Crime Fiction Migration: Crossing Languages, Cultures and Media 9781474216524, 9781474216555, 9781474216548

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgements
1. Introduction: The Crime Fiction Migration Effect
2. Migrating into other Media
2.1 On novelization: The case of The Killing
2.1.1 The Forbrydelsen effect
2.1.2 Writing The Killing down
2.2 On film adaptation: We Need to Talk about Kevin some more
2.2.1 On the book’s traumatic linguistic style
2.2.2 ‘Nobody loves an adaptation’ (Boyum, 1985 : 15), or do they?
2.3 On theatrical adaptation: Even more Curious Incident s
2.3.1 Curious prose
2.3.2 Curious drama
3. Migrating into other Mainlands
3.1 On translation: Greek Markaris’ Late- Night News novel into English
3.1.1 Criminal Late- Night News
3.1.2 Anglophonizing the News
3.2 On filmic remaking: Americanizing Austrian Funny Games
3.2.1 Deviant metafilmic Games
3.2.2 Americanizing the Games
3.3 On theatrical remaking: Greeking Shear stylistic Madness
3.3.1 A ‘mad’ detective play unlike any other
3.3.2 Metatheatrical Madness
4. Conclusion
References
Index

Citation preview

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Crime Fiction Migration

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Advances in Stylistics Series Editor Dan McIntyre University of Huddersfield, UK Editorial Board Beatrix Busse, University of Berne, Switzerland Szilvia Csábi, Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary Monika Fludernik, University of Freiburg, Germany Lesley Jeffries, University of Huddersfield, UK Jean Boase-Beier, University of East Anglia, UK Peter Verdonk, University of Amsterdam (Emeritus), The Netherlands Larry Stewart, College of Wooster, USA Manuel Jobert, Jean Moulin University, Lyon 3, France Other Titles in the Series Corpus Stylistics in Principles and Practice, Yufang Ho Chick Lit: The Stylistics of Cappuccino Fiction, Rocío Montoro D. H. Lawrence and Narrative Viewpoint, Violeta Sotirova Discourse of Italian Cinema and Beyond, Roberta Piazza I.A. Richards and the Rise of Cognitive Stylistics, David West Oppositions and Ideology in News Discourse, Matt Davies Opposition in Discourse, Lesley Jeffries Pedagogical Stylistics, Michael Burke, Szilvia Csábi, Lara Week and Judit Zerkowitz Sylvia Plath and the Language of Affective States, Zsófia Demjén Style in the Renaissance, Patricia Canning Stylistics and Shakespeare’s Language, Mireille Ravassat Text World Theory and Keats’ Poetry, Marcello Giovanelli The Stylistics of Poetry, Peter Verdonk World Building, Edited by Joanna Gavins and Ernestine Lahey World Building in Spanish and English Spoken Narratives, Jane Lugea

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Crime Fiction Migration Crossing Languages, Cultures and Media Christiana Gregoriou

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 Paperback edition first published 2019 © Christiana Gregoriou, 2017 Christiana Gregoriouhas asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. viii constitute an extension of this copyright page. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Gregoriou, Christiana, 1978– author. Title: Crime fiction migration : crossing languages, cultures and media / Christiana Gregoriou. Description: London ; New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. | Series: Advances in stylistics | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016058380 | ISBN 9781474216524 (hardback) | ISBN 9781474216548 (epdf) Subjects: LCSH: Detective and mystery stories–History and criticism. | Crime in literature. | Crime in mass media. | BISAC: LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / General. Classification: LCC PN3448.D4 G74 2017 | DDC 809.3/872–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016058380 ISBN: HB: 978-1-4742-1652-4 PB: 978-1-3500-9906-7 ePDF: 978-1-4742-1654-8 ePub: 978-1-4742-1653-1 Series: Advances in Stylistics Typeset by Newgen Knowledge Works Pvt Ltd., Chennai, India. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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For Tim

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Contents Acknowledgements

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Introduction: The Crime Fiction Migration Effect

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Migrating into other Media 2.1 On novelization: The case of The Killing 2.1.1 The Forbrydelsen effect 2.1.2 Writing The Killing down 2.2 On film adaptation: We Need to Talk about Kevin some more 2.2.1 On the book’s traumatic linguistic style 2.2.2 ‘Nobody loves an adaptation’ (Boyum, 1985: 15), or do they? 2.3 On theatrical adaptation: Even more Curious Incidents 2.3.1 Curious prose 2.3.2 Curious drama

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Migrating into other Mainlands 3.1 On translation: Greek Markaris’ Late-Night News novel into English 3.1.1 Criminal Late-Night News 3.1.2 Anglophonizing the News 3.2 On filmic remaking: Americanizing Austrian Funny Games 3.2.1 Deviant metafilmic Games 3.2.2 Americanizing the Games 3.3 On theatrical remaking: Greeking Shear stylistic Madness 3.3.1 A ‘mad’ detective play unlike any other 3.3.2 Metatheatrical Madness

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Conclusion

References Index

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Acknowledgements Thanks are first due to many family members, and particularly my parents, Maro and Nikos, as well as many friends and colleagues (such as Katerina Doutsiou and Clive Upton), who have, knowingly or otherwise, encouraged me in this bookventure. I especially thank friends and colleagues from the Poetics and Linguistics Association (Dan McIntyre, Andrea Mayr and Bronwen Thomas in particular) and the International Society for the Study of Narrative (such as Frederick Aldama and Marina Lambrou), whose input and support at conferences in Las Vegas (2012), Valletta (2012), Manchester (2013), Heidelberg (2013), Maribor (2014), Canterbury (2015) and Cagliari (2016) have been invaluable. Thanks also go to Jeremy Scott and Reshmi Dutta-Flanders, Peter Stockwell, Linda Barone, Randy Allen Harris, and also Maarit Piipponen and Tiina Mäntymäki, for inviting me to deliver talks on this subject, giving me the opportunity to receive greatly needed feedback. Thanks also go to David Platten and Gigliola Sulis, who helped co-organize our 2013 ‘Retold, Resold, Transformed: Crime Fiction in the Modern Era’ conference, and to all who attended and shared their work and input; knowing there were so many of us finding this subject topical, fascinating and in need of delving into, urged me on. Anne Furlong has been amazingly forthcoming with support material on adaptation, not to mention precious advice, for which I am ever so grateful. Doctoral students I have had the pleasure to support at the time also provided much needed inspiration and insight, so I take this opportunity to mention Ilse Ras, Anna Bernacka, Huimin Wang, Ashna Bhagwanani, Saza Abdullah and Jekaterina Bragina. Thanks also go to all Berkeley-related folks (Tofa Borregaard, Nina Katz, Craig Upson and Namwali Serpell, to name but a few). It was in the wonderfully stimulating Berkeley, California, where my 2013 three-month visiting scholarship gave birth to the start of this book. Nowhere else have I ever felt more at home. I would also like to single out and thank Michael Papadopoulos, Laura Paterson, Athina Karatzogianni and Joanna Kopaczyk for not resisting my constantly running ideas by them, and for always being forthcoming with much-needed advice and guidance. I do love you guys. You are not just my friends. You are my mentors. Last but not least, I  thank, and dedicate this book to, my husband, Tim Wileman. My flashlight.

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Introduction: The Crime Fiction Migration Effect

Cognitive stylistics is concerned with explaining the cognitive, linguistic and narratological processes through which literary texts carry meaning. As I discuss elsewhere (Gregoriou, 2009: 4), the cognitive stylistic academic field draws on theories that delineate the various processes of the human mind when interacting with literature. Put simply, cognitive poetics is a field that investigates what happens, cognitively when we read. It is a field capable of, say, explaining how exactly twists work in a story, or how the reader is influenced into sympathising with certain personas in a play, and not others.

This book applies such concepts to crime (-related) fiction. I adopt a very broad definition of what I take to be the wide umbrella term ‘crime fiction’, and specifically account for fictional and certainly suspenseful storylines, mostly featuring one or more victims of crimes such as, but not limited to, murder. Such stories range from those that some classify under such categories as espionage to those referred to as police procedurals as well as psychological thrillers and mysteries. The works I examine hence fit into various crime fiction subgenres, including the whodunit and the whydunit tradition as well as detective fiction, among other broader investigative genres (see Gregoriou, 2007: 29–48 for genre definitions, terms, rules, formulaic regularities and constraints). In addition, this book explores not only such cognitive stylistic processes where linguistic prose fiction as well as audiovisual dramatic, crime fiction ‘texts’ are concerned but also where such narratives find themselves, through popular demand, metaphorically ‘migrating’, meaning ‘travelling elsewhere’, crossing the boundaries of the language, medium and culture they were first bound by. I  adopt Page’s (2010:  6)  definition of ‘mode’ as ‘a system of choices used to communicate meaning’, and propose a move from a monomodal to a multimodal approach to the study of crime fiction; the stylistic toolkit need not be limited to linguistic

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Crime Fiction Migration

insight. To better understand the workings of this ever-fascinating crime fiction genre in particular, exploring other semiotic modes, working in synergy with language, is important. In discussing various modes, Page (2010: 3) argues that we should not assume that the dominance of the verbal mode thus far in narrative theorizing means that it is fully adequate to explicate the contribution of other modes (be they visual, verbal, kinaesthetic, or related to conventions such as dress code). Instead, we need to reconfigure narrative theory and analysis in such a way that verbal resources are understood as only one of many semiotic elements integrated together in the process of storytelling.

Examining original crime fiction works alongside their translations (which I take to refer to language-crossing), adaptations (i.e. media-crossing) and remakings (i.e. culture-crossing) could prove instrumental in understanding how the various semiotic modes interact with one another. After all, ‘migrations’ (by which I  am referring to all three crossing-types) of this genre are not only popularized but are themselves interpretations, even critical readings to start with. As Cartmell and Whelehan (2010: 18) point out, ‘each adaptive process generates its own nexus of relations’ and ‘the pleasure of studying adaptations is in part one of discovery and of the creative aspect of putting several textual readings together in a new constellation’. Onega and Gutleben (2004:  9)  similarly urge us to place emphasis on the way each originating and resulting text ‘sheds light on the other’, thus ‘obliterating hierarchical or evaluative distinction[s] between the two’. The crime fiction migration effect is a term I am coining to refer to this ever so popular phenomenon of crime fiction ‘on the move’, and its subsequent relocation elsewhere, the ‘adaptive process [working] to ensure a story’s on-going re-birth within other communicative platforms, other political and cultural contexts’ (Griggs, 2016: 5). Exploring this twenty-first-century trend enables a proposal for a model for multimodal research and a framework for genre analysis with which to better understand the processes involved in crime narrative construction (and resulting fascination) in many of its media. I take ‘media’ to refer to communication channels, and here specifically to cover the novelisticlinguistic, televisual, filmic and theatrical media extending then to both the private (novels, televisual film/show watching) and the public sphere (cinematic film watching, theatre). Through this analytical process, I  also illustrate why this crime fiction genre continues to be popular and highlight why it is, like people, globalized, itself ‘migrating’ in order to survive into the later parts of the twenty-first century. As Cardwell (2002: 13, cited in Griggs, 2016: 3–4) puts

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it, building on the same biological and horticultural metaphor as I do (and also others, such as Genette [1982] 1997 and Bortolotti and Hutcheon, 2007), in cultural adaptation, rather than as a product of evolution and/or betterment, the newly formed adaptation is seen as an ‘aid to the survival of the original’, and a means with which to ‘revitalise the source’ (a position that, unlike me, Cardwell sees as negative in fact). Most importantly, all artistic work analysed here is consistent with new crime fiction’s migration effect and this genre’s very own journeying in the form of translation, adaptation and remaking across media, cultures and languages worldwide. With the recent fashion of, for instance, Nordic noir (see, for instance, Forshaw, 2012 and 2013) filling the global telecinematic space and highlighting the process of crime genre franchising, I explore not only what appears to be a fashionable trend of the early decades of the twenty-first century but also a very successful business model. That is not to say that other genres, and indeed any of the literary, dramatic and gameshow kind, are not susceptible to similar ‘journeying’ (to stay with the same underlying metaphor). Various literary genres get translated into other languages and formats, and remakings are not atypical of all kinds of plays (see various contemporary Shakespeare updates on the small and big screen), films, not to mention TV shows in general (see various talent and game show franchising), to name but a few media of many. Although not limited to crime fiction, the phenomenon of genre migration is undoubtedly true of it. When referring to films and remakings, Messier (2014: 71) similarly notes that ‘[t]here is perhaps no other genre in which remakes are more popular than in horror’. Crime fiction is a genre that is particularly prone to migration as it continues to enjoy consistent popularity and attractiveness irrespective of time, place as well as people. Seago (2014a) explains why exploring this migration matters: ‘Because crime fiction offers insight into the cultures that produce it and because the definition of what constitutes a crime is constantly shifting, cross-border movements, translations, interpretations and cross-fertilisations of detective stories are particularly interesting and offer access to intercultural and intracultural anxieties, cultural and social shifts and the emergent construction of a popular literary form’. Far from lacking originality, crime fiction translations, adaptations and remakings prove inventive and imaginative, their continuing emergence evidenced and supported by the large number of academic works that currently focus on migrant forms. See, for instance, Busse and Stein (2012), Porter (2012), Vanacker and Wynne (2013) and Gregoriou in Evans and White (2013) for analyses of recent adaptations of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes texts. Fan fiction is another example of the crime fiction migration effect, though

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Crime Fiction Migration

not one I explore in this book in any detail (though see, for instance, Thomas, 2010 and Gregoriou, under consideration). As Boyum (1985: 50) argues, when watching a film of a book we have read, we crystallize a new film experience out of the stuff of memory and thus interpret on the basis of a prior literary interpretation. It is such intermodal/medial/cultural relationships that I wish to explore (in which case the adapted text is also read intertextually – but also see Leitch’s [2003: 165] 11th fallacy: ‘Adaptations are intertexts, their precursor texts simply texts’, at which point he clarifies that precursor texts are also intertexts), though that is not to say that all audience of remakes need be familiar with the original or – perhaps better described – source work (Hutcheon, 2006, cited in Thomas, 2010: 147, proposes a Bakhtinian dialogical reading of the process as opposed to a crude hierarchical or chronological classification based on dubious categories such as that of the ‘original’). Indeed, the experience of those dealing with an adaptation with knowledge of the source text, those that Conte (1986: 25) describes as ‘knowing’, is bound to differ greatly from that of those who do not share such knowledge, that is, ‘unknowing audiences’. ‘Knowing’ audiences, for instance, ‘carry out a kind of “meta-comparison”, noting differences and evaluating effects’ (Furlong, 2012:  181). Furthermore, and as Hutcheon (2006:  122)  argues, readers familiar with the adapted work will ‘experience the adaptation through the lenses of the adapted work, as a kind of palimpsest’, their familiarity with the source text thus forcing their reception of the adaptation to be a fusion of the two separate works, with one seen as more like the other than it actually is. Hutcheon (2006: 4) explains the pleasure of this same experience by alluding to the combination of repetition and variation: pleasure comes from ‘the comfort of ritual combined with the piquancy of surprise’. In fact, such a ‘knowing’ adaptation experience can be likened to experiencing the crime fiction genre in and of itself; this, after all, is a genre that readers and viewers enjoy revisiting the formula of, alongside any given text’s variation from it. So is the case with adaptation in general: ‘Recognition and remembrance are part of the pleasure (and risk) of experiencing [a knowing audience’s] adaptation; so too is change’ (Hutcheon, 2006: 4). On the particular act of watching a filmic adaptation of a book we have enjoyed, Boyum (1985: 50) continues: ‘Not only do we come to an adaptation with the hope of reliving a past experience, but we often tend to come with the hope of having the same experience – something that wouldn’t even happen were we ourselves to reread a novel and consequently to imaginatively “reshoot” it.’ In other words – and now turning to the question of what drives crime fiction migrations – it is the want to re-experience texts we once immensely enjoyed, perhaps through

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others’ minds or to allow others to experience them like we have, which drives their re-creation in the form of such processes as translations, adaptations and remakings. As Collins (2010:  119)  argues when discussing filmic adaptations of prose fiction, and the interdependency of literature and film in such cases, each of the two mediums indeed comes to function as the ‘special effects’, advertisement even, for the other. According to Hutcheon (2006: 30), ‘[g]eneral economic issues, such as the financing and distribution of different media and art forms must be considered in any general theorizing of adaptation’ too . Collins (2010: 120) notes such medium interdependency as being attributable, to a great extent, to infrastructural changes within the entertainment industry; many production companies (such as Miramax) and selling ones (such as Amazon) are devoted to films and books in equal measure, after all. This interdependency is illustrated, for instance, whereby ‘[b]ook publishers produce new editions of adapted literary works to coincide with the film version and invariably put photos of the movie’s actors or scenes on the cover’ (Hutcheon, 2006: 30). Other, even more practical reasons lie behind such translations, adaptations and remakes, such as wanting to make texts newly relevant and accessible to a given audience and (sub)culture. As Hutcheon (2006: 176–7) put it, ‘adaptation is how stories evolve and mutate to fit new times and different places [. . .] Evolving by cultural selection, travelling stories adapt to local cultures, just as populations or organisms adapt to local environments’. After all, as Seger (1992: 5, cited in Hutcheon, 2006:  5)  notes, bestselling books may reach a million readers, Broadway plays up to 8 million, and yet a televisual adaptation or film an audience of many millions or more. Another rather obvious adaptation reasoning, then, is economic, and the wanting to capitalize on new audiences, generating more funds in a given context out of what proved already profitable in a different context (something that can also be said of story prequels and sequels, in fact). Novelizations specifically have come to be ‘associated most often with crude commercialism and the idea of “cashing in” on a successful franchise’ (Thomas, 2010: 147), and are often linked to the source text’s marketing (see, for instance, Mahlknecht, 2012; for more on the nature of the adaptation industry, see Murray, 2003). Timing also matters. As Collins (2010:  120)  argues, ‘adaptation mania [. . .] exploded in the 90s’, only to be ‘intensifying a decade or more later’, while when discussing adaptation’s ‘financial appeal’, Hutcheon (2006:  5)  notes that adapters turn to safe bets more so at times of economic downturn, a timing particularly relevant to the texts here under analysis, many of which were produced soon after the 2006–8 period. Importantly, this is a period which, it is generally agreed, marks the beginning of the worldwide economic crisis.

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Putting aside the specific drive behind the following works’ narrative migration though, the ‘texts’ under analysis in the present book are comparable and representative of the migration ‘effect’, as in migration ‘phenomenon’, in several ways. All are contemporary, proved critically or commercially popular, bestselling and/or award-winning, or at least controversial, and hence were subject to reselling and subsequent transforming when converted into ‘texts’ for other media, languages and cultural audiences. And it is through migration that these texts have not only been ‘decontextualised’ but also ‘recontextualised’ (see Venuti, 2007). Like Griggs’ work (2016:  6), the present book is not limited to the classic ‘book to screen’ kind of adaptation, but explores adaptations ‘produced across a variety of media platforms’. In addition, it covers adaptations which move across the same medium but cross languages and/or cultures. The next two chapters cover medium and cultural migration respectively, though the two processes are also integrated where each of these chapters’ individual configuration is concerned; each chapter features, in turn, ‘moves’ into the same three crime fictional medium ‘strands’: the novelistic, the filmic and the theatrical. Whereas the first of these chapters looks at the novelization of a televisual show, before exploring the filmic and theatrical adaptation of crime fiction books, the second looks first at literary translation, before interrogating and analysing filmic and theatrical culture-crossing remakes. Many contemporary, popular and fictional crime narratives could have been selected for analysis – we, after all, all live in the age of adaptation (Hutcheon, 2006). As Collins (2010: 121) puts it when discussing adaptations specifically, and those of all different kinds of generic forms (and not just crime-related genres in particular), ‘[g]iven the sheer volume of adaptations that have appeared [since the 1990s], there is no way one could do justice to their diversity except in an entire series of books’. This is true of the crime fiction form specifically and of its various ‘migrations’ more generally. Nonetheless, not all adaptations are created equal (Collins, 2010:  120), and many have offered categorizations and distinctions when it comes to the categories’ distinguishing features. While Wagner (1975) offered ‘analogy’, ‘transposition’ and ‘commentary’ as adaptation types, Andrew (1984) proposed the categories of ‘borrowing’, ‘intersection’ and ‘fidelity of transformation’ instead, and further theorists have since proposed a range of such taxonomies and models to add to the mix (‘correction’, ‘expansion’, ‘replication’, ‘revision’, ‘reimagination’, ‘update’, ‘versions’, ‘products’ and so on). Rather than being concerned with defining all these categories, and the present book’s precise migration types, using such terminology, I instead describe the six

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chosen contemporary crime fiction narratives as migrated ‘examples’, and ones merely chosen to fit the medium strands of the six processes examined here. In doing so, I keep the focus on the format process and its relation to audience language and culture. Besides, the given source works and their respective migrated works were specifically chosen to cover a range of geographically diverse audiences, and specifically as many as five:  the British (see sections 2.1 and 2.3), American (see 2.2 and 3.2), German-speaking (see 3.2 and 3.3), Scandinavian (see 2.1) and Greek-speaking (see 3.1 and 3.3). Due to my own specialism lying in the area of English linguistics (and not because of this language’s hegemony), I  maintain an overall focus into and/or out of English language works. Since I myself am limited to speaking two languages (I am Greek Cypriot and speak Greek as my first language with English as my second), I can only discuss actual translation (i.e. 3.1) between these two languages alone. I, of course, am able to read and view works either in, or translated into, only these two languages. Crime fiction is a genre that continues to capture, and filter through, popular knowledge and cultural imagination (also see my previous crime fiction monographs: Gregoriou, 2007, 2011b). A lot can be accomplished by discussing these different migration processes in this book on the given genre; the medium and cultural migration processes both involve, to use a metaphor other than ‘migration’, a level of recycling that the genre’s own fluidity allows. This book is also about ‘critical stylistic noticing’, and an exploration of the amalgamation of various semiotic resources in narrative, and transmedia storytelling in particular. In his book Convergence Culture:  Where Old and New Media Collide, Jenkins (2006: 95–6) defines transmedia stories as those which unfold across multiple media platforms, with each new text making a distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole. In the ideal form of transmedia storytelling, each medium does what it does best – so that a story might be introduced in a film, expanded through TV, novels, comics [. . .] Each franchise entry needs to be self-contained so you don’t need to have seen the film to enjoy the game and vice-versa.

The stories examined here manage to cross-culturally and cross-medially permeate popular consciousness, though that is not to say that Jenkins’ ‘convergence’ is always applicable; as Hutcheon (2006:  120)  notes, and as previously touched on, an audience ignorant of viewing an adaptation or unfamiliar with the source material could simply ‘experience the adaptation as [it] would any other work’, regardless of the source material. Engaging critically, stylistically and cross-disciplinarily with such texts though could allow an insight into the

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very mechanics of successful migration. Even more so, all modes of communication operate within cultural systems. ‘[A]daptation and translation are not merely innocent bystanders in cultural relations’ (Krebs, 2013: 2), and looking at narratives shifting into different cultural contexts enables a better awareness of, and an exploration into, originating, resulting and relational cultural systems to start with. And, as Page (2010: 11) puts it, multimodality – as in multimodal research – itself ‘gains from a close study of the potential of the narrative as an influential mode of discourse that crosses cultures and media’. As noted, the first of the next two chapters explores crime fiction medium migration and specifically adaptation ‘movements’ into the novelistic, filmic and theatrical forms in turn. I start by looking at the novelization of the first series of the Danish televisual Forbrydelsen (first screened in Denmark in 2007, with series one of its US AMC adaptation The Killing having been first screened in the United States in 2011) into Hewson’s trilogy’s (2012, 2013, 2014) 2012 book (The Killing). I then analyse a crime book’s journey into a film: Lionel Shriver’s (2003) We Need to Talk about Kevin and Lynne Ramsay’s 2011 adaptation of it, before exploring another such book’s travel into a stage play: Mark Haddon’s (2003) The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (for a discussion of the novel following my ‘metafunctions of deviance’ model, see Gregoriou, 2011a). The 2003 book was adapted for the UK’s National Theatre in the form of physical theatre in 2012 (see Stephens, 2012 for the play script), a production that proved very successful, having won, among others, seven Olivier awards in 2013, including that of ‘best new play’. The 2014 Broadway production of the same play later won a 2015 Tony Award for Best Play. The second of the two analytical chapters adopts a slightly more literal reading of ‘migration’ and looks at geographical adaptation movements, tracking crime fiction travels from one place to another. It yet again focuses on the three media the first chapter explores, and the journeying of crime fiction into, this time, ‘yet another’ novel, film and play, but this time for a different culture and audience. I  first focus on the translation of the first of (Istanbul-born) Greek Petros Markaris’s (Costas Haritos series) crime novels into English. Nichterino Deltio (Νυχτερινό Δελτίο) [1995] (2009) is analysed alongside its UK version (2004) The Late-Night News, translated into English by David Connolly (the same translator’s US edition being instead named Deadline in Athens). Besides, as Markaris’s own translator (Connolly, 2014: 63) puts it, ‘Greek writers deserve a place on the international stage by virtue of being good writers and not simply as representatives of an “exotic literature” or a “glorious past” ’. I also engage with filmic works, first looking at the cultural exchange and also domestication

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and foreignization that is involved in the process of remaking popular audiovisual crime fictional texts for a different audience. I here explore the Austrian Funny Games (1997) film alongside its American remake version Funny Games (US) (2007), both written and directed by Michael Haneke. These films ‘[alert] us [viewers] to the fiction of what we’re watching’ (Brunette, 2010: 60) through ‘[partaking] in the Brechtian tradition’ (Grundmann, 2010:  25)  via their selfreflexivity. I  thirdly and finally explore the journeying of a long running and much adapted metatheatrical detective stage play, Bruce Jordan and Marilyn Abrams’ Shear Madness, based on Scherenschnitt, a play originally written by the Swiss German playwright and psychologist Pörtner (1964a; see also 1964b for the English translation) ‘to demonstrate how people can misperceive reality’ (Kingston, 1997). I  specifically engage with reincarnations of the play into the trademarked American (Shear Madness  – 1979 till now) as well as Greek (Σεσουάρ για δολοφόνους  – 1999–2012) and Cypriot culture and stage (Kotziakaro Teza  – 2011–13), all based on the interactive play version of the script which was also credited to Pörtner (1979). Unlike the rest of this book’s chapters, sections 2.1 (on Forbrydelsen) and 3.1 (on the work of Markaris) deal with crime fiction series migration rather than migration of individual and stand-alone crime fictional narratives. Besides, ‘crime series [. . .] is in fact a platform that allows for a great deal of originality and flexibility in both its creative and commercialised aspects’, further to being ‘capable of crossing borders, transplanting styles and characters into new countries and cultures’ (Anderson, Miranda and Pezzotti, 2015: 7, 3). Even more so, ‘seriality may become a useful tool for a sustained investigation into contemporary society and its problems’ (Anderson, Miranda and Pezzotti, 2015: 3), which is why including such serial crime fiction in the present book’s corpus allows ideological engagement with the relevant source texts, and the implications that the migration has for the ideologies in question. In fictional crime narratives moving across cultures, they prove capable of forming bridges between individuals and their societies, generating insights and shared cultural understandings, if not misunderstandings. Like Page’s (2010: 3), this work too marks ‘a paradigm shift away from mode-blindness’; I explore these social ‘bridges’ semiotically and with access to not only linguistic but also other communicative modes, including such signifiers as gesture, music, costuming and casting. As noted, I  also employ narratological as well as cognitive poetic methods of analysis (for an outline of the cognitive poetic toolkit, see Stockwell, 2002), the specific tools varying depending on the medium and textual type under analysis but connecting with such

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things as story structure and stylistic choices, all affecting the effect/interpretation of these contemporary crime narratives ‘in motion/movement’. In exploring crime fiction framing, I use Emmott’s (1997) frame theory, for instance. Emmott’s model of narrative comprehension provides an analytical framework that hypothesizes about the mental stores and inferences that are necessary to create and keep track of contexts and characters when reading a narrative text. According to Emmott’s model, the reader would turn any situation encountered into a ‘contextual frame’ which would restrict (i.e. ‘frame’) their expectations and mental representation of the circumstances containing the current content. The reader would then, accordingly, monitor the group of characters in particular places, times and circumstances. Misreadings, typical of the crime fiction genre, potentially generate what Emmott (1997) refers to as ‘repairs’ and ‘replacements’ to these frames thereafter. Put in less technical terms, this is ‘where the author attempts to lead the reader astray by providing partial information, foregrounding irrelevant clues and burying crucial evidence, giving facts out of context so that their relevance is not apparent or by suggesting associations and emphasising details which are later revealed to be misleading’ (Seago, 2014b: 207). Also related to the reader’s cognitive processing but this time considering the poetic structure of different kinds of minds, I employ conceptual metaphor theory (see Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). According to this theory, far from being ‘creative’ and marked, cognitive metaphors are not only pervasive in everyday language but also in thought; figurative language is an integral part of human categorization and a basic way of organizing our thoughts about the world. Fowler’s (1977) ‘mind style’ concept will also prove relevant to discussing the structuring of ‘unusual’ minds. Fowler (1977: 76) originally introduced the ‘mind style’ term to refer to ‘cumulatively consistent structural options, agreeing in cutting the presented world to one pattern or another’, giving rise to ‘an impression of a world-view’ (for other such mind style analyses, see, for instance, Gregoriou, 2014). The term has come to be associated with characters whose conceptualization of reality differs from the norm, which is why the more one’s reality is unique, and hence differs from the norm, the more distinctive their mind style (i.e. language) is expected to be (Short, 1994a:  2505). Moreover, and as Montoro (2010:  31)  notes, ‘looking at mind style indicators in a multimodal environment, as opposed to the more traditional monomodal focus on novelistic forms, can result in further insights into the nature of the concept itself ’. The notion of linguistic politeness will also come into play in the analysis that follows, in relation to mind style analyses in particular. Mostly

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associated with the politeness theory of Brown and Levinson (1987), linguistic politeness refers to humans’ need to be appreciated, respected and liked (known as the need for ‘positive politeness’), and their need to remain free from action and imposition by others (known as the need for ‘negative politeness’). ‘Speech acts’ are so called ‘acts’ performed by saying things (see speech act theory, associated with the philosophy of Austin, 1962, and Searle, 1969). Those speech acts that pose threat to politeness-related needs are often accompanied by linguistic markers betraying the speaker’s attention to the needs in question (see also such discussion in Gregoriou, 2009). Not employing such linguistic politeness markers, or over-employing them in fact, can prove revealing (see also Gregoriou, 2013, for analyses of such strategies in the BBC Sherlock TV show’s Holmes–Watson meeting scene). Finally, the concept of metatheatricality and metadrama will also prove pertinent to analysis. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, while making no distinction between metatheatre and metadrama, describes the latter as a ‘drama about drama, or any moment of self-consciousness by which a play draws attention to its fictional status as a theatrical pretence’ (Baldick, 2001: 151). Such ‘meta’ concepts are discussed in the analysis of the play texts’ cultural and medium adaptability and related self-reflexivity.

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2.1 On novelization: The case of The Killing 2.1.1 The Forbrydelsen effect As Hale and Upton (2000:  1)  note, British ‘[t]elevision (except in the special case of Wales) broadcasts a negligible number of programmes originally made in languages other than English’, the language that the vast majority of British TV viewers speak, and monolingually so. Besides, partly due to the dominance of the American film and TV industry, and in addition to being an international language, English has come to be the industry’s preferred language. English language prominence is why most British (and American) TV viewers have come to be averse to watching foreign language films/shows in fact, particularly when subtitled, rather than dubbed or ‘voice-over’ed (whereas subtitling refers to a screen projection of abbreviated dialogue, dubbing concerns an alternate, synchronized soundtrack of the dialogue in full and voice-over concerns a narrator who interprets the action for the audience [Zatlin, 2005: 123–4, 126]). Besides, Anglo-Americans’ dislike of subtitles probably also relates to such televisual screenings requiring viewers’ undivided attention to the screen. Unless fluent in the given film/show’s original language, one cannot nowadays multitask while watching them, say, reading text messages on iphones and browsing online on ipads at the same time; one’s eyes need to remain on the screen and its subtitles at all times. Here, viewing attention is itself divided between the screen’s image and words while, for practitioners involved in the subtitling of such texts for local TV viewers, interlingual as well as intermodal translation needs accounting for; translators need not just convert the show from one language to another but also ‘from one sub-code (the seemingly unruly spoken language [of what the screen’s speakers say]) to another (the more rigid written language [of the subtitles])’ (Gottlieb, 1994:  106, cited in Zatlin, 2005:  133). In short, subtitled TV shows require more attention and more cognitive effort than British TV viewers are

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normally willing to offer, and the subtitling of these shows proves a demanding task for translators. Even though the latter’s interpretative take would ideally also be accounted for in analysis, my not speaking Danish prevents me from engaging with Forbrydelsen’s translating and subtitling as processes. I  instead engage stylistically with the show in terms of its form rather than language and rely on the translators’ (UK Netflix) English subtitles where the characters’ onscreen conversation is concerned. Like Pepper (2016: 10), ‘I am not basing my analysis solely on the original work but a hybrid creation of [in this case, the script writer] and translator – and [hence recognize] that something essential is lost in the translation and circulation of the original work in another language’. Notwithstanding, the genre ‘not only survives in translation but gains new meanings and relevance every time it crosses geographical, cultural and linguistic borders’ (Simonsen and Stougaard-Nielsen, 2008: 5, cited in Pepper, 2016: 10), which is why the translated and subtitled version of the text is worth studying in and of itself, and as a form of source text interpretation that merits attention. Further to preferring drama in their native language, the English-speaking world has not always, or particularly, been interested in crime fiction originating from the Scandinavian/Nordic countries, fiction that has also come to be known as ‘Nordic noir’. The terms used for this genre are not straightforward: for Kärrholm (2013), the term ‘Nordic noir’ alludes to exoticism, and is ‘used to define a specific urban milieu and a mode or sentiment deriving from knowledge about the corrupted state of society’, while Agger (2016) suggests that ‘Nordic’ may be a geographical but alternatively cultural or social term. Nestingen and Arvas (2011: 5) too similarly problematize the origins, definition and signification of the term ‘Scandinavian crime fiction’. Peacock (2014: 2) uses this last term to refer to novels and reserves ‘Nordic noir’ for the filmic context, though I use the two terms synonymously, and irrespectively of medium, much like Forshaw (see, for instance, the title of his 2013 book Nordic Noir: The Pocket Essential Guide to Scandinavian Crime Fiction, Film and TV). ‘The modern Scandinavian crime novel was all but invented in the nineteensixties, by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, Swedish partners who borrowed realist elements of the nineteenth-century novel and made the crime genre into a form of social criticism’ (Siegel, 2014). And yet it was not until the first decade of the twenty-first century that Nordic noir began to break through in Britain and America, and this being an ever-growing market is also evidenced by TV programmes as well as radio and newspaper articles appearing on the subject during that time (Forshaw, 2012: 3). Forshaw (2012: 191) refers to this being an

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‘all-conquering Scandinavian literary invasion’, and expects most of such writing to ‘continue to be read, long after any cachet of novelty is forgotten’. The early part of this century saw avid British crime fiction readers navigate towards Scandinavian crime writing almost instinctively. What is more, ‘[t]he crime tale has become to Scandinavia what the sonnet was to Elizabethan England:  its trademark literary form’ (Siegel, 2014). Nordic noir is considerably defined by the Nordic landscape and its cold climate which symbolically or metaphorically, as well as literally, sets the crime/ ‘death’ setting; besides, not only do live bodies physically lose their bodily warmth after death but Nordic countries are also typically known to be cold (also notice Forshaw’s 2012 book title Death in a Cold Climate:  A  Guide to Scandinavian Crime Fiction). Hewson (2012) draws attention to this generic feature in the first sentence of the acknowledgement section of his novelization of The Killing; here, he refers to the relevant story as set ‘a million miles away from the warm, outgoing climate of Italy where most of [his own crime fiction] work is located’. In addition to being defined by temperature/climate, Nordic noir is also a genre the storylines of which are not dumbed-down; they are instead sophisticated, unapologetically complex, and sombre, bringing to the fore observations relating to political, cultural and societal injustice (on Nordic noir politics and social campaigning, see Thomas, 2012). ‘In the context of a Scandinavian welfare state and its putative Utopia of equality and sameness, the crime series stages discussion of issues of cultural citizenship’ (Povlsen, 2011: 89) while also drawing on related indignities: ‘as with so much of the rest of the world, sordid political scandals are an integral part of political life, and examples of the abuse of power crop up repeatedly – within the police, the armed forces, among politicians’ (Forshaw, 2012: 162). Whatever its cultural context, this is a ‘crime’ genre, after all: ‘always outward, always on the ways in which individual lives are shaped by the push and pull of larger social, political, and economic forces, always on the nature and adequacy of the justice system and on the reasons why crimes are committed, it remains the most politically minded of all the literary genres’ (Pepper, 2016: 17). This is also a ‘noir’ genre specifically: in other words, a dark, bleak and melancholic one. As Haut (1999) argues in his book Neon Noir, as a popular and often lucrative genre, contemporary crime fiction has come to address the social contradictions and conditions of a decaying society; to examine a culture one need only examine its crimes. Other Nordic noir generic features directly speak to this genre’s deviance from the wider, and perhaps expected, crime fiction generic norm (for contemporary American crime fiction’s formulaic regularities, and the nature of such crime fiction-specific generic deviance, see Gregoriou 2007).

