Keynote Address

Keynote Speaker: Professor David Greetham

Keynote Paper: “‘What the devil am I going to do with you?’ Multiple Endings in Film Adaptations of Novels”

Keynote Address: 5.30pm in Rm. 9207

Time was that the final frame of a Hollywood movie really was “The End.” But this paper questions how we can know that, and, especially in film adaptations of novels, what “interference” between the two media can make a truly “conclusive” ending difficult to recognize and assess. In examples drawn from some of the most highly regarded novels and films, I question how we can respond to what John Fowles refers to as the “tyranny” of the “final” ending, and how the two media may be seen as in conflict for that “last word.” There are several models under which this conflict can be charted, ranging from the “surgery” committed on Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights in the 1939 Laurence Olivier/Merle Oberon film (in which the second generation of Earnshaws and Linton is simply omitted) to Harold Pinter’s screenplay for The French Lieutenant’s Woman, where the two (possibly three) endings in the original Fowles novel are addressed by the double narrative of a nineteenth-century period piece wrapped up in a twentieth-century filming of the novel, a filming that questions what we mean by the “happy” v. “unhappy” and the “first” v. “second” ending, and whether that conflict can (or should) be resolved. Drawing on the work of such directors as David Lean, Stanley Kubrick, and Anthony Minghella, and such authors as Charles Dickens, Anthony Burgess, and Michael Oondaatje, the paper explores several types of conflict, several types of fidelity (if there is any such thing) and several types of re-creation, especially in those cases where there is no straightforward one-to-one relation. Sometimes that relation can be obscured by faulty recollection, by self-interest, and by a failure to contextualize the historical moment. Sometimes an audience/readership may be set up to expect one type of ending, only to be delivered of another. So are all endings, especially adaptations, inconclusive in one sense or another, and by what critical means do we recognize a successful ending?