Adaptation as sadomasochism: The case of Guy Maddin’s Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary

The article argues that the violence of rhetoric pertaining to fidelity in adaptation – e.g., that the adaptation ‘destroys’ or ‘mutilates’ the adapted text – may at times be symptomatic not of displeasure, but of sadomasochistic pleasure in adaptation. As readers, viewers and listeners develop fantasmatic relationships to texts, they identify with narrative structures, characters and style. Reading, viewing or listening to an adaptation as such can thus be seen as a way of fantasizing both the adaptation and the adapted text, and particularly of fantasizing the latter’s wholeness of meaning and/or form. Guy Maddin’s exemplary Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary in 2002 is analysed in terms of its ‘dismemberment’ of the ballet on which it is based. While ballet is usually conceived as an art form that communicates through dancers’ whole bodies, Maddin’s film obscures parts of the frame through picture distortion and ‘cuts off’ parts of the bodies through framing and editing techniques in order to elicit sadomasochistic pleasure. The conception of a sadomasochistic form of adaptation is not, however, restricted to film adaptations of ballet, and the article briefly discusses other possible applications of the theory.