Going Global

Abstract

It can be a dreary and deeply unimaginative process to tot up all the things a film gets “wrong” about a novel. And it may, in any event, be simply unfair to ask a primarily visual medium to remain faithful to its textual predecessor. Would we even want that? Yet as we know from Harry Potter aficionados the world over, there is no stopping viewers from doing just this. Whenever a book has achieved such widespread advance circulation as The Reader—translated now, as Ari Shapiro notes, into almost forty languages¹—and serves as the explicit inspiration for “its” film, people are simply bound to ask about how the two line up. How do Schlink’s novel and Stephen Daldry’s film compare? And how do we explain the inevitable alterations? Film scholars may understandably cry foul, insisting that we not subordinate one medium to another. This is a valid point for many reasons, not the least of which is the fact that many people who view the film may never have read the book. But the novel—and the various debates it has engendered—was, as we have noted, already a mass-market phenomenon, and it shows no signs of abating. It would be naïve, I think, to exclude from consideration the myriad ways in which the film revises and expands upon—even “corrects”—the novel. This genetic approach does not compel us to neglect the film’s distinctive contributions either.

Walter Benjamin asked me once in Paris during his emigration … whether there were really enough torturers back there to carry out the orders of the Nazis … Benjamin sensed that the people who do it, as opposed to the bureaucratic desktop murderers and ideologues, operate contrary to their own immediate interests, are murderers of themselves while they murder others … I fear that the measures of even an elaborate education will hardly hinder the renewed growth of desktop murderers. But that there are people who do it down below, indeed as servants, through which they perpetuate their own servitude and degrade themselves, that there are more Bogers and Kaduks: against this, however, education and enlightenment can still manage a little something.

—Theodor W. Adorno, “Education after Auschwitz”