Ekphrastic Anxieties: Revising Disability, Masculinity, and Race in Warner Brothers’ Moby Dick (1956)
Open AccessThe present dissertation argues that ekphrasis is a key concept for understanding film adaptation as a process as well as for understanding difference. It analyzes film production documents, including publicity materials, screenplays, and screenplay drafts from the 1956 Warner Bros. production of Moby Dick to show that the provisional function these documents hold within the adaptation process involves an ekphrastic quality, or ekphrasticness, through which printed verbal language is held in tension with prospective visual forms. This tension manifests itself in sites from which cultural anxieties about disability, masculinity, and race, which remain veiled in the final product, erupt. Applying a genetic methodology derived from John Bryant’s fluid text theory and French genetic criticism, it conceives adaptation as a fluid text that agglomerates sequential versions and is collaboratively revised over time. A focus on collaborative revision requires unearthing the contributions of artists and technicians that remain hidden under authorial and auteurist notions of artistic production and provides a model for a broader understanding of adaptation as the product of a given culture during a particular period in history.The first example revolves around the advertising campaign for Moby Dick. Studio owner Harry Warner expressed concern about Captain Ahab’s disability as representing a potential threat to box-office revenue. As a result, the publicity department at Warner Bros. used a combination of written copy, portraits, and illustrations to draw audiences’ attention away from Ahab's disabled features as fashioned by director John Huston, star Gregory Peck, and the film’s crew (e.g., prosthetic leg, facial scarring). This concern is linked to ongoing debates at the time of the film’s release about the reintegration of war veterans into society. Publicity campaigns aim to shape viewers’ perception and should be viewed as part of the film adaptation process. The second example involves the tension about the film’s portrayal of masculinity, revealed by script revisions and critical reception. The screenplay drafts show attempts to incorporate the novel’s domestic themes, embodied in the wives and children of the crew (particularly Starbuck’s), which stirred up unease about the film’s masculinity. For instance, without watching the film, Melville scholar Milton Stern reviewed a version of the screenplay and complained about the film’s ‘feminine’ qualities. The review illustrates an ekphrastic tension between more feminine versions marked as melodramatic and more masculine versions marked as philosophical. After Bradbury left the film’s production, Huston attempted to masculinize the film with his revisions. In spite of his efforts, Melville scholars viewed the adaptation as feminizing the novel. The final example examines revisions of Pip, a minor character who plays a critical role in the novel. The screenwriting and filming stages of the adaptation process struggled to maintain Pip's symbolic significance, which Melville’s own creative process links to questions about the agency and humanity of black people in antebellum America. Inconsistencies in the novel suggest that Pip was a late introduction to the writing process, and that Melville sought to endow the character with heroic recognition (a trope known as anagnórisis or anagnoresis). First drafts show attempts at maintaining a sense of that heroic recognition, but the final version on screen reduces Pip to a passive recipient of Ahab’s failed paternalistic protection. Possible world theory frames the narrative of the revision process as going through different fictional worlds (alternative versions of Pip), highlighting the implications of Pip’s possible-because-drafted lives. It suggests that these limitations are linked to the stereotypical representation of black characters in Classic Hollywood at the time rather than to a lack of artistic imagination.
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Jaime_Campomar_Ekphrastic_Anxieties_redacted.pdf | 2023-11-14 | Open Access |
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