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Namely, the wider crime fiction genre presently offers somewhat satisfying endings, with investigators celebrating the disclosure of the identity of killers who are later punished or otherwise brought to justice. Instead, major Nordic noir characters that one expects to survive each series in fact often do not, while this genre typically features unexpectedly unhappy or otherwise melancholic endings; put simply, not only do this genre’s ‘good guys’ regularly ‘lose’ but the ‘bad guys’ also get away with their crime somewhat, disallowing story ending redemption one way or another. I start by drawing on some of the Forbrydelsen academic literature while stylistically engaging with the televisual show’s first series in terms of its overall generic structure and effect. The current section ends with a brief discussion of the show’s American televisual remake (Fox’s The Killing, 2011–14) with respect to the first two series (seeing that the original source series was here split into two), while the next section explores Hewson’s (2012–14) novelization of the first book of the trilogy in some detail. Agger (2011) describes the Danish televisual Forbrydelsen as a police procedural, defined by Scaggs (2005:  147)  as ‘a sub-genre of crime fiction which foregrounds the actual methods and procedures of police work in the investigation of crime’: the murder of the young woman Nanna Birk Larsen, where the first series is concerned, to be exact. Agger (2011) clarifies that the Forbrydelsen procedural especially mixes the thriller with the melodrama though. Whereas Priestman (1998:  5)  defines ‘thriller’ as that genre in which the action is primarily in the present tense of the narrative, ‘melodrama’ refers to ‘narration that depicts characters and conflicts in stylised ways to invoke moral premises’ (Nestingen, 2011: 172). It is the melodramatic conventions which remain most noticeable in the Scandinavian crime novel (Nestingen, 2011: 172), and which speak to this show’s geographical origins the most. In fact, although Forshaw (2010: 189) argues that the show was ‘almost certainly’ influenced by US HBO’s The Wire (2002–8), it proved no exception when it comes to all Nordic noir themes noted above. Forbrydelsen’s central investigators are the highly intelligent Detective Chief Inspector Sarah Lund (played by Sofie Gråbøl), who is in the process of leaving her post and moving to Sweden to live with her boyfriend, and her police partner, and soon to be replacement, the uncompromising and sexist Jan Meyer (played by Søren Malling). Set in a cold Danish winter setting, the show features characters in heavy-weather clothing in the form of big, warm jackets, and thick hats and gloves, while ‘[f]or the first time in TV crime drama, a tongue-in-cheek cult has grown up around an item of clothing, Sarah’s rarely discarded Gudrun & Gudrun knitted sweater, which resulted in massive sales for the company’ (Forshaw, 2012: 190). When explaining the significance of the

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sweater, Frost (2011) quotes Gråbøl herself, who as a TV actress now ‘impossible to separate’ (Thomas, 2010: 149) from the character she plays in Forbrydelsen decided upon Lund’s attire on the basis of ‘the jumper being decidedly unpolicelike’. For the actress (see interview in Frost, 2011), the sweater tells the story ‘of a person who doesn’t use her sexuality’ and ‘doesn’t have to wear a suit’, but also reminds Gråbøl of being brought up in the 1970s, in a very hippy-like environment, the sweater being ‘a sign of believing in togetherness’: ‘There’s a nice tension between those soft, human values and Lund being a very tough closed person – because to me it says that she’s wanting to sit around a fire with a guitar; it gives a great opposite to her line of work and behaviour’. Nonetheless, the show features violent crime, yet crime linked to small town politics rather than, say, passion, in the form of such much-used, yet now rather old-fashioned, murder rationales as vengeance or greed. Agger (2011) speaks of Forbrydelsen being ‘socially engaged’ while, along the same lines, Forshaw (2012: 190) draws attention to the show’s evocation of Danish society injustices, such as the ‘Danish xenophobia [being] reflected in a sub-plot involving a non-Danish teacher who comes under suspicion; a character who encourages violent vigilante action in his indecisive boss stands in for many Danes here in his hostility to immigrants’ (sic). Meyer is shot and does not survive the first series of Forbrydelsen, while all series outcomes are consistent with the Nordic noir theme in their darkness. As Cobley (2012: 296) points out, ‘[t]he denouement of the first series is lifted directly, in structure if not exact theme, from the film Se7en (1995)’. The revealed killer taunts the victim’s surviving family member (the husband in the case of the filmic Se7en, and the father in the televisual Forbrydelsen) and forces the latter to kill the killer in revenge, ensuring the murderer’s own, if metaphorical, ‘release’, and the surviving family member’s eventual, and saddening, arrest. As for Lund, by the middle of the first series, her relationship crumbles and her son moves in with her former husband while, by the start of series 2, she finds herself demoted. The show was first screened via Denmark’s national channel DR1 from 2007 to 2012. Followed by Norway, it came to be aired by 32 countries during 2007–2014 (Akass, 2015: 743). It was in 2011 and 2012 that the original series was screened in the United Kingdom, with English subtitles and in two-episode clusters, on the (arts) channel BBC4. Though Forbrydelsen literally means ‘The Crime’, BBC translated the show into The Killing. The show’s screening in the United Kingdom was somewhat timely. Forshaw (2012:  190)  highlights the show’s ‘political aspect [being] represented in the character of charismatic Councillor Troels Hartmann, mesmerizingly played by Lars Mikkelsen, somehow involved

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in the murder investigation’, and also ‘the principal theme of this plot strand – the difficulties of maintaining a fraught political coalition’ having a resonance for Britain in 2011; the United Kingdom too was experiencing an ‘ill-matched parties’ coalition when the show aired there. The show, and its novelization, consistently draw on the COALITION IS SEX metaphor in this respect; Centre group leader Kirsten Eller is, for instance, politically referred to by a journalist as someone to be ‘wooed’ (Hewson, 2012: 127), and later by Hartmann (when talking to his political adviser and lover Rie) as a ‘carpetbagging hack who’ll climb into bed with anyone who’ll have her’ (Hewson, 2012: 232), this suggesting a casual and disreputable, rather than a serious, long-term and honest, connectedness between the political parties involved. Relevant here is also the original show’s, and the 2012 book’s POLITICS IS WAR/A (VIOLENT) GAME metaphor, such as in the reference to political point scoring and ball dropping (Hewson, 2012: 80), in an opponent politician (Bremer) referring to Hartmann as having ‘defeated’ him (Hewson, 2012: 148) and in a newscast presenter referring to there being a ‘battle for the mayoral post’ (Hewson, 2012: 209). The same has relevance for later references to politicians having ‘tricks up [their] sleeve’ (Hewson, 2012:  480), fighting, stone throwing, considering a truce, winning and game playing (Hewson, 2012: 504–6), the related metaphors generating links between politics on the one hand and trickery, aggression, violence and casualties on the other. Despite its literal and metaphorical darkness, the show came to glean ‘massive cult status’ and ultimately proved itself to be ‘perhaps the most talked-about TV drama in years’ (Forshaw, 2012: 189). Even though it only attracted fewer than 400,000 BBC viewers (Clemens, 2012), it came to win numerous nominations and awards (most importantly, 2011 and 2012 British Academy of Film and Television Awards, known as BAFTAs in the United Kingdom), and also inspired migrations of its own, not to mention further interest in crime fiction generated by the Nordic region in general, and not exclusively such fiction in televisual form. As Büchler and Trentacosti’s (2015: 18) statistical report shows, the translation of Nordic noir or Scandinavian crime fiction was itself ‘boosted by screenings of popular Scandinavian TV series’ such as Forbrydelsen. The show’s first series is noticeably slow-paced; Forshaw (2012: 190, 191) draws attention to the plot’s ‘leisurely development’, and the numerous scenes focusing on the victim’s grieving parents, scenes ‘not for the impatient’, and ones that proved ‘reflective’ and ‘character-driven’. As Povlsen (2011:  97)  puts it, ‘[t]he prominence given to the family’s emotions is unusual for a crime series’; ‘[t]heir process of mourning figures prominently’. The first was also a series that was noticeably long, hence the two-episode clusters BBC4 opted to screen it with; it

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consisted of twenty fifty-minute episodes for a mere twenty-day investigation into the woman’s murder (with the second and third seasons featuring a further ten episodes each). Even more so, the first series’ twenty episodes are chronologically ordered. Each of them features not only about one day of the investigation each, but also days in their logical turn. The term ‘plot’ is generally understood to refer to the sequence of chronologically ordered events which generate a narrative, with ‘discourse’ encompassing the manner or order through which the plot is narrated, the latter often disrupting the basic chronology of a story (Simpson and Montgomery, 1995: 141; see also Labov, 2001). The Forbrydelsen ‘plot’ and ‘discourse’ matching not only allows viewers to slowly accumulate and adjust investigative knowledge alongside the relevant detectives but also further enables the series producers to draw in great detail on the effect of the crime in question on everyone the victim left behind. This is a group including of the young female victim’s grief-stricken friends and family, the detectives, and the various suspects the case comes to inadvertently point toward, and disturb the lives of. Along the same lines, Colbran (2014: 164) draws on Forbrydelsen as ‘a new development in the police drama genre’ when describing its story as ‘victim-led’ (meaning focusing more on the crime’s effect than its investigation), and it is perhaps because of this story’s slow pace that the series has been linked with verisimilitude (see Furst, 1992: 4), as in giving a reality- or life-likeness: ‘Despite the fact that the narrative is propelled by the painfully obvious device of a brutal rape and murder of a young woman (gender and age of course, not being unimportant here) and follows a conventional “whodunit?” arc, critical discourse sustained the TV series in the UK as a piece of exceptional realism’, Cobley (2012: 290) notes, though he later clarifies that the text is frequently far from realistic (in focusing on some events and not others, for instance). I briefly stay with, and elaborate on, what Cobley describes as an ‘obvious’ victim-device next. As noted, Forbrydelsen’s first season features Lund and Meyer’s twentyday investigation into a single, yet brutal, murder of a young woman, and in a Copenhagen forest. As the Cobley citation above signals, the victim’s age and gender are not incidental; neither is her beauty, race or class in fact. As is typical of crime narratives (whether fictional or not), drawing an image of an undeserving victim is important when it comes to generating reader sympathy and interest (see the so-called victim deservedness scale I draw through textual analysis of serial killer narratives in Gregoriou, 2011b: 172). Our discourse chains suggest that not only women, the middle class (or at least the non-poor) and the white are seen as more worthy of life when compared to men, the working class/ poor, and the non-white respectively, but also that the young and beautiful

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are seen as more valuable than the old (whatever that term means) and nonbeautiful (however one assesses ‘beauty’). The Forbrydelsen first series victim is hence idealized (also see Christie’s [1986] criminological notion of the ‘ideal victim’) by being female, and a female that also happens to be a teenager, white, middle class/non-poor (the private school she goes to is described as ‘[n]ot cheap’ [Hewson, 2012: 160]) and beautiful/attractive. What contributes to the sexualization of Nanna is also her having been found raped, and having been made to run through a forest in only a slip, its whiteness and intimate-ness suggesting virginal innocence and vulnerability respectively. White is also the dress her parents choose to dress her dead body in, and her coffin’s colour, this again reinforcing the impression of Nanna as an innocent, young, and undeserving (of murder) woman, and one whose life was only starting. As Povlsen (2011:  89)  notes, when discussing Nordic noir in some detail, ‘[s]pecific to the Scandinavian countries is the importance of the roles played by single mothers and their children’. Equally characteristic of this crime genre more widely, then, is the choice of Lund as the lead investigator in Forbrydelsen, a single mother with troubled relationships:  not only with her adolescent son but also her mother, her former husband and her series one lover. Even more so, Lund appears to be a non-compassionate, perhaps even autistic, detective (see section 2.3.1 for a discussion of the link between exceptionality, detecting and autism in crime fiction), a woman with ‘no empathy’, and ‘incapable of bonding or identifying with other women’ (Povlsen, 2011: 97). Lund having a problematic personal and social life is significant. As argued in Gregoriou (2007: 58, 59), modern crime fiction detectives not only most often appear to sacrifice their individuality and personal life to their work, but they also subsequently exude a kind of tragic aura. Also important is her being female; Pepper (2000: 167) argues that modern crime writers have come to exploit the form’s formulaic regularities and, more specifically, the crucial question of character so as to problematize their audience and have them question why it is that ‘good’ detectives have, up to recent decades, all been male (and also white and straight in fact). Talking specifically about Nordic noir, Povlsen (2011: 89, 97) notes that ‘we see more female police detectives on screen than we did ten years ago’, with Lund being much like a ‘stereotypical and conventional male detective in a feminine disguise’. Along the same lines, Agger (2011) argues that Forbrydelsen represents a reversal of masculine and feminine stereotypes while invalidating family life in the process. Further to being a lonely figure that bears a close resemblance to prototypical male detectives encountered in modern crime fiction more generally then, Lund finds herself damaging her own family life, along with her own career, by each series end.

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However much the show deviates from the wider crime fiction genre, it certainly features many of its generic features too. One of the most noticeable devices the Forbrydelsen narrative employs is that of what are ‘popularly referred to as red herrings’, defined by Seago (2014b: 208) as ‘misleading plot-lines’, and which later enable the kinds of frame ‘repairs’ Emmott’s (1997) theory proposes; crime narratives frame characters in certain circumstances, only to later require a ‘repair’ to these frames. As Emmott suggests, such repairs force readers to not only replace the ‘erroneous’ frame when they discover the problem, but to also reread or reinterpret the text with the ‘correct’ frame from the point at which the switch should have taken place. In fact, the show could be said to be overusing this narrative device, with most series’ one episode endings pointing to yet another red herring, yet another suspect framed as the girl’s likely killer, and a suspect deemed innocent later on, the reader needing to repair the relevant frame. When the car Nanna is found in is linked to politician Troels Hartmann’s office at the end of this series’ first episode, viewers looking forward to episode two are left wondering what his exact involvement in her murder is. Similarly, each subsequent episode ending brings to question the innocence of several others, including the last driver of the car Nanna’s body was found in (John Lynge) in episode 2, Nanna’s fellow pupil Jeppe Hald in episode 3, and also later on her ex-boyfriend Oliver Schandorff, her teacher Rahman Al Kemal (also referred to as Rama) and the linguist-teacher Henning Kofoed, among numerous others. Some suspects are even brought to the viewer’s attention as likely suspects more than once; the politician Jens Holck proves a red herring on at least two occasions in the course of the series and Troels Hartmann on at least as many as four. The narrative comes to point in each of their direction as likely killers, only to then suggest they are innocent, then guilty, then innocent, and so on, the readers engaging in several frame repairs where they are concerned. It is Theis Birk Larsen’s friend and colleague Vagn Skærbæk who the televisual narrative points towards as the girl’s killer at the start of the 17th series episode, though attention is thereafter (in episode 18)  directed towards Leon Frevert (Nanna’s last taxi driver and a part-time Birk Larsen employee) instead. Vagn is revealed as Nanna’s actual rapist and murderer at the end of the final, 20th, episode, hence the narrative’s final frame repair on his own involvement this last time. The last frame repair, this time of the realization of Vagn having been far from the close old family friend everyone thought he was (for which reason Theis shoots him dead), can in fact be described as a ‘frame replacement’ (Emmott, 1997); typical of the crime fiction genre ending, readers become aware of having been misled not just a little, but for the largest section of the work. The text

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itself proved deliberately misleading, and Vagn’s participation in the narrative needs rethinking from scratch, and for everyone involved. Even more so, the televisual narrative features frame repairing that is not murder-related also. See, for instance, the narrative threads suggesting that Morten Weber (Hartmann’s campaign manager), and also Rie Skovgaard (Hartmann’s political adviser), have both separately betrayed Hartmann’s trust; whereas the suspicion against Skovgaard proves ill-directed, the one against Weber ultimately proves justifiable. Hartmann himself also proves to be a liar all along – unlike what he told the police, Nanna is someone he has indeed met, and been interested in, in the past. Morten breaks the law in his attempt to protect Hartmann, a predicament the latter is left to live with. Archer (2014: 218) dwells on the TV series’ suspense plots and cliffhanger episode endings which he regards as more than ‘just mechanisms to maintain interest (and also, of course, consumption of the product […]), but use delay and suspended revelation to elicit broader epistemological questions of cause, effect, and connection’. Each episode ending, he explains, makes ‘skilful use, at climactic points, of movement across temporally consistent but physically disparate spaces […] through the specifically filmic and televisual use of cross-cutting, also known as parallel editing’, this ‘wordless montage of its protagonists, alluding constantly to the interdependency of these dramatic agents across spatial boundaries’. Such highly dramatized end sequences show concurrent scenes in succession. The first episode’s end sequence shows the politician carrying on with his everyday life as usual and unsuspectingly before the wordless scene switches to each of the girl’s grieving parents coming to terms with their loss, with brief close shot glimpses into the girl’s dead body and others’ examination being carried out around it while, lastly, Lund is seen pondering over the case’s latest development. For Archer, each montage of loaded, tableau-like scenes puts the viewer in the position of having to make sense of these juxtaposed simultaneous events as interconnected, and as related to the sociopolitical urban injustices Nordic noir is so concerned with. Danish film composer Frans Bak’s end-credit music, which is also the opening-credit one (see and listen to it at , last accessed July 2016) is key, and interpretable, here too. The increasingly loud, atmospheric and suspenseful musical theme intensifies the meaning potential of the darkly lit and wordless montage it accompanies, particularly at each episode ending. As the SoundCloud site’s commentators themselves say, the rhythm and synthesizer beats draw you in while the vocals hypnotize and magically mesmerize. Elsewhere, the show’s other music is haunting, hymn-like, lamenting the death

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of the young woman in scenes where her parents mourn:  crying, fighting, or otherwise grieving. As Golubic (2016), the show’s music supervisor, puts it when reviewing Bak’s score, [o]ne of the great things about Frans Bak’s music is that he has a myriad of different approaches to creating tension and suspense. Some of the magic of his score is its ability to find lots of different ways to bring you to the edge of your seat while at the same time not wearing out is welcome [. . .] I think the sophistication and the beauty of Frans’ music really lets you feel the different nuances of fear and intrigue in compelling ways that are then personalized by the different characters which are introduced.

In other words, music is specific to the characters shown on screen at the time and suggests certain character tendencies, piano playing when Lund becomes suspicious (Sweeting, 2012), for instance. So popular has Bak’s scoring proved that he was invited to score the US remake of the show, appealing as the Forbrydelsen narrative proved with respect to the American TV viewing market. I briefly turn to The Killing (Fox, 2011–14) remake next, a remake born out of the need to make the show’s story as accessible and as familiar to an American audience as possible, and to eliminate the need for the English subtitles that the source text required and which the US audience was, as previously explained, unreceptive to. Despite the source text’s appeal to this new, American, audience, the narrative needed ‘the “right” resetting’ in the process of migration; it required decontextualizing and ‘recontextualizing’ and also ‘transculturating’, which, for Hollywood, usually means ‘Americanizing’ the work (Hutcheon, 2006: 146). The US reincarnation set in Seattle, ‘the perfect backdrop for a dark brooding series with perpetual rainfall’ (Akass, 2015: 748) invited comparisons with the ‘long mourned Twin Peaks (ABC 1990–1991)’, comparisons based on both shows’ ‘dreamy, hypnotic tone’ and ‘murder by drowning of a seemingly popular and uncomplicated teenage heroine’ (Akass, 2015: 747), renamed (from ‘Nanna Birk Larsen’) into ‘Rosie Larsen’ in the US remake. Apart from resetting the show, the American producers also split the very long first series of the Forbrydelsen original (whose 20 episodes were near one-hour long) into two US series, each series consisting of thirteen 45-minute long episodes. The split of the Nordic series from one into two US ones dissatisfied US viewers and led to the first (out of three) show cancellations. Further to Bak’s music scoring, the US remake maintains the ‘day-long’ episode structure and the montage and cliffhanger end-style of the original while the US show’s lead detective, Mireille Enos as Sarah Linden, is, like Nordic Lund, also non-sexualized. Linden is featured with her hair indifferently pulled back in

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ponytails and often wearing unflattering heavy winter woollen jumpers. Though such jumpers are different from those Lund wears in the source text, the protagonist’s overall appearance in the remake echoes that of the original text’s protagonist in suggesting that, like Lund, Linden is also uninterested in what she looks like, and only wants to do her job. In a telling, and metafictional for ‘knowing’ audiences, scene, Sofie Gråbøl’s Lund of the original Forbrydelsen makes a cameo appearance in the US Killing (2012) show, and in the role of a make-up and suit wearing, not to mention hair-styled, District Attorney Christina Nielsen, directly talking with Linden. Gråbøl’s appearance in the US show is a nod to the original Danish series, and also contrasts both with her own appearance in the original as well as Enos’ Linden’s, bringing Linden’s casual appearance to the (‘knowing’) viewers’ attention even more. Despite such similarities and source-text references, the remake differs from the original it is ‘based on’ (the US show’s opening credits clarify) in several ways, including Linden being warmer, less emotionally distant, than Nordic Lund. The US version also deviates from the Nordic one in terms of the story and its complexity, the remake’s storyline being different but also somewhat more accessible than the original’s. Unlike in Forbrydelsen, for instance, the US remake’s mayoral candidate, and murder suspect, Darren Richmond, gets shot by Belko Royce (the US version’s Nordic Vagn) after which Richmond ends up paralysed and confined to a wheelchair. Also, despite the closeness that Linden develops with her male partner Stephen Holder (the US version’s Nordic Meyer), he is revealed to have negatively interfered with the case by trusting someone who manufactured evidence unlike in the original where his professional integrity goes unchallenged. Even though he does suffer an attack of his own, Holder survives series 2 and ultimately helps Linden solve the case. Also, Stan Larsen, despite the audience believing so at the story’s start, turns out to not be Rosie’s father. The US story’s outcome is also different from that of the Danish original. A series of flashbacks in the second series’ finale disrupts the basic chronology of events, and hence the story’s plot and discourse so far having matched. In these flashbacks, Rosie is shown to have died almost by accident. First attacked by Jamie Wright, Richmond’s campaign manager (the US version’s Nordic Morten Weber), who believed she had overheard his illegal dealings with a man called Michael Ames, Rosie gets thrown into the back of the campaign car Wright was driving that night, a car that Terry Marek, Ames’ lover, then releases into the river in her attempt to help Ames out and convince him to leave his wife for her. Tragically, and unbeknown to Terry, not only was the girl alive but was also none other than her own niece. Wright gets shot and Marek is taken away in custody, a

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resolution more typical of the wider crime fiction genre than it is of Nordic noir, the latter being a genre in which police officers die and killers live to see another day or otherwise escape the law. The US version of the text also has a smaller suspect list (there is one, and not two, teacher suspects, for instance) and faster pace (Rosie’s funeral takes less airtime than Nanna’s, for example). Akass (2015: 743, 748) additionally draws attention to the ways in which ‘the erratic mothering of Sarah Lund [see earlier discussion of Nordic noir’s single mothers] transmogrified into the “bad” mothering intrinsic to its US incarnation’, partly due to the US audience, less accustomed to maternal benefits than the Danish one, being less accepting of a mother who works and/or chooses self-fulfilment over domestication. Bad at mothering is Rosie’s mother, Mitch, who, unlike the original, instigates her husband Stan’s attack of the teacher murder suspect and also takes several days away from her family, and certainly more so than the original’s Nordic Pernille (Akass, 2015: 748). The same goes for Royce’s mum, who is implied to have traumatized him to the extent that he not only shot her dead but also developed such an obsession with Rosie that he murderously attacks two of her murder suspects, and ultimately kills himself. Unlike the original’s Lund, Sarah Linden’s equally bad parenting is blamed on a childhood spent in foster care after abandonment by her own mother. It is her social worker Regi, and not her actual mother like in the Nordic original, who cares for Sarah, but also judges her work commitment and questions her ability to care for her own son, who she temporarily lost because of work Linden did on an earlier case (Akass, 2015: 748). Defeated by child services, and not unlike Lund, Linden has her son move in with his father while she solves the young girl’s murder case. Such ‘bad mum’-related mother-blaming discourse (Boyle, 2005:  10)  is typical of media and true crime killer narratives also. Like fictional ones, non-fictional killer narratives too often imply culpability for the mothers of killers and other wrongdoers, mothers being blamed for either loving their sons (killers are prototypically male) too much or, conversely, too little (Gregoriou, 2011b: 30). I return to such discourse in the chapter on Shriver’s (2003) We Need to Talk about Kevin novel but, before doing so, I turn to Forbrydelsen’s novelization, interrogating its stylistic relationship with the Nordic original, next.

2.1.2 Writing The Killing down Novelization is far from a recent phenomenon, and one that ‘maintains [. . .] despite periods of decline, a prominent place in the book market, whereas more innovative genres come and go without any long-term potential’ (Baetens,

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2005:  50). Nevertheless, the study of novelizations itself is so new that Leitch (2003: 162) describes it as an ‘infant’ discipline, with few analysts (see some in Cartmell and Whelehan’s 1999 edited collection) engaging with the form: ‘Within the field of film and literature studies, novelizations represent an ignored field, whose quantitative importance (since there exists a real novelization industry) and qualitative diversity (since “novelization” has many meanings depending on various national and linguistic traditions in which it appears) has never been fully acknowledged’ (Baetens, 2007:  226). This lack of academic interest may well have to do with adaptation being a process most often associated with ‘a one way street, leading from older, more elite media to newer, mass cultural media’ (Hark, 1999:  175). To use the same metaphor, as novelization reflects a move towards the opposite direction, it can be said to be an atypical adaptation process in this respect. Cartmell (1999: 144) agrees, when arguing that novelizations ‘shake a fundamental belief that in the beginning was the word’ while, as Baetens (2005: 44) puts it, ‘the rise of novelization is one of the ways in which a previously dominated system (that of writing) manages to counterattack, to appropriate the tools of the dominant system (that of the image) and to aim them against it; the text writes back’. It is for this reason that Baetens finds novelization to be ‘an ambiguous anachronism both innovative and monstrous’ (44), a ‘false adaptation’ or ‘anti-adaptation’ (47), a genre that is anti-literary (57) even, in that it is both ‘cinematographic and antiekphrastic’ (58). Indeed, not everyone appreciates novelization as an art form:  ‘for many [novelizations] are simply commercial grabs, unmitigated commodifications, or inflationary recyclings’ (Hutcheon, 2006: 119), with Baetens (2005: 47) too deeming novelizations as ‘necessarily a literary by-product knocked together by some unassuming hack in the service of the Hollywood merchandizing machine and timed to coincide with the release of the movie’, or TV series, as the case of this chapter’s source art form is. After all, with the Forbrydelsen show’s three series having been screened in the United Kingdom in 2011–12, and Hewson’s three books released to the British audience in 2012–14, with an image of the show’s sweater-wearing protagonist (actress Gråbøl) on each book cover, the series novelization is indicative of a ‘knowing’ (Conte, 1986: 25) audience (meaning, as noted, an audience familiar with the source series). As Baetens (2007: 227) says, ‘[w]hile following the screenplay as closely as possible, the aim [of novelization] is to address the broad audience of occasional readers who might be interested in getting or staying in touch with the movie [or show, as the case is here] they have just seen (or just missed) and the characters (or rather the stars) whose images illustrate the front cover of these books.’ Even more so, the actress’s image in all

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of Hewson’s book covers is indicative of the close relationship she bears with the regular, and for readers familiar, series character she performs in the show, and much more so than, say, a particular character she might have embodied in a film she starred in (see discussion in Hark, 1999). The novelization’s inside title pages clarify all books as being ‘[b]ased on the BAFTA-winning TV series written by Søren Sveistrup’, and yet the first is a ‘reimagining of the original story’ (Hewson, 2012: Acknowledgement), the second ‘[diverts] from the original TV narrative’ (Hewson, 2013: Acknowledgements) and the third is ‘not a scene-by-scene copy’ (Hewson, 2014: Acknowledgements). Such paratexts suggest a British (note the reference to the BAFTAs) readership again aware of, and appreciative of, the show, and yet one that needs to enter the novelization with its anticipations suitably adjusted; the reader is told that the books are based on the show, but are meant to offer an experience unlike that of the show. Not all novelizations are created equal then. The timing of the book release (whether before, during, or after the source text is promoted to the same audience) clearly affects critic, and reviewer, attitude towards the novelization art form, not to mention reader interest and related expectations. In the remaining part of this chapter, I detail some of the most important stylistic features of Hewson’s (2012) novelization of the show’s first series, relating these to features of the source show itself as well as to the novelization’s paratextuality. In Archer’s (2014: 212) discussion of the Forbrydelsen novelization, he notes that it is ‘unusual to see original crime screenwriting adapted into novels’, while Hewson’s book marketing and book form in fact has ‘literary’ qualities that are not often associated with the filmic novelization tradition. Baetens (2007: 233) distinguishes commercial and high art novelizations, the major difference between them being ‘their degree of self-consciousness’: ‘Commercial novelizations narrate unmediated stories; what is narrated is not presented as seen on screen, whereas high-art novelizations systematically narrate mediated stories. What is narrated is presented as something that is projected on a screen.’ Van Parys (2011) too describes commercial novelizations as strictly aiming to replicate the original’s storyline without references to it ‘in order not to take the reader (who wants to relive his or her film experience) out of the diegesis and break the mimetic illusion’, while literary novelizations (he opts for ‘literary’ rather than ‘high art’) are interested in the viewing and adaptation process as well as the formal characteristics of the original, and often refer explicitly to the source. The Killing (2012) novelization appears to be high art/literary, and not commercial as here defined. The writer credentials that precede the book’s prologue also suggest a concern with classifying the book as serious rather than ‘tie-in’ literature.

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David Hewson is here hailed as a ‘well-known’ crime thriller writer in his own right, known for ‘highly acclaimed’ ‘fiction set in European cities’, and devoted enough to the novelization project so as to have ‘spent time in Copenhagen researching and writing the novel of The Killing’. Also concerned with classifying the book as high, as opposed to commercial, art is the book’s paratextual praise. Here, Marcel Berlins from the Times is said to have described the book as ‘[n]ot just a novelization’, while the Observer similarly says it is ‘more than a cheap tie-in’. ‘Knowing’ audiences are also in these early opening pages’ paratext reassured that they will encounter ‘a brand new twist to the ending’ (Daily Mail), so an ending other than that featuring in the TV series. The crime fiction surprise ending that readers have come to expect of the genre is guaranteed where the novelization is concerned. Again as expected though, this surprise’s precise nature remains unknown even to ‘knowing’ audiences, the novelization work hence acquiring a newly found crime fiction status in and of itself, irrespective of the readers’ familiarity with the source text it originates from. Unlike the Nordic noir genre often featuring main characters dying, such as Jan Meyer in the televisual Forbrydelsen show, the novel’s Meyer instead survives the shooting. Though physically paralysed and psychologically traumatized, his survival offers an ending consistent with the wider non-Nordic crime fiction genre in fact, in which such characters outlive attacks of this kind. Even more so, Theis is only made to serve 18 months in prison for shooting Vagn, and his relationship with Pernille is implied, and expected, to survive during his time in custody, an ending again less gloomy than that of the source text the book is derived from. Finally, the novelization offers scenes that stretch to over and beyond the first series timeline and scenes in which two further frame replacements take place, replacements that the show itself does not feature. Again atypical of the show it originates from, the novelization comes to feature flashbacks which disrupt the possible chronology of events, and hence the narrative’s discourse and plot having so far matched. Hewson’s added flashback storylines follow on from the show’s loose end regarding a necklace Nanna was found holding when dead (the show not having revealed how exactly she came to have it) and reveal that Lynge, one of the show’s early murder suspects, was Nanna Birk Larsen’s rapist and murderer all along. Contrastingly, Vagn proves to have been a mere saviour (‘[t]he man who fixed things’ [Hewson, 2012: 707]) of Theis Birk Larsen as Theis happens to be victim Mette Hauge’s killer, a member of a gang Theis and Lynge were both in when younger. In adding this extra twist, the novelization, which ‘starts out as an adaptation’, ‘ends up becoming a reinterpretation’ (Mulrooney, 2012) of its televisual source text instead.

