Abstract
In this analysis of how historical poetics helps to illuminate the contexts of production, Britt demonstrates how ‘auteurship’ can be adapted from film to television through recent crime-drama series by David Lynch (Twin Peaks: The Return) and Nicolas Winding Refn (Too Old to Die Young). The literary values that these shows espouse, argues Britt, are articulated through the notions of freedom and commitment—both the freedom given to TV creators in the new dispensation and the distinct value placed on freedom within the plots and the way that Lynch and Refn’s adaptations of the crime drama subgenre correspond to Jean-Paul Sartre’s concept of committed writing. Taking a loose interpretive stance on adaptation and using Sartre’s philosophical reading of literary poetics, Britt sees a framework of freedom, commitment, and other existentialist values as highlighting the literary shortfalls of Refn’s show, rather than lending it integrity as a radical or editorial adaptation; and as giving Lynch’s reworking of his iconic TV venture a multi-media countenance that expands the formal properties of the television platform.
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Notes
- 1.
Jean-Paul Sartre, What is Literature? (New York: Harper & Row, 1965).
- 2.
Sartre, What is Literature?, 14.
- 3.
Sartre, 14.
- 4.
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- 6.
Douglas, Writing the TV Drama Series, 21.
- 7.
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- 8.
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- 9.
Nicolas Winding Refn, Drive (2011; Culver City: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2012), Blu-ray.
- 10.
David Lynch and Mark Frost, Twin Peaks: The Return (2017; Los Angeles: Paramount, 2019), Blu-ray.
- 11.
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- 12.
R. Barton Palmer and David Boyd, Hitchcock at the Source: The Auteur as Adaptor (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011), 7.
- 13.
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- 18.
Perlmutter, Policing the Media, 44.
- 19.
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- 20.
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- 21.
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- 22.
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- 23.
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- 25.
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- 26.
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- 27.
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- 28.
Marta Bałaga, “Nicolas Winding Refn - Director of Too Old to Die Young,” Cineuropa, May 20, 2019, https://cineuropa.org/en/interview/372832/
- 29.
Thomas M. Leitch, “Where Are We Going, Where Have We Been?” in The Literature/Film Reader: Issues of Adaptation, ed. James M. Welsh and Peter Lev (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2007), 332.
- 30.
Sartre, What is Literature?, 16–17, emphasis in original as quotations; italics mine.
- 31.
Justus Streller, Jean-Paul Sartre: To Freedom Condemned: A Guide to His Philosophy (New York: Philosophical Library, Inc., 1960), 31.
- 32.
Aleister Crowley, The Book of the Law: (Technically Called Liber Al Vel Legis Sub Figura CCXX as Delivered by XCIII = 418 to DCLXVI): An IXII Sol in Aries March 21, 1938 E.v. (York Beach: Weiser Books, 1976), 9.
- 33.
Andrew Bundy, “‘Too Old to Die Young’: Nicolas Winding Refn on His ‘Heroin-Induced, Obsessive, Fetish Ride about America’ [Interview],” 2019.
- 34.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), 188; italics in original.
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Britt, T. (2024). What Is Television? Two Auteur Series in Literary Contexts. In: Worthy, B., Sheehan, P. (eds) Adapting Television and Literature. Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-50832-5_5
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