18 - Thematic Equivalence and Ontological Ambivalence: Film Adaptations of the Works of Don DeLillo

Summary

Adapting Don DeLillo

Many film directors and producers worldwide have expressed an interest in adapting Don DeLillo's works, although not all of them have been successful in fulfilling the project. Of the prolific US author's oeuvre, to date, a short play ‘The Rapture of the Athlete Assumed into Heaven’ (1990), two novels, The Body Artist (2001) and Cosmopolis (2003), and the short story ‘Baader–Meinhof’ (2002) have been brought to the screen with the titles The Rapture of the Athlete Assumed into Heaven (Keith Bogart, 2007), À Jamais (Benoit Jacquot, 2016), Cosmopolis (David Cronenberg, 2012) and Looking at the Dead (Jean-Gabriel Periot, 2012), respectively, while Noah Baumbach's adaptation of White Noise is in production at the time of writing.

The relationship between cinema and DeLillo's works has been widely studied. For David Banash, who follows David Kellman's concept of the cinematic novel, DeLillo's novels can be described as cinematic, since the author strives to create a prose style that emphasises ‘not only images, but the very production and mediation of those images by camera angles, and framing, camera moves, the effects of editing, the role of projection and huge screens, and most importantly, the reception of those images in the spaces of theatres’ (Banash 6–7). Likewise, DeLillo's fascination with the visual, his admiration for cinema as an art form, and especially European cinema, have been remarked upon by several critics (Banash; Boxall; Cowart; Keesey; LeClair; Osteen, among others). However, despite their cinematic quality, DeLillo's works seem to be challenging in terms of adaptability.

Deborah Cartmell notes that ‘A list of “unfilmable” novels, compiled in 2007, places at the top of the list Joyce, Proust, and Kafka, paradoxically novelists who have been observed to explicitly replicate cinematic devices in their writing’ (4). Like these writers, who DeLillo has mentioned as influences on his writing, DeLillo creates works that are complex and cinematic, but are they, in Cartmell's words, ‘unfilmable’? The list of works already adapted seems to prove that they are not. However, the most aesthetically successful adaptations of DeLillo's work to this day are not those based on his novels, or at least, not those that aim at reproducing the whole text.