
Full text loading...
By comparing John Waters’ 1988 film Hairspray with its adaptations narratologically, previous studies of the film have treated the process of adaptation as a zero-sum game that diminishes the political stakes with each iteration. With this article, I suggest that generic tools such as mise-en-scène and choreography have the capacity to transform discourses instead of merely supplanting them. To better understand the discursive spaces opened up by the trans-medial adaptation process, I read the opening scene of Waters’ film and its three subsequent adaptations as a discourse of the city, following Annette Insdorf’s assertion that a narrative’s first moments reflect significant thematic and aesthetic moves on the part of its creators.