits its audience. Considering these points, are we qualified to judge this screenplay? We certainly shouldn’t judge it in the same way that we would judge a novel or a poem.
However, I think people in the seminar discussing this work overestimated the text’s value and excused its faults (of which there were many!) on the basis of its status as an early version of a screenplay. I don’t think that we would treat early drafts of poems so kindly, brushing aside any its faults because it was a first draft for a screenplay. The screenplay’s irritatingly stereotypical "English" phraseology, almost as if lifted from a P.G. Wodehouse novel, and ploddingly obvious dialogue, in my mind, outweigh the screenplay's virtues, like the clever manipulation of sound effects and visual effects, and a sophisticated undertone of incest and complicated, triangular relationships. But, because of its status as a screenplay and all the trappings that go with it, like the studio insisting that a woman be written into the screenplay because Hollywood needed a woman (specifically Joan Crawford to meet the studio’s contractual obligations to her), I think these faults were underestimated. It is a text that shouldn’t be dismissed, but why make allowances for its quality to the extent that we do?
In the end, I think these allowances are made because of Faulkner's authorship. This is especially strange when the collaborative nature of the process of writing a screenplay was stressed in our seminar, not to mention the fact that any given screenplay may be redrafted by other writers several times before the final copy is created. But is such an author-centric reading of the screenplay desirable? Barthes’ “The Death of the Author” and Foucault’s “What is an Author?” shed light on this question. Unlike Barthes’ assertion that a text’s existence is not bound up in the author’s existence (Barthes 223), the screenplay never seems to be discussed separate from the author. As the screenplay is so collaborative, Barthes’ claim that a text is never original, but rather is “is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture” (Barthes 223), casts doubt on how authentically Faulkner the screenplay is. Rather than considering the screenwriter as “author”, it might be more useful to think about the studio being the “author”. The studio is the prime shaping force of the screenplay – it is written to cater for the needs of the studio, and owned by them, and the collaborative process of composing a screenplay means that it is reasonable to talk about the studio as a whole shaping the text. The screenplay exceeds the concept of sole authorship, as other collaborative pieces do (Foucault 237).
Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author”. Ed. Daniel Finkelstein and Alistair
McCleery. The Book History Reader. London and New York: Routledge, 2002.
221-224
Hawks, Howard and Faulkner, William. Turn About. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, August
24, 1932.
Foucault, Michel. “What Is an Author?”. Ed. Sean Burke. Authorship. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh UP, 1995. 233 – 246.
I like your argument very much, except when you say that perhaps the studio is the author. I think Barthes' point is that the viewers of the film, the 'readers', are the ultimate shapers of the text. The author of the text is purely the reader. In this way your argument is all the more relevant. Giving the script special preference for merely being partly written (whatever that means with Barthes in mind) by Faulkner should be abandoned. In fact, I can take this to an absurd level and entertain the total abolition of authors names from texts, as they don't belong to them, nor should we applaud their genius.
ReplyDelete(I don't really believe this myself, I am merely being half sarcastic, half advocate)
I think you made an interesting point about a first draft for a poem not being treated so kindly. I think the distinction here is that this screenplay-draft was Faulkner's end-product. If he had gone on to make the film himself, the screenplay may have been dismissed (but maybe not). I think that the only value of this screenplay is Faulkner's authorship of it. But that's probably just because I personally didn't like it much. If I had, I'm sure I could argue for some other terms on which it can be valued.
ReplyDeleteThis problem makes me skeptical of the death-of-the-author. I think that knowing who wrote the text significantly impacts on the way we interpret it. Someone familiar with Faulkner and his other work will interpret this text very differently to a first-timer. I think that the known identity of the individual who created the work seems to impact on the significance of the words on the page. We cannot simply read it as an entity abstracted from Faulkner's mind.
I think this text is a great example of a 'tissue of quotations drawn from innumerable centres of culture'. But while the screenplay is largely dictated by Hollywood conventions and the economic needs of the studio, the author's agency within these boundaries cannot be denied. While the shapes made by the writing hand are those belonging to culture, there is a brain which weilds and fashions these shapes to give them somewhat original meaning.