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Hewson’s 700+ paged (2012) novelization of the first Forbrydelsen series converts the series’ twenty episodes into fourteen book chapters. Individual chapters do not coincide with individual episodes. Nevertheless, each book chapter, like each episode, ends with a cliffhanger, and the effect chapter endings generate is not unlike that of the TV series’ episode-ending suspense-generating montage, as previously discussed. Even more so, where a chapter 3 section reproduces the second episode’s ending, the novelization comes to echo the latter’s concurrent scene montage: Across the city, in a campaign car speeding through the night, Troels Hartmann took the last call he wanted [. . .] In the apartment above the depot, while Pernille quietly wept, Theis Birk Larsen sat with Anton and Emil, one on each huge knee, telling more stories about angels and forests, watching their faces, hating his lies. Sarah Lund bit on another piece of Nicotinell [. . .] (pp. 74–5)

This short book section, split into the three corresponding televisual scenes, each respectively devoted to the politician, the victim’s parents, and Lund precisely mirrors the televisual montage. Like the source text’s, the novelization’s (and hence literary, this time) montage is similarly interpretation-inviting; the viewers and readers are asked to ponder over, and connect for themselves meaningwise, the three different scenes. A further book section also alludes to the fourth episode’s televisual ending montage. This time, the televisual mode features the politicians Hartmann and Eller publically joining forces while Nanna’s family mourns and Lund and Meyer watch a school recording from the night Nanna went missing: On the steps of the City Hall Troels Hartmann and Kirsten Eller stood next to one another, blinking in the bright lights of the cameras, smiling and shaking hands. Waiting for Meyer, Lund watched it all on the news channel on her computer. Then went back to the video. The school. (p. 141)

Hewson draws on a more explicit link between two of the show’s three scenes this time, adding the reference to Lund physically watching Hartmann and Eller on TV (which the televisual montage does not feature), and hence inviting a more categorical meaning-connectedness across the two spatially separate, yet now paralleled, scenes. Not all televisual scenes find their way to the novelization of the show, in their source text form, or in the same order, or on the same narrative dates and times even. Unlike the televisual show, for instance, the novelization does not

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feature the narrative thread where Weber’s loyalty to Hartmann is explicitly questioned, or various other scenes relating to politicians arguing and negotiating, including the scene of Hartmann being taken in for questioning during a city council meeting, and of him being smeared with red paint right before a debate, among numerous others. Not all non-novelized scenes have to do with politics. Non-migrated scenes include that of Nanna’s teacher Rama returning to school after his arrest, that of Lund noticing the entrance hall light to her flat was interfered with, and her receiving a suspicious telephone call from a silent caller. Further to some of the show’s action and conversation finding themselves omitted, some are summarized, glossed over or even correspondingly reworked and reworded in the book. I illustrate the difference between the two modes, even in a relatively faithfully (as in ‘consistent with the original in terms of meaning’) adapted scene: Where a colleague asks him to confirm whether the girl’s death is their ‘fault’, televisual Hartmann responds with ‘I damn well hope not’ whereas the novelization’s Hartmann instead says ‘No’, ‘It isn’t’ (p. 52). Here, the televisual politician sounds unsure of his party’s involvement in the girl’s death, and in a way that the book’s Hartmann is defiantly not so. Equally though, the novelization itself strays from the source text further, in and of itself. There is added novelization action, and the novelization further features exchanges, or bits of exchanges, that the televisual viewers do not get. Unlike the show, the novelization’s Meyer rescues Lund from a suspect’s speeding car, and repeatedly handclaps when urging his team on, these actions reinforcing his macho image much more so than the TV show does perhaps. Similarly, novelistic Lund’s boss, Buchard, offers a preliminary explanation as to the significance of the necklace the dead girl is found clutching (‘And then there’s this [. . .] My guess is he made her wear it’, p. 58), a necklace first cataphorically referred to as ‘this’ and ‘it’ in the book, with the reader being invited to wait for several lines before discovering what object the girl was holding exactly (cataphora refers to ‘textual references pointing to subsequent information in the text’ and ‘help[s] to shape the viewers’ scope of expectation’ [Wulff, 2009: 2]). In contrast, not only does the televisual boss not offer such an explanation, but the TV series also features close shots of the girl’s hand clutching the bracelet from as early a scene as when her body was first discovered (in episode 1). The televisual show then draws attention to this object earlier on, and therefore raises related questions for viewers sooner, further to providing the relevant answers later than the novelization does. It is not until episode 15 that viewers are told that Holck, Nanna’s lover, is likely to have bought it for her, an explanation that is later falsified. As it turns out, both modes come to later reveal that the necklace

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belonged to another murder victim (Mette Hauge) all along. The televisual show fails to explain how Nanna came to have Mette’s necklace, though viewers might presume that Nanna found or ripped it off their joint killer (who in the show is Vagn); she might have held on to it when dying to indicate to the police that the two murders are connected. Since the novelization opts for Nanna and Mette having been killed by different men (the book suggests that Nanna was killed by Lynge and Mette by Theis, who subsequently held on to Mette’s necklace), the book instead suggests that Nanna merely found the necklace in her father’s belongings. Note there being more such ‘late reveals’ in the book which, despite differences to the ending, the show does not feature; the viewers get glimpses of one teacher’s pornographic magazines and another teacher’s participation in a ‘role model’ basketball game much sooner than the novelization dealing with these very scenes allows, for instance. Contrastingly, the televisual mode’s ‘late reveal’ of Nanna and her (newly discovered) boyfriend Amir wanting to run away together the novelization deals with sooner, with Amir explaining so to Theis and in person. To offer two last examples, of dialogue difference this time, in conversations Lund has with her mother in the novelization, Lund mentions her former husband having hit her (p. 80) which, for readers, might perhaps begin to explain her divorce, while her mother elsewhere denies having ‘chased [Lund’s] father away before he died’ (p. 224) something again the televisual show does not feature. These conversational exchanges Hewson adds offer significant contextual detail, detail designed to explain Lund’s independence, and perhaps her apathetic attitude to men and relationships. Such detail is also given through the literary mode in various others ways, which I elaborate on next. Much more significantly perhaps, and as Baetens (2005:  55, 234)  notes, novelizations emphasize narration, and are hence filtered by a narrative device missing in the audiovisual form. For instance, the book’s narrative voice offers a description of Hartmann’s campaign poster:  ‘Then [the poster of] Troels Hartmann. The young one. The handsome one. The politician women looked at and secretly admired. He wore the Liberal colours. Blue suit, blue shirt, open at the neck. Hartmann, forty two, boyish with his Nordic good looks, though in his clear cobalt eyes a hint of pain escaped the photographer’s lens. A good man, the picture said.’ (p. 12). Noticeably, the poster is not merely described; it is explicitly evaluated, the book’s narrator effectively telling the reader what to think in response to it, something that the televisual mode’s producers can, at best, only imply. Related to this, and equally important, is also the narrator’s

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overall concern with description of place:  as Archer (2014:  221)  notices, ‘[s]paces of the city which remain unexplained to television viewers not familiar with the politics of Copenhagen space – especially the working-class district of Vesterbro, which as home to the Birk Larsens underpins the series’ interest in economic strata and mobility – are meticulously named and described in Hewson’s novel’ (see, for instance, p. 347 of the book). The narrator describes Vesterbro, and Copenhagen in general in fact, in a way the televisual show does not capture:  ‘Three politicians about to fight each other for the crown of Copenhagen, the capital city, a sprawling metropolis where more than a fifth of Denmark’s five and a half million natives lived and worked, bickered and fought. Young and old, Danish-born and recent, sometimes half-welcome immigrant. Honest and diligent, idle and corrupt. A city like any other.’ (p. 12). Descriptions of this sort do more than paint a picture; they elaborate on the series, informing the non-Danish reader of what Copenhagen is like and, in doing so, assume an audience unfamiliar with, and new to, the story’s cultural context (in this case, the city and its demographic). Similarly, the novelization maintains the local place names (such as ‘Rådhus’ on p. 476, for the Copenhagen City Hall) and the primary televisual characters’ Danish names, even including a memory-aiding two-paged principal character list at the outset, this helping the reader keep track of who everyone is, and what their role in the narrative is (i.e. ‘Gert Stokke – a civil servant heading Holck’s Environment Department’, p. x). Even more so, Hewson’s narrative is peppered with a few Danish words, many of which are found in the original source text; Lund’s occupational description as ‘Vicekriminalkommissӕr’ (p.  3) (as opposed to ‘Detective Chief Inspector’), alongside the use of ‘Politigården’ (p. 5) (‘police station’), ‘Politi’ (p.  429) (‘[Danish] police’), ‘borg fred’ (p.  482) (‘truce’) and ‘Skål’ (p. 660) (‘cheers’) arguably function to foreignize the English novelization of the narrative text, and remind the reader of its Danish cultural origin, important as this is to the storyline. Even more interesting are also the novelization’s references to Danish-specific cultural aspects which do not feature in the TV show. Unlike televisual Vagn, the novel’s Vagn drunkenly toasts with the Danish cheer ‘[b]unden i vejret eller resten i håret’ (p. 660), which is explicitly subsequently translated into ‘Bottoms up or the rest in your hair’ (p. 660, author’s italics). Similarly, whereas televisual Meyer has a Burger King hamburger delivered to eat, the novelization’s Meyer eats a Danish hotdog from a ‘pølsevogn’ (author’s italics, p. 117), as in a hotdog van, on this same occasion. Further to the locally specific (and, for the British reader, exotic) foodstuff

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item replacing the Americanized option of the original, the Danish hotdog van’s italicization brings its cultural origin into the narrative foreground, and offers a strong sense of place to the book, much like passing space-relevant and historic references, such as that to the golden statue of Absalon (p. 429), founder of the city of Copenhagen, and the land reclamation project that a pumping station (p. 499) relates to, do. The book’s guiding, and interpretative, narrative voice is, like with many novelizations, very play script-like (see Baetens, 2005: 234). In the book’s back cover, Michael Dobbs (Daily Mirror) declares Hewson’s prose as ‘clipped’, while the Daily Express is quoted as describing Hewson’s style as ‘almost like a film script’. Indeed, the book is in the third person, and Hewson (2012) opts for relatively short sentences, an unusual number of which are in fact fragmented, minor, grammatically elliptical, non-standard (‘Nineteen, breathless, shivering in her skimpy torn slip, bare feet stumbling in the clinging mud. [. . .] Another fall, the worst.’ on p. 1). Even more so, the prologue’s action is mediated in the present tense (‘Nanna Birk Ralsen runs [. . .] She falls, she clambers, she struggles’ on p. 1), which too alludes to the teleplay script, rather than novelistic, style, though the narrative switches to the more fiction-appropriate past tense from chapter 1 onwards (‘Sarah Lund stood in the lee of the dirty brick building near the docks’, on p. 3), with two short excerpts in the present tense towards the book’s end, one of which echoes the opening chapter’s wording. In ‘Mette Hauge runs [. . .] She falls, she clambers, she struggles [. . .] Another fall, the worst’ (p. 693), the earlier victim’s perspective is accessed, while she too attempts to escape an attack, even though this ultimately turns out to be in Lund’s imagination, that is, a presumption: ‘This Lund sees bright and clear in her restless head’ (p. 694). Nevertheless, throughout the book, numerous similes give Hewson’s prose a distinctiveness uncommon to screenplay writing (‘a plane that flies above this wasteland like a vast mechanical angel’ on p. 2; ‘winding corridors [. . .] like calcified veins’ on p. 5), and the same can be said of many of the actual metaphors Hewson employs. When describing Nanna’s father expecting to hear the worst, for instance, his heart is said to be beating ‘so hard it banged against his ribs’, his fast inanimate beating heart taking on animate qualities. When later having his fear confirmed, Theis’ grief and fury are described along the lines of a personified and loud ‘roar’ ‘born deep in his belly’; it ‘rose through him’ and ‘burst into the damp night air’, and ‘might have carried all the way to Copenhagen on its own’, but instead ‘died’ (p. 41) when the father gives in to his emotions and collapses into devastating tears.

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What this last metaphor-filled example also shows is that, further to Hewson’s (2012) book featuring a narrative voice through which the reader is given access to elements that the televisual show does not offer, such a voice is often mediated through character perspective: ‘Nanna had been in her belly when they moved to Vesterbro’ (p. 10) ‘Bengt was a criminal psychologist. That was how they met. Through a drug murder in Christiania. The victim was one of his patients’ (p. 44) ‘Images filled his memory. Pictures, sounds, a touch, a word’ (p. 46).

These examples feature detail which the characters Pernille, Sarah and Theis are respectively implied to be recalling, knowledge here detailed through the narrative voice. Atypical of screenplay style, these last three examples offer background detail and contextual-filling flashbacks to things which happened earlier. Also atypically of screenplay style, such narrative voice enables sections of the storyline to not only be related through character-perspectives but also to be interpreted through such perspectives. Access to Theis’ thinking on pages 507–8, for instance, explains his rather cold attitude towards his visitor Amir, Nanna’s first boyfriend, who he never truly approved of, his thoughts, embedded in memory, tell us. While Archer (2014: 22) also notices Hewson’s ‘tendency to conclude chapters from the perspective of individual agents within the drama’, this is a tendency that is not limited to chapter ‘conclusions’, alone. The narrative voice tells readers what many of these characters are sensing, feeling and thinking, something that the televisual show can only convey through performance of course (unless a character chooses to verbalize their sensing, feeling and thinking, that is). The book’s opening chapter gives access to Nanna’s viewpoint, as she attempts (and fails) to escape her captor, for instance, while the subsequent chapter comes to be mediated through the perspectives of Lund, Nanna’s parents Pernille and Theis, and the politician Hartnann, as the story unfolds. To draw on some more examples, the novelization gives access to Lund’s wandering thoughts to her future life in Sweden (‘Lund wondered what she’d meet as a not-quite-cop in Sweden. She’d never really asked herself that question. Bengt wanted to go. She wanted to follow’, on p.19), and to her assessment of her surroundings (‘Lund and Meyer were upstairs in the Birk Larsen flat [. . .] Decorated, Lund thought. She never got round to that herself. The woman she now knew to be Pernille Birk Larsen worked at being a mother. Seemed good at it. As far as Lund could judge’, on p. 23). Archer (2014: 223) also notes ‘Lund’s characteristically wordless’ televisual scenes being ‘rendered in the novel in a combination of implied interior monologue and free indirect discourse’, where presumably free indirect discourse (‘discourse’ here

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suggesting ‘thought’ rather than ‘speech’) – henceforth FID – refers to the merging of character and narrator voice/thought, such as in ‘Checking the hierarchy, Lund thought. Smart man’ (p. 49) and in ‘Impressive, she thought. In a way’ (p. 57). As discussed in Gregoriou (2009: 74–5) – and following Short’s (1996) speech and thought presentation model – the FID mode of thought presentation merges narratorial indirectness with characterological directness (i.e. contains a mixture of character-appropriate and narrator-appropriate linguistic features), this contributing to characters being represented in an authentic/realist way (Short, 1994b). The effect achieved through the use of this presentation is one whereby the readers feel they are getting a vivid, and immediate, representation of the character’s thoughts as they happen, the thoughts being subconscious to the character themselves, and the author producing a sense of irony and empathy at the same time (Short, 1996; Leech and Short, 1981). Arguably, the novelization portraying such thoughts, and in a way in which the televisual show does not allow, enables the reader to sympathize with Lund and relate to her as a character more so than the source text, which might explain why Lund comes across as more empathetic in the book than its source televisual show. The same can be said of FID involving other characters’ thoughts. In ‘Skӕrbӕk stared at the cash. [Theis] Birk Larsen wished he’d lose that stupid silver neck chain’ (p. 28), the narrator gains access into Theis’ head, with ‘stupid’ alluding directly to Theis’ voice, this being a word the character, and not the narrator, would have used. Similarly, in ‘Theis Birk Larsen walked outside wondering what to do. What to tell Pernille. Where to go next? He didn’t like the police but maybe it was time to talk to them. He wanted to know something, find something. Or make it happen’ (p. 37), there is merging of the narrator’s voice (the narrator tells us the character ‘walked outside wondering what to do’) with Theis’ thinking (‘What to tell Pernille. Where to go next?’), which gives readers a glimpse into his consciousness, while he contemplates what to do next. In one last example, mediated through Pernille’s viewpoint this time, we are told that her ‘apartment was so full of the scent of flowers it made her head hurt. Here we lived [. . .]’ (p. 105), the voice again being blurred, with the ‘her’ being suggestive of the narrator’s viewpoint, and the ‘we’ in the sentence that follows that of Pernille’s. Overall then, though close to the televisual source text, the novelist makes full use of the narrative mode to allow his novelization readers an experience different to televisual show watching. Among others, the novelistic mode offers valuable context and background detail through added scenes and conversational exchanges, the narrative voice itself, and access to character thoughts, feelings and perceptions, some of which are mixed with the narrative voice so as

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to justify characters’ actions and thinking and, in so doing, bring readers closer to them. In doing so, though, the narrative text is interpreted for readers to a certain extent. Narrative gaps that the televisual show leaves unclosed the novelization comes to fill. All the while, the novelization assumes an audience who reads a ‘foreign’ text, an audience unfamiliar with the source text’s cultural origins, origins they come to exoticize to a certain extent. Even more so, character descriptions match the behaviour, and physicalities, of the show’s actors, such as in the description of Meyer as ‘the surly, bigeared man’ (p.  45), mediated through Theis Birk Larsen’s viewpoint. Lund is described from Hatmann’s perspective as a woman with ‘hair swept back from her face like a teenager’, ‘too busy to think about boyfriends. A  woman who thought nothing of her appearance. Which was odd since she was striking and attractive.’ (p. 25). Further to describing Lund’s appearance, the latter description evaluates it, and much along the same lines as the actress herself was earlier quoted to have done so (see interview in Frost, 2011). The novelization also regularly dwells on Lund’s large eyes. ‘Now she was looking straight ahead, at them, nowhere else. She had very large and staring eyes’ (p. 25), a Hartmannmediated description offers. Further to the recurrent reference to Lund’s long silent stares evoking the source text, it adds to the impression of a persistent and self-assured woman perhaps. Equally source text-evoking is the character costuming (‘Still in the black leather jacket and woollen hat, the scarlet cotton overall, Theis [. . .]’; ‘Pernille there in her fawn gaberdine coat’ on p. 45), with inspector Lund’s sweater also getting several mentions: ‘With her was a woman in a blue cagoule, an odd black and white patterned sweater visible beneath it’ (p. 25), ‘She walked in. Same old coat. Same black and white sweater’ (p. 221). Hewson even has Lund change from one sweater to another in one scene (p. 362), and put on a brand new one at her son’s dismay (p. 403) even, when she does not do either in the show itself (though she does sweater-change in both modes where, yet another, p.  552, reference is concerned). Unlike the televisual mode featuring it as a mere costume item, and not addressing it directly (perhaps with the exception of it getting torn, at which point televisual Lund once refers to it as being destroyed), the novelization brings Lund’s infamous sweater-wearing to the reader’s attention, and into the foreground (for explicit novelization thoughts about destroyed jumpers, see p. 84 and p. 474). In the following scene, unique to the novel again, this is done so through the novelization’s narration, and also Meyer’s speech and Lund’s thought presentation in the book:

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‘He kept looking at your jumper’ [Meyer says.] She still wore the black and white sweater from the Faroes. It was warm and comfy. Bought in on the holiday just after the divorce with Mark, trying to ease him through the shock. She liked them so much she got some more. Different colours. Different patterns. There was a mail order place . . . (p. 67)

Lund’s sweater-wearing does not have any bearing on the storyline as such but, having attracted such an attention, even a cult-like following, from televisual fans, it is persistently added into the novel for effect, evoking a ‘knowing’ audience again, who are perhaps to be amused, rather than informed, by its mention. Other costuming props are, or become, more meaningful. The televisual chain around Vagn Skærbæk’s neck appears to have little bearing on, and is not directly referred to, in the show. The novelization, however, draws attention to this chain on several occasions (see p. 55, p. 107, and so on), further to the first mention of it (p. 28) being described as ‘stupid’ from Theis’ perspective, and as already discussed. The use of the polysemous word ‘stupid’ to describe the chain from Theis’ viewpoint a second time (on p. 345, alongside the description of Vagn himself as ‘pathetic’ on this page), not to mention Meyer’s reference to it as such (p. 566), suggests that, rather than unfashionable/unsightly, its wearer, Vagn, is perhaps himself ‘stupid’ and hence a man not clever enough to hide his criminal actions and divert the police’s attention away from him as a suspect. As Seago (2014b: 11–2) puts it, repetition is a ‘strategy for misdirection which builds on the processing capacity of the reader’; it ‘can be used to confuse or to aid recall’ and is crucial when ‘complying with the [genre’s] fair play rules’. The repetition of the chain as ‘stupid’ is a means through which reader attention is hence misdirected, the suggestion being that he is not smart enough to have committed the murder crime and to have hid having done so. Notice also Acting Chief Brix’s reference to him as ‘a guy who can’t even change a light bulb’ (p. 549), and also his televisual uncle’s reference to Vagn as not having the ‘brains’ to be a doctor, like his parents were, despite Lund saying ‘[h]e’s not stupid’ (p. 550) shortly after. When Vagn appears to be admitting to a crime, he no longer wears the ‘stupid’ chain in question (‘no silver chain’, on p.  680); he no longer needs it, his stupidity disguise having now fallen. He proves to be a non-stupid guilty party, and indeed a killer of others, even with the book’s very last section ultimately suggesting that these others do not include Nanna herself. Language’s power to direct and misdirect cannot be underestimated.

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I so far placed focus on the move from audiovisual to written narrative crime text. The next section places emphasis on the opposite process, but considers the transfer into film rather than television.

2.2 On film adaptation: We Need to Talk about Kevin some more Though fictional, Lionel Shriver’s (2003) We Need to Talk about Kevin (henceforth Kevin) is set around the time of the 2000 US presidential election, and revisits the age-old nature/nurture question in relation to the killing tendencies and murderous acts of a teenage mass killer (for stylistic and critical discourse analyses of crime novels featuring killers, see Gregoriou, 2007 and 2011b). Kevin is also an epistolary novel, and takes the form of a series of letters written by Kevin’s mother Eva to his father, Franklin, in the aftermath of Kevin’s rampage on a school day Eva recollects and exophorically refers to as ‘that Thursday’ (p. 7) (exophora having to do with references which pose questions the answers of which are explainable by looking beyond the confines of the text itself). Eva remembers her life prior to Kevin being conceived, describes the process through which she apprehensively came to have children, and explains what destructive effect Kevin in particular had on her life, not to mention the lives of many others, and from as early as his conception. She also confesses to secrets she kept from Franklin, such as her being responsible for accidentally breaking Kevin’s arm when he was little. Her narrative overall lets it be assumed that, despite her own lack of emotional connection with her son, Kevin’s crying from his crib with rage for days on end was merely a premonition of the destruction he was to effect after; even as a toddler and kindergartener, he terrorized others causing them physical, psychological and life changing damage (see, for instance, references to his sister’s lost eye), managing to get away with all until the day of the massacre, a day he planned, executed and ultimately enjoyed taking ‘credit’ (p. 172, author’s italics, here and throughout) for. Unlike most, if not all, such mass killers in real life, including Columbine’s (1999), one of the most well-known and deadliest school shootings in American history, Kevin chooses not to take his own life after his attack. Rather than the 2003 novel being specifically Columbine-inspired, Shriver (2008) herself notes having ‘already begun the book when the headlines from Denver hit – overshadowing the raft of similar shootings that led up to it’. Nevertheless, the Columbine massacre is referred to in Shriver’s book on several occasions. As Downing (2013: 188) points out,

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[t]he novel is referential of real-life school killings and shows a familiarity with media discourses and psychological theories surrounding child-killers. We are told that Kevin’s fictional crossbow massacre in the high school gymnasium takes place only several days after the Columbine killings, and that Kevin is later “obsessed with those Columbine kids who upstaged him . . . with six more fatalities”.

The book is set a year and a half after ‘Thursday’, its letters spreading over a sixmonth period during which Eva visits her son in prison. Eva’s narrative additionally features a series of mostly temporarily ordered yet fragmented scenes looking back to Kevin’s conception and life, also dipping in and out of Eva’s life in the aftermath of his murderous actions. In effect though, the narrative’s ‘discourse’ clashes with its ‘plot’. As previously defined (‘plot’ being the chronological sequencing of events and ‘discourse’ being the representation of these events in story sequence) this plot–discourse clash proves significant here. Seeing that the narrative ‘account’ (p.  228) is given in the first person, Eva’s is in fact the sole perspective on Kevin the novel allows readers access to, not to mention a perspective of hindsight, hence a recollection that is deeply troubled and can be seen as charged, limited and unreliable altogether. One of the unstated questions lingering throughout the course of the book is whether her version of these past events in fact consists of factual memories alone or whether it is a story in fact traumatized, meaning severely affected by its devastating climax. As Shriver (2005) herself puts it, ‘[i]t suits her purposes for Kevin to seem out of kilter from birth. [Eva’s] story is rigged’. In other words, readers are led to wonder: was Kevin truly born evil, as Eva’s narrative suggests, or is she merely interpreting various events in such a way that Kevin’s ultimate murdering action is somewhat explainable, redeeming her of nurture-worthy blame? For Downing (2013: 189), the book ‘explores, without resolving, such perpetually aired debates as the one concerning nature and nurture, and seems to conclude that they may well be unanswerable’. ‘Thursday’ taking place three days prior to Kevin’s sixteenth birthday is not coincidental; Kevin chose that day so as to come to enjoy the benefits of being trialled as a child rather than an adult, given that on the day of the massacre he had not yet ‘turned the age of full legal accountability’ (p. 392). He ultimately is sentenced to serve no more than seven years for his murder of eleven individuals on ‘Thursday’. Most of Kevin’s victims were in fact hand-picked by their killer, and actually invited to the school gym, the actual murder scene, by letter, and on the pretext of celebrating their achievements. Kevin crossbow-murders three adults on Thursday:  a thoughtful teacher, a nameless school cafeteria worker

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(whose murder Kevin thinks of – in war terms – as ‘collateral damage’, p. 374) and his own father Franklin, the readers ultimately come to realize. Despite the letters being written by Eva and directed at Franklin, the death of the latter is not actually discovered by the readers until the book’s very end. The novel is equally noteworthy for the other eight, and young, ‘Thursday’ victims, not to mention their equally young victimizer. All of these young victims, including his little sister Celia, the death of whom readers also learn about alongside that of Franklin’s, easily fall into society’s supposedly non- or ‘least-deserving’ victim categories (see Gregoriou, 2011b: 172), meaning victims seen as ‘vulnerable’ due to their young age. Most of them having been killed at school makes the massacre even more shocking ‘because of the idealized notion to which culture clings that school is a safe, protective, nurturing environment’ (Downing, 2013: 189). Eva also makes a point of committing her son’s victims’ names to heart but not eulogizing over them (see p.  246), this highlighting the norm whereby real life mass killing victims are heroized at first, their names quickly forgotten after (see p. 285). It is not just the majority of Kevin’s victims that are young. So is the central mass killer himself. Such representations of the young as innocent, and yet  also dangerous ‘folk devils’ (O’Neill and Seal, 2012:  20), have been identified within cultural criminological contexts as symbolic: young people represent social and cultural decay, are a group to be feared, or feared for, and signify both protection and punishment (see, for instance, Altheide, 2009). Even Kevin ‘the killer’ himself is hard to separate from Kevin ‘the young boy’, the double labelling being contradictory and therefore complex, not to mention perhaps uncomfortable to respond to. As Valdrè (2014: 150) puts it when discussing the corresponding film, the story ‘forces us, as viewers and as psychoanalysts, to talk about “nasty children”, and of the future teenage murderer without prejudice and without taking anything for granted’. Though rejected by several literary agents and publishers before eventually getting published, Kevin was well received, particularly in the United Kingdom. It won the 2005 UK Orange Prize award for fiction, and was later adapted for other media, including a serialization for United Kingdom’s Radio 4. It is Ramsay’s 2011 art-house intense film adaptation of this book, starring Tilda Swinton as Eva and Ezra Miller as the teenage Kevin, that this chapter turns to, after discussing the book itself. I  start by exploring the style of the book before unpacking its migration to screen, focusing mostly on semiotic and narratological matters, including the literary medium’s language and structure, then turning to the film’s casting, acting, sound effects, visual metaphoricity and filmic cinematography. A stylistic and multimodal analysis of, respectively,

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the book and its adaptation, will not only showcase the formulation of their composition but also illuminate how effects and, most importantly clues, are embedded in their overall style. As Messer (2013:  11)  notes, ‘[a]cademic writing about the book’s themes of maternal care and adolescent violence has been vigorous, with numerous references being made narrative in medical, pediatric and psychiatry journals’ (see, for instance, Viding et al. 2014’s description of Kevin as exceptionally cold and callous, and hence a murderer with psychopathic features). The novel also especially attracted attention from literary scholars, some of whom were drawn to the book’s messages in relation to motherhood, gender and sexuality in particular. According to Muller (2008) for instance, Eva’s character challenges the persistent conflation between the feminine and maternal body; her retrospective tale is suggestive of her insecurity and fear of becoming a mother having contributed significantly to her troubled relationship with, but also eventual murderous actions of, Kevin. Having said that, in the book itself, Eva admits to supposed bad mothering (‘I really was a bad mother’, p. 69), but does not claim responsibility for what Kevin did: ‘I’m determined to accept due responsibility for every wayward thought [. . .] but there, there, precisely there is where I draw a line, and on the other side, that, that Franklin, that [i.e. the massacre] is not’ (p. 71). Similarly, in an interview publicized in the film adaptation’s DVD boxset ‘extras’, Shriver herself is quick to highlight that in the film too there is never a sense that Eva defends herself against Kevin’s murderous actions. Jeremiah (2010) challenges the notion of maternity as an instinctive and unproblematic affair, and describes Kevin as an anti-parenthood and anti-children novel that ultimately critiques mother-blaming. Shriver, according to Jeremiah (2010: 175), ‘rejects biologism, and embraces constructivism, or performativity’. Other scholars discuss the novel in relation to silence and camouflaged voices (Latham, 2009), female phallicism (Gambaudo, 2011), geopolitics and the failure of Western sociopolitics (Webb, 2009), not to mention ‘maternity’ failing and the novel more broadly calling into question the liberal ideals of ‘family’ in the West (Robbins, 2009). Cultural criminologists too were drawn to Eva’s deconstruction of her relationship with Kevin, the boy here seen as an innately evil monster child, a deconstruction playing on the ‘unknowable strangeness of children’ in a more general sense (O’Neill and Seal, 2012: 40). As for the film, Thornham (2013) notes Eva literally seeing herself mirrored in her ‘monstrous double’ Kevin, such as when sinking her face in a tub full of water. Similarly, when she inserts one of Kevin’s cds into her laptop, her face is seen mirrored on the screen, after which she gets a computer virus. Her face

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being reflected where the screen delivers a clown face, the words ‘you lose’ and menacing laughter, show her to have clearly been maliciously tricked, particularly as the cd itself manipulatively reads ‘I love you’. In what Thornham (2013) refers to as another ‘monstrous doubling’, ‘as she gazes in fascination at the television screen on which Kevin is “explaining” his crimes, the reflection of her face is half superimposed on his, dissolving into his more dominant features’. Expressively, when opening the DVD cover of filmic Kevin, the viewer too physically encounters half of Eva’s face on the left against half of Kevin’s face on the right, the two coming together to form a single face. Such visual mirroring of the two suggests a lack of escape for Eva; she is part of Kevin much like he is genetically part of her, the two being one and the same perhaps. As Phipps (2015: 109) notes, ‘while Eva’s overt manipulation of the narrative shapes our perception of Kevin, her occasional lapses into identification suggest a strong continuity between mother and son’. Along the same lines, the book makes reference to young Kevin feeling pride for Eva breaking his own arm when little (p. 174), for which he rewards her by finally using the toilet (he resisted potty training thus far); he is admiring the malice in her that she, too, can see in him. Touching on this same correlation, Downing (2013: 178) notes that ‘[t] he spectre of monstrous mothers haunts the discourse about monstrous children’. For Thornham (2013), the film also ‘replays the Oedipal story’ given both Kevin’s murdering of Franklin and the story’s sexual overtones in the relationship between Eva and Kevin. See, for instance, Kevin’s masturbation scenes in both the book (p. 299) and film, scenes in which Kevin, rather than being mortified, seemingly takes pleasure out of his mother watching him. He is similarly seen staring at a street poster of Eva’s travel adventure book, the scene suggesting admiration. See, finally, the book’s final letters, indicative of Kevin, despite appearances and actions to the contrary, having a strong emotional connection with and perhaps genuine, if not perverse, love for his mother. He keeps a stolen photo of her in his cell, protects her when others imply that she is to blame for his actions (‘Oh, lay off my mother’, p. 353) and even uses some of her actual beliefs about life in America to manufacture what to Eva looks like a ‘fancy’ (p. 356), hence fake, killing motive. It is not until the end of the book that he somewhat apologizes to Eva for what he has done, giving her Celia’s glass eye (Kevin is implied to have been responsible for Celia losing her eye) in a wooden box she was not to open, accepting her affection (‘I love my son’, p. 400) and giving her his (‘he clung to me childishly, as he never had in childhood proper’, p. 398). For Valdrè (2014: 156), ‘Kevin finally gets what he wants most – his Mother’.

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2.2.1 On the book’s traumatic linguistic style As noted earlier, the book technically allows access to Eva’s character-narrating perspective alone, with Franklin as the direct primary audience of the letter writing, and us ‘real’ readers the indirect secondary one, as over-readers of these private letters. Nevertheless, the book’s language is interactive and ‘polyphonic’ seeing that not only does Eva quote others but also ‘constantly anticipates Franklin’s answers’; ‘her thoughts put down on paper are shaped by his probable or hypothetical reaction’, and she manages to ‘re-create his presence, his voice and his reactions’ (Latham, 2009: 133–4). Here are some examples: a. Don’t try to guess; you’d never recognize her from that portrait. (p. 2) b. A familiar role, you would think. (p. 3) c. Are you chuckling yet? (p. 35) The use of imperatives (see the first clause in ‘a’) and interrogatives (see ‘c’) alongside declaratives (i.e. ‘b’ and the second clause in ‘a’) assumes an audience. Exophoric referencing such as the one to ‘that portrait’ (a) invite the reader to assume the implied knowledge Eva supposedly shares with Franklin (knowledge acquired here, it is worth noting, after he passes away) and fill context in a story the reader is thrown right in the middle of, through an ‘in medias res’ narrative technique way. Eva being able to fully include Franklin’s voice in her narrative, and respond to herself, offering feedback on his behalf, point to the great familiarity the two characters must have had in life. It also allows the reader to get acquainted, and sympathize, with Franklin’s character alongside Eva’s, this contributing to the effect that the novel’s heart-breaking ending, revealing Franklin’s passing, causes. Such a style adds a strong sense of irony of course, strengthening the impression of Eva being very much isolated in her devastating experience, being able to only mentally ‘talk about Kevin’ with the man she had him with: Franklin. In actual fact, post-massacre Eva is mostly silent. When discussing the opening extract from this book in Gregoriou (2009, see chapter 6, Task L), I employ Werth’s (1999) text world theory terminology, and note that what gets triggered here is the creation of unrealized possible subworlds, otherwise known as epistemic subworlds. ‘[S]uch epistemic sub-worlds cover any remoteness or hypotheticality expressed within the text world’, and there are plenty such hypotheticalities to be found here, ones that remain ‘unrealised and remote from the originating text world’ (Gavins, 2000: 22). As Phipps (2015: 108) notes, ‘she speaks as her husband, [but also as] her son, and high school teachers, often conveying their thoughts and recreating dialogue that she could not have heard

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[. . .]. She becomes the voice of these cultural frameworks’. This is in fact true of the whole of this novel, such interactive narrative language indicating that the narrator is engaging in memories blended with fantasies rather than actual memories alone. The novel is also highly ‘evaluative’ in the Labovian (1972; see also Labov and Waletzky, 1967) sense of the term. ‘Evaluation’ is a narrative element that can be inserted at any stage during a story, and functions to, among other things, make the point of the story clear and ward off responses of the ‘so what?’ nature (see Gregoriou, 2009 for a detailed discussion of the Labovian framework). Evaluation is marked by a number of different linguistic forms which include evaluative comments and embedded speech (‘She fixed me with a hard stare. “That’s an unusual name” ’, p. 3), comparisons with unrealized departures from basic narrative grammar such as modals (see ‘you would think’ example ‘b’ above), negatives (the ‘Don’t try to guess’ in example ‘a’ above), intensifiers (note the ‘so’ in ‘I’m so tired of this’, p. 4) and explicatives (‘[Shame] is not an emotion that leads anywhere’, p. 4). Evaluation is also reflected through the text’s adjectival, and noun, use. For instance, in reference to old friend callers who she splits into ‘innocents’ (those unaware of Kevin’s murdering actions) and ‘initiates’ (those in fact aware), she relentlessly opts for evaluative descriptors: ‘innocents sound too roisterous, whereas initiates begin with a deferential stutter and a hushed, churchy tone’ (p. 6). In the midst of her sorrow and deeply uncomfortable encounters with others throughout the course of her narrative, such thorough access to Eva’s perspective does more than evaluate though. It allows insight into her background, experience and interests, not to mention intellectual capacity and humour. In ‘I’d left that embroidered bag from Egypt [. . .] in the cart’ (p. 3), the narrator, exophorically again, informs us of her much travelled life, while in ‘I meditated on Campbell’s asparagus and cheese, thinking aimlessly how Warhol would be appalled by the redesign’ (p. 3) she metonymically or elliptically (see ‘aisle’ ellipted in the ‘asparagus and cheese’ mention) refers to her hiding from one of her son’s victim’s parents in a supermarket aisle, humorously noting her meditating over the relevant image’s similarity with Warhol’s pop art at the time. In her discussion of the voices and silencing of the book, Latham (2009:  131)  also notes the ‘intricately metaphoric language in the narrator’s introspective self-examination’ which is worth examining in a little more detail. Eva’s narrative draws extensively on figurative language, and creative metaphors in particular. In ‘I’m exhausted with shame, slippery all over with its sticky albumen taint’ (p. 4), the emotion of shame is concretized and stickily liquidized,

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uncomfortably washing over her. Elsewhere, she conceptualizes America (a country that she lives in and yet feels uneasy with, as an Armenian by origin) as a person that would visit you, whether you liked it or not, almost anywhere on the planet (p. 37), a personification that reflects not only America’s super power but, once more, Eva’s interest in travelling, a favourite domain when drawing metaphors, and one I return to shortly. In describing the house she chose for herself to live in after Kevin’s attack, she talks of there being ‘an air about the place of fragility and underconfidence’ (p. 4), the atmosphere and flaws of the house which is also personified reflecting her own damaged psyche. The house’s flickering lights are next linked to her flickering new life (‘on-again, off-again’ p. 4), much like the disgorged innards of her sole telephone socket are compared to the uncertain telephone connection to the outside world, and the house’s insufficient energy supplies to the inadequacy of her own physical body. Elsewhere and rather meaningfully, the much travelled Eva conceptualizes motherhood as ‘another country’ (p.  81) she decides to, like other women, also visit. Even more so, she undertakes this ‘visit’ only as a consequence of being afraid of losing Franklin, this leaving her entirely on her own. Ironically, this ‘monstrous decision’ (p. 22) of having Kevin proved to be precisely what cost her Franklin anyhow. Eva also extensively draws on the LIFE IS A STORY metaphor through which she conceptualizes the difficult decision (for her) of having a child; for Eva, having a child means losing/leaving one’s own story and becoming hopelessly trapped in someone else’s (p. 32), further mixing the story metaphor with that of ‘story’ as a space/room where people can actually get imprisoned. Again to express this same reluctance, she describes having a child as dangerously inviting a stranger inside your home (‘just about any stranger could have turned up nine months later’, on p.  50), the pregnancy itself making her feel like an empty container to be manipulated and disposed of: ‘I felt expendable, throwaway, swallowed by a big biological project [. . .] I felt used’ (p. 51). Interestingly, nomadic Eva’s term of address ‘Mother’ (p. 48) for her own (contrastingly agoraphobic) mother suggests distancing (note the term being formal but also capitalized), or a lack of a strong connection with her own ‘mum’. ‘Mum’ is in fact the mothering term that could be described as ‘preferred’ or ‘most likely’ in linguistic terms, and yet is a term Eva does not employ. This possibly explains the closeness that Eva herself too fails to create with her own offspring later on. When Kevin rejects her breast, and her affection, Eva uses the same distancing term for herself: ‘It wasn’t mother’s milk he didn’t want, it was Mother’ (p. 86); ‘there was something wrong with Mother’s [smile]’ (p.  87). She also refers to herself through acting metaphors both in reference to her pregnancy (‘I had the

