Adaptation as sadomasochism: The case of Guy Maddin’s Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract 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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".