Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance - Volume 6, Issue 3, 2013

This article examines how issues of fidelity and adaptation influenced the reception of Ken Russell’s Women in Love (1969) and its classification by the British Board of Film Censors at a galvanizing moment in British sexual history. Through the focus of Russell’s reading of D. H. Lawrence it opens up some wider questions about the fluctuating histories of adaptation, censorship, and liberty. The files documenting the classification of Women in Love held at the BBFC tell an important censorship story from a particularly incandescent cinematic moment.

The controversial 1954 novel Histoire d’O/Story of O (Réage 1976) and its feminist reception encapsulates the socio-political debates which surround BDSM texts. Questions of objectification, agency and subjectivity are here played out over the female sexually submissive body. Beginning with an overview of the key feminist critiques of the Story of O, this article examines what’s at stake in Réage’s ‘phantasm’ ([1969] 1971: 12) of sexually submissive femininity. Second, Kink.com’s hardcore pornographic Story of O adaptations – The Training of O and to a lesser extent The Upper Floor – are analysed not only through their relation to the novel, but also through the contradictory negotiations of objectification, agency and subjectivity. This is anchored through Kink.com’s self-construction as ‘real’, ‘ethical’ and ‘consensual’. Finally, a case study cites one porn performer, Cherry Torn, as one amongst many O’s in Kink.com’s current content, offering in turn a plurality to Réage’s source text. In so doing, this article seeks to ask what Torn’s performance adds to our understanding of what it might mean to be O beyond the pages of a fictional novel, whether fleetingly, serialized digitally or indeed privately.

Chris Carter once said that he ‘didn’t want [The X-Files] to be another Moonlighting. [He] didn’t want the relationship to come before the cases’, ruling out the possibility of a relationship between the two main characters. While this did, ultimately, change by the end of the show’s run, the unresolved sexual tension that existed through the course of the series, particularly in seasons one to seven, gave fan fiction writers fuel with which to create their own erotic adaptations of the show. For a fandom that coined the term ‘shipper’, it is not surprising that a large amount of fan fiction concerning Mulder and Scully’s relationship has been written. It is less surprising that a high percentage of these deal with the first sexual encounter between the two agents. But this is also a subject that The Sex Files: A Dark XXX Parody (Hain, 2009) has chosen to explore. In this article I explore the interaction between the canon text, the fan fiction that has arisen from it, and The Sex Files, to examine the appeal of first time fics and the ways in which prior readings of the text(s) led to the fan readings of the porn parody.

The main focus of this article is to critically assess the recent hardcore porn film The Texas Vibrator Massacre. Following the decision of the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) to ban the film in August 2008, this article explores the contexts of such regulatory control in response to what has proven to be a problematic conflation of hardcore porn and horror. Although the film is coded as a sex work, its callous tone and representations of violence have meant that the film complicates what is, on the surface, a pornographic parody film. Using the rejection of the film as a starting point, the article explores the now conventional porn parody sub-genre and how Rob Rotten positions himself in relation to this type of pornography. Moving beyond issues of parody and into the controversial representation of sexual violence, I position The Texas Vibrator Massacre as an example of both hardcore porn and graphic horror that problematizes the critical assessment of these respective genres. In discussing the film through the prism of censorship and the practicalities of classification, I argue how this framework of regulation can be used to outline the wider implications of conflating horror and hard-core pornography.

This article focuses on the television series Secret Diary of a Call Girl as an adaptation of popular, but explicit and problematic, material for the avowedly mainstream television channel that commissioned and screened it, ITV2. Adapted from Belle du Jour’s blog and print memoirs about life as a high-class sex worker, the texts’ sexual content and erotic appeal necessarily varied when adapted from one media platform to another, but also proved a landmark success for ITV2 in shaping a distinctive channel identity. The article examines Secret Diary of a Call Girl’s strategy of operating in both comic and erotic modes to offer recognizable satisfactions to different audience groups, and explored the way in which its exploration of feminine sexuality as performance is augmented by this comedic structuring of the narrative. The article also attends in particular to two particular aspects of the adaptation: its visual strategies in shots and positioning of its protagonist, and its institutional and generic context, using Tony Bennett’s research on television viewing and cultural capital to explore the role of the series as reputation enhancing for ITV2 in being positioned as ‘original drama’ whilst also drawing viewer interest by offering multiple spectator positions to audiences in order to make available varied viewing pleasures for a heterogeneous range of viewers.

In recent years, the American premium cable channel HBO has come in for quite a bit of attention as the vanguard of ‘quality television’. Though its adaptations in miniseries form are relatively longstanding, it is only recently that they have produced series as adaptations, notably in the popular and critical favourites Game of Thrones (2011–) and True Blood (2008–), the adaptations of George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire saga and Charlaine Harris’s The Southern Vampire Mysteries series. Both TV series, though critical and popular successes, have been subject to criticisms for their very explicit subject matter; as such, I propose to examine the reasons for the eroticism of the two series, as well as the function that it serves, so as to better determine the extent to which the emphasis on eros stems from their source texts, their medium, or the requirements of their production at HBO. In so doing, I hope to elucidate exactly what is meant by that very fraught term ‘quality television’, especially as it relates to the titillating nature of these series.

NAZISPLOITATION!: THE NAZI IMAGE IN LOW-BROW CINEMA AND CULTURE, DANIEL H. MAGILOW, KRISTIN T. VANDER LUGT AND EELIZABETH BRIDGES (EDS) (2011) London: Continuum, 336 pp., ISBN: 978-1-4411-8359-0, p/bk, £17.99

VISCONTI AND THE GERMAN DREAM: ROMANTICISM, WAGNER AND THE NAZI CATASTROPHE IN FILM, DAVID HUCKVALE (2012) London: McFarland Publishers, 232 pp., ISBN: 978-0-7864-7030-3, p/bk, £39.95