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afternoon to assemble myself into the glowing mother-to-be’, p. 52) and mothering of Kevin (‘all this tenderness that in the end I simply aped’, p. 87), ‘roles’ she finds non-intrinsic and feels she needs to perform. ‘Eva feels unnatural because while she can undertake the [mothering] tasks, she can’t access the emotions that are socially ascribed as belonging to those tasks, and which create meaning and are linked to self-fulfilment’ (Molinier, 2012: 253, cited in Messer, 2013). Kevin’s early reference to Eva with the mum-mother blend “Mommer” (p.  149) and, later on, “Mumsey” (p. 242), show – in their linguistic unusualness – his own discomfort with her role as a mother. Kevin finds himself unable to articulate ‘mom’ or ‘mother’ as doing so would confirm their relationship, natural bond, or ‘connectedness’. At the same time, his unusual naming strategies undermine their biological relationship. Eva also employs acting metaphors when referring to her post-Thursday actions, suggesting these actions being automatic and lacking in substance: ‘I continued to act the part of a woman who’d lost interest in food’ (p. 6); ‘There may indeed be an element of theatre in these visits [to Kevin]’ (pp. 39–40). When only a baby, she discusses Kevin as ‘a singular, unusually cunning individual’ (p. 87) and not what he was for Franklin: that is, a son (see ‘connectedness’), boy or baby (see ‘vulnerability’). Though she does slip into describing Kevin as her son later on, the above referring expression implies that, for her, he is not immediately a son requiring protection but an abnormal individual, and an impostor of some kind. Equally distancing are references to him as a son who she feels belongs to Franklin and not her (‘You towered over my couch with your son’, p. 93), not to mention the reference to him as ‘hell in a handbasket’ (p. 91) because of his constant crying. In Eva’s mind, the screaming baby simply did not want to be there (‘I think Kevin hated [being alive]’, p. 90), much like she never truly wanted to have him in the first place. She consciously describes her and Franklin’s efforts at potty training Kevin in terms of war (p. 186) whereas, when discussing Kevin’s notoriety, she opts for normalizing metaphors of crime conceptualized as schooling (‘Thursday was an elective, like printmaking, or Spanish’, p. 165) and work/business (‘to get noticed in this [killing] business you have to add a twist’, p.  42; ‘he has carved himself a niche [through murder]’, p. 168). His killing ‘colleagues’ (p. 240) are also collectively referred to as a ‘tribe’ (p. 169) working towards building a killing ‘tradition’ (p. 243), as if they share common ancestry or regional culture. She also explains Kevin’s and others’ criminal actions in terms of ambition (‘you and I needn’t have worried about [Kevin’s] dearth of ambition’, p. 43), celebrity (‘he thinks very well of himself, especially since becoming such a celebrity’, p.  57) and fame (‘Kevin explained the [new

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arrival] boy’s claim to fame’, p. 42). His killing of many is also a consumption of sorts: ‘[he] inhaled their hearts and hobbies whole’ (p. 247), his murdering actions generating a story for others to be entertained by (pp. 356–7), and Eva in particular to watch (p. 394). As Eva puts it, as his implied audience, perhaps us all ‘need [Kevin]’ (p. 357), rather than not. She also comes to terms with his actions on the day of the massacre by drawing parallels with her planning and taking a trip (p. 366) and talks of her present predicament as a foreign country she has come to be introduced to (p. 392). To continue with the, to her, familiar travelling concept, she similarly refers to Kevin’s state of mind as the sole foreign country she would have been most reluctant to visit (p. 379) and, in describing her dumbfounding when Kevin asks her about her thoughts of America, she links this with her own staggering when strangers on a plane ask her what novels she enjoys reading (p. 275–6). Like with metaphors drawn on earlier, holidaying is a semantic domain she favours, travelling being not only her hobby but also her business; she runs her own ‘Wing and a Prayer’ travel agency prior to Kevin’s attack, only to sell it and start working at a less glamorous ‘Travel R Us’ travel branch after it. Ironically, she also admits to being treated with suspicion by all neighbours of hers at present, a mistrust that she says is often reserved ‘for illegal immigrants’ (p. 45). Equally normalizing is Eva’s reference to Kevin keeping, and then giving Eva, Celia’s glass eye as a ‘souvenir’ (p. 394) and ‘present’ (p. 397), which again alludes to crime as travelling/holidaying (see discussions of such normalizing and abnormalizing metaphors in serial killer narratives in Gregoriou, 2011b). Elsewhere, Kevin is a defective product (p. 139), his mother the manufacturer that takes the blame for his actions. Kevin himself celebrates his crime ‘anniversary’ (p. 396), while Eva interprets his preference for wearing tiny clothes as, among other things, a refusal to join adulthood (p. 170). I return to the costumes when discussing the film. Eva’s narrative also employs similes, effective as these are in creating humour through more explicit analogy: ‘as if at any moment the entire structure [of the house] might simply blink out like a bad idea’ (p. 4); ‘as if I am walking a balance beam, and with one step off I will topple’ (p. 6). She also likens Franklin to a tree, signifying the comfort his embrace held for her: ‘Built like an oak tree, [. . .] I could curl into the crook of your branches’ (p. 36). References to the colour red are also worthy of note, as reminiscent of the colour of blood, hence interpretable on a metonymic level; they allude to death. Eva mentions the ‘gallons of crimson paint splashed all over the front porch’ (p. 7) by unwelcoming and unnamed passers-by, the light shining through her room taking on a ‘lurid red glow’ (p. 7) as a result. She elsewhere too notes her taste for ‘rich red’ wine at each day’s end

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(p. 53), and Kevin’s attacking her precious maps with similarly coloured ‘concord grape juice’ (p. 153), also likening the ‘emotional tone’ she experienced in Kevin’s birth to ‘a pulsing, aortal red’ (p. 220). I revisit such meaningful blood red colour symbolic references in my discussion of the relevant film shortly. To stay with the book, there is, as touched on, a great deal of irony and humour throughout, such devices underscoring the darkness of the novel itself and offering a welcome respite. Eva, for instance, refers to the paint thrown at her porch as ‘artwork’ (p. 7), its expensive enamel suggesting a ‘serious investment’ (p.  7) on the thrower’s part. It is often such ironic undertones that are manipulated in sentence cohesion, linking ideas together through incongruity rather than congruity, graphological foregrounding effected through the use of italics: ‘This tremulous little house – it doesn’t feel quite real Franklin. And neither do I’ (p.  5); ‘You restored to me the concept of home. Home is precisely what Kevin has taken from me’ (p. 45). Idioms are also literalized: ‘he returned, “you need to get a life.” “I had one. You took it” [Eva replied]’ (p. 242). Here, the idiomatic lexical string’s individual words come to take focus over the meaning of the string as a set (the ‘to get a life’ string meaning being, to use another idiom: ‘to mind one’s own business’), Eva highlighting metaphorically that she does not ‘own’ her life the way she used to any more. Similarly literalizing the parts of the given phrasal expression, when sucking on lychees during a discussion with his parents as to Celia coming to terms with her lost eye, Kevin says she will have to ‘suck it up’ (p. 295). This is a scene I too shall return to. Kevin’s handling of food is highly noticeable, in fact, his playing and consumption of it read negatively, such as when he messily devours a chicken on the night his mother wants to take him out to dinner only to later play with the bread at the restaurant they go to (p. 274). The screaming baby grows into a disconcerting silent child in the book. ‘Silence and quietness are [after all] seen as intrinsic characteristics of the killer’ (Latham, 2009:  139; see also relevant killer schemata discussed in Gregoriou, 2011b; for an introduction to ‘schema theory’, which suggests that we package knowledge into ‘schemata’ in our brains, which we can activate/adjust in relation to our everyday lives/encounters with others’ non/fictional narratives, see chapter  5.2 in Gregoriou, 2009). It is not until Kevin has something he truly wants to say that he skips the one and two-word language acquisition stages to produce phrases and clauses ‘off the bat’ (p. 115), causing Eva to negatively describe the silent child as having been ‘a spy’ (p. 115) until then. Meaningfully, these first constructions of Kevin’s are negative (‘I don like dat’, p. 114), as are most of his positive face threatening offerings later on in fact (i.e. ‘It stinks’,

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p. 124; ‘dumb was his favourite word’, p. 156 – for positive face threatening acts, see politeness theory in Brown and Levinson, 1987; see also such discussion in Gregoriou, 2009). As Latham (2009: 145) argues, Kevin’s silence where his interaction with his mother is concerned is sincere, whereas his verbosity towards his father is insincere. Like Eva in motherhood, from as early as a toddler, Kevin is ‘a little performer’ (p. 128) insincerely playing parts, particularly the ‘happy little boy’ one where his father is concerned, also ‘pull[ing] the wool’ (p. 232) over his teachers’ eyes for years when at school. His father in fact comes to love him to such an extent that he convinces himself Kevin can do no wrong, and is much like a ‘misunderstood choir-boy’ (p. 346) as Eva herself puts it. Eva seeing the reality of the situation, a reality that Franklin is implied to have chosen to close his eyes to, forces the couple’s relationship to suffer to the extent that they consider divorcing. It is not until pages 363–4 when Kevin’s acting subsides, Kevin beginning to be disturbingly sincere with his father as well as others, before his parents’ separation is actually realized. Further to the ‘in medias res’ technique, the book employs several suspense generating mechanisms. Early on in the book, and prior to Kevin’s massacre being mentioned (though readers are bound to be aware of it had they read the book’s blurb), the transitive verb ‘forget’ is used intransitively:  ‘No one in this “community” shows any signs of forgetting’ (p. 2). Similarly, the transitive verb ‘know’ is also used intransitively such as in the reference to house callers who ‘don’t know, and [Eva] can always tell’ (p.  6), or bidders over the house where Kevin lived, outbidding one another ‘[n]ot because the bidders didn’t know; because they did’ (p. 10). The nameless grammatical object (i.e. ‘about the massacre’ or such like) is somewhat implied throughout with Eva’s reluctance to name it signifying her difficulty in coping with it in the first place. Similarly, she later uses ‘it’ cataphorically, hard as it is to name what it was that Kevin did in the following example: ‘I’m sorry, but you can’t expect me to avoid it. I may not know what to call it, that Thursday’ (p. 12). Such references urge the reader to carry on reading, so as to fill in the crime story’s gaps as it were. Similarly, when talking about unblocking her children’s bathroom sink after the disappearance of Celia’s elephant shrew pet (which she implies Kevin is responsible for killing and blocking the bathroom sink with), she repeats the reference to her putting away the liquid clog clearer, preparing her defence against Franklin’s accusation in the following letter: that she might have left the clearer out for Celia to play and accidentally destroy her eye with. The second reference to her putting away the clearer is further italicized, triggering the readers’ interest as to why, thus urging them to read on. Finally, object-less references to Kevin having ‘decided’

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something after overhearing his parents discuss a trial separation (‘That moment [. . .] is when he decided’, p. 349) leave the ellipted object for readers to infer. It is in fact the murder of others as well as his father and sister that Kevin made a decision over that day, the readers come to realize later. Equally true to the mystery genre, the ‘frame replacement’ (Emmott, 1997) that takes place at the end of the book (and indeed the film) needs discussing as a structuring force, replacement being the previously noted process whereby readers become aware of having misread large sections of the work either because of lack of attention or as the text itself proved potentially misleading. Shriver needed a hook with which to market her work and therefore felt she had to reveal the ultimate outcome of Kevin’s mass killing from the book’s very start, its first chapter/letter even (see Latham, 2009), marketing the book against this information: ‘Shortly before his sixteenth birthday, Kevin Khatchadourian kills seven of his fellow high-school students, a cafeteria worker and a teacher. He is visited in prison by his mother, Eva, who narrates in a series of letters to her estranged husband, Franklin, her account of Kevin’s upbringing’ (back cover blurb, Shriver, 2003). As noted, what readers do not learn until reading the whole of the book, however, is all of whom it was that Kevin actually killed. Unlike ‘whodunits’ where the reader needs to work out who it was that killed the victims, we here get a ‘whydunit’ where the reader is put in the position of having to work out why. See Eva asking Kevin this very question on p. 397, only to get the indecisive response that he used to think he knew of a reason but is no longer confident about that. Even more so, it is the full extent of Kevin’s death toll (his victims were eleven and not nine), and all of these victims’ identities, that the reader is prevented from knowing until the book’s end – readers have in essence been misled into reading what can actually be also described as a bit of a ‘whoduniTO’. Besides, Shriver still needed to withhold something for a plot twist (i.e. what will soon be described in terms of Emmott’s [1997] ‘frame repair’ or indeed ‘replacement’) to be effective, for a surprising crime fiction novel-kind of revelation to impress the reader with. Originally written without the epistolary format then, the letters were introduced as a way with which to mislead the reader into thinking that Franklin and Celia are alive and well. ‘Miscuing’ (Emmott, 1997: 160) of the signals needed in order to understand the episodic (here defined as ‘immediately relevant’) information offered takes place early on, such as in the blurb’s and book’s reference to Franklin as a husband ‘estranged’ (p.  7), and Amazon’s book blurb description of him as ‘absent’. Similarly, miscuing are Eva’s ambiguous references to her and Franklin having been ‘separated’ (p. 1), ‘parted’ (p. 20), her being ‘[s]tripped of

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[a] handsome husband’ (p. 167) and her having come to ‘lose the man that [she] most wanted to talk to’ (p. 24) in the book itself. Separation, parting and the notion of losing Franklin are deliberate, and meant to be misconstrued in terms of physical separation and most likely and inferentially activate a misleading ‘divorce’ schema at the novel’s start. Similarly, the book lets it be assumed that Celia is alive and living with Franklin at the time of the letter writing, with such references as that of Eva not having ‘been allowed to keep Celia’ and Eva ‘imagining the two of [them] together’ (p. 224) suggesting that Franklin ‘kept’ her instead, the ‘allowing’ being ascribed to law perhaps. The two characters actually discussing a trial separation and child custody in the weeks leading up to the massacre helps sustain this illusion. Nevertheless, readers later come to revisit all such references pragmatically rather than merely semantically and, in Celia’s case, along the lines of Kevin being the one disallowing Eva from keeping Celia, ‘keeping’ being interpreted along the lines of ‘on earth’ or ‘alive’ rather than purely ‘in legal residence with Eva’. The overall passive voice choice (‘we’ve been separated’, ‘we’re parted’, and ‘been allowed to’) also enables Eva to hide the agency of the force which would have featured in the ellipted ‘by x’ (read here as perhaps ‘by law’) prepositional phrase in all clauses, a force now keeping Celia and Franklin away from her. It is not until page 388 of the 400-page book that readers eventually come to interpret this force as death, a separation caused by none other than Kevin himself, Kevin then seen as the enforcing ruler of this separating power. When Eva first discovers them dead, Franklin and Celia are interestingly mentioned within grammatically unimportant, comment-type rather than topical clausal elements. Readers encounter these characters’ first lifeless references in what Halliday would describe as grammatical rhemes rather than themes, the given revelatory sentences worth considering in some detail. As for Celia, we encounter her prior to Franklin, and in a delayed subject position:  ‘Backed against the target was Celia – standing at attention, still and trusting, as if eager to play “William Tell” [. . .] Celia would wait. Her body was affixed to the target by five arrows [. . .]’. The opening clause’s first noun phrase’s postmodifying clause describes Celia as ‘standing’, ‘still’ and ‘trusting’, suggestive of Celia being animate/alive, an interpretation reinforced by her ‘waiting’ for Eva’s attention a little longer. In this further potential misreading, Celia could be thought of as seen living and patiently standing up, perhaps literally where Eva’s first impressions are concerned. Franklin having not yet been encountered dead helps this misreading. It is the later sentence’s reference reducing Celia to a ‘body’, along with its being affixed ‘by five arrows’ that clarifies her form being propped up, though now lifeless. In

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the same page’s ‘I’ve felt compelled to weave some thread of connection between the otherwise meaningless dishevelment of that backyard and the finest in the man I married’, Franklin grammatically features as the ‘dishevelment’ and ‘man’ almost hidden within the prepositional phrase starting with ‘between’ (a phrase in fact postmodifying the bigger noun phrase ‘some thread of connection [. . .]’ that itself functions as a grammatical object in the wider clause). In other words, Eva here focuses on her wanting to find a connection between two very different forms for Franklin, all the while indirectly revealing that he, shockingly for the reader as well as her, is now seen dead. The process whereby readers correct their understanding of the text over a short stretch is what has previously been described as a ‘repair’ in Emmott’s (1997) frame theory terms. Repairs are often a result of the reader facing the previously introduced ‘miscuing’ (Emmott, 1997: 160). In being allowed access to Eva’s mind at this particular point in time then, readers experience what Eva herself does; in discovering her husband and daughter’s dead bodies, she struggles to compensate these images against these characters’ live forms. Eva could even be mistaking Celia as merely standing up against the target at first glance herself; much like the readers’ literary/linguistic double take, Eva too perhaps engages in a tragic physical ‘double take’ of her own. Even more so, the grammatical ‘rheming’ of both these personas shows the discovery of their deaths coming across as perhaps incidental, circumstantial, and hence on some level expected and inevitable on Eva’s part. Eva’s immediate reaction is laced with a further narrative describing how events must have unfolded earlier that morning, with jumps into Franklin’s point of view and reasoning when Kevin attacked him and Celia. Overall though, the above grammar and tone hint at a certain level of composure on her part as she faces an outcome that she perhaps had feared all along. Ultimately, while readers frame ‘repair’ at the realization that the form of Celia that Eva encounters is lifeless rather than alive, they come to frame ‘replace’ the book as a whole where both Celia and Franklin’s endings are concerned. Readers become aware of their major misapprehension, a misreading effected, given that the earlier text now proves to have been deliberately ambiguous. What readers originally take to be a narrative of a woman coming to terms with her son’s killing of several others here needs to be revised as an even more tragic narrative:  Eva is coping with her son having murdered her own husband and daughter as well (and hence his own father and sister), leaving Eva utterly alone. The letters she writes will never reach their addressee we realize though she does insist on writing to Franklin as if somehow they will, even after she reveals he is now dead (‘I don’t know if you keep up with these things’,

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p. 391). At second read, the book itself does hint at the letters remaining unsent, such as on p. 329’s reference to them being thought of as ‘respondence’ rather than ‘correspondence’. Even more so, some of her narratives throughout the novel need rethinking altogether, in light of these new devastating bits of information. When she describes visiting Franklin’s parents after the massacre for example, she talks of ‘irretrievable breakdown’ (p. 138) preventing Franklin from being able to accompany her. What readers originally think of non-episodically (which, unlike Emmott’s 1997 definition, is here defined as ‘not immediately relevant’) along the lines of a breakdown (a car’s or marriage’s perhaps), needs in due course to be rethought episodically (here meaning ‘immediately relevant’), along the lines of most possibly Kevin’s mental breakdown. The nominalization of the italicized ‘breakdown’, like the passive voice used above, disguises the agency of who/what it was that ‘broke’ exactly, and hence who it is that needs to be given responsibility for the breakdown in question. Similarly, when offering condolences to one of Kevin’s victim’s parents, Eva accidentally says ‘I’m so sorry for my loss’ as opposed to ‘your’, her ‘gaffe’ reduced to a ‘miscue’ by Eva herself (p. 141). As we later realize, the miscue took place at the narrative level as well – Eva too was suffering from personal loss at the time, given that her husband and daughter had also died, something that most other characters do not seem to empathize with. (Needless to say perhaps that had most other characters been able to empathize with her throughout the book, the overall novel surprise resolution would have been lost.) To return to the peppering of clues in the book, Kevin telling a pregnant Eva that she will ‘be sorry’ (p. 219) for bringing Celia into their life is also newly interpretable as a real threat to what he truly proved capable of doing to Celia later on. An early reference to Kevin’s justification of his actions is also differently meaningful if we return to this after realizing Franklin was also killed: ‘And you can understand why in relation to you [Franklin] of all people [Kevin] feels compelled to portray himself as a victim’ (p. 357). Given that Kevin killed Franklin, portraying himself as a victim somewhat justifies and excuses his murdering of his father, specifically to his father. Discussions Eva and Franklin had with Kevin in the morning of the attack also take new meaning at the end of that day’s narrative. Franklin’s reference to Kevin being a ‘heartbreaker’ (p. 362) in his outfit is ominous for instance, and is immediately pragmatically interpretable seeing that Kevin, later that day, shoots arrows through people’s hearts (‘Struck perfectly through the heart, [Laura] was dead’, p. 375), this heart breaking including his father’s and sister’s we later realize. The heart break could also be in reference to the emotional damage that Kevin’s actions cause for all of his victims’

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friends and families. Even more so though, Kevin’s encouragement for Eva to kiss Celia one more time is interpreted ironically by Eva, but takes on literal dimensions later on; Kevin was in fact offering Eva the opportunity to say goodbye to her daughter for good. Similarly, Eva dwelling on her last kiss with Franklin, and her direct thanks to him for kissing her, also ultimately prove to be episodic, and newly significant at second thought/read. Finally, the arrested Kevin looking into his mother’s eyes before she returns home to find out what happened to her husband and daughter is also meaningfully object-less: ‘He was searching’ (p. 382) Eva says, the intransitive use of the transitive verb again later understandable as in: looking to establish if she, as yet, knew the whole of what he had done. On her return home, Eva makes reference to her presumptions in relation to why Franklin and Celia were nowhere to be found: ‘Robert had obviously taken Celia to McDonalds’ (p. 385), ‘You were hiding, giggling in a closet with Celia’ (p. 387), only for readers to later interpret these presumptions as ill-fated ones instead. Overall, in some sense, and for some readers literally perhaps, the book needs rereading from scratch.

2.2.2 ‘Nobody loves an adaptation’ (Boyum, 1985: 15), or do they? Fidelity has been ‘the bane of adaptation studies’, partly because it supports medium specificity and aesthetic value, and partly because it creates certain aesthetic, social and media hierarchies (Elliott, 2013:  22–3; see also Leitch’s 2003: 161, 8th fallacy: ‘Fidelity is the most appropriate criterion to use in analyzing adaptations’). And yet McFarlane (2007) usefully disposes several misconceptions about film adaptation of literary work: fidelity is not a wholly inappropriate way of looking at such films he says, and such filmic work does not in fact make fewer demands on imagination than the corresponding books do. Films can be just as powerful an art form as the more senior art form of books, not to mention just as complex (see also Leitch’s, 2003: 154, 4th fallacy: ‘Novels are better than films’). In fact, from as far back as the 1980s, Boyum (1985: 20) argues that film is ‘in a very real sense a form of literature itself. Not simply sharing the very qualities that make literature literature, but making for a system of narration that unites the power of words with the potentially even greater power of the images they aim to create’. Scottish director Lynne Ramsay’s art-house film adaptation of Kevin will next be semiotically and stylistically explored, its relation to Shriver’s originating work unpacked. By definition, film’s communicative power is highly conventionalized and not highly encoded (Boyum, 1985: 38) but that is precisely

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why it merits consideration and explanation. Just like engaging in stylistics can explain interpretation(s), unfolding art-house cinematic conventions can be rewarding in bringing to light the ways in which the different semiotic modes interact within and across different mediums, generating particular meanings and effects. Leitch (2007:  237)  argues that ‘many filmmakers make contributions so definitive to the films on which they collaborate, that their hand is instantly recognisable’. This is especially true of Ramsay, a film-maker unafraid to deal with taboo subjects, her former work including ex-con junkies and absentee fathers. Kevin also deals with a taboo in its featuring a mother who is not only averse to child bearing and motherhood but is also one who lacks a connection with, and in fact dislikes, her own first born, Kevin. Ramsay’s early interest in photography is too evident in her directing of filmic Kevin, each filmic frame of hers being not unlike an artistic photograph, capturing a great deal of intensity. In an essay published on the cover of the We Need to Talk about Kevin filmic DVD, psychologist Mark Stafford mentions another one of Ramsay’s interests: portraying ‘the effects of unseen events’, something evident not only in Kevin (where killings, among other agonizing scenes, are suggested rather than shown), but in Morvern Callar (2002) and Ratcatcher (1999) also. For Johnston (2013), other recognizable Ramsay filmic elements in Kevin include ‘thoughtful sound design, visceral cinematography, [and] effective editing’: Looking at any of Ramsay’s films one can tell they are hers  – the fluid camera work, the silent moments lingering on frames within frames, the audience’s entry point and identification with many of her characters comes through these seemingly effortless modes of visual presentation [sic]. Her keen attention to the importance of sound design acts as a lynchpin for the very success of her films. (Johnston, 2013)

Without the book’s internal narration, one inevitably ‘loses’ the humour and sarcasm of Eva’s letter writing towards Franklin, not to mention has less of a sense of her intellectualizing, if at all, in the film. Boyum (1985: 36) after all explains that film ‘is tied to the external rather than the internal, unable to pierce through surfaces to whatever contradictions they might conceal’, even if that is less true nowadays than it was in the 1980s (also see Hutcheon’s [2006: 56] reference to interiority, being the terrain of the telling [i.e. novels], rather than the showing [i.e. drama] or interactive [i.e. games] mode, as ‘a cliché’). As Ramsay herself put it (cited in O’Hagan, 2011) though, ‘the letters were not going to work in a film the way they worked in Lionel’s novel. They just weren’t visual. Plus, the budget

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imposed a certain order. We honed the script down to the bare bones’. Hutcheon (2006: 40) similarly argues that the epistolary novel seems to present the most obvious difficulties for dramatization, because of the changes it requires in adaptation. The four-hundred page prose novel had to be reduced to a 112-minute film, the epistolary element eliminated, with Thornham (2013) too touching on the adaptation adjustment when saying that ‘the dualities and difficulties that can be worked through textually in the novel are in Ramsay’s film rendered in cinematic terms’. Like the book, the film adaptation is centred on the present day and made up of a series of flashbacks. Unlike the book though, the flashback scenes are highly fragmented and far more temporarily disordered, the viewers only able to determine temporal placement by such things as Eva’s hair style and length, the later Eva made to look older. The overall filmic style here aims to communicate Eva’s inner conflict and utter despair with her circumstances particularly after Kevin is conceived. The fragmentation also helps imply unreliability; just like with the book itself, the viewers do not, after all, know whether these past scenes mediated through Eva are actual, and truly factual, memories of hers. Some of the distant past scenes having been shot with a 5D Canon digital camera, often distorted and in less than clear focus, also add a layer of hyperreality to Eva’s memories (Seamus McGarvey, Director of Photography, DVD extras), as does the overlapping of scene elements set in the past (such as Eva and Franklin coming to terms with Eva’s pregnancy) against scene elements set in the present (such as the noise of the photocopy machine at her work office, post-massacre) throughout. The film was shot in no more than 30 days, on a budget of just less than $7m (O’Hagan, 2011). The wide 2.35:1 ratio shot allowed Ramsay (cited in McGill, 2011: 17) to do what is called ‘mise en scène’, which ‘translates as “putting into the scene” and refers to “those aspects of the film that overlap with the art of the theater: setting, lighting, costume and the behaviour of the figures” ’ (Bordwell and Thompson, 2001: 156, cited in McIntyre, 2008: 313). Doing ‘mise en scène’ in the filmic Kevin ultimately conferred an epic feel on a film that might easily have felt too interior and claustrophobic. Kevin is distinguished by [the film makers’] careful, spacious compositions, by their unsettling play with physical space and the gaps between people, and by the near-theatrical atmosphere evoked by the use of very few, largely indoor locations. Most striking of these is the horrid, showy Connecticut house that Eva’s husband Franklin (John C. Reilly) buys for the family – the stuff of smug

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suburban nightmares for bohemian Eva, and soon a battleground for her and Kevin. (McGill, 2011: 17)

Interestingly, when recollecting the memory of moving into the new house, Eva is seen going down her Soho apartment building’s elevator in the dark (see the DOWN IS BAD orientational, and DARK IS BAD conceptual metaphors, in Lakoff and Johnson, 1980), the scene metaphorically marking her ‘descent’ into suburban hell. Similarly, the physical closeness of Eva and Franklin prior to Kevin’s arrival contrasts with the large physical space created between these characters once Kevin is conceived, and particularly once they move into the house, something the wide framing of the film allows. Physical space here needs interpreting metaphorically and on an emotional level. Similarly, as production designer Judy Becker explains (DVD extras), the Soho apartment the couple shared when childless is designed to seem comfortable, warm and inviting, and yet the house they move to once Kevin becomes a toddler is meant to contrastingly be seen as cold and austere. Noticeably, the flat is decorated with masks Eva acquired when travelling (suggesting her need for distance), all the while she is trying to calm her crying firstborn, pretending to feel close to him when in fact she is not. She is seen decorating a room in the new house with one such mask while trying to cope with a difficult, if older, Kevin again. She herself is wearing mothering ‘masks’ here. Thornham (2013) also notes the recurring mirror shots of Eva, along with the distancing effect of much of the film’s framing, as in fact reminiscent of mainstream maternal melodrama. Like Eva’s, filmic Kevin’s physique is also shown mirrored, such as on the dining table when having dinner with his parents, his charade shown metaphorically through literal reflection. Towards the film’s close, Thornham (2013) notes there being ‘a repeat of the sequence in which Eva lowers her face into water, with the camera positioned below the surface. This time, however, her face does not merge with Kevin’s; he remains separate, resentful, flicking at the surface of the water into which she has removed herself ’. Here, Kevin’s naked upper body is seen reflected in his sink’s water, his face menacing, the construction acquiring realness instead of a facade. Kevin is physically and mentally uncovered, his actual angry self about to be shown to all, his innocence disguise irreversibly removed. The film’s composition and design overall then plays with notions of ‘performance’ and ‘facade’ (Ramsay, quoted in O’Hagan, 2011) as to family and community throughout, notions communicated in the novel linguistically through such things as the previously discussed metaphors of ‘acting’.

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Ramsay (DVD extras) also notes the film’s semi-scope being the kind often used for battle scenes and wastelands. Appropriately then, in filmic Kevin, all three characters experience conflict in what Swinton herself (DVD extras) describes as a ‘war film’. Kevin is in conflict with Eva, and Eva in conflict with Franklin over Kevin. And all three of them act or ‘pretend’ for others’ sake because of this conflict:  Eva plays the part of a caring mother when she feels anything but caring, Kevin plays the part of a son to Franklin when he feels no real loving connection with his father, and Franklin (himself inadvertently perhaps) plays the part of a father and husband while choosing to ignore the issues he is constantly confronted with by the other two. The performances of Swinton and Miller call attention to this illusion. Much like Michael C. Hall’s Dexter (see relevant discussion in Gregoriou, 2011b), the mother and son performances simulate or inexpertly yet deliberately copy normal human interaction. Eva is seen pretending to be a caring mother when urged by Franklin to reassure Kevin that what happened to Celia’s eye was not his fault, and yet her accusatory tone gives the game away. Similarly, and much like the book suggests, Kevin quickly switches from the menacing boy to the cheerful one whenever Franklin enters the room. Even more so, Robey (2011: 79) notes ‘McGarvey’s at-a-remove cinematography [imposing] an eerie barrier between the ostensible storyteller and her guilt-inflected reminiscences’, establishing space not only between characters but also between Eva and her own recollections. By doing this, Robey adds that the film removes ‘control so thoroughly from its main character that she can’t even marshal her own flashbacks – they happen to her out of the blue’. Relatively long, that is, full body shots of Eva awkwardly walking back into her house after processing the image of red paint having been thrown at it, and that of Eva walking into a job interview (at her soon to be workplace) also imply an automatic and disengaged way of life. In her feminist reading, Thornham (2013) also notes ‘the vast, white, symmetrically framed corridors of the recreation centre, the hospital, the supermarket and the prison [where] Eva’s agency is removed’, the wide shot institutional spaces showing Eva to have lost her subjectivity to pregnancy and motherhood. Along the same lines, the book’s Eva talks of, in pregnancy, demoting herself ‘from driver to vehicle, from householder to house’ (p. 58), losing her humanizing qualities through the metaphorical conceptualization of herself as now a ‘thing’ rather than ‘agent’/doer. Her objectification is also shown through the various scenes whereby neighbours, colleagues and passers-by, in the knowledge of what her son did, merely blankly stare at her, as if at an object that requires observation and maybe even explanation. Not many

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actually communicate with her, most of the few that do (such as relatives of her son’s victims) doing so with malice rather than caring interest or concern. ‘The doctor’s office where Eva seeks some explanation for Kevin’s dull and sullen toddlerhood, meanwhile, is decorated with clown portraits straight out of a horror film’, notes McGill (2011) while Halloween-dressed child neighbours frighten Eva when returning home from work late one evening. This driving scene through the Halloween setting literally reminds Eva of the ‘horror’ that was Kevin’s upbringing in fact. It is also a driving scene alluded to later, where Eva, hearing of trouble, drives into Kevin’s school on Thursday evening in a scene not unlike the Halloween one. Kevin is a psychological rather than a metaphysical/supernatural horror film. Nevertheless, according to O’Hagan (2011), ‘Ramsay skilfully deploys some of the tropes of the demonic horror film genre’, example films of this bad seed (McGill, 2011) subgenre (launched by Leroy’s 1956 American film The Bad Seed) of the wider horror genre including such work as Damien: Omen II and Rosemary’s Baby (see Thornham, 2013 for a discussion of such tropes/horror references in filmic Kevin). Shriver too has her textual heroine draw on several horror dramas which directly link pregnancy with infestation and colonization: ‘Rosemary’s Baby was just the beginning. In Alien, a foul extraterrestrial claws its way out of John Hurt’s belly. In Mimic, a woman gives birth to a two-foot maggot. Later, the X Files turned bug eyed aliens bursting gorily from human mid-sections into a running theme.’ (p. 58). I next look at the filmic images more closely, and concentrate on metaphors and the use of colour. Right after a camera shot zooming towards a flowing curtain (suggestive of Eva’s viewpoint just before she discovers Franklin and Celia’s dead bodies), the film opens with Eva in a pre-Kevin scene set in La Tomatina – the Spanish foodfight festival – this suggesting a link with what is to be found on the other side of the curtain in fact. Back in Spain though, Eva is seen immersed literally in exotic, ecstatic, almost orgasmic freedom, ‘in the midst of a seething crush of people all coated in mashed-up tomatoes’ (McGill, 2011). The crowd literally holds her up in the air, an image metaphorically alluding to her uplifted feelings here (see UP IS GOOD orientational conceptual metaphor in Lakoff and Johnson, 1980), and yet a crowd image very much metaphorically clashing with the physical isolation she ultimately experiences as a result of having Kevin, a decision leaving her in a very different kind of red-looking (i.e. bloody) anarchic mess to respond to post-attack. The opening scene McGill (2011: 16) notes is also later mirrored when ‘Eva, hiding in a supermarket aisle from one of the parents of her son’s many victims, is framed in front of scarlet rows of tinned tomato soup’,

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a scene, like the book, nodding at Warhol’s work too of course, and the pop art messages of consumerism and advertising that go with it. The tomatoes’ blood red colour proves particularly important, colour being a filmic element that ‘works beneath the level of intellect appealing to emotion and creating atmosphere’ (Quinn, 2007: ‘Glossary of Useful Film Terms’). The redness of the liquid paint neighbours attack Eva’s car and house with, the richly red wine she drinks (in both the book and the film), the strawberry jam Kevin coats his bread with, is certainly a redness that is interpretable. Similarly, the red shirts Kevin wears and the red ball he refuses to play with when little, not to mention the sparkly redness of his sister Celia’s shoes, and that of the chair Eva sits on when looking for a menial travel agency job in the aftermath of his actions, too playfully and metaphorically allude to blood. As Thornham (2013) argues, redness may even allude to Americanness, red being the dominant colour of the American flag. This film, Miller asserts (DVD extras) is an American one, and there is a reason it is set there, he says (though he does not explain this link explicitly himself). For Stafford (DVD cover), the recurrence of this rich red colour is merely suggestive of Kevin’s imminent violence. It is only after the massacre that Eva strives to desperately remove the colour red from her life, such as when she literally keeps scrubbing the persistent red paint her house was attacked with, later also rubbing this paint from her hair and also her hands and fingernails. Such actions allude to the metaphor of there being blood in her hands she factually cannot remove. As Robey (2011: 79) puts it, red is ‘a colour that won’t leave Eva in peace’, and yet it is mostly in the concluding sequences that blood is visible on screen. The film is filled with such intense visual metaphors throughout. To name but a few more, young Kevin bursting his crayons and messily playing with his food allude to the destruction he is physically capable of effecting later. When Kevin’s sister’s eye is lost to drainage cleaner, he is shown feeding on a lychee: the extreme close shot of Kevin sucking on the eyeball-like fruit itself alluding to the eye, the loss of which he himself may well be responsible for (see Gregoriou’s [2011b] discussion of a similar effect achieved by such extreme close shots of a serial killer’s morning routine in American TV show Dexter’s opening credits). Meaningfully, he later spits the lychee out, a clear indication that he indeed does not like the fruit, and only chewed on one to upset his mother. When discussing the same lychee scene as described in the book, Latham (2009: 145) too, like many others, reads the scene symbolically, and as suggestive of Kevin’s gruesome disfigurement of his sister Celia: here ‘the monster devours, ingests, regurgitates and mutilates’: ‘Methodically, he splayed the lychee open, parting the slippery flesh from the smooth brown seed. [. . .] He tore into the lychee with his front

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teeth.’ (p. 295). Elsewhere, to show Eva’s apprehension with motherhood while pregnant, she is seen uneasily surrounded, and even repelled, by exposed and bloated pregnant bellies in a changing room, and is later left unmoved when tens of girls dressed in pink ballerina outfits run past her laughing loudly in the corridor. The pregnant bellies and loud ballerinas metonymically refer to motherhood and femininity/femaleness respectively here. She is also seen screaming in childbirth, her face distortedly reflected in a round mirror in the delivery room while the female nurse unfeelingly insists for her to ‘stop resisting’, before she is shown stunned and unfeeling sitting in the hospital bed, right next to a much engaged Franklin holding baby Kevin. Like many of Ramsay’s tragedies in this film and others elsewhere, the childbirth is another event here ‘left unseen’. Eva’s distorted screaming face is instead another horror film reference alluding to tragedy. This is not, the visual metonymies imply, a woman content with her choice to have a child – if anything, she is horrified, even tortured by it. Even more so, Eva is shown feeling uncomfortable and isolated in a world where femininity and motherhood are forces for females to endure and helplessly suffer from, these being powers that all females are ultimately unable to resist. Elsewhere, when she is first seen visiting Kevin in prison, the camera stays on her, with only extreme close shots of Kevin’s mouth provocatively biting off his fingernails, this metaphorically signalling to viewers that the film’s focus is Eva, and not Kevin in fact. It is not until later that viewers get to see the postmassacre Kevin up close, and ultimately with his head shaved, him somewhat confronting the realization of what he has done only at the film’s end. When Eva unprotestingly buys broken eggs from a supermarket, the egg smashing another ‘petty act of revenge’ (Robey, 2011:  79), she goes home to cook the eggs only to later pick shells out of the omelette she chews on. Rather than an aggressive tendency, the extreme filmic close shots of her removing eggshells from her mouth point to both an emotional and physical self-torture. These eggshell pieces, along with the extreme close shots of an unseen imprisoned Kevin biting his fingernails before laying bits of them outlined on the table for Eva to see, for Thornham (2013), allude to the fragmentation and otherness of the body. In imagining Kevin shoot his arrows at his victims in the gym, present day Eva is seen horrified, but also takes different still and shocked positions, her mouth open, re-enacting the position of her boy’s dead victims perhaps, or alluding to her own metaphorical ‘death’. Besides, her life would never be the same after; it has, because of his actions and in many ways, ended. Background images are also interpretable. Posters which line the office of Eva’s travel writing firm promise ‘Escape’ into the exoticism of Thailand and Vietnam,

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and get replaced by the cheap, mass-produced, downmarket travel agency posters of her low-grade Travel R Us job (Thornham, 2013). Earlier, Eva’s moving boxes, like one of her business’s posters, also spell out ‘Escape’, suggesting her business is now closed/sold of course, but also her being unable to ‘escape’ from what Kevin has done altogether. As Kevin walks into school the day of the attack, he walks past a screen long ‘Expect Great Things’ background poster (‘great’ ironically acquiring negative rather than positive connotations at second viewing) while, as he pushes open the double doors to enter the sports hall he chose for his attack, Thornham (2013) notes the viewers being faced by another poster, its twin signs ironically exhorting ‘Pride’ and ‘Focus’. Later, ‘inside the hall, he turns to face the US flag and bows, then stretches wide his arms as the lighting, with its red and blue horizontal bars against the white of the hall, reminds us that the film’s dominant colours of red and white, so often contrasted in the film, together make up the American flag’. There is also irony in the Robin Hood story he gets read when ill and the archery sets and lessons he gets given (tragically by his own father, no less), these transforming into a hobby and passion that ultimately allows him to expertly attack his victims with a bow and arrow at home and inside the school gym after. Valdrè (2014: 152) asks: ‘Is this identification with the anti-hero who robs the rich to give to the poor? Is the arrow a symbol of the phallus that kills by penetrating, and full of power compensates for a wounded narcissism? Is this identification with the poor, deprived, or he/she who needs to be compensated?’ In any case, the extreme close shots into Kevin’s eyes, and his large garden target replacing his zoomed-upon pupils, elsewhere assert that he now literally has his eye on the target, and is inspired into using this skill of his for murder. The DVD cover for Kevin is also filled with child-like drawings of archery lessons among other references, highlighting the ironic contrast between the menacing actions of archery-skilled Kevin and the innocence we align with children game-playing in general. Similarly, his parents’ attempts to relate to him through (video-) game playing offer a scapegoat, as if supposedly linking to the boy’s later manifested violence; we here ironically encounter a young Kevin shouting ‘die’ at the screen while video game playing with his dad. The actors’ performance is also noteworthy, this adding layers to the filmic text’s interpretation, as does the casting itself:  ‘casting is characterisation’ Giannetti (2005 [1993]: 299, cited in Quinn, 2007) says, after all. McGill (2011) notes Ramsay wondering initially whether Ezra Miller was ‘too beautiful’ for the teenage Kevin role (two further younger actors play Kevin in earlier stages of his life), but ultimately deciding that his lush looks added a dimension: where you ‘like’, are ‘drawn’ to, and yet are ‘repelled’ by him all at once. All three Kevins

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(Ezra Miller, Jasper Newell and Rocky Duer) share not only a similar appearance but the same menacing look, their head slightly bowed, their eyes looking confidently and threateningly straight up. Miller’s Kevin even stands and sits slump at an angle rather than upright, smiling and talking confidently from the corner of his mouth rather than the centre, much like the book suggests (see, for instance, p. 169). It is only in the final prison visit where Thornham (2013) notes Eva and Kevin are no longer being mirrored (‘his head shaved, Kevin now seems both older and more childishly vulnerable’), Kevin having lost his confidence, showing to be ‘lost, bewildered and afraid’, talking from the centre of his mouth for a change, again much like the book suggests (p. 366). Shriver (2011) herself described Ezra’s playing of Kevin with ‘a subtle manipulative sleaziness’. Eva’s struggle with baby Kevin’s constant crying is also shown through Swinton’s performance, and facial expressions in particular, such as in a scene where she stops with the baby stroller right in front of a loud drilling machine, only to shut her eyes trying to block out the crying noise for a while. Tilda Swinton’s typically ‘mysterious, otherworldly, or ethereal’ (Stacey, 2015), not to mention much award nominated, performance is described as having ‘spikiness’ (McGill, 2011) and (Lauren Berlant’s) ‘flat affect’ (Stacey, 2015) in contrast to Ramsay’s describing of John C. Reilly bringing a welcomed ‘warmth’ to the role of Franklin (also in McGill, 2011). These are traits reminiscent of their parts in other performances of theirs as well; see, for instance, The Beach (2000) for Swinton and the animated Wreck it Ralph (2012) for Reilly. Stafford (DVD cover) too mentions two other of Swinton’s films screened not long before the film in question (Julia, 2008 and I am Love, 2009) and which, like Kevin (2011), also portray a woman who can no longer distinguish between her nightmares, her past and her present. Importantly, Stacey (2015) brings attention to Swinton’s androgynous look, and her ‘often bringing to her screen and live performances a quality or atmosphere that contradicts the conventional expectations of feminine emotional expressiveness and legibility in popular cinema’. Choosing an androgynous, almost gender-challenging or tomboyish actress for the role of Eva, a female character uncomfortable with her role as a mother, is far from coincidental. Catherine George’s costume design is also particularly significant in this film. Eva’s often ethnic clothes, for instance, nod at her travelling past, the same way her previously discussed linguistic travelling metaphors do in the book. So does Eva’s Tomatina memory, her flat’s decor, and the maps she decorates a houseroom with for that matter. Even more so, Eva is seen wearing not only her wedding ring but also Franklin’s T-shirt in various post-massacre scenes, a T-shirt that Franklin himself is seen wearing in memory filmic scenes shortly

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after, a clue to his deadly loss that perhaps passes unnoticeable given that Eva generally favours loose-fitting clothes elsewhere also. Viewers become most aware of whose T-shirt Eva is wearing exactly when she is seen sniffing it after Franklin is revealed to us viewers as now dead, her ring clearly visible still. On the other hand, Kevin is seen wearing T-shirts with various playful images, these suggestive of ironic undertones. His wearing an ‘I’m the big brother’ Tshirt at his sister’s birth, for instance, is a testament to the facade Eva’s family commits to. Most importantly and, much like with the book, his clothes tend to be at least a size too small, Kevin holding on to T-shirts he grows far too big for. The tiny tees help heighten his sexuality, something he uses as a sort of weapon for others’ discomfort. Noting the similar build Swinton and Miller have, and the narrow stripes connecting all three incarnations of Kevin through clothes in the film, Laverty (2012) gives a further distinction highlighted through what it is the actors are actually wearing: ‘Clothes for teenage Kevin are tight, implying his lean physique, while clothes for his mother Eva are generally loose and soft, linens and cottons, implying her vulnerability [. . .] Fitted jeans and tiny tees make Kevin appear formidable, whereas loose clothes make Eva appear weak. He wears his clothes, she hides in hers.’ Even more so, Eva is noticeably seen wearing white on the day of the massacre, this colour’s suggested innocence being shattered by what Kevin does later that day, her white clothes bloodied because of it. As for the other characters, Franklin’s clothes are all-American, Celia’s often pink and girly, them being stereotyped into obscurity perhaps. As Laverty (2012) notes, unlike Franklin’s, Celia’s clothes are missing from Eva’s post-massacre house altogether. This perhaps hints that Celia in particular is all but forgotten, her loss incidental compared to Franklin’s, an interpretation supported by the grammatical analysis at the literary discovery of Celia’s dead body conducted earlier. Clothes too then perhaps signal that Celia was not as important to Eva as Franklin had been. Jonny Greenwood’s music score and Paul Davies’ sound design are also noteworthy, and interpretable. The sometimes upbeat old/early rock and roll music soundtrack, inclusive of Buddy Holly’s ‘Everyday’, a song which also features in the official movie trailer, perfectly clashes with the theme (see Ireland, 2012 for the role of the incongruent soundtrack in the representation of the cinematic criminal). Some of the bluesy and folk soundtrack choices, such as skiffle musician Lonnie Donegan’s ‘Muleskinner Blues’ and ‘Nobody’s Child’, more directly correlate to the soulful mood of the scenes in which they feature, and which they help bridge into. Washington Phillips’ ‘Mother’s Last Words to Her Son’ is particularly effective when bridging the scenes of slow-motioned Kevin ‘growing’

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while he plays with his archery set, the song’s ‘You always have been your mother’s joy’ lyrics ironically hinting at his behaviour and skills bringing people anything but joy. Similarly, lyrics about ‘rolling in a hurry’ (Lonnie Donegan’s ‘Ham ‘N Eggs’) complement scenes where Eva drives to see Kevin in prison, Beach Boys’ ‘In My Room’ when she goes through his stuff looking for secrets, and Christmas hymns when the family prepares for Christmas. Eerie ethnic music, such as Liu Fang’s ‘The Ambush’ and ‘Farewell to My Concubine’ nod to Eva’s travelling past again. During the Tomatina scenes as well as when exiting the gym Kevin committed mass murder in (as noted, the murders, like the eye disfigurement, remaining unseen), and when Kevin is seen arms stretched in the empty gym, a crowd noise is heard that is not unlike cheering, this suggestive of the perverse celebration that he will now come to enjoy as a result of his actions: he is in fact now a notorious celebrity. Kevin bowing in silence in front of the empty gym also shows his murder to be a performance, and an accomplishment for others (us?) to view, and even applaud. Noticeably, the film’s English subtitling for the hearing impaired offers lyrics alongside description of the given background music genre or other sound, important as these are to the film’s interpretation. ‘Silence is as important to [Ramsay’s] mix as music and ambient sound’ (Johnston, 2013), given that the film in fact features little language or dialogue, and is much more visual than it is aural. Ambient sound (Quinn, 2007: ‘Glossary of Useful Film Terms’) refers to the use of normal sounds that come from within the story, these including the previously discussed sound of the copy machine Eva works over for instance, used for bridging scenes and suggesting remembering. The most important filmic ambient sound here, however, is the water sprinkler, which I return to shortly. In the film itself, and in Eva’s consciousness, Franklin’s voice is overheard repeatedly asking Eva to return to him, alluding to Eva’s trips abroad perhaps, but also misleading the viewers, much like the book, into thinking the two are currently divorced or otherwise separated by space, but not death. The trailer in particular also draws attention to the couple’s discussion about separation, misleading us readers much like the reference to ‘estrangement’ in the book’s blurb does. Similarly, we hear Eva’s recurrent voice telling Franklin, in an answering machine message, that she wants the two of them to talk and work things out, a message which helps strengthen this same illusion. Ironically, we later realize that this message was left on the day of the massacre, and possibly after Franklin himself passed away. In both the film opening and towards its end, Johnston (2013) notes ‘the camera swiftly and slowly [moving] towards an open sliding glass door that causes a sheer curtain to

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waft in a kind of tortured tension.’ Visually, Robey (2011: 79) describes the filmic curtains as ‘a literal veil over the worst of what Kevin achieved, one day, with a crossbow, [. . .] the delayed reveal [. . .] being one of the very few structuring decisions lifted straight from the book’. Like with the book, it is towards the film’s end that we find out that behind the opening scene’s filmic curtain lies a murdered father and sister, Franklin and Celia having been killed by the same bow and arrow Franklin gave his son, not to mention lessons on using it. At the film’s end, we also return to other scenes the film started with, Eva recollecting happy family moments that we now realize are moments belonging to the morning preceding the horrors of the Thursday massacre. Young chanting voices, along with the water sprinkler system that operates in Eva’s garden are, among other noises, particularly audible in this opening scene, before the first screen shot becomes visible even, and come to attract an ominous reading, even with the viewers not yet knowing what lies behind the curtain. The same chanting noise is later heard when Eva imagines Kevin throwing his arrows at his victims while the sprinkler background noise is re-employed where Eva discovers younger Kevin’s mischief, such as his destroying the treasured maps with which she had only just finished excitedly decorating a room in their new house. Sprinkling is also heard when Celia’s tiny pet is introduced and immediately goes missing, a pet that Kevin is implied to have taken and killed, also blocking the (kitchen rather than bathroom, in the film) sink with it. Though the sprinkler is an acceptable background noise given these scenes all taking place in the big house, the sound is foregrounded through repetition and placing here. The film’s subtitling too, again for the hearing impaired, makes note of this noise as ‘lawn sprinkler whirring’ (‘whirring’ in fact being used in such subtitling throughout, to describe numerous machine noises), similarly marking this sound device’s significance further, and in given places, throughout the film. Finally, this noise is heard, and subtitled, when we revisit the film’s opening flowing curtain scene at the end, not only from Eva’s perspective but also an observer’s perspective this time. Here, Thornham (2013) notes the film confirming Eva’s identity as the author of the opening scene’s point of view. Eva is seen going past the curtain and into the garden, before the whirring becomes more rapid and the focus is moved to a dead Franklin and Celia, viewers not seeing Eva’s garden reaction at all, but instead being faced with the water sprinklers washing over the two lifeless bodies. Eva is then seen coming back into the house slowly, without physically reacting to what she has seen, though her clothes are now, as noted, full of blood, this suggesting contact with the bodies. The

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camera not capturing her garden reaction is another ‘unseen’ tragic event, but also suggests that what Eva encountered was far from unexpected. As Valdrè (2014: 156) notices, the film suggests as if, for Eva, ‘the massacre were entirely predictable, inevitable’. Viewers now understand what sort of meaning this sprinkler background noise has for Eva: it is an omen of sorts, the everyday family-happy house noise against which her greatest horror became reality. To bring this section to a close, Eva’s literary and filmic narration allows creators to not only suggest unreliability as to the account offered but also build clues and effects in the work’s production. The book’s travelling and acting metaphors constantly remind readers of Eva’s reluctance to accept the mothering path she chose, a path that perhaps is forced upon not only her, but all women in general. The visual art’s use of wide framing enables a portrayal of the emotional distance between characters, with the deep colour red used throughout as a forewarning of the blood to be shed later, and the various mirroring scenes suggesting dualities to, and links between, the characters portrayed. Various stylistic techniques work linguistically in the book, but more so aurally and visually in the film, to generate suspense, create frames that later require repair or replacement, and hence ultimately refresh the texts as whodunitTOs in addition to whydunits, and certainly ones that require reflection if not actual revisiting. The most tragic of scenes remaining unseen in the film urge viewers to themselves actively engage in the producing process, while newly noticeable meaning is also ascribed to casting, scenes of physical reflection, aspects of costume design, soundtracking and also performance. In migrating from book to film, Eva’s story not only comes to life but also draws attention to, and illuminates, its own stylistic subtleties, a discussion of which can also create a better understanding as to the ways in which the narrative’s semiotic modes actually interact with one other. Having considered film adaptation of crime fiction, I next turn to theatrical adaptation.

2.3 On theatrical adaptation: Even more Curious Incidents 2.3.1 Curious prose Haddon’s (2003) The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time has attracted not only much critical recognition and numerous awards (including the Whitbread Book of the Year in 2003) from the publishing industry but also much attention from school educationalists and academics alike, partly because it proved itself to be ‘one of the most successful of recent “crossover” novels – fiction that appeals to both adult and younger readers’ (Walsh, 2007: 106). Seeing that the book is also

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written from the perspective of Christopher, a 15-year old with high-functioning autism, and what came to be known as Asperger’s syndrome (for a while, at least), it has specifically attracted the interest of ‘disability studies’ scholars (see, for instance, Berger, 2008; Burks-Abbott, 2008; Murray, 2006 and 2012; Muller, 2006; see also Draaisma, 2009) despite the book itself not directly referring to this condition as such. Some, such as Berger (2008: 284), see Christopher ‘as a metaphor for the social autism that surrounds him’, Haddon’s novel highlighting the need to care, foster and learn from those who share Christopher’s vulnerability. Muller (2006: 121) even regards the novel as ‘a positive articulation of disability as ability, where we are invited to appreciate differences’ with respect to socialization as well as cognition and emotion. Contrastively, others, such as BurksAbbott (2008: 295), argue that Haddon relegates ‘the autistic to otherworldliness while establishing a non-autistic author like himself as the necessary medium between artistic and non-artistic reality’, deeming the novel problematic, and militant ‘against autistic self-representation’ somewhat. Talley (2005: 240–1) also warns that such books imagine ‘the disabled person in overly romantic terms’, the disabled characters featuring ‘not for their ends but merely for the benefit of non disabled readers’ who are obsessed with gaining insights. In any case, it is because of the use of unusual mind style (see Fowler, 1977), in terms of both language and structure, employed precisely because of this ‘autistic’ first person and hence limited perspective, that the novel has also attracted the attention of numerous linguists and cognitive stylisticians alike (see Gregoriou, 2011a for, among an analysis of the book using my tripartite ‘deviance’ model, an overview of its critical linguistic appeal; see also Fanlo Piniés, 2005, Luckin, 2013 and Semino, 2014a and 2014b for approaches to the book’s language and its relation to ‘mind style’ and autism). Using Fowler’s concept of ‘mind style’ to refer to the use of unusual language to project an unusual mindset/view on the world, I revisit the novel’s linguistic mind style features, many of which bear relevance to Simon Stephens’ UK physical theatre adaptation, shortly. Note that Christopher is autistic and has behavioural problems, and yet is also a noticeably gifted boy, particularly where his own memory (notice particularly his use of the MIND IS A RECORDING metaphor in ‘I could Rewind to 4th July 1992 when I was 9 years old’, p. 96) and mathematical skills (‘Here is a formula for a population of animals’, p. 126) are concerned, something in fact atypical of most such real life autistic individuals. Murray (2006) refers to characters such as Christopher as ‘super crips’ and ‘autistic savants’ (defined by Talley [2005: 240] as ‘persons with extraordinary skills in a particular area’), most noticeably featuring in films like Barry Levinson’s Rainman (1988). Instead of being an accurate portrayal

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of autism then, Christopher’s is in fact a believable one; according to Semino (2005): ‘Chris’s behavior (both linguistic and non-linguistic) is compatible with a widely shared “group schema” for autistic people. He has many of the characteristics that we stereotypically associate with autism (need for routine; fascination with maths, lists and patterns; alienated, but passionate, motivated, and with high recall skills and so on), even though no “real” individual is likely to exhibit Chris’ particular combination of characteristics’ (see also Talley’s discussion of the book offering a ‘caricature’, and mere ‘sense’ of what it might be like to be autistic). Haddon’s book is supposed to have been written by the character of Christopher himself, here hence a character, narrator and implied author all at once. Christopher starts writing his detective novel and investigative book once prompted by his special needs teacher Siobhan (‘And that is when I started writing this’ p.  33). The book centres around the teenager’s investigation into the murder of his next door neighbour’s, Mrs Shears’, dog, with ‘detective fiction [offering] Christopher a way to understand and frame his own story’ (Gilbert, 2005: 243). This is a story of a boy who lives with his father, and whose mother he believes to have died. It is not until the middle of the book when he solves the dog murder ‘crime’ that he discovers how it relates to his own condition and family predicament. He discovers not only that his mother is in fact alive and well but, struggling to live with his disability and the frustration it caused in her marriage, left his father for the neighbour’s partner, Mr Shears, with whom she moved to London. She attempted to stay in touch with Christopher through a series of letters that Christopher eventually discovers, but which her former husband prevented Christopher from having access to, instead telling the teenager that she had died. It was a subsequent failed relationship between his father and the also abandoned Mrs Shears that resulted in his father killing her dog, Wellington, in a rage. Realizing that his mother now lives in London with Mr Shears, and upset with, and fearful of, the revelation of his father as a dog-killer, Christopher sets off to find his mother. For Blackford (2013: 300), Christopher here projects onto the dog (in terms of its non-human traits), which furthers the novel’s view of Christopher having a mechanistic mind, and also suggests that Christopher only reacts like an animal because the world treats him as ‘less than human’. Nevertheless, Christopher eventually reunites with his mother, before ultimately forgiving, and returning to live with, his father once more. Christopher’s autism often shows the character’s mind to be self-consciously wandering and digressing (‘But this is what is called a digression, and now I am

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going to go back to the fact that it was a Good Day.’ p. 33). The book is somewhat disjointed and disordered, featuring maps, lists, drawings, diagrams and even mathematical equations alongside the expected narrative text, speech and thought presentation. Having said that, Luckin (2013) proposes that ‘Christopher’s heavy use of visual elements in his narrative’ instead help to ‘create cohesion and coherence’, the visuals also indicating and reflecting the fact that Christopher is a visual thinker which, as Grandin (1995:141) highlights, people with Asperger’s syndrome tend to be. In fact, and contrary to Greenwell (2004: 281) considering Christopher’s pictorial elements as asides, as ‘digressions’ of ‘simple entertainment’, Carter (2007: 5) sees them as ‘complex choices, or at the very least as rather intelligent coping/writing strategies’. Further to the multimodal book elements, Christopher even uses ancient Greek prime numbers when chapter numbering his book, with chapter 19 being devoted to explaining what prime numbers actually are. Coupled with his inquiring mind though, his precise and impressive memory, and his giftedness in the fields of mathematics, space science, logic and pattern-spotting, the autism enables a link with Doyle’s detective character Sherlock Holmes, a character often thought of as similarly placeable within the autistic spectrum across not only the source Doyle texts but also various subsequent depictions of this character on stage and film (see, for instance, Grant, 2011, for a brief discussion of BBC’s Sherlock’s protagonist as autistic). This link to the infamous fictional detective, which Christopher too makes when referring to Sherlock Holmes as a character he admires, is also ‘underscored by the fact that the title of Haddon’s text is taken from Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1894 Sherlock Holmes story ‘Silver Blaze’ and is a line from Holmes that proves pivotal to the solving of the case depicted there’ (Murray, 2012: 179). Murray (2012: 187–8) in fact questions the linkage between such disabled detectives’ neurological exceptionality and their said exceptional detective skills, and argues that narratives such as Haddon’s ‘stress an emerging pattern of human diversity and autonomy that comes with spectrum conditions’ such as autism. Many, such as Montoro (2005), describe Christopher as an unreliable, and hence somewhat manipulative, character-narrator, not in the sense of him being deceitful, but in that of him being an ambiguous narrator. At the same time though, he can also be described as an over-reliable one, seeing that this focalization is overly descriptive: ‘And when I am in a new place, because I see everything, it is like when a computer is doing too many things at the same time and the central processor unit is blocked up and there isn’t any space left to think about other things’ (p. 177). Conceptualizing his own mind as a computer (rather than a mere recording device this time) and using the overly

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coordinated clauses he generally has a tendency toward, Christopher finds himself unable to see the wood for the trees, unable to keep track of what is worth noticing and being detailed about and what is not in the world around him. Luckin (2013) linguistically (qualitatively and quantitatively) illuminates Christopher’s need for order and clarity, his presenting ‘Given’ information as ‘New’ and his inability to synthesize information, and points out that people with autism are frequently unable to filter out irrelevant or distracting details from their environment; they tend to have excellent rote memory abilities, but at the same time have problems with processing sensory stimuli (Dodd, 2005: 160). Walsh (2007: 114) puts this latter observation in cognitive poetic terms: ‘one of the symptoms of Christopher’s condition is his inability to draw a clear distinction between figure and ground’ (see Stockwell, 2002), meaning what signals are mobile and worth processing (what cognitive poetic analysts refer to as ‘figures’) in relation to their background (‘ground’), or those signals which are less impactful and require little or no processing; ‘his attention is selective in ways that are at best eccentric’ Walsh (2007:  114)  argues, such as when he thematizes objects before people (see, for instance, his reference to the policeman having a leaf stuck at the bottom of his shoe on page  7). In other words, the facts that he gives when conversing with others or narrating are not always ‘telling’ or useful. They do not always help advance his narrative plot. It is partly for this reason that he is often seen under- but also over- and mis-interpreting situations he encounters, and the same holds true for the conversations he finds himself participating in. Luckin’s (2013) transitivity analysis of chapter 59 of the novel similarly confirms Christopher’s difficulty in understanding the intended meaning behind people’s utterances; the majority of this chapter’s verbal processes (clauses containing verbs of saying) ‘project’ instead of ‘contain’ a verbiage (i.e. what is being said). Put simply, rather than interpreting what people say, he instead voices/repeats it (see also McIntyre’s 2015 corpus stylistic approach to the novel, which also attests the abundance of the category of ‘direct speech’ in the novel). Semino (2014b) describes such problems in terms of pragmatic failure on Christopher’s part; she argues that he struggles with informativeness and relevance in conversational (and narrative) contributions, hence infringing (meaning breaking, but without intention to deceive or generate additional meanings in the form of ‘implicatures’) Gricean (1975) maxims. Again, this is the case both when it comes to the interaction the Christophernarrator has with his readers and the ones the Christopher-character has with other characters (see relevant discussion in Fanlo Piniés, 2005, section 10.3).

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What he, in effect, does is give too much information to others at times, such as in the following excerpts: ‘How old are you?’ [the policeman] asked? I replied, ‘I am 15 years and 3 months and 2 days.’ (p. 7) And he said. ‘Jesus. What is that?’ And I looked down and I said, ‘That’s my pet rat Toby’ [. . .] And the policeman said, ‘A pet rat?’ And I said ‘Yes, a pet rat. He’s very clean and he hasn’t got bubonic plague.’ (p. 185)

Needless to say perhaps, but to give a month and day-specific age statement is unnecessarily irrelevant, and so is discussing what the rat is not suffering from. Where the first instance is concerned, Christopher only elaborates on his age as to be as precise as possible; for Fanlo Piniés (2005: 354–5) in fact, Christopher here showcases the importance he ascribes to time and numbers, and his arithmetical abilities. In as far as the latter instance is concerned, Christopher seems to be wanting to reassure the policeman that the rat does not pose a threat to anyone’s health, something nevertheless extraneous in this context. Christopher is made aware of this over-elaborating tendency of his, most often by his teacher Siobhan: So I started walking, but Siobhan said I didn’t have to describe everything that happened, I just have to describe the things that were interesting [sic]. (p. 232) And I was going to write out how I answered the [maths] question except Siobhan said it wasn’t very interesting, but I  said it was. And she said people wouldn’t want to read the answers to a maths question in a book, and she said I could put the answer in an Appendix which is an extra chapter at the end of a book which people can read if they want to. And that is what I  have done. (p. 260)

I return to the latter excerpt later, when discussing the play. He elsewhere finds himself, perhaps contradictorily, giving too little information, or information others are already aware of: I sat up and said, ‘The dog is dead.’ ‘I’d got that far,’ he said. I said, ‘I think someone killed the dog.’ [. . .] ‘And what, precisely, were you doing in the garden?’ he asked. ‘I was holding the dog,’ I replied.

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‘And why were you holding the dog?’ he asked. [. . .] ‘Why were you holding the dog?’ he asked again. ‘I like dogs,’ I said. (p. 7–8)

Christopher’s responses to the officer’s questions are here not entirely unrelated to those expected, but clearly do not meet the given contextual conversational demands; his contributions are not detailed enough. Fanlo Piniés (2005: 367–8) interprets such behaviour on two levels. He discusses narrator-Christopher’s use of various assertive tactics of ingratiation in order to project a positive selfimage: ingratiation, self-enhancements and self-promotion, and he also uses the defensive tactic of offering excuses to avoid that readers infer a negative impression of him. On the other hand, in Christopher’s conversations with other characters, he enhances his positive face through ingratiation, but also shows an indifference towards self-presentation, revealed in his failure to observe principles of conversation [. . .] It is the conflict between his desire to present a positive self-image and his indifference towards social conventions and face management that reveals his particular mind style.

Even more so, the boy, while exposing that ‘all language is approximate and figurative to a degree’ (Ciocia, 2009:  328)  also has trouble interpreting figurative language, such as in the following example, where he seems to be reading the ‘keeping an eye on someone’ idiomatic expression literally: And I said, ‘Where is the toilet on the train?’ And he pointed and said, ‘Through those doors, there. But I’ll be keeping an eye on you, understand?’ And I said, ‘No,’ because I knew what keeping an eye on someone meant but he couldn’t look at me when I was in the toilet. (p. 200)

Using qualitative as well as corpus linguistic/quantitative methods of analysis, Semino (2014a) elsewhere also discusses the character’s under-lexicalization (such as Christopher not knowing what ‘single’ and ‘return’ mean in relation to train tickets on the book’s p. 89, or what the ‘tube’ is on p. 211) and also overlexicalization (i.e. he has to his availability many specialized lexis in areas such as mathematics). Among others, she also discusses his unusual focus on his own actions and thoughts rather than how other people affect him (via a pronoun and transitivity analysis), and his inability to engage in phatic communication (Malinowski, 1972), meaning the kind of ritualistic language people use to avoid silence and manage conversational turns: ‘I didn’t reply to this either because

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Mrs Alexander was doing what is called chatting where people say things to each other which aren’t questions and answers and aren’t connected.’ (p.  51). Most importantly, invited to ‘read aright the signs that Christopher so often misreads’ (Walsh, 2007:  113), the reader engages in frame repair, even when Christopher fails to repair his understanding retrospectively, mostly because of his autism that is, but also partly because of his young age and naivety. Not only does Christopher admittedly have trouble processing and responding to jokes (‘I cannot tell jokes because I do not understand them’, on p. 10) for instance, but he also lacks the maturity with which to see the relationship between his father and Mrs Shears, the divorcee neighbor, as sexual, or understand what that means even (‘Do you mean that they were doing sex?’ on p.  76  – note, additionally, here, the use of ‘do’ instead of the expected ‘have’). I turn to such frame theory (Emmott, 1997) analysis of the book next. Christopher’s misreading and miscuing take place throughout the book. Again with reference to the previously noted pragmatic failure on his part, Semino (2014a: 299) discusses the boy’s tendency to say things that, unbeknown to him, hurt others’ feelings and ‘attack’ others’ positive face, meaning their need to be noticed, liked and approved of (for positive face threatening acts, again see politeness theory in Brown and Levinson, 1987). It is his problems with ‘face’ management, and the related awareness of others’ positive face needs, that result in unintentionally impolite behaviour on his part: ‘Steve [. . .] needs help to eat his food and could not even fetch a stick. Siobhan asked me not to say this to Steve’s mother.’ (p. 6); ‘And I said, “I’m scared of being in the park with you because you’re a stranger.” And [Mrs Alexander] said, “I’m not a stranger, Christopher, I’m a friend.” ’ (p. 77). Clearly, Siobhan is aware of the need to protect Steve’s, and Steve’s mother’s, positive face needs in ways in which Christopher is not. Similarly, Christopher appears to be oblivious to the fact that telling a neighbour, to their face, that they are a stranger and hence potentially threatening to their own safety is also itself discourteous. Elsewhere, when referring to his grandmother having ‘senile dementia’ and thinking that he ‘was someone on television’ (p. 17), or the character of Terry who, Christopher speculates, ‘[not only] won’t go to University’ but, according to ‘Father’ (notice the distancing and formalizing naming strategies Christopher uses) ‘is most likely to end up in prison’ instead (p. 33), he does not intend for the correlations to be insulting or amusing – for Christopher is simply stating facts, oblivious to their effect on other characters or his reading audience. Even more so, though not to do with face management but other pragmatics this time, when arguing in conversation with a reverend, against there being ‘heaven’ in ‘another kind of place altogether’

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(p. 42), Christopher interprets this to the letter along the lines of heaven literally being in space: ‘And if heaven was on the other side of a black hole dead people would have to be fired into space on rockets to get there, and they aren’t or people would notice.’ (p.  42). The readers are bound to be entertained by Christopher’s reasoning skills and visual projections regardless of the humour again here being unintended where the character is concerned. Nonetheless, his often valid claims as to concepts such as ‘heaven’, for instance, remind us of the sort of surrounding fictionality that the rest of us all too often take for granted. Importantly, when Christopher later discovers letters that his mother sent him from London, he takes a while to realize that she is in fact alive and well, though most young adult and adult readers are bound to pick up on this fact much sooner than he does. It is this overall misreading tendency of his that also often gets Christopher into trouble in the book itself; he often aggravates those around him, and even inadvertently puts himself in physical danger. Readers themselves are put in the position of ‘miscuing’ as well though, misreading the linguistic signals needed to understand the episodic information offered (as previously noted, for ‘miscuing’, see Emmott, 1997: 160). On the way back from the police station, where Christopher found himself arrested for hitting a policeman who touched him, the boy asserts that he is out to find out who killed Wellington, and wonders what the police would do if they find the person responsible. His father is angered by this (‘Then father banged the steering wheel with his fist’ p.  27), and is later referred to as drinking and crying, which Christopher interprets as sadness over the dog’s death: ‘I asked, “Are you sad about Wellington?” He looked at me a long time and sucked air in through his nose. Then he said, “Yes, Christopher, you could say that. You could very well say that” ’ (p. 27). Even if some readers may suspect so, it is not until later that Christopher as well as the readers discover the truth and repair the earlier frame: that his father Ed is, in fact, the dog-killer, who killed Wellington out of revenge for Mrs Shears ending their relationship. Ed’s frustration and anger, both here and elsewhere, is ultimately, or at second read, interpreted then as not having to do with Christopher’s communicative behaviour at all; Ed is instead here worried that his son may well discover the truth. Similarly, Ed’s cries and sadness are in fact most likely to do with guilt rather than mere grief over the dog. Similar clues of this sort are found where, in asking a neighbour whether ‘she knew of anyone who might want to make Mrs Shears sad’, she advises: ‘Perhaps you should be talking to your father about this’ (p. 49), which is interpreted in terms of the father being potentially able to help with the enquiries, but also, in retrospect, of Ed actually being the guilty culprit (if only of disliking Mrs Shears

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in this instance) himself. Christopher is also similarly oblivious with respect to the reasoning behind his father’s dislike of Mr Shears, something that other neighbours appear to be aware of, even without them realizing that Christopher is not (‘I think you know why your father doesn’t like Mr Shears very much’, on p. 73). Later linguistic cues to Ed saying Christopher’s mother had ‘a problem with her heart’ (p. 29) are originally interpreted literally by the boy (at least) who is later told she died of a heart attack, but are later revealed to be emotionally and ironically interpretable; the woman has in fact abandoned her son and gone to live in London with her new partner, her ‘heart’ not functioning emotionally as one would have expected. When Ed delivers the false news of his mother’s death, he is also said to be apologizing to Christopher, something readers ultimately frame repair and interpret in terms of Ed apologizing to Christopher for lying to him about his mother’s passing in the first place. Ed is then being comforted by the neighbour who says: ‘We’re going to get you through this’ (p. 37). ‘This’ is originally interpreted in terms of bereavement. It is only later that readers, along with Christopher, fully appreciate that ‘this’ is in reference to the couple separating, and the mother’s abandoning of her son, instead. Christopher seems to experience not only a lack of emotional empathy with respect to others’ feelings but also does not emotionally react as expected either, at times. His description of the dead dog (p.1) and early references to his mum’s, as far as he is concerned, passing (p. 28), or the discovery of her affair (p. 76), are given with little indication as to an emotional reaction on his part. The same goes for his arrest, which is given rather matter-of-factly and without a response on his part (‘ “I am arresting you for assaulting a police officer.” This made me feel a lot calmer because it is what policemen say on television and in films’, p. 11), and neither does his having punched a fellow student to the extent that she suffered a concussion cause any emotion in him (p. 45). Though clearly affected by these events, he seems to be reacting to them without the expected level of upset. Having said that, he elsewhere emotionally reacts quite strongly, not only to the discovery of his mother’s letters but also to the realization that she is actually alive, and that his father lied to him on several important matters: ‘Then I stopped reading the letter because I felt sick. Mother had not had a heart attack. Mother had not died. Mother had been alive all the time. And Father had lied about this. [. . .] I felt giddy. [. . .] My stomach hurt’ (p. 141). As noted, Christopher feels so physically and emotionally upset in this realization that he leaves his home afraid of his father and in search of safety. He does exhibit strong emotions elsewhere of course, such as when defensively attacking others when he feels threatened, or when he groans, rocks, barks and screams when made uncomfortable (‘someone’s jacket touched

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my knee and I felt sick and I started groaning really loudly’, on p. 216) or cannot get his own way: ‘And Mother said she had rung Mrs Gascoyne and told her that I was going to take my Maths A level next year [rather than the present year] so I threw my red ice lolly away and I screamed for a long time and the pain in my chest hurt so much that it was hard to breathe’ (p. 250). His aggravation and vulnerability are more appropriate for a young child rather than a 15-year old of course, but the physical reaction displayed here, not unlike his conversational behaviour, is certainly explainable by his condition. All in all, Christopher is quite a complex character, who wins the hearts of the reading audience with his frankness, naivety and courageousness – after all, confronting one’s demons and challenging the limitations one faces are nothing short of heroic, particularly considering his unique family circumstances as well. I next turn to consider Stephens’ (2012) physical theatre adaptation of the novel, using not only two differing performances I  had the opportunity to watch and make detailed notes on but also the dramatic script itself. This theatrical adaptation being ‘physical’, the production in question was minimalistic, fully employed visual and other types of metaphor, drew from dance, music and visual art alongside the theatrical form and challenged the traditional three-walled play restriction throughout (for more on the elements of physical theatre, see Callery, 2001). Even more so, the Curious text having been adapted by Stephens, a playwright whose writing is characterized as part of the ‘in-yer-face’ (Sierz, 2001) generation, the theatrical adaptation is here provoking, involving and powerfully moving its audience all at once.

2.3.2 Curious drama Further to the book’s appeal to both adults and children (the two differing audiences having separate editions and book covers even), it has been translated, and published, in over 30 countries (Ezard, 2003). Subsequently, the book was adapted for the stage for a UK audience (Stephens, 2012), as well as for different theatre cultural audiences thereafter. Stephens’ play version was translated for the Greek theatre stage by Margarita Dalamanga-Kalogirou, for instance, a production I touch on at the end of this section, if briefly. A quick look at amazon. com reveals novel- but also play-related merchandise in the form of the Mp3 UK play soundtrack, Stephens’ play script, various educational material (see, for instance, Bolton, 2016a and 2016b) and a book poster of sorts. A film adaptation of the novel, written and directed by Steve Kloves, was also at some point

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planned (see Stanley, 2010), though such an adaptation has yet to materialize, or go into production. In Haddon’s (2013) discussion of the play, he notes that though ‘[i]t seemed impossible [. . .] that such a radically first-person novel set entirely in the head of a single character could be translated into a radically third-person medium without doing it irreparable damage, [the author and his publisher] were worn slowly down by the sheer volume of requests’. I myself had the opportunity to watch both a ‘proscenium arch stage’ May 2013 Apollo Theatre performance and an ‘in the round’ June 2014 National Theatre Live (henceforth NTL) cinematic screening of this production’s ‘encore’, performances upon which the following analysis is based. The two performances I viewed differed, partly because performances are unstable anyway, partly because the intervening year enabled the production and cast to adjust and develop and partly because of the differing spaces used for staging; the proscenium arch version enabled viewers to look into Christopher’s ‘Rubik cube’- style shaped stage and mind for instance, while the ‘in the round’ one put viewers in the position of literally looking down into Christopher’s world from a variety of angles. There were further differences when it comes to the actual performance experience though. According to Boyum (1985: 38), in the theatre, viewers’ eyes are not directed by camera angles, as in film, and hence our eyes can wander. However, theatre fixes the viewer’s precise distance from the stage, and only allows this single visual viewpoint from which to access this stage. The NTL screening, however, enabled close shots, shots from the top of the stage, alternating perspectives, and cross-fading superimposition even, thus giving viewers a film- rather than a theatre-like experience, and a more shared one even. As Gilbey (2014) puts it when discussing NTL screenings generically, ‘these broadcasts are geared toward the cinema experience’; lighting is used to alter the emphasis of a scene, and viewers are here being offered close-ups that are nevertheless not too ‘artificially intimate with the actors’, nor is there ‘a sense that [the audience is] too far from the action’. Details one may have missed in a physical Curious performance such as facial expressions, the tiny ‘E. Boone’ lettering on Christopher’s father’s t-shirt or the exact writing on the letters from his mother he discovers, can, with the NTL version, be captured. Having said that, the experience of physically being in the room along with the cast and the special effects is immensely powerful and intense, in ways in which the NTL-style performance does not quite permit. According to McIntyre (2008: 310), when engaging in ‘the stylistic analysis of plays it is generally assumed that the focus of analysis should be the dramatic text rather than a performance of it. [. . .] For stylisticians, the reason for concentrating on dramatic texts is that in prototypical

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drama the text is a more stable object of analysis than a performance.’ It is for this reason why, while not discounting the two performances, I here make reference to the dramatic script (Stephens, 2012) also. As Haddon (2013) himself puts it, ‘[m]aking my novel into a play seemed a preposterous idea’ but ‘in the end it reminded me of the reasons I wrote it in the first place’; the stage makes it clear to him that the story ‘is not about disability but about difference’, that outsider stories of this sort are appealing ‘partly because they offer us a clearer view of ourselves from the margins to which we have pushed [such outsiders]’, and that ‘his insulation from other people’s feelings’, that is, Christopher’s lack of emotional empathy, is something we in fact ‘could all enjoy from time to time’. This inability of this detective character to experience others’ mental state, or attribute a mental state which differs from his own to others, can be described in terms of mind-blindness (‘When I was little, I didn’t understand about other people having minds’, on p. 145), or a problem of him developing a theory of mind (see, for instance, Zunshine, 2006). This is not an unproblematic description (William, 2012). As Burks-Abbott (2008: 292) puts it, ‘Haddon’s uncritical acceptance that Christopher lacks a theory of mind is not sustained while telling the latter’s story’. For instance, Christopher lies in the book even though, as Luckin (2013) notes, lying is meant to be ‘theory of mind in action’. And, in any case, Zunshine (2013) more recently recommends dropping all references to autism as mind-blindness altogether seeing that failure to ‘read minds’ may be predicated on the mind-reading limitations of people who diagnose autism and not those who are actually diagnosed. To return to the physical play, directed by Marianne Elliott and starring Luke Treadaway as Christopher (both of whom have won Olivier awards in 2013, for Best Director and Best Actor respectively), it is certainly a modern and unusual one in many ways. A close adaptation of the novel, though with many scenes moved around and some book chapters necessarily disregarded, it takes its bare bones from much of the direct speech of the novel itself, much of the book’s narration and indirect speech also being converted to dialogue in the play itself. Most importantly, the adaptors also converted Christopher’s teacher Siobhan from a character to, additionally, a part-narrator, having her reading the book she encouraged him to write aloud, and on stage, as the action unfolds, narrative levels coexisting or even merging in effect: Christopher’s teacher, 27-year-old Siobhan, opens Christopher’s book. She reads from it. Siobhan: It was seven minutes after midnight [. . .] (Stephens, 2012: 3)

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Whereas the first chunk of the p. 6 excerpt above is Christopher’s, the last sentence (‘I never said that’) is in fact Siobhan’s own, showing herself responding to what she is reading, in the boy’s presence. Much like in the book itself, where Siobhan finds and reads some of the book, so it happens in the play, with her, first physically and later without the aid of the book as an actual prop, helping engage the audience in a manifestation of Christopher’s mind. Siobhan mediates the voice of other characters too, such as Christopher’s mother, Judy, whose letters Siobhan, along with Judy, also part-reads aloud: Judy: I said that I couldn’t leave you and [Ed] was sad about that but he understood that you were really important to me. Siobhan: And you started to shout and I got cross and I threw the food across the room. Which I know I shouldn’t have done. (Stephens, 2012: 44)

Siobhan even ‘becomes’ Christopher himself, verbalizing his voice in his place on occasion: Ed: Promise me that you will give up this ridiculous game right now, ok? Christopher: I promise. Siobhan: I think I would make a very good astronaut. Ed: Yes, mate. You probably would. (Stephens, 2012: 23–24)

The rest of the actors also namelessly adopt snippets of Christopher’s voice at times (‘Voice Five: the dog was stone dead’, Stephens, 2012:10), or verbalize signs he reads (‘Voice Three:  Dogs must be carried at all times. Voice Five:  Special Lunch Offers’, Stephens, 2012: 55) or choreographically become pieces of furniture he manipulates, or lift him and others off into the air, to suggest flowing in space, or sea swimming for instance. Seeing that his dad also discovers his book at some point, Ed is also heard reading from it, though he is sometimes seen speaking within his son’s imagination too (‘Ed:  Stand behind the yellow line’, Stephens, 2012: 70). Most unusually though, in an attempt to experientially portray Christopher’s mind, special effects technology alluding to maths, computers and outer space

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are much employed on stage. ‘To bring Christopher’s acutely attuned reality to life on stage, the show’s creative team turned the performance space into a sort of “magic box”, whose walls are made of individual square pixels, creating a visual representation of Christopher’s inner reality’ (‘A “Magic Box” with Curious Insights’, 2015). As Benedict (2012) puts it, ‘Christopher’s mathematical obsessions are literally illuminated via Paule Constable’s lighting patterns and projections racing across Bunny Christie’s immensely versatile, graphpaper-like floor’, a ‘mindscape’ (Klotzko, 2012:  966)  upon which Christopher draws, and upon which his beloved numbers are projected. In the intimate, in-the-round staging, ‘the floor becomes extraordinarily versatile, serving as a teacher’s chalkboard’ (Benedict, 2012), a function that in the proscenium arch stage version is performed by the back wall instead. When Christopher is on the train, projected images move towards the left suggesting right hand movement. Similarly, he fixes his body around a projected moving escalator to show his supposedly moving with it while, ‘in a heart-in-mouth scene, [the floor opens] out to reveal a subway tunnel down into which Christopher heedlessly leaps’ (Benedict, 2012). Christopher’s obsessions are also projected paratextually; the play booklet, much like the book itself, employs mathematical explanations, theories, and quotes from an autism centre director, a mathematician and the novelist himself. Similarly, to actively engage viewers, the (May 2013)  Apollo theatre’s prime number seats were given ‘prime number seat’ cards, which the viewers were asked to play with, winning a prize if they found their name’s letters number-corresponding to one such prime number. Likewise, the June 2014 NTL theatrical screening was preceded and hence framed by a short recording inclusive of rehearsal scenes, cast interview excerpts and a short discussion by autism consultant Robyn Seward as to the difference between social and creative imagination. Social imagination is a kind of ability that autistic individuals have a problem with she argues, but creative imagination is not. The adaptors here explain the multisensory approach they took when transferring the book onto the stage, the transformation enabling producers to show viewers what being ‘in the spectrum’ is like. Interestingly, Gilbey’s (2014) Guardian article suggests doing away with the DVD-extra-like contextualizing clips preceding such screenings: ‘cut the chat and get on with the show’, his article title says. BBC Learning Zone’s ‘The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time: From Page to Stage’ paratextual material further allows viewers a glimpse at the ‘page to stage’ migration through interviews with a large section of the play crew, not to mention consultants. First, we see the crew describing physical theatre as ‘a dynamic way of exploring a subtext’ including ‘a range of body language,

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choreography and dance’, ‘physical language’ here used to portray Christopher’s viewpoint. As Benedict (2012) puts it, ‘Elliott’s command of focus, aided and abetted by an indivisible sound and visuals team, is abetted by the eloquence of the non-naturalistic staging marshalled by movement directors Scott Graham and Steven Hoggett’. Klotzko (2012: 966) also adds that the evocation of what it is to have Asperger’s syndrome comes through Treadaway’s remarkable performance together with the inspired staging, lighting, music, and choreography. Adrian Sutton’s jagged, percussive, and dissonant music powerfully replicates Christopher’s distress for the audience. The choreography by Frantic Assembly captures Christopher’s sense of the chaos that is London. [. . .] Christopher also dreams of being an astronaut, to be alone in the universe; Paule Constable’s lighting made the auditorium a field of stars.

The choreography, lighting, music and staging all reflect Christopher’s previously noted ‘figure and ground’ problems, his science-related obsessions, and also his autism-specific behavioural/conversational difficulties. It is no surprise that the play was nominated for Olivier awards for Best Sound Design, Best Lighting Design, Best Set Design and Best Theatre Choreography all at once in fact, the first three of which it actually won. Also described on the BBC website Learning Zone clips is ‘the use of an ensemble and multi-role playing [which] gives playfulness to the piece, [. . . and] a sense of theatricality’. Individual actors play the role of Siobhan, Christopher, Ed and Judy, but the production’s other six actors play all the remaining 23 roles between them, these roles not including the script’s six ‘voice’ parts even. The same actor plays the role of the Reverend and the Policeman for instance, such multi-role playing putting actors in the position of being on stage most of the time, yet having to ‘[make] an impact with a character quickly’, and snapping in and out of character roles equally swiftly, and distinctively so – in terms of costume props, physicality and line delivery all at once. This stylized ensemble, Scott Graham, the choreographer explains, represents ‘the nature of Christopher’s mind, which can be chaotic, until he focuses in on something’, again alluding to the previously discussed ‘figure and ground’ problems. Creators are also seen discussing ‘projection, lighting and sound [coming] together to create atmosphere’, using detective-like lights and music to pick things out of darkness for instance, and explore the character’s emotional state particularly in relation to places he finds himself feeling safe or contrastingly unsafe in. They also discuss the play’s employing of electronic, ‘computery sounds and beeps’ to reflect Christopher’s liking of maths and machines, these too linking to the character’s previously noted tendency of conceptualizing

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his own mind as a recording machine or computer as well (which Fanlo Piniés [2005:  358] notes is itself ‘dubious in terms of realism’). The electronic tracks Sutton created are named after the sounds they echo: ‘Astroboy’, ‘Polperro Beach’, ‘Sleepwalking’, ‘Station’ and ‘Exam’ for instance. These tracks not only guide the rhythm and fastness of the surrounding choreography but also allude again to his interests (in the case of ‘Astroboy’, to outer space), and also the circumstances he finds himself in. The ‘Polperro Beach’ and ‘Sleepwalking’ tracks are slow and mellow, reflecting the pleasuring, calming feelings he experiences when on the beach with his mother (birds and waves being heard in the background), or when sleeping, and contrast the ‘Station’ and ‘Exam’ tracks which instead are faster, and respectively busy with train and crowd sounds, and intense countdown-like stressful clock noises. The challenges of this specific kind of adaptation are, in the BBC documentary, described as not only covering such things as the imaginative, non-naturalistic light and agile design to allude to the laboratory of Christopher’s brain but also an incident board in a crime room in a police station elsewhere. Also discussed is the use of an abstract set, adjustable to various sorts of places and times, the cool, light and controlled lighting, busy and changing as his brain, the use of a model box in the design process and, finally, a kit fully equipped with the few props needed to display and tell the story with (simple white boxes serve as seats and containers, and even a toilet for instance). Similarly, the actors accompanying Treadaway’s Christopher on stage are themselves ‘clearly displaying’ (much like the kit). As the crew says, they are ‘energy systems’ of his, whizzing around and bouncing off the walls around him, something that the transfer to the different theatre spaces (from a round to a proscenium arch stage) in fact problematized. The choreography needed adjusting not only because of the nature but also the size of the stage in use. Unlike the previously stated Boyum (1985:  36)  quote suggesting that dramatic versions of books are limited in that they cannot allow access to people’s internal processes then (see also Leitch’s [2003: 158] 6th fallacy: ‘Novels create more complex characters than movies because they offer more immediate and complete access to characters’ psychological states’, a fallacy he says is ‘apt to drama as to film’), this theatrical play version does just that, multimodally using technology and physical movement to give voice to Christopher’s mind, and specifically his thoughts, turmoil and emotions. Dobrov (2001:  9)  refers to ‘metafiction’ as ‘that process whereby a representation doubles itself, where a narrative or performance recognizes, engages or exploits its own fictionality’. The Curious book metafictionally addresses its own novel-ness; the book is in fact the one Christopher himself

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writes, and there are references to other detective novels Christopher himself makes within his own construct, such as Doyle’s (for a detailed discussion of the metafictive elements of The Curious Incident book, see Ciocia, 2009). Metafictional are the book’s real-world referentialities also. See the detailed and exact description of Christopher’s journey from Swindon into London, for instance, and the book’s cultural/exophoric references to real life companies, such as in: ‘I’ll buy some ready-made [food] stuff from Marks and Spencer’s and take those in’ (Stephens, 2012: 13). Similarly metafictional and meta-adaptive is the theatrical adaptation of Curious though; the play too addresses its own fictionality and adaptability, partly as Christopher, on Siobhan’s suggestion, is implied author and implied adaptor, meaning he lets his own written story be turned into the fractured play we are watching (‘I was wondering if you’d like to make a play out of your book’, Stephens, 2012:  50)  despite himself admittedly not liking plays:  ‘I don’t like acting because it is pretending that something is real when it is not really real at all so it is like a kind of lie’ (Stephens, 2012:  50). The related techniques are to be discussed along the lines of metatheatre, and include such elements as direct audience address, textual and real-life referentiality and ‘play within the play’ or ‘play about the play’, among others. The play version of The Curious Incident (much like Shear Madness later) actually employs many such metatheatrical elements, as I next illustrate. As Benedict (2012) puts it, Siobhan narrating the book in the play justifies the public presentation of private thought, allows for leaps in chronology and adds terrific jolts of wit as stern Christopher ‘corrects the long-suffering actors’ interpretations’. On the face of it, the traumas that Christopher and his family struggle with shouldn’t leave room for laughter, but there’s plenty of it. That counterbalances an absolute refusal to soften the intensity of the extreme pain caused by the characters’ deceits.

Much like Christopher is character, narrator and implied author of the novel, he is character, part-narrator, implied author, implied adaptor but also director of the corresponding play, there being many ‘text referentialities’ and ‘play about the play’ scenes within the play itself. His directing privileges contribute to humour in fact, when he finds himself adjusting at first, and later actually correcting the production: Reverend Peters: I think I’d rather like to take the part of a policeman. Christopher: You’re too old to be a policeman. (Stephens, 2012: 50–1)

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I hear the sound of feet and it was a policeman. The Station Policeman enters and explores the back of the stage. Station Policeman: Excuse me have you seen a 15-year-old boy he’s …/ Christopher: / Not the one who was on the train before. The Station Policeman looks at Christopher. Exits, disappointed. Is replaced by a London Transport Policeman [sic]. London Transport Policeman: Excuse me have you seen a 15-year-old boy he’s wearing an orange jacket and a rucksack and he has a rat with him [sic]. (Stephens, 2012: 64–5) Roger: What’s he going to do? There’s no school for him to go to. We’ve both got jobs. It’s bloody ridiculous. He gives Christopher a strawberry milkshake. Judy: Roger. That’s enough. You can stay as long as you want to stay. Christopher: It was Mother who gave me the milkshake. They look at him. It was Mother who gave me the milkshake not you. Judy picks the milkshake up. Christopher: You need to shout more loudly at him. Like you’re really angry with him not just being nice [sic]. Judy looks at him. Nods. Judy: Ok. She puts the milkshake down. She’s much angrier. Roger. That’s enough. You can stay as long as you want to stay. She looks at Christopher examining his response. Expecting more feedback.

(Stephens, 2012: 82) The above scenes, and their line repetitions, are metatheatrical in reminding viewers of the artificiality of what they are experiencing, of Christopher’s authorship and directorship of the play text, and of what is performed needing to be a projection of what exactly is in his head. Also, where Christopher comes across various objects when looking for his book in the play, different actors are seen holding the objects, the light being shed upon each of them in turn. Most amusingly, where he mentions finding a chocolate biscuit (Stephens, 2012: 36), an actor is actually seen taking a bite of this object, his deliberate metatheatrical ‘breaking up’ and stepping out of his role, supposedly losing control of his

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acting, eliciting audience laughter. This is reinforced when the same actor is revisited holding a wooden spoon right after, but again distractingly eating the biscuit as well, a loud chewing noise being heard in the background, eliciting further laughs. Similarly metatheatrical is the use of ensemble acting and the narrative level of Siobhan reading the book simultaneously unfolding while what she reads about is acted on, also on stage. Equally metatheatrical are the play’s fourth wall invasions. The concept of the ‘fourth wall’, the imaginary boundary between the fictional world and its audience, appears in Denis Diderot’s (1713–84) critical writings about the theatre from as early as 1758. In the play in question, the fourth wall is broken since the Curious actors, on occasion, come out of the stage and into the audience, to deliver their lines from there. Likewise, fourth-wall invading is Christopher’s direct address to his audience towards the play’s end. Here, he asks whether his having gone to London on his own, having solved the dog’s murder crime, and having written a book which was later turned into a play means that he can do anything. This is, in fact, unlike the novel where he merely states that all these mean that he, in fact, can (p. 268). ‘Does that mean I can do anything?’ (Stephens, 2012: 99) is a question Christopher asks of Siobhan as well as, indirectly perhaps, the audience, three times in the play, as a way of highlighting that even though he perhaps cannot, like the rest of us, do anything (notice the question remains unanswered), he nevertheless remains empowered by his experiences anyway. As Stephens himself puts it in an interview (Ue, 2014: 118), life is not about the capacity to do ‘anything’; ‘[L]ife is about the capacity to negotiate our inabilities rather than to engage with our abilities and tries on our abilities’. Even after the lights go black, Christopher leaves and returns to directly address, in-role, his audience once more, even if most have left and ‘just one person’ remains in the audience, whom he is meant to thank ‘for staying’ (Stephens, 2012: 99): Using as much theatricality as we can throw at it, using music, lights, sound lasers, the boxes, the train tracks, the rest of the company, the orchestra, the fucking ushers for Christ’s sake, using dance, song, bells, whistles, the works, he proves by means of a counter-example that when a triangle with sides that can be written in the form n squared plus one, n squared minus one and two n (where n is greater than one) is right angled. (Stephens, 2012: 100)

His audience address here includes his appendicized answer to a question on his maths A level, which is taken directly from the novel. This final address however,

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even more metatheatrically, makes direct reference to the theatre and its special effects which he employs to triumphantly illustrate this answer of his: Maths Appendix After the applause, lights down, smoke, Christopher appears rising through the centre trap. There is very cool, electro music. Thank you very much for clapping and thank you very much for staying behind to listen to how I answered the question on my maths A level. Siobhan said that it wouldn’t be very interesting but I said it was. She didn’t tell me what I  should use, so I  decided to use all the machines and computers in the theatre including:  VL000 arc lights, which are moving lights, light emitting diodes, JBL control speakers, a Countryman boom mic and radio transmitter, 4 PTDX Panasonic overhead projectors and our DSM called Cynthia who will operate these. [. . .] And that is how I got an A*. Confetti. He exits.

His celebratory equation-solving leaves the departing audience with an upbeat feeling (Stephens showing us an ‘unmediated celebration of the brilliance of Christopher’s mathematical mind’, Ue, 2014: 118) while also being, in Labovian terms (see Labov, 1972 and Labov and Waletzky, 1967), coda-like, meaning effectively bridging the story world with the real word, the theatre world in which (some, in fact) viewers are physically placed. Baldick (2001: 151) refers to metadramatic epilogues of this sort as consciously acknowledging the theatrical situation, and Stephens notes loving the fact that some people will have left by this stage of the play, this creating a uniqueness in the experience of not just watching the performance, but of watching the coda as well (Ue, 2014: 119). As for the clues to the solving of the story, these are, much like in the book, here embedded in what characters linguistically hint. Crucial, however, is the relevant actor performance, particularly since – as noted – much of the book’s indirect speech and narration is, in the play, rendered in the form of conversation, given directly from the characters involved. (Paul Ritter’s) Ed’s voice breaks when he tells Christopher both about there being a problem with his mother’s ‘heart’, and about being sorry for her passing, both of which are indicative of his deceit, as is his walking away from Christopher when referring to himself feeling merely ‘sad’ about the dog’s death. Similarly, (Nicole Walker’s) Judy’s coming ‘closer’ emotionally to Christopher through his finding of, and reading of, her letters, is conceptualized through the actress physically approaching him,

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literally closing the distance between them, while he plays with his train set. Importantly, he ultimately decides to use trains himself, to physically join her in London, bridging the gap between the two. The actor performance is worth staying with, if briefly. According to Klotzko (2012: 966), ‘Treadaway was unforgettable as Christopher:  his uninflected speech, clenched jaw, averted gaze, and awkward gait were spot on. With his tall, lean frame and constantly fidgeting hands, he seemed to cower within’. Similarly, Benedict (2012) argues that Treadway’s ‘Christopher is ruthlessly defiant, never stooping to plead for sympathy. His chin lifted with undoubting selfpossession [sic], he never comments upon his character, attacking every moment with taut concentration and stark physicality that contrasts upsettingly with his furious, fearful retreats into himself ’. Clearly, performing Christopher’s autism effectively was key to the character’s successful portrayal, his paralinguistic but also nonverbal mannerisms adding to the effect that his verbal communication has. To illustrate physically Christopher’s problems with the processing of figurative language, his misreadings are shown through his physical performance and reactions to what others are saying. When he knocks on Mrs Shears’ door, she tells him: ‘I really don’t think I want to see you right now’ (Stephens, 2012: 15), to which he responds by turning his back to her so she can no longer see him while, when Ed tells one of his head teachers that ‘Christopher is getting a crap enough deal already [. . .] without [her] shitting on him from great heights as well’ (Stephens, 2012: 22), he reacts by worryingly looking above him, pulling his hoodie over his head, eliciting audience laughter. Similarly humorous are instances where the police officer asks him not to move, to which he physically freezes, and when subsequently the same officer tells him to ‘park’ himself (Stephens, 2012: 60), he car-like takes a seat on the train. Noticeably, these last instances reinforce the impression of his body, rather than his mind this time, being machine-like operable. The actors’ costumes are very casual, almost rehearsal-like, with a few add-on costuming props, such as hats and work-wear tops and jackets, being used for quick character switches where the ensemble is concerned. Christopher himself is in track suit bottoms throughout, and seen changing in and out of his t-shirts and bright coloured hoodies with the help of his parents (Noticeably, his clothes are in colours other than yellow and brown, these being ones he expresses he does not like in the book). The parent-assisted dirty clothes-changing is slow, painstaking and impactful, highlighting both his parents’ love and affection, his own vulnerability and childishness, but also his resistance to being touched. Much like in the book, he refuses physical contact and instead accepts others’ affection only by the touching of spread fingers:

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Judy: Christopher. She goes to hug him. He pushes her away so hard that he falls over. Roger: What the hell is going on? Judy: I’m sorry Christopher, I forgot. Judy spreads her fingers. Christopher spreads his to touch hands with her.

(Stephens, 2012: 76) Not only is this finger-touching action very slow but it also comes accompanied by a buzzing noise, this reflecting, and experientially putting readers in the position of feeling, Christopher’s discomfort physically. In fact, the whole play is itself extremely experiential in that it puts the audience directly in Christopher’s shoes, forcing them to view what it is like to see the world through his unique viewpoint. As noted, Dalamanga-Kalogirou’s translation of Stephens’ play script gave birth to the play’s 2013–14 Greek production, directed by Takis Tzarmagias. The Greek play was somewhat similarly entitled “Ποιός σκότωσε το σκύλο τα μεσάνυχτα” (‘Who killed the dog at midnight’) and starred acclaimed Greek theatre actor Manos Karatzogiannis in the role of Christopher. As I have not had the opportunity to watch the play in person, Karatzogiannis kindly provided me with a 2013 video-recording of one of its performances to watch and consider alongside Stephens’. Contrary to Stephens’ British proscenium and in-the-round productions, the Greek production in question adopted the combined traversethrust stage type, with the much smaller (100-ish) audience occupying two of the four sides of the square stage, these two sides connecting at a corner, and hence inviting viewers to an even more intimate relationship with the Greek cast. The Greek theatre space and its capacity being very small also allowed the cast to physically approach, and even walk/sit among the audience, at times. Much like with the original Stephens production in Britain, the Greek production’s Siobhan (note all characters having maintained the British identities given in Stephens’ script) part-narrates Christopher’s story, often reading out from a hard copy of his script she holds, and even commenting on its qualities in response to it. Also like Stephens’ original English play, the casually dressed Greek ensemble cast choreographically operates around Christopher and turns into objects (bank cash machines, tables and so on) for him to manipulate. They also physically manipulate him back, and even mediate Christopher’s narrative voice at times, again like in the original. The Greek cast is interestingly smaller though, consisting of just six (rather than ten)

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actors, though there are just as many roles (twenty-three) for them to perform between them. Individual actors play the role of Siobhan, Christopher and each of his parents, but the remaining two actors take on all remaining roles. One actor, for instance, finds himself performing three different distinctive neighbour-character roles, each conversing with Christopher, and all in turn. It is for this reason that the Greek cast is more gender- and age-fluid than the British one, with one Greek male actor, for example, taking the role of a female neighbour, and later on that of the much older male reverend. This serves to flag up each actor’s multi-role playing and flexibility, metafictionally bringing attention to the actors actually being cast and not the characters they play, and more so than in Stephens’ version. Other metafictionalities in the Greek version, taken straight from Stephens’, include Christopher’s bookwriting and play-adapting, his play-directing (his correcting/adjusting performances, and his choosing what cast member will perform what role), and his viewer-addressing. Karatzogiannis even remains in role when the rest of the cast comes to the front of the stage and bows at the play’s end, and only breaks out of that role after he showcases his A level maths equation-solving straight after. Though this Greek production does employ a simple, adjustable set, and a few small metal backless seats for characters to sit/stand on/look inside of, it adopts much more simplistic technology than the British one, and relies mostly on lighting patterns with which to direct audience attention and focus, and less so on the special effects technology involving screen projections and music the original play required. Christopher uses chalk to write on the metal seats and also stage side wall, this – like the source text – alluding to classroom-like scenarios. Unlike the original production though, the Greek play is not performed in a graph-paper-like floor or black box. Like the original, the Greek play’s character and viewer miscuing is respectively physically shown and hinted at through the script’s performance. Though quite close to the original script, the play’s Greek translation demanded some adjustments. For instance, some of the examples of actual figurative language Siobhan mediates on Christopher’s behalf are Greek-language specific rather than universal. And Christopher’s marked reference to his father and the neighbour ‘doing’ (as opposed to ‘having’) sex is not maintained in the Greek script, which adopts the non-deviant and expected Greek equivalent of ‘had sex’ (‘κάνανε σεξ;’). Karatzogiannis’ Christopher’s sexual reference nevertheless also elicits laughter.

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As Short (1996: 349) puts it, looking at writing in stylistic detail helps to reveal important aspects which might otherwise have gone unnoticed, and it also provides detailed and interesting ways of testing out or supporting critical hypotheses about style and meaning which we may have arrived at through our initial reading.

Much like stylistic analysis itself, comparing the text’s linguistic make-up with the corresponding play’s multimodal make-up can allow the analyst a similar awareness, and also the opportunity to explore this awareness in relation to initial impressions of the two forms, accounting here not only for language but also the meaning-impact of clothing, staging, lighting, music, song, choreography, and even culture. While an analysis of multimodal dimensions can never be exhaustive, the analysis of the given novel’s theatrical adaptation elaborates on the ways in which metafictionality itself has here migrated and been elaborated on, as have aspects such as Christopher’s computer machinelike metaphors, his miscuing, and his problems with figurative language and also figure and ground. Finally, the audience’s own over-reading and miscuing is supplemented via such devices as the actors’ paralinguistic behaviour, while the British producers’ use of a multisensory approach supplemented with various paratexts ensures an experience that further to critically engaging with, and interpreting, the novel, elaborates on its effects, and highlights the novel’s subtleties. Having so far mostly focused on medium migration, the present book’s second part next turns to cultural migration. The chapter that follows returns to prose fiction, and considers translation involving the same two cultural contexts the present section considered, but this time looking at Greek crime fiction being translated into English.

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3.1 On translation: Greek Markaris’ Late-Night News novel into English As Hale and Upton (2000:  1)  argue, ‘the publishing industry in the United Kingdom brings out fewer books in translation than any other in Europe’; whereas the United Kingdom maintains a percentage of translated works at around a mere 2 per cent, that is a tiny percentage compared to the 14 of Germany, the 18 of France, the 24 of Spain and the 26 of Italy (BIPE Conseil, 1993). According to Büchler and Trentacosti’s (2015: 23–4) more recent study, ‘translations published in the United Kingdom and Ireland represented around 3% of all publications’ while literary translations during 2005–2015 ‘account for around 4% of all literary publications, with a peak in 2011 when translations surpassed 5%’. Looking specifically at genre, and three sample years (2000, 2009 and 2011) ‘indicated a clear predominance of fiction, which alone accounts on average for 63% of all literary works in translation’ (Büchler and Trentacosti, 2015: 25) within that 3–5+%, a still, comparatively speaking, small percentage. In short, not much gets translated into English in the first place. Having said that, the English speaking countries’ ‘translation deficit’ (Büchler and Trentacosti, 2015: 9) is less true of contemporary crime fiction. Since the early 2000s, we have seen ‘a marked increase in translated crime fiction into English’, due to ‘a growing general interest in foreign crime fiction and, in particular, European crime fiction’ (Seago, 2014a), this no doubt being linked to the success that Stieg Larsson’s Swedish crime fiction work has had. One international publisher focusing on translated crime fiction, Bitter Lemon Press, puts their revenue growth between 2005 and 2010 at 12 per cent per year, a striking figure given Anglophone publishers’ long-standing resistance to translated works (Alter, 2010). Even more so, ‘Scandinavian Noir and Eurocrime feature regularly on the bestseller lists and in 2005 a special prize for translated crime

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fiction was created after the Gold Dagger had been won by non-English language crime authors three years in a row’ (Seago, 2014a). Non-English crime fiction has come to grow in currency, and the Anglophone world was forced to ‘sit up and listen’, and hence translate and read such works. The sections that follow correspondingly consider Petros Markaris’ Mediterranean – and specifically Greek – crime fiction (Greek being my native language), and its translation into English. Vervenioti’s (2015) ‘5 Best Greek Crime Novelists’ list is inclusive of writers such as Yannis Maris (1916–79), whose fiction is set in the 1950s, and the famous contemporary (American Greek) crime writer George Pelecanos, whose novels are set in Washington, D.C.  and which are actually penned in English. Most pertinent to this study is Vervenioti’s list being inclusive of Petros Markaris:  the only contemporary, Greek-writing and Greece-residing (though born in Istanbul to Greek and Armenian parents, Markaris came to settle in Athens in his 30s, says Borger, 2012) crime writer, whose Greece-based storylines the Anglophone world has been given the opportunity to read in translation, and across several crime novels in a series.

3.1.1 Criminal Late-Night News In an interview with the National Public Radio, Petros Markaris justified his choice of writing detective fiction as thus: ‘If you want to write today a social or political novel, you have to turn to the crime novel’ (Baker and Shaller, 2012: xiii). His sociopolitical crime novels are crisis-related. As Barbeito (2015:  69)  says, ‘[g]iven the devastating effects of the financial crisis on Greek society, which has practically demolished the social safety net and left the majority of the country’s youth with virtually no prospects, it is not at all surprising that a critique of the global economy and financial crime is pursued at this time by a Greek author like Markaris’. Indeed, Markaris’ series ‘uses a grumpy detective, Costas Haritos, to examine the financial crisis and other social issues contemporary Greece is grappling with’ while, ‘[l]ike many of the writers identified with Mediterranean noir, the globalization of crime is one of his main themes’ (Davis, 2014). Further to Markaris’ work being timely (financial-crisis related) and socially and politically motivated then, it is particularly concerned with transnational organized crime: global murder and cross-national human trafficking being some of the crimes that his work features. Much like the crimes he deals with, his fiction is also nation-crossing; it drew enough attention for it to be translated into several other languages, these

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including Italian, Spanish, German and, importantly for my study, English. It hence proved a ‘safe bet’ (see earlier reference to Hutcheon, 2006:  5)  for it to have been translated when it was, that is, during the economic downturn period (which it itself deals with). Studying Markaris’ nation-crossing crime fiction proves particularly fitting for analysis in relation to adaptation in the form of cultural migration and, even more specifically, translation into English; such engagement enables investigation of cross-cultural crime representation across languages and cultures, too. I start with a stylistic analysis of the first book of Markaris’ (eight-book long) Inspector Costas Haritos series, Nichterino Deltio (Νυχτερινό Δελτίο) [1995] (2009) in Greek, before briefly turning to the source text’s 18-episode televisual adaptation (1998–99) for Greek ET1 channel viewers (available to watch on YouTube at , last accessed July 2016), starring theatre, television and film star Minas Hatzisavvas in the role of Costas Haritos. It is in the next section that I explore David Connolly’s (UK) English translation of this novel into The Late-Night News (Markaris, 2004). First published in 1995, Greek Nichterino Deltio (Late-Night News), was Markaris’ first novel, and a first person – and hence internal – narrative, written from middle-aged Haritos’ point of view, a somewhat politically and socially dubious police inspector character, whose thinking reflects ideology that can be described as sexist, homophobic and racist. His description of female characters is sexualizing, of potentially gay characters rather flippant and of foreigners living in Greece indifferent and uncaring. He even appears to have a morally ambiguous past, having been involved in the torturing of leftist prisoners when younger (under the regime of the Colonels), an involvement he seems regretful of during the course of his later years. Even more so, and like many of his colleagues, he is complicit to the societal and police service corruption that surrounds him; for instance, towards the start of his series’ first narrative at least, he appears keen to ‘close’ cases for personal gain, and regardless of whether these cases are genuinely sewn up, with all relevant guilty parties arrested. Having said that, it is the consistent access to his viewpoint, and perhaps his life-likeness (and my own schemata, i.e. familiarity with real life male Greeks of that age) that contributes to the/my perception of him being a likeable, even endearing, character regardless, as does the narrative suggesting that he cares for his wife Adriani, and has a soft spot for his daughter Katerina, who he adores. This favourable impression of the character is also helped by the Haritos-focalized narrative being often humorous and interactive; the character-narrator poses

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amusing questions to himself which he proceeds to answer, for instance. Most importantly for the present research perhaps, this is a character who shares a genuine interest in language, an interest that is worth exploring in relation to the book’s translation/linguistic migration. His only hobby consists of looking up Greek and English words in dictionaries, the definitions he encounters coming to link to his thinking in relation to whatever situation he finds himself in. He also reflects on linguistic features he spots, such as a journalist’s politenessrelated (see Brown and Levinson, 1987) title- and ‘plural form’-dropping (since the Greek second person plural form used in a singular sense indicates respect/ formality, not unlike many other European languages) when addressing Haritos in an interview. As Haritos’ narrative explains, the journalist’s deliberate linguistic choices are to establish a relationship of equality rather than distance/power between the two men, or so the journalist expects. Similarly, Haritos elsewhere notes police-officers’ FBI-influenced interaction style being short of greetings, something meant to save time and enable efficiency, he metalinguistically then explains. Even more so, the Haritos-focalized narrative features personifications, idioms and proverbs used in abundance, while certain characters’ accent is represented with phonetic misspellings. Such choices create humour, but also a sense of irony around the character voices in question. The narrative is also filled with similes and extended metaphors, many of which are school-related; he, in chapter 24 for instance, likens report-writing to a pupil taking an exam. The extent to which such choices survived the storyline’s linguistic migration is worth exploring. Typical of the crime fiction genre more widely, the novel’s opening features suspense-generating cataphoric referencing; the first person character-narrator does not get named as ‘Costas Haritos’ until the book’s third chapter, and the book’s first line third person ‘he’ (‘αυτός’) does not get identified as the protagonist’s subordinate officer, sergeant Thanassis (Nollis), who  – among other things – brings him breakfast in the mornings, until a further two paragraphs into the story. Nevertheless, before even being named, Nollis is said to be nonverbally describing himself, though through Haritos’ viewpoint, as ‘μαλάκας’ (Markaris [1995] 2009: 9: ‘“‘Ειμαι μαλάκας” μου λέει. ‘Οχι με λόγια, με το βλέμμα του μου το λέει’, meaning he says he is such but not with words, and only with his eyes/look), an assessment that Haritos says he agrees with non-verbally in response, before dwelling on Thanassis’ background for a further paragraph. The label ‘μαλάκας’ is a very common and informal/rude noun with a very flexible meaning potential in modern Greek; depending on context, tone, gender, age and interlocutor relationship, it can mean ‘idiot’, ‘mate’, ‘jerk’, ‘masturbator’ and

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also ‘shocked/surprised’, to name but a few modern senses of many (see Vergis and Terkourafi, 2015 for a discussion on this interactionally ambiguous word’s amelioration, albeit a socially conditioned and partial semantic shift to a more positive sense, and the conventionalization of mock impoliteness based on the expression ‘ρε μαλάκα’ being used as either solidary – like ‘dude’ – or insulting – like ‘asshole’, with ‘ρε’ being an integral part of the solidary sense, though not necessarily of the insulting one). This same page’s later descriptions of Nollis as lacking in intelligence, competence and ambition direct the reader towards the ‘idiot’ sense of the word ‘μαλάκας’ though, a word that gets repeated, the repetition proving a ‘strategy for misdirection’ (Seago, 2014b: 11–12) that I return to, as the word proves differently interpretable later. Other characters are similarly described cataphorically through the story-telling, engaging the reader accordingly and generating suspense. Somewhat atypically of the crime fiction genre though, the story starts a few days after the murder case of two Albanians (Mehmet and Pakize) in traffic-ridden Athens is opened, inspector Haritos recollecting – through thoughts – the police’s first visit to the crime scene in question, and informing the readers of its specifics, all while conversing with Nollis about his missing office breakfast. In fact, much like with a lot of Greek (but not much English) fiction, the Greek narrative is written in the immediate present tense, its action unfolding vividly and dramatically, with chronology-disturbing glimpses to the narrative past filling in readers’ knowledge blanks, the plot here effectively contrasting with the story’s discourse. Despite the opening storyline having to do with the Albanian couple’s murder case, the book features several additional murders that take focus. The female journalist who asked if the couple had a child, Yanna Karayoryi, gets mysteriously murdered, as does her replacement, Martha Kostarakou, and the Albanian man, Ramiz Seki, who confesses to have committed the Albanian couple’s murder early on in the book. To return to the earlier point regarding Greek racism, Haritos and his colleagues’ treatment of Seki is noticeably more aggressive than their treatment of Greek suspects, he prefers ‘Albanians’ over giving these foreigners actual names, and they appear to be all but forgotten when the Greek women get killed; he admits that, for Greek police officers, Albanian lives have less worth compared to that of Greeks’ (Markaris, [1995] 2009: 13). Like most such fiction, the story features many red herrings and, since the first double murder case is considered closed and potentially unrelated to the others, such red herrings mostly revolve around the first murdered journalist, Karayoryi. One of these red herrings involves assumed paedophile Petros Kolakoglou, whose conviction was ensured by Karayoryi, and for which reason he is suspected to have

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killed her upon his release from custody. Another involves this same journalist’s former lover, her TV channel manager Nestor Petratos, whose relationship with Karayoryi she ended once she actually secured the professional advance that affair enabled (she too is said to have described him as ‘μαλάκας’, as in an ‘idiot’, when talking to her sister about their relationship). Though the readers are encouraged to suspect such characters of killing Karayoryi, they are ultimately invited to correct their understanding of these two men as killers. I return to the two female journalists’ actual murderer shortly, as it ultimately proves related to the rest. The book’s first double murder lies at the surface of a bigger, collective and organized crime, unlike the readers having first been led to suspect that this was merely a crime of passion:  that the arrested Albanian man, Ramiz Seki, harboured unreciprocated romantic/sexual feelings for Pakize which led him to kill her alongside her partner. The Albanian murders instead relate to human trafficking in the form of Eastern Europe child selling and also illegal organ harvesting; Seki did indeed kill Mehmet and Pakize, but over a dispute that involved an internationally-run human trafficking business all three of whom were a part of. Seki was later killed to ensure his silence and protect the illegal business. As for the two journalists, the book’s ending reveals they were surprisingly killed by police officer Nollis. Haritos discovers Nollis’ killer identity before sharing this revelation with readers. In a last – and this time even more extended – cataphoric reference use, Markaris employs third person singular male pronoun references for several pages towards the book’s end, and in relation to both Greek women’s killer. Readers remain oblivious to their killer’s identity, even where Haritos visits him at home, the latter explaining how and why he came to kill them exactly. Haritos first describes Nollis’ living room as unlike any of the other characters’; the unusualness of his living room’s space perhaps metaphorically alludes to the killer’s own (social) unusualness too. It is through the course of this living-room conversation, when Haritos’ interlocutor refers to having been a police academy student, and later when the character-narrator refers to the two men’s normal morning routine, that readers come to realize that Haritos is conversing with none other than his breakfast-bearing colleague Nollis. Karayoryi once had a relationship with Nollis, but ended this relationship with him when she fell pregnant, not wanting to keep their child. It was only 19 years later, the narrative’s recent present, that she came to tell Nollis she had kept their child all along, but refused to tell him who their daughter was, or allow him access to her. The female journalist instead promises to do so, on condition that he would use his police record access to help her uncover the previously described human

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trafficking case she was investigating into, an exposé that would shame the police and make her famous. Nollis found himself involved in the human trafficking case when helping her, but ended up killing Karayoryi in anger when he realized that she would never reveal who their daughter is, and that she was using him merely for professional advancement. Nollis later also killed Karayoryi’s journalist successor Kostarakou wanting to ensure that both his own involvement with the human trafficking case and in the leaking of police records remained hidden. At this point in the two men’s discussion, Haritos speculates the two of them will never have another morning routine, and from the next day forward, expects himself to be described as ‘μαλάκας’ from Nollis’ perspective instead, this time perhaps bringing the ‘surprised/shocked’ sense of the word to the fore. When admitting it all, Nollis is perhaps still a ‘μαλάκας’ as in an ‘idiot’, but one now interpretable on a different level too. Rather than an idiot simply for lacking in skills and ambition, Nollis is thought of as one for having been taken in by Karayoryi’s deception, and to the extent that he came to kill her, not to mention a ‘μαλάκας’ in the ‘jerk’ sense of the term for doing so. He kills himself in despair after admitting all to Haritos. Seeing that Nollis was driven by his love for his own, if actually unknown, daughter (a love that Haritos appreciates as he shares such adoration for his own similarly aged daughter), the protagonist and his boss, Ghikas, ensure that Nollis’ involvement with the human trafficking aspect of the crime remains secreted, protecting Nollis’ honour, and the police service’s good name. Haritos’ affection for Nollis is manifested partly through the kindness he shows the killer when conversing with him at the book’s end (which, as noted, noticeably contrasts with the aggression used with Seki, who too killed two people), but also through the naming strategy the character-narrator employs. Thanassis Nollis is first-named (‘Thanassis’) via the book’s narrative voice throughout and even at the end (this suggesting closeness between the two men), but surnamed (‘Nollis’) in interactions with Haritos’ own superior (this suggesting distance) when in reference to Nollis killing the two women and then himself; Haritos keeps up the pretence of Thanassis-related detachment when conversing with his superior, though the narrative voice’s persistent first-name choice betrays him feeling pity for the now dead man instead. In comparison, Haritos’ consistent reference to the two female journalists by their surname suggests his detachment from them. When looking through Karayoryi’s belongings, Haritos comes across some letters she had received. The writer appears to be wanting something from Karayoryi, something she has but will not share, this unspecified item’s nongendered reference being described through pronouns. Note that the Greek

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grammatical system requires every noun to have either a female, male or neutral gender, this gender being somewhat arbitrary in fact. The writer opting for the neutrally gendered object pronoun ‘το’ for this item’s reference proves misleading. Instead of the writer – who turns out to be Nollis – wanting, say, information from Karayoryi, he turns out to have been looking for access to their shared child’s (‘child’ being a word that requires a neutral pronoun in Greek: ‘το παιδί’) whereabouts. Unbeknown to Nollis, Karayoryi gave the child up for adoption at birth, and to her own sister. The child, Anna, grew up to be a young woman who resembled Karayoryi in appearance, something that not only Haritos but also Nollis seem to be struck by in the book itself when Anna goes by the station so as to give officers some of her aunt’s (she believes) files. When Haritos notes Nollis’ awe at noticing Anna’s resemblance to Yanna Karayoryi (also notice the phonetic similarity/rhyme of the two women’s names), he pays little attention to it, precisely because he was struck by it himself. Another narrative strand involves Kolakoglou threatening Karayoryi when she put him away in prison, and for paedophilia, a crime he turns out to have never committed. Rather than threatening her out of revenge, Kolakoglou was, in fact, doing so with the knowledge that she had a child out of wedlock, something very few knew about and many would have frowned upon at that time. It is towards the end of the book that relevant frame repairs (Emmott, 1997) force readers to correct their understanding of these earlier frames, and to reinterpret the text with the ‘correct’ frames in place accordingly. Kolakoglou was an innocent man, convicted for crimes he never committed, while Nollis’ embarrassment, awkwardness and nervousness portrayed throughout the storyline is now differently meaningful; Nollis was not incompetent, but was in fact deceitful and fearful. All of Nollis’ interactions with Karayoryi, given in the text through Haritos’ viewpoint, also need interpreting in light of the fact that the two were once lovers, and Karayoryi once fell pregnant with their child, who she kept without Nollis knowing, and who is later used to blackmail him for police record access. At second read, Haritos’ contemplating as to why Karayoryi stares at Nollis intently, at which point he hypothesizes that she finds his large build attractive, serves as an episodic, that is, important, clue that is likely to be initially read non-episodically, as unimportant. His large build links to the reveal of him being her killer later on; forensic experts inspecting the murder scene will note that her killer was tall and strong. Similarly, Nollis’ awe when noticing Anna’s resemblance to Yanna Karayoryi hinted at his then realization of Anna being his own daughter. Like with all crime fiction, the ending’s revelation forces the storyline’s rethinking from scratch, with all frames repaired for cognitive reprocessing.

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I end my Greek book discussion with a note on food, as does the book’s narrator. According to Verdaguer (2001: 187, cited in a 2015 call for papers for a planned volume on crime fiction and food), ‘mentions of food and cooking tend to complement the social backdrop of the [crime fiction] story and reveal the milieu described by the author, very much in a nineteenth-century tradition of realism’ while ‘reflecting the cultural orientation of novels, which range from ethnocentric to multiethnic’. And Markaris is himself aware that food relates to readers’ understanding of the national and regional place of crime fiction, but also links to such things as characterization, attitudes and values, ideology and class. It even relates to gender, not to mention it being indicative of social relationships. As Markaris (2006b, cited in Wiedenmayer, 2016: 38) himself puts it, in his autobiographical and critical work, ‘food, as well as the relationship of the police staff with the kitchen, does not just indicate the traditionally good cuisine of [the source crime text] country, but also the [Mediterranean] detectives’ relationship with their parental home and, especially, with their mother’, such women being defined by their good cooking alone. Wives are similarly defined by their cooking skills in such contexts, hence food here being indicative of women’s role in the source text society: ‘Equality between men and women took too long to reach the Mediterranean countries, which worked to the advantage of the cuisine and its flavours’ (Markaris, 2006b: 71), he clarifies. Haritos’ rejection of the quality food that housewife Adriani prepares for him (and even sends to him when out of town in the TV adaptation!), and his opting for Greek fast food souvlaki instead, suggests stubbornness and even contempt. Having said that, the book ends with Haritos appreciating, and pondering over his relationship with, Adriani, and his love of her cooking, and specifically her stuffed vegetables ‘γεμιστά’. I return to the translation of such culturally specific items in the section that follows, where I discuss the novel’s English translational context more widely. Before doing so, I end this section with a few paragraphs on the Greek novel’s televisual adaptation. Much like the source text, its Panos Kokkinopoulos-directed ET1 televisual adaptation features Haritos’ dictionary interest, the definitions he encounters again linking to his life/work circumstances. Also consistent with the source text are the televisual episode openings. The very first episode’s opening features an internal monologue, and also an explicit Haritos POV-shot camera angle, these respectively pointing to Haritos’ mental and physical viewpoint. Though the camera position from then on gets unfixed from Haritos’ origo, and alternates between shots suggesting Haritos’ viewpoint as well as that of others’ deictic base, his internal monologue persists throughout the opening segments of all

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series episodes. Such opening monologues give voice to Haritos’ thoughts, justify his tactics, and also help summarize/recap the story for the show viewers, and all the while the melancholically and musically themed opening credits, and scene montage featuring black and white images from Haritos’ past alongside earlier show scenes, unfold on screen. The first episode’s internally narrativized opening credits’ roll is followed by a scene mirroring the book’s own opening. Haritos and Nollis are shown silently looking at each other much like the book describes, close shots focusing on their respective faces, with Haritos’ internal monologue explaining how each of the men’s close shot looks are to be interpreted. The show features the same silent dialogue between the two men as the book; Nollis is said to be supposedly implicitly self-describing as ‘μαλάκας’, to which Haritos agrees. This is a scene repeated in the second episode’s introductory segment, important as it is to reinforce this point. Also like the source text, when given a photo showing young Karayoryi laughing alongside Nollis, Haritos discovers the latter to be Anna’s father and her mother’s killer, and before revealing so for viewers; the camera does not get closed in on this photo until much later, at the show’s end. Over the shoulder shots of Nollis tell the viewer of an unknown suit-wearing stalker of several characters and retain his killer identity throughout the show. Many characters being suit-wearing proves useful, particularly as these frames use the back of the man’s suit as a shot framing device but do not depict his head at all, hence protecting his anonymity. When Haritos visits him at the show’s end, the camera only slowly moves around to reveal who Nollis was. It is when Haritos ponders over the likely reversal of roles as to who exactly the ‘μαλάκας’ is that Nollis kills himself, as in the book. When conversing with Ghikas over their colleague’s suicide, televisual Haritos refers to Nollis as their sergeant. Unlike other episode endings, the series’ second-to-last and last episode’s endings feature an internal monologue so far encountered only in episode openings. It is in the finale’s end-monologue that Haritos retains the source text’s ‘Thanassis’ naming strategy, important as this is in reinforcing the close status of their relationship. Unlike the source text, note also televisual Nollis having Karayoryi’s images plastered on his wall, and his having given Haritos a Virgin Mary icon present on Katerina’s birthday, this suggesting that Nollis cared for Karayoryi, but also understands how important it is to celebrate one’s daughter’s life, both of which Haritos appreciates. Unlike the source text though, this finale’s end-monologue elaborates that, though the mystery is now resolved, with the trafficking gang group broken, the masterminds behind the human trafficking operation (named Sovatzis and Krenek) get away unharmed, there being not enough evidence for the police to get to them. The storyline is Euronoir

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after all; though several criminal pawns are killed or arrested, the international business employing them possibly carries on its illegal dealings without, and despite, them. The televisual adaptation sticks to the source text storyline (‘plot’), but varies from the latter’s narrative design (‘discourse’) somewhat. The adaptation reorders some source text scenes; unlike the source text, the televisual opens with the police officers’ inspection of the Albanian couple’s murder scene, for instance, while Adriani leaves to visit Katerina later in the book than she does so in the show. Also, seeing that the 391-page book was stretched into as many as 18 televisual episodes of 45 minutes each, the show’s second half gets padded out with several added characters and scenes. Some additional sequences show Haritos persistently staring at several of his office neighbours’ building block balconies and windows, unlike the source text which only focuses on a single balcony and neighbour. He observes a young couple falling in love, the girl falling pregnant, her mum dying of a heart attack when she discovers this, and the girl leaving with her father while the boy/father-to-be joins the army. Another young couple very happily welcomes a child, but then argue, break up and ultimately reconcile. Lastly, a woman spends her days tarot (/fate) reading alone, and is then seen dancing in her balcony in a wedding dress. These unfolding televisual scenes can be read as clues to the story’s revelatory outcome as they relate to fate, young love and child bearing, and related challenges (note that such mother-blaming links are not unlike those established in sections 2.1, 2.2 and 2.3 of the present work). The show also provides access to Haritos’ dreams/nightmares and fantasies which also prove clue-like; prior to discovering that Karayoryi once had a child, Haritos dreams of her being pregnant, child-bearing and breast-feeding, for instance. The televisual show is mostly serious; the male actors sport ties and are suited up, and the women are similarly non-casually dressed (note also Karayoryi wearing a white shirt when killed, the whiteness of the colour adding to the impression of her being an innocent victim perhaps – not unlike Forbrydelsen’s Nanna). Further to the written text’s Haritos struggling with traffic, televisual Haritos is seen crashing, or otherwise having trouble with, his car several times, and also fighting a cold and then a toothache and stomach-ache, all adding to the impression of a much-suffering detective figure. Scenes of this sort also bring a comical element to the otherwise sombre show though, humour being a welcome respite from the show’s morbid theme; among others, see, for instance, the added scenes featuring Haritos’ visit to the dentist, with the famous comedy actor Yannis Bezos featuring as his dentist, or those of Haritos observing ditzy

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Constable Koula Kalafati studying English, computer and mobile phone using, and taekwondo (which she amusingly refers to as ‘taekfondo’) with the popular comedy actress Maria Lekaki in the role of Koula. As for televisual Nollis’ performance in interactions with Haritos, Karayoryi and his daughter Anna, Nollis is shown to be awkward, slow, and hence suspicious, important as it is for viewers to ‘repair’ these frames later, a repairing that also needs to be effected when it comes to the ‘over the back’ frames of Nollis following all characters previously discussed. To help the viewer do so, these frames are revisited, with one stalking shot moving to Nollis’ front, this time revealing his identity. Casting is also interpretable: the actresses chosen for Anna’s (Maria Kallimani) and Yanna’s (Marilena Karbouri) roles share a physical resemblance that proves useful, particularly as Haritos is first shown to be struck by Anna’s appearance but does not explain why at that stage (the two women’s physical similarity is made explicit here by the book’s internal narration). It is only later, when Nollis is similarly struck by Anna’s appearance in both the book and the film, that Haritos mentions their similarity and makes this link explicit for viewers too. First identified by Genette ([1972] 1980: 234–5), narrative metalepsis refers to ‘any intrusion by the extradiegetic narrator or narratee into the diegetic universe (or by diegetic characters into a metadiegetic universe, etc.), or the inverse’. A ‘deliberate transgression of the threshold of embedding’ results in ‘intrusions [that] disturb, to say the least, the distinction between levels’, also producing an effect of ‘humor’ or of ‘the fantastic’ or ‘some mixture of the two [. . .], unless it functions as a figure of the creative imagination [. . .]’ (Genette [1983] 1988: 88). Diegetic music is music that is naturally part of the scene or character-chosen and ambient, such as where a street extra plays the accordion, Karayoryi’s sister plays a musical toy Karayoryi gave her, or Haritos plays some car radio music in the show. Contrastingly, extra- or non-diegetic music is music that is added in, narrator-chosen and hence soundtrack, the TV show characters being entirely oblivious to it. The show’s same exact musical themes (by Marios Strofalis) are encountered by viewers both diegetically and extra-diegetically. This is metaleptic, in disturbing the distinction between the character- and narrator-specific levels, even enabling the characters to hear their own scene’s musical soundtrack as it were. In fact, according to the writer’s IMDb (Internet Movie database) record, Petros Markaris is himself considered a Brecht expert, which explains his interest in metadrama. Much like both the Funny Games films to be discussed in the next section, the televisualization of Markaris’ first Haritos novel partakes in the Brechtian tradition via its self-reflexivity too. To start with, the televisual show’s viewers themselves view characters ‘viewing’. The title sequence’s labelling

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(‘Late-Night News’) alludes to viewers actually TV news watching, while Nollis stalking people, Haritos and his wife watching TV, Haritos obsessively watching the neighbours – something he only explicitly addresses as narrator in the opening segments of episodes 13 and 17 – and Haritos’ dreaming of watching suspects on TV during episode 13, all bring ‘viewing’ to the viewers’ attention. Similarly metadramatic and interpretable are the show’s filmic references (to films such as Cameron’s 1997 Titanic and Verhoeven’s 1992 Basic Instinct), as is the ninth episode’s opening monologue, which (among others) directly draws on the metaphor of drama, with Haritos referring to himself as first an audience member and then an actor in the police officer role of a play, and specifically that of Inspector Clouseau in Blake Edwards’ farcical Pink Panther series. Petros Markaris himself seems to pose as one of the show’s non-acting characters (as Gustav Krenek, one of the human trafficking business’ masterminds) even, in a photo Haritos gains access to. It is in the course of the televisual show’s second series, Amyna Zonis/Zone Defence (2007–8), based on Markaris’ second Haritos book [1998] (2010) that Markaris makes an actual appearance as an extra, in the role of a locksmith, a participation resembling actor Sofie Gråbøl’s, Forbrydelsen’s Lund’s, in the US remake of the televisual Nordic noir, The Killing (see section 2.1). Cameo scenes such as that of Markaris’ ‘are signatures, deliberate marks of authorship’ and come to ‘signal the artifice of the work’ (Dixon, 2008: 290), and hence also serve a metafictional function. The first series ends with a particularly metafictional sequence; following a last fantasy sequence of Haritos’, this time featuring the police officer observing the whole cast dancing in pairs, he turns and looks directly at the camera, that is, us viewers, then rises up in the air looking down on them all from high above.

3.1.2 Anglophonizing the News As noted, despite the recent popularity of the non-English crime fiction genre, not much of such fiction is consumed by the Anglophone world, relatively speaking. It is for this reason that the genre attracts relatively little academic interest, too. More specifically, ‘European crime fiction in languages other than English has received relatively little critical attention in the Anglophone critical world’ (Gorrara, 2009: 2, cited in Pepper, 2016: 8, my italics). Indeed, with respect to translation studies especially, ‘[t]here has been little research on crime fiction translation and existing studies have tended to use a corpus of crime texts to analyse translation issues which are not necessarily specific to the genre as such’ (Seago, 2014a). Crime fiction, a genre known for its strong relation to place and

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also its tendency to manipulate and misdirect, is worth inspecting in relation to translation strategizing, challenging as the translating task is where this genre’s style and structure is concerned. Besides, ‘[t]he translator has to work within the constraints of genre norms, but their task is further complicated by the shift to a different set of linguistic resources, a target cultural context which may not supply relevant real world knowledge to close inferential gaps, and a possibly very different set of social and cultural norms which define what is deviant or transgressive along different boundaries’ (Seago, 2014a). Connolly’s chapter-for-chapter, and nearly always paragraph-for-paragraph and sentence-for-sentence translation is rather faithful, with the exception of a few explanatory/evaluative sentences. When Haritos discovers a room full of young children playing with toys, for instance, Connolly does not translate his explanation as to where their toys are likely to have been bought. Importantly, his translation of the novel is also ‘direct’, meaning that it was a translation from one language (Modern Greek) to another (English), rather than ‘indirect’ (Toury, 1995: 129), meaning translation from one language to another but via yet another (otherwise known as ‘relay’ or ‘mediated’ translation). In directly translating Markaris’ [1995] (2009) mystery then, to what extent has Connolly opted for matching and resemblance, that is, equivalence (see Jacobson [1959] 2004; Kenny 2009), over literal (i.e. word-for-word) translation? Has Connolly domesticated the novel, making his translation specific to the target language culture, or has he foreignized it, resisting the target language’s values, and signifying difference (on domestication and foreignization, see Venuti, 1995: 49; see also Munday, 2013, chapter 9), and what is the meaning and effect of those strategies? To answer these questions, I  touch on naming and fixed expressions, before turning to Grammenides’ (2012) analysis of Connolly’s translation of culturally specific items (Aixelá, 1996) where these same two versions of Markaris’ novel are concerned. I then investigate strategies Connolly employed with respect to source and target culture generic and stylistic norms. I  here turn my focus to ‘translational stylistic’ and ‘cognitive’ analysis, this ‘following the movement from text to context to mind that all stylistics [. . .] has followed’ (Boase-Beier, 2014:  403); I  inspect the translation of genre-specific clueburying, relating these to research by Seago (2014a and 2014b) and Emmott (1997). There are numerous elements that allude to the translated (English) novel’s source text being Greek. In Connolly’s translation (Markaris, 2004), the characters mostly maintain their original Greek names and, much like Hewson’s work, Connolly lists his ‘dramatis personae’ prior to the novel’s start, a handy list

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for readers who might struggle to keep up with who everyone is. Confusingly though, the source text’s Thanassis Nollis is renamed into ‘Thanassis Vlastos’ in Connolly’s list and, possibly mistakenly, as ‘Thanassis Kouris’ at the text’s very end. All place and street names remain the same and hence Greek-specific in the text’s English version, and the translator alludes to the source text’s Greekness on numerous occasions. ‘ “Don’t be afraid, it’s nothing”, Dourou said to her in Greek’, writes Connolly (in Markaris, 2004: 228), while the narrator’s reference to a character being ‘one of our people’ (Connolly in Markaris, 2004: 139) alludes to an ‘our’ that is exclusively (of the reader) Greek, though the original’s ‘δική μας’ (Markaris [1995] 2009: 190) alludes to an inclusive (of the reader) ‘our’ instead. The translator even attempts to maintain the source text’s metaphor-related creativity. Where, in the police officer-focalized narrative, Markaris [1995] (2009: 50) refers to families having been sentenced (‘κάποιος είχε καταδικάσει’) to living together due to their row of houses having been lined up close to one another, Connolly (in Markaris, 2004: 32) opts for the meaning equivalent ‘someone had condemned’, which maintains the police mindset underlining both versions. The same goes for various similes; towards the end of chapter 2, both texts liken the journalists packing their paraphernalia when leaving Haritos’ office to his ‘office [rediscovering] its normal appearance, like the patient who, once out of danger, is unhooked from the machines’ (Connolly, in Markaris, 2004: 11). Idioms, lexical strings whose meaning is not composed out of the meaning of the individual words each string consists of, and proverbs/traditional sayings, which instead have a didactic function and a metaphorical sense, prove more problematic to translate, particularly where the English language does not offer word-for-word translated versions. Here, these expressions often get translated into their English meaning-equivalents. For instance, the Greek (Markaris [1995] 2009: 290) ‘[π]ολλά χρόνια θα ζήσετε’/‘you’ll live long’ expression turns into its ‘[y]our ears must have been burning’ equivalent in Connolly’s English (in Markaris, 2004: 216) version, when in reference to someone getting talked about in their absence. Not all such Greek fixed expressions have equivalent English fixed expressions, or get translated. The translator does, however, allude to some references’ cultural significance, and often without getting into specifics; see Connolly’s (in Markaris, 2004: 111) reference to ‘the sky and I had that popular song in common. Grey clouds and grey moods’ in place of Markaris’ original text’s reference to song writer Tsitsanis (Markaris [1995] 2009: 152), whose relevant grey-cloud related songs most Greek readers will recognize. I next refer to Grammenides’ analysis to examine the text’s linguistic transculturation in some detail.

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‘The dilemma over foreignization or domestication of the text is one shared by all literary translators’ (Hale and Upton, 2000:  7), and is one that can be explored through what Aixelá (1996:  58)  defines as ‘culturally specific items’, that is: ‘textually actualized items whose function and connotations in a source text involve a translation problem in their transference to a target text, whenever this problem is a product of the nonexistence of the referred item or of its different intertextual status in the cultural system of the readers of the target text’. Using a descriptive translation studies approach, Grammenides (2012) notes Connolly having opted for strategies such as literal translation (where an equivalent cultural reality exists in the target language-culture), but adds that related connotations are not necessarily transferred across to the target culture text unproblematically. Grammenides’ example of Connolly using ‘aspirin’ (Connolly in Markaris, 2004:  275)  for the Greek literal equivalent ‘ασπιρίνη’ (Markaris [1995] 2009: 367) might seem straightforward. Having said that, it is also a translation perhaps dependent on the reader knowing Greeks’ tendency to opt for aspirins, over the British readers’ likely choice of paracetamol, to fight headaches with. Where there is no ‘equivalent’, Grammenides (2012) lists and elaborates on Connolly’s use of six translational strategies. He first lists cultural substitution, such as Connolly’s translating a reference to a Greek song for an English language one, though again noting the two songs’ different meaning and associations impacting on the readers’ understanding of the given cultural reference. Another example, though less problematic this time, is translating the source text’s (Greek standard) 8:30 pm to the target text’s (English standard) 9 pm evening news. Grammenides secondly lists Connolly opting for explicitation, this involving the description of cultural markers without mentioning their name, such as the use of Connolly’s (in Markaris, 2004: 110) ‘university entrance exams’ in place of Markaris’ ([1995] 2009:  150)  source text Greek-specific ‘Πανελλαδικές’. He thirdly discusses transliteration, where the translator transcribes the source language characters or sounds in the target language, such as in Connolly’s (in Markaris, 2004: 251) ‘bifteki’ for Markaris’ ([1995] 2009: 336) Greek dish ‘μπιφτέκι’, and then, fourthly, transliteration followed by explicitation, the explanation here taking the form of in-text or even footnote-specific glossing, readers being given the option to either interrupt their reading to fully appreciate a reference or, alternatively, carry on regardless. He mentions here the only example of footnoting in Markaris’ first Haritos novel, explaining that footnotes are uncommon for the crime fiction genre and its wide readership, unlike other prose pieces and essays he examined in translation where these are found in abundance. Specifically, Markaris’( [1995]

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2009:  379)  use of ‘Πολυτεχνείο’ is translated with Connolly’s (in Markaris, 2004:  285)  ‘Polytechnic School Events*’, the footnote later elaborating how ‘*[t]he students revolted against the Junta [see earlier reference to the Colonels’ regime]. The police were unwilling to go in so the Junta sent the army. Tanks were used to drive the students from school. This was the most significant resistance that the junta had faced’. Fifthly, Grammenides lists translation by a hypernym (i.e. Connolly in Markaris, 2004: 112, opting for the superordinate ‘sleeping pills’ over Markaris’ [1995] (2009: 153) specific sleeping pill type ‘Yπνοστεντόν’) and, sixthly and finally, omission, where a culturally specific item is not translated at all (see earlier discussion of Tsitsanis, for instance). Grammenides interprets such translational choices ideologically and politically, and accounts for there being a transfer from a language-culture with lack of authority (in this case the peripheral Greek culture) into a hegemonic language-culture known for its supremacy (in this case a central British, or at least Anglophonic, one). He concludes that such techniques lead to a ‘transparent target text and to the ethnocentric reduction of the foreign text to target language cultural values. The unknown is reduced to known and the different to the similar. Consequently, [. . .] the translated texts do not contribute to the reconciliation or the recognition of cultural difference. In sum, otherness is denied and transformed’. For Grammenides then, Connolly clearly opted for a domesticating translating approach to Markaris’ first novel. This was so with an ‘imperialist attitude adopted by hegemonic cultures’, also adding that these ‘choices are determined by the rules imposed by the commissioning institution’ (transliterations followed by explicitation are considerably higher in books translated for a Greek publishing company, he says). Before turning to the translation of the cognitive stylistic features the previous section addressed, I  briefly stay with the translation of food, which Grammenides’ ‘bifteki’ example brings to the fore. Though most food (such as Haritos’ morning croissant, or his love of souvlaki) gets translated faithfully, not everything is. Greek ‘κουλούρι’ (a round, savoury snack), in Markaris’ ([1995] 2009: 10) text becomes sweet ‘biscuits’ in Connolly’s (in Markaris, 2004: 2) translation and, contrastingly, Italian-influenced minced meat pasta bake ‘παστίτσιο’ in Markaris ([1995] 2009:  31)  becomes Greek ‘moussaka’ in Connolly’s (in Markaris, 2004:  18), the latter reminding one of Hewson introducing Danish hotdog ‘pølse’ to the Forbrydelsen novelization, even though the televisual source text character is shown eating an American burger instead. Strangely enough, only the exotic and yet likely-known foodstuff are allowed in translation, and introduced even where the source text writer does not use them. Wiedenmayer

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(2016: 38) illustrates the significance of crime fiction ‘food’ translation with the following example: The main character in his own crime novels, the police officer Haritos, is particularly fond of γεμιστά, ‘stuffed tomatoes and peppers,’ which act as a symbol of reconciliation, when his wife, Adriani, prepares them after a fight. In the English translations by David Connolly γεμιστά is translated just as stuffed tomatoes, although in the second novel Zone Defense (2006) [sic] there is a recipe at the end of the book with the title ‘Stuffed Vegetables (Constantinople style)’ describing how to cook stuffed tomatoes and peppers.

Arguably then, when considering translation, food is more than a mere cultural reference, however one opts to employ it. Food brings the text’s Greek origin into the narrative foreground, but also adds realism, specificity and value, as well as being pertinent to the translation of character relationship, and (attitude to) gender. As Markaris (2013) himself says in a TVXS interview, the stuffed vegetables described above were the character Adriani’s starting, defining, and classic police officer housewife-specific characteristic, a character he admits (like many of his works feature) was largely based on someone he knows well and, in the case of Adriani, his own mother. Even more so, the English translation and recipe-offering of Greek foodstuff can be said to promote the source text’s cuisine, urging the reader to prepare, and taste, the relevant food, and hence become more physically and personally immersed in the novel’s story, and through the sense of taste. As for the adding of the recipe at the 2006 book’s end, this can be described as culture enticing, and even touristic. To stay with food, if metaphorically this time, the text’s English translation retains some of the flavour of the original. It also offers an experience different to the Greek one, though. Stylistically comparing the two versions could explain why that is. To start with, the English text opening (like many of its chapter openings in fact) employs cataphora, much like the Greek opening text does: Every morning at nine, we would stare at each other. He would stand in front of my desk with his gaze fixed on me, not exactly at eye level, a fraction higher, somewhere between the forehead and the eyebrows. ‘I’m a moron,’ he would say. He said it, but not in words; he said it with his eyes. I sat behind my desk and stared him straight in the eye, neither any higher nor any lower. Because I was his boss and could look him in the eye, whereas he couldn’t do the same with me. ‘I know you’re a moron,’ I’d tell him. No word escaped me either; my eyes did the speaking. We had this conversation five days a week, every week of the year, excluding the two months that we were both on leave. (Connolly in Markaris, 2004: 1)

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Once more, the first line’s suspense-generating ‘he’ (Thanassis, readers later realize) and ‘we’ (Thanassis and Costas) force the reader to wait before finding out who is staring at whom exactly. The Greek present tense story gets converted to the past tense in English though, as is conventional of such fiction in this target culture language. And since the English language does not have a similarly polysemous lexical item available, Connolly (in Markaris, 2004:  1)  translates the original’s versatile ‘μαλάκας’ mostly into ‘moron’, pinpointing the sense to ‘idiot’ here and in as many as 16 pages at least, and eliminating the semantic ambiguity ‘μαλάκας’ (meaning, as mentioned, ‘jerk’, ‘surprised’, ‘idiot’ and so on) allowed. Much like the translation examples that Seago (2014a) discusses, Connolly’s translation of ‘μαλάκας’ makes explicit what the source text deliberately left open to interpretation. Further to closing down on the variant possibilities of interpretation, this impacts on the reader’s cognitive engagement and interaction with the text. Translating ‘μαλάκας’ into ‘moron’ does not allow the reading of Thanassis having been initially described as, potentially at least, a ‘jerk’. Though mostly relating the sense of the word into ‘moron’ (‘ “Is it something serious?” I asked like a moron’, ‘I’d be a real moron to waste my whole day going through that pile of paper’, Connolly in Markaris, 2004: 49, 69), to pinpoint a different sense of this same word’s (‘μαλάκας’) translation, Connolly instead opts for ‘asshole’ (‘He’s an asshole, she’d say, if you’ll pardon the expression’, Connolly in Markaris, 2004: 85) on one occasion though, here the character even acknowledging the rudeness of the word sense with an apology straight after. The Albanian’s Greek is foreignized in the source text mostly through phonetic misspellings (‘Έκεις τσιγκάρο’; Markaris [1995] (2009: 19), rather than the standard ‘Έχεις τσιγάρο’; the Albanian’s /k/ and /g/ replacing the Greek /χ/ and /γ/ sounds), and only partly through nonstandard Greek grammar (‘Εγκώ τρία χρόνια όχι εδώ’, Markaris [1995] (2009: 19), rather than the standard ‘Εγώ δεν ήμουν εδώ πριν τρία χρόνια’). Connolly’s translation instead maintains the Albanian’s foreignizing but more so through nonstandard English grammar of such instances: ‘Got cigarette?’, ‘I not here three years’ (Connolly in Markaris, 2004:  8); the English sound system not being dissimilar from the Albanian one renders phonetic misspellings mostly unusable, and potentially confusing here. The only exception to this is Seki using ‘Keeds?’ (Connolly in Markaris, 2004: 23) instead of ‘Kids?’, the phonetic misspelling alluding to Seki having used a vowel other than a short /i/ here perhaps and, in any case, a foreign accent. And though he is said to be saying ‘keeds’ for ‘kids’ on the following page too, this same character is quoted using the standard ‘kids’ (Connolly

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in Markaris, 2004:  39)  a few pages after. Interestingly, when the characternarrator elsewhere attempts to speak a little English, his ‘No problem, not for you’ (Markaris [1995] 2009: 190) Connolly (in Markaris, 2004: 139) translates into ‘No problem, no here for you’. The character-narrator self-describes his own English as fluent in both versions but the translator ironically undercuts this assessment, in case the reading of it was literal, by steering away from the arguably standard English of the source version. Lastly, when a character refers to police office English being ‘βλάχικα’ (Markaris [1995] 2009: 329), an adjective that metaphorically alludes to one’s language being uneducated and uncivilized, Connolly (in Markaris, 2004: 245) translates this into ‘pidgin English’ instead. When the character-narrator makes reference to the reporters’ linguistic strategizing, the English translation does not refer to double titles and plural verb forms (both marked for respect) having been dropped as a means with which the reporter is to create a close relationship with Haritos; double titles like ‘Mr Inspector’, and ‘plural for respect’ forms are not found in Modern English, after all. Instead, the English text refers to the reporter opting for ‘no name or sign of respect’ (Connolly in Markaris, 2004: 11) meaning-equivalent, to accommodate the target language’s politeness-related markers:  ‘He’d stopped calling me by name some time before and now just addressed me as “Inspector” ’ (Connolly in Markaris, 2004: 11). Similarly, the source text’s double titles (such as ‘Κύριε αστυνόμε’ in Markaris [1995] 2009: 86) are replaced with single title labels in English (‘Inspector’, Connolly in Markaris, 2004: 60) and, when Haritos later opts for the plural form to add formality to his interactions with this same reporter, and reports so as narrator, Connolly (in Markaris, 2004: 55) stays with a mere reference to the ‘officiousness of [the character-narrator] manner’, steering clear of the need to translate the plural politeness form altogether. In translating the text, Thanassis’ use of the polite plural when talking to Costas at the novel’s end is also lost, there being no direct English equivalent with which Connolly can translate the former’s respect for the latter, particularly when confessing to murder. When Costas questions Thanassis’ love for his unknown daughter, the latter switches to the singular tense; the Greek narrative voice acknowledges this switch opening (‘μου λέει ξαφνικά στον ενικό’/‘he suddenly says in the singular’, Markaris [1995] 2009: 382), but Connolly (in Markaris, 2004: 288) has little choice but to translate this into ‘said to me sharply’ instead. Elsewhere, the Greek interjection ‘ρε’, a vocative marker which signals solidarity remains also untranslatable, as does the closeness of the relationship one would opt to establish in Greek when using it.

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Even harder to translate is Haritos’ dictionary interest. Connolly makes reference to all real life dictionaries Haritos later reads through (‘Liddell & Scott’s Greek Lexicon, Dimitrakos’ Dictionary of Modern Greek, Vostantzoglou’s Thesaurus [. . .]’, Connolly in Markaris, 2004: 14) but offers lexemes and related definitions all in English, even where, strangely, the dictionaries are evidently English-Greek. When Haritos’ superior uses the word ‘profile’ in the Greek text (‘προφάϊλ’, Markaris’ [1995] 2009: 147), Haritos later looks the word up: I was lying on the bed, looking up Ghika’s ‘profile’ in the Oxford English-Greek Learner’s Dictionary [. . .] There it was: Profile = 1. a side view, outline or representation of a human object, esp. of a human face or head. 2. a short biographical sketch of a subject. So that’s what he meant. We used to call it a description, now it had become a ‘profile’. (Connolly in Markaris, 2004: 117)

Further to the text’s reference to Greek definitions being thereafter contradicted as these are relayed in English, the definitions (which Connolly, unlike in the original, italicizes for ease) are even less translatable where the dictionaries the character uses are Greek-Greek, with the translator again opting for EnglishEnglish definitions for hence entirely different lexemes as well as senses. Since Connolly opts for English equivalents rather than Greek lexemes, the dictionary definitions he offers, and their translation, steer away from the source text even further, and so does their linking to the narration that follows. When Haritos happens upon the Greek letter ‘M’ and looks up ‘μου(ν)τζούρα’ (‘defacing’), he dwells on an idiom containing this word and alluding to marriage, and comments on the (1960s) dictionary being too old to account for the word being used in reference to a modern-day card game. The character-narrator next links these senses to his own case-related thinking. Marriage, he next contemplates, is something Karayoryi is unlikely to have ever been interested in, and she was instead merely playing games (Markaris [1995] 2009: 128). Connolly translates the text as follows: I opened up the dictionary and fell randomly on the letter D.  Deface = to spoil or mar the surface, legibility or appearance of; disfigure. Defaceable (adj.); defacement (n.); defacer (n.) Karayoryi had defaced him all right. She’d got him out of her face in double quick time. But what was the game she had been playing with Petratos? (Connolly in Markaris, 2004: 93)

Connolly finds himself needing the letter ‘D’ instead of ‘M’, and his translation, and English-English definition of the meaning equivalent ‘deface’ does not allow reference to marriage at all. He does translate the reference to game-playing

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found in the original, but not the card game reference needed for the last two sentences to be cohesive perhaps. Translating Greek-related dictionary definitions is not without its challenges; Connolly finds himself relying on poetic license. As for the translation of story clues, Haritos refers to Thanassis as a ‘strapping lad’ (Connolly in Markaris, 2004: 43), alluding to the same clue of him being a killer later as the original’s reference to him as ‘λεβεντόπαιδο’ (Markaris [1995] 2009: 70) does, while the translator brings the reader’s attention to his amazement at meeting Anna (‘ανιψιά της;’, Markaris [1995] 2009: 241) by ilaticizing, and hence Thanassis emphasizing, the word ‘niece’ instead (‘Her niece?’, Connolly in Markaris, 2004: 158). Unlike the original though, Karayoryi is said to be wearing an ‘olive-green dress’ (Connolly in Markaris, 2004:  50)  when killed, and not anything white. As for the earlier reference to the letters found in Karayoryi’s possession (the writer wanting something referred to with the neutrally gendered object pronoun ‘το’, and which later turns out to be ‘το παιδί’, as in ‘the child’), Connolly – in as far as possible – avoids referring to this item (i.e. as ‘it’) nearly altogether. He does not translate any of the letter’s three sentences that would require a neutral pronoun (‘θέλω να το δώ’, ‘θέλω να μου το δείξεις’, ‘έχω και ‘γω δικαίωμα πάνω του’, Markaris [1995] 2009: 101–2, which would have translated into ‘I want to see it’, ‘I want you to show it to me’, ‘I too have rights over it’), unlikely as it would be for an English speaker to refer to a child as ‘it’. Note that the English language dictates the use of a gendered reference (‘he’ and ‘she’) for children, after all and, though letter-writing Thanassis never met his child, Yanna told him she actually had a little girl. It is in the summarizing of what the, as yet unknown, writer wanted that Connolly has no option but to use ‘it’ (‘He never said what it was exactly, he was always vague, as if it were something very familiar’, Connolly in Markaris, 2004: 71). Similarly, Connolly translates ‘κάτι που αυτή κρατάει’/‘something that she (literally) holds’ (Markaris [1995] 2009: 101) for ‘something that she had’ in its place (Connolly in Markaris, 2004: 71), maintaining the illusion of the given item not being a person. As Seago (2014a: 6, 13) says, grammatical gender adds ‘a further dimension to gender manipulation and poses particular problems for the translator, especially if the author is consciously withholding linguistic clues’, and translating the text too closely would have undercut the author’s deployment of ‘devices to misdirect and manipulate the reader’. Translating crime fiction is no easy feat. The next chapter adds two more cultural contexts (and one more language) into the mix. Having considered the Britishizing of a Greek novel, I next explore the Americanizing of an Austrian film.

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3.2 On filmic remaking: Americanizing Austrian Funny Games 3.2.1 Deviant metafilmic Games Much like all works investigated in this book, Haneke’s Austrian Funny Games (1997) and its shot-by-shot replica, American remake Funny Games (US) (2007), have a crime fictional storyline. Drawing from the family-under-siege or familyin-peril cinematic genre, the films centre round the loving Schober (‘Farber’ in the US version) family: an affluent married couple, Anna (‘Ann’) and Georg (‘George’), their young son Georgie (‘Georgie’ or ‘George Jnr’ also in the US, as the boy is named after his father), and the family dog ‘Rolfi’ (ironically named ‘Lucky’ in the US version). Their small family’s lake house privacy is invaded by two late-adolescent men, Paul and Peter. Using the excuse of needing eggs, the men manipulate the family into unwittingly inviting them into their home, after which they viciously torture, attack and ultimately kill all family members, for no apparent reason. The films exhibit what I, in previous work, described as linguistic, social and generic deviance (see Gregoriou, 2007 for my metafunctions of deviance model). The murdering characters flout in terms of their linguistic and social behaviour, and the creators break – and question – the horror genre conventions, as the subsequent analysis illustrates. Due to the films being nearidentical, I discuss their plot and structure altogether. I here draw my examples from the original 1997 official DVD version of the film and its English subtitles. It is in the next section that I discuss Haneke’s 2007 American remake in a bit more detail. Paul and Peter first approach the family with the use of much linguistic politeness whereby they express their attention to others’ positive face, that is, the need to be liked, and also negative face, that is, the need not to be imposed upon (as noted, for politeness theory, see Brown and Levinson, 1987), also damaging their own face where this proves necessary. Peter breaks the first four eggs Anna willingly offers him, and apologetically comes asking for another set of four; ‘I’m really embarrassed’, ‘Thanks’, ‘I should have been more careful’, ‘I’m really sorry. Honestly’. Such acts are self-face threatening in that they damage his own positive face image, his own need to be approved of. They suggest he was not careful, might come across as not genuinely embarrassed or sorry or thankful and so on. These acts also serve as a mechanism with which to repair the damage caused to his ‘face’ when he broke Anna’s eggs in the first place though, and it is through this linguistic self-damage and repair that he succeeds to secure

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a further four eggs from her, and more time in the house overall. Also, as Russell (2010:  131)  notices, each time Peter mentions the neighbours, for whom the eggs supposedly are, he stumbles between referring to them informally by first name, then quickly switching to the formal ‘Mr and Mrs’-type of varieties. This flags up his positive face-giving, that is, respectfulness, for them also. Paul also employs much linguistic politeness when asking to try out Georg’s new golf clubs: ‘May I? Would it be cheeky to ask to try one? [. . .] Please?’, here paying attention to Anna’s negative face needs through questioning and hedging his directive as a request, begging, but also asking whether she would even find his asking to try one appropriate. He also damages his own positive face in the process, such as when referring to himself as ‘cheeky’, and minimizes the size of the imposition by suggesting he ‘tries’ rather than keeps, and only ‘one’ rather than many, or all, golf clubs. While the men appear to be abiding by norms in linguistic terms, they do not actually do so in social terms. Even during these early interactions with the family, their actual physical behaviour contradicts their linguistic behaviour and, in so doing, they violate social norms and expectations, and ‘[throw] into relief the unspoken codes of social practice’ (Fiddler, 2013: 294). They in this sense defamiliarize, draw the viewer’s attention to these social rules in the first place (for defamiliarization, see Shklovsky, 1965). When Peter breaks the second set of four eggs, he unapologetically and, non-embarrassingly this time, comes asking for yet again another four; one would expect him to have given up on his egg quest by this stage, awkward and self- and other-face threatening as the act of breaking a neighbour’s eggs twice, in fact, is. Also, both Peter and Paul invade each family member’s physical personal space when moving unnecessarily close to them, and they indirectly and physically refuse to leave the household when asked to. They protest: ‘Why are you so unfriendly all of a sudden?’; ‘We just want the eggs’. In having secured them access to the family home at the outset, the men’s excessive linguistic politeness and pseudo courteousness and friendliness exhibited initially proves to have been purposeful, and their actual social behaviour from then on begins to take even more threatening dimensions, and in a physical sense. What is perhaps most noteworthy is that they continue to employ linguistic politeness while physically harming the family members. While attacking and torturing the family, they needlessly carry on using strategies which indicate their paying attention to these family members’ need to be respected (‘positive face’), and need to be left unimposed (‘negative face’). All the while, and contradictorily, they are physically showing them that they do not in fact respect them, and carry on imposing on them. Paul mock-apologizes

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to Georg for shattering his kneecap: ‘Sorry I hurt you’; ‘I’d like to apologise for what happened before’. These are positive face enhancing acts for Georg and self-positive face threatening acts for Paul himself. In actuality, Paul clearly does not feel sorry for having hurt Georg at all, and he does not deem his vicious act unfitting. Similarly, Peter overuses such politeness strategies when disagreeing with Anna’s assessment regarding visitors coming to rescue them two hours later: ‘That’s not quite true. I heard your phone call. You told your friends to call first. If I’m not mistaken’. The disagreement is positive face attacking for Anna but also carries some politeness with the use of ‘quite’, and a self-directed positive face threat for Peter who, after all, suggests he might be mistaken. Similarly, when asking scared Georgie to make him a sandwich, he forms an interrogative out of the directive, and brings attention to the boy’s supposed kindness: ‘Would you kindly get me some food? Could you?’ Given the fact that the family is kept hostage, and is currently physically harmed by their actions, viewers would expect the two men to employ directness (of, respectively, the kind ‘You’re wrong’/’I disagree with your assessment’ and ‘Get me food’), if not entirely impolite, and more positive face-attacking markers (of the kind ‘You are lying’ and ‘Get me food, you idiot’). Instead, their persistent politeness here takes on chilling, further to mock, dimensions, and can be read as a mind style marker for them (for mind style – unusual language employed to project an unusual mindset – again see Fowler, 1977). The men even directly bring attention to the need for them to retain their polite mannerisms, when these continue to be ludicrous given the circumstances. Peter justifies his not helping injured Georg take a seat when saying ‘I don’t want to impose’, and Paul reacts to the family not cooperating with their twisted games, for which they harm them, by saying: ‘All that for trying to be friendly’. Equally, Paul is pleased when Anna refers to him with a familiar term (‘Stop this pal’), to which he responds with ‘That’s nice. Getting familiar [. . .] It simplifies communication’. He also pretend-attacks Peter’s manners: ‘Have you no manners?’, ‘Did you behave badly?’, ‘Disgusting. What will these people think?’ As McGettigan (2011: 228) puts it, ‘[t]hey make much of their polite manners and friendly intentions but have weapons and use them’. It is this contrast between their overusing politeness strategies and drawing attention to their supposed good mannerisms (for Brinkema, 2014: 99, their ‘intrusion into the house is structured by the meta-game of social politeness’) while not abiding by the principles of the strategies, and also being physically cruel, that makes them come across as so socially deviant and strange. This behavioural pattern is not atypical of the horror film genre’s villains of course, many of whom have sophisticated mannerisms while socially acting anything but so

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(see for instance, Anthony Hopkins’ portrayal of Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs [Demme, 1991]). Much like the two boys, Lecter too ‘[mixes] cruelty with good manners’, ‘[unsettling] the dichotomy between acceptable and unacceptable behaviour’ (Messier, 2014: 63–4). Even more so, by keeping up the pretence of being well-meaning, the two men mock the family for having been taken by their politeness and courteousness in the first place, which intrudes on the family, and disturbs them, even more. The implication is that the family could not see past their good manners, which is why they are in the predicament they are in at present. Paul and Peter’s continuous mock linguistic politeness comes to indirectly mock the social norms viewers are used to, then, the implication being that Paul and Peter are more than aware of what the norms are, and simply choose to break them. It is for this reason that the killers fit the fictional criminal archetype I, in previous work, refer to as ‘the spoilt child’ (Gregoriou, 2007: 117): ‘Though it is rather early on in life that such individuals display criminal behaviour, they often claim that unlike monstrous criminal figures [which I describe as ‘monsters’ for having been ‘born evil’] or abused children [named ‘vampires’ for having been ‘made evil’], [spoilt children] act abnormally because they like it, and because they can’. In a telling Funny Games scene, the two men directly draw on ‘the vampire’ archetype where their own behaviour is concerned (though they do not refer to it as such, of course), only to then falsify them being classified as so. In response to their victims’ question of why they are acting the way they do, Paul mockingly tells the Schobers that Peter has sexual difficulties and is a child of divorced parents, among various other problems, only to soon directly admit to all of these being lies, and there being many stories he could have narrated for them (‘What answer would you like? What would satisfy you? You know what I said isn’t true. [. . .] Satisfied? Or another version?’). By then referring to Peter as a ‘spoilt little shit’, he hence implies that both their actions are not linked to any suffering they themselves endured (see ‘vampire’ criminal archetype), as one might have expected, a scenario that would have relieved them of a little blame perhaps even (Paul’s words in fact being ‘an almost verbatim quote’ from Haneke’s earlier film, Lemmings, 1979, Elsaesser [2010:  61] notices). In short, they act the way they do simply because they want to. Haneke argues in favour of this sort of interpretation. In cinema critic Serge Toubiana’s interview with Haneke (available as a 1997 DVD extra), the writer/director refers to the boys as clowns, one of whom is ‘white faced’ and the other ‘silly’. These are rich kids acting criminally with no motive, and only for the pleasure of experiencing a thrill, Haneke explains. Interestingly, and confusingly at times, Paul sometimes

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refers to Peter as ‘Tom’ while Peter sometimes refers to Paul as ‘Jerry’ in return (‘Ok, Tom.’ ‘Ok, Jerry.’). Elsewhere, Paul also offers the ‘Beavis and Butt-head’ pairing; ‘One for Beavis. One for Butthead’, he says, in reference to two bullets he found. As Haneke himself notes in the DVD extra interview, the boys indeed have different names. Further to the choice of the Catholic saint, and alliterative, names Paul and Peter, they are also cartoons: Beavis and Butt-head (also alliterative), and Tom and Jerry. The latter two sets are not only fictional and animated American pairings we have become accustomed to being entertained by but also artefacts and archetypes of those not abiding by societal rules, rather than mere characters. For Fiddler (2013:  293), these names ‘evoke, at once, cartoon-like violence and saintliness’, an ‘apparent playfulness’ that ‘renders them unknowable’. In an interview with Sharrett (2010: 583), Haneke also points out that he would be happy with the interpretation of Paul, ‘the tall one’, the main ‘plotter’, as ‘an intellectual with a deviousness that could be associated with [. . .] destructive fascist intellect’; Peter, ‘the fat one’, he says, is the opposite in that ‘there is nothing there on the order of intellect’. Even more so, their victims are also somewhat archetypal. ‘Anna’ and ‘Georg’ being middle-class names that Haneke uses, and even reuses in other filmic work of his also (such as in Benny’s Video, 1992), might suggest that these individuals too are exemplars, in this case representatives of a liberal and privileged class (they have boats, hunting rifles, play golf and so on), rather than just random victim-characters. Furthermore, the filmic text implies, rather than shows, Paul and Peter being engaged in a chain of several attacks on middle-class families in the area, and not just the one the film is centred on. In an early scene, the protagonist family see the two men from afar, and with a neighbouring couple: Fred, who Georgie refers to as his ‘uncle’, and his wife Eva. When Anna calls for Fred to come and help them put their boat into the lake, he promises to come shortly, though Anna and Georg note his ‘weirdness’ along with Eva’s silence. When Paul and Fred later come to help with the boat, Paul is introduced as the son of a business associate of Fred’s, but the latter continues to act rather awkwardly. For instance, and as Russell (2010:  129)  points out, ‘Fred and Paul’s version of when Paul arrived clash, leading Fred to correct the story so the two versions seem consistent’. The family again notes Fred’s strange behaviour, but does not dwell on it, despite their dog’s persistent barking at Paul. It is only later that viewers realize that Fred was also held hostage during that scene, the Schober family’s previous encounter with Paul and Peter functioning as a mechanism with which the two men came to gain the Schobers’ trust for a little longer, particularly as Peter asks for eggs supposedly on Eva’s behalf. Here, the Schober characters, as well as the

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filmic audience, are effectively led to ‘miscue’ the signals needed with which to interpret the ‘episodic’ information offered during the early scene, and it is only later that all engage in ‘frame repair’, ultimately understanding these young men to be dangerous, and murdering criminals, instead of Fred’s guests. Though originally read non-episodically then, Fred’s awkwardness, and the dog’s barking (the films suggest the dog did not miscue, and could in fact sense danger) come to be read as episodic clues, as indicative that something is wrong, and as misread warnings. Later on, Anna, while held hostage still, gets visited by another pair of neighbours, Gerda and Robert who, along with Gerda’s sister, come and greet her via sailboat. Gerda, too, miscues, thinking little of Anna’s actually dangerous ‘guest’ Paul. When Gerda asks whether Paul is cold, indirectly asking for an explanation as to his wearing white cotton gloves, he, non-episodically for her, says he has eczema. She advises he goes swimming to cure it, for which he thanks her (‘Thank you for the tip’). It is later that Gerda and her family are to recognize the episodic importance of the glove-wearing (i.e. it enables Paul to act without leaving fingerprints behind), and frame repair accordingly. At the end of the film, Paul and Peter go looking for eggs in Gerda’s house, on Anna’s behalf supposedly this time. Sorfa (2011: 173) proposes a metaphorical reading for these eggs as victim bodies, the eggs being fragile and needlessly breakable by the killers, much like characters’ bodies ‘leak out and they will die’, a reading reinforced by close-ups of broken eggs across the family floor. The last scene’s implication is that their egg quests and attacks will continue, and so will the neighbouring characters’ miscuing, until the subsequent family too gets killed that is. Gerda visiting Ann while Paul was there, along with Paul’s seeming niceness at the time, again enables there to be the trust Gerda needs for her to open her door and let Paul in. In an attempt to interpret the film’s circle of violence, Messier (2014: 68) suggests that ‘the recurring violence is a direct effect of our own desire to continually seek it out as popular form of entertainment: the game is far from over’. ‘We hunger for [screen carnage], we lust after it, and Paul’s sly, sadistic gaze at the audience in the film’s final frame suggests that we never seem to get enough’, Russell (2010: 172) says. I return to the final frame shortly. Though neither were considered blockbuster films commercially, Funny Games and Funny Games (US) can certainly be described as thoughtprovoking, which is why they attracted much attention from academics (such as Grundmann, 2007 and 2010; Wheatley, 2009; Brunette, 2010; Price and Rhodes, 2010; Russell, 2010; McGettigan, 2011; Messier, 2014), critics (Koehler, 2008, Johnston, 2008) and reviewers (Bradshaw, 2008) alike. Cult, art house and

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postmodern cinematic forms, both German-language and English-language versions of the film are notable for being symbolic, experimental and destabilizing. For Wheatley (2009: 106), Haneke’s ‘goal is moral reflection in and of itself ’, these being films that ‘ask the spectator to consider certain moral questions but do not lead to any answers’. As the original film’s DVD blurb says, ‘[w]ith characteristic mastery, Haneke turns the conventions of the thriller genre upside down and directly challenges the expectations of the audience, forcing viewers to question the complacency with which they receive images of casual violence in contemporary cinema’. Haneke (Toubiana DVD extra interview) himself similarly says that this is a film about the portrayal of violence in the media and the movies (see also Haneke’s 2010 own essay, ‘Violence and the Media’ and Schmid, 2016), but also one in which he analyses the work of art within the work of art. Most noticeably then, these crime films specifically question the viewers’ enjoyment and engagement with violence, and the horror genre. This transpires when Haneke allows Paul specifically to break the filmic (rather than theatrical this time) ‘fourth wall’ or, as previously defined, the imaginary boundary between the fictional world and its audience, forcing us to question our own act of watching them. It is mostly for this reason that both films make rather uncomfortable viewing; ‘[I]t caused my stomach muscles gradually to contract to about a sixth of their original volume’, Bradshaw (2008) characteristically says of the remake version. The cinematic fourth wall violation is arguably more metafictional than the theatrical fourth wall violation in fact, ‘fourth wall’ being a violation found in theatre more so than cinema. Besides, theatre audiences actually share the same physical space as the play cast (putting cinematically screened theatrical performances aside for now). In contrast, the filmic audience watches the play performance either at the cinema, or televisually, in the privacy of their homes, hence the ‘fourth wall’-violating engagement with the observer being somewhat abstract rather than actual for film watchers. I next turn to analyse Funny Games’ exact fourth wall violations, metafictionalities that here take the form of direct audience address. The metafictionalities also extend to textual and reallife referentiality, ‘play within the play’ and ‘play about a/the play’. To start with, the violation of the boundary between the fictional world and its real life audience takes place when Paul suddenly turns to the camera and acknowledges the filmic audience. In the 1997 original film, Paul first does so by looking at and winking at the camera, this being a scene that Haneke wanted to ‘irritate’ the viewers with (Toubiana DVD extra interview), them not perhaps automatically knowing who that wink was meant for, and what it meant, until later. When Paul subsequently grins at, and even ultimately directly speaks to,

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the film viewers, Haneke invites the viewer to become a killer accomplice, he explains, only to also later chastise them for doing so, an argument that Brunette (2010: 58) deems contradictory in fact. Paul engaging with the filmic audience directly is metaleptic; it forces the viewer to uncomfortably engage with the violence they are no longer merely witnessing, but now somewhat participating in, questioning themselves perhaps why they are doing so, and what their role is in relation to the unfolding action. Being acknowledged also shatters ‘the spectator’s belief that they are “unseen” by the diegetic characters’ (Wheatley, 2009: 107). The metafilmic element is evident not only in what this character does (as in their looking, grinning and talking at the camera) but most importantly in what he ultimately says when speaking directly to the film audience. Paul asks the family characters whether they want to bet on being alive by morning, before turning to the filmic audience, asking us what we think of the bet, whether they have a chance, and whether we, the viewers, are on the victims’ side. When the boy manages to get to his uncle Fred’s house, and gets hold of a rifle, Paul strangely instructs him to shoot at him. The boy finds it empty. As Gerbaz (2011: 171) notes, ‘Paul then looks at Georgie – in a close-up point-of-view shot from the boy’s perspective, which means Paul is also looking at us  – shrugs, and says “poof ” ’. After Georg asks the men to stop torturing them, Paul again turns to the viewers asking us to respond as to whether that is, indeed, enough, before asking us to confirm whether we want ‘plot development’. Metafilmically, Paul addresses and highlights viewer expectations via direct address to his audience: he asks us to take a position in relation to the so-called bet, to consider whether we feel there was ‘enough’ violence and plausible plot development to satisfy us with, and even provides us with sound effects (‘poof ’). Metafictional also are the killer lines that refer to the audience reaction, and are hence about the audience, despite not being directed to them. When Anna asks why they are not killed sooner, Peter refers to the importance of entertainment value, and the killers’ own fun, the implication being that this is also something that audience entertainment depends on. Similarly, after recapturing Anna who went looking for help, Paul re-enters the family living-room telling Georg ‘It’s play time again’, and in English, after which he talks about having given them a ‘chance’, the need to ‘put on a good show’ for the audience, and showing this audience what they can do. When Georg urges Anna not to cooperate with them, Paul objects with ‘We’re not at the main film yet’/‘We are not up to feature film length yet’, suggesting they came to recapture Anna so that more drama could ensue, and drama long enough in length for a feature film. By raising awareness as to the nature of the horror filmic genre, discussing audience expectations

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and inviting audience reactions, the filmic text becomes again metafictional, in terms of both textual and real-life referentiality this time. Genre awareness, and media in general, are here portrayed as contributing to the violence that unfolds. Uncomfortably, this suggests that violence is a mere performance for the viewers’ pleasure. The funny games are being staged for the audience, which is placed in a double bind: taken out of its moral vacuum and brought into existential proximity with the characters, the audience wants to stay with the victims and bear witness to their suffering, but it is also told that its very spectatorship is the actual reason for their suffering. (Grundmann, 2010: 28)

The film proposes that its characters suffer because the viewers want them to; viewers are implicated, complicit to this violence. The suggestion is that we, as horror film observers, ultimately ‘commit’ crimes when being entertained by merely watching them being committed, if in a fictional context. Having said that, for Lübecker (2015: 36), the scene’s ‘effect is aggression, rather than traditional self-reflexivity and distanciation’. He even goes to the extent of describing the experience of the film as ‘assaultive’ (Lübecker, 2015: 99), ‘as violent as anything criticised by Haneke’ (Lübecker, 2015: 58) in this respect, and also paradoxical: ‘[Haneke] begins by assuming that we want violence and pleasure in a tantalising combination, and then tells us that we should not want it’, his ‘moralising’ further ‘undercut by a (self-)ironic stance’ (Lübecker, 2015: 42). Carrying on the discussion of the mystery genre tropes, the film’s young men elsewhere argue over the reality of what they see in movies, Haneke rather typically entering a ‘scene with dialogue already under way to mirror the fragmentation and haphazard nature of contemporary existence’ (Russell, 2010: 154). In a metafictional ‘play about a play’, the two characters ‘strike a conversation about a fictional movie character Kelvin who is stuck between a fiction and a reality universe’, the metafiction of both the film’s and Kelvin’s movie being blended, much like the film raises awareness of the link between reality and fiction/representation (Filmslie). Paul proposes: ‘[T]he fiction is real [. . .] You see it in the film [. . .] So it’s as real as the reality you see’. Another, and more significant perhaps, metafictionality is evident in the film’s well-known ‘rewind’ scene, at which point a ‘play about the play’ takes place, here alongside a ‘play within the play’ in fact. This ‘re-do’ is a scene Haneke (Toubiana DVD extra interview) refers to as the ‘culmination’ of his film’s ‘system’, and as a scene that again ruptures the filmic illusion. After Anna manages to get hold of the hunting rifle long enough to shoot Peter dead, Paul adopts narrative creator/authorial agency, and looks

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for the TV set remote control to literally rewind back to a few moments earlier, at which point Peter was alive. He uses the remote control not to rewind a scene he watches on the room’s TV, but to rewind the scene we, the viewers, are watching on our own TV sets (if we are actually doing so). His rewinding hence rewinds himself. This is a ‘play about the play’, Peter’s actions being selfreflective in relation to the film’s own fictional universe (‘play about the play’), rather than another fictional universe altogether (‘play about a play’). The scene gets re-enacted with Paul’s hindsight, the replay being a ‘(re)play within the play’. He manages to take the rifle away from Anna this time, and ensures that Peter in fact stays alive, telling her she is not allowed to break the rules and instead has ‘failed’, a reference to video-game playing perhaps. ‘The sequence seems to be an allegorical statement about cinema’s power: the rules of the pre-determined script may not be overriden or avoided by the victims’ (Filmslie). Here, Paul also ‘unequivocally [violates] narrative conventions inscribed within a framework of linear time’ (Messier, 2014:  67), that is, disrupts the chronology possible of events, and the plot (how events realistically can unfold) clashes with the discourse (the narrative design). Note him being the only character who has the power to discoursally ‘rewind’ and actually ‘re-do’ filmic scenes to his benefit – his victims do not. In fact, Paul is the only character who breaks the fourth wall altogether, and the only one aware of the scenes being filmic; all other characters are apparently oblivious to his wall violations, and to their being in a film. Interestingly, at the Cannes’ viewing of the original film, Haneke (Toubiana DVD extra interview) notes that the film caused a commotion, partly because the audience applauded when Anna first killed Peter, the rewinding of that scene provokingly highlighting to them that they allowed themselves to be ‘totally manipulated’ into applauding Peter’s murder. He is quoted to have hoped to shock filmic spectators into leaving the movie theatre, as ‘only psychopaths would watch it to its end’ (Lübecker, 2015: 42). As Koehler (2008) puts it, Haneke ‘[trips] up an audience who had found themselves rooting for a murder’. Among others, Brunette (2010:  67)  disagrees, deeming Anna’s action as ‘self-defence’ or ‘justice, however “primitive” a form it make take’, and not murderous. In any case, Anna’s shooting of Peter is considered acceptable by the audience because of the circumstances she finds herself in, despite being life-taking. Haneke’s intention was merely to raise awareness to this being the kind of action viewers would ordinarily disapprove of. The film’s title can also be read metafictionally, in challenging the viewers’ understanding of what ‘funny games’ it is they are witnessing. First, the title could well be in reference to the criminals’ vicious and murderous game playing

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with the family, and games they actually give names to, such as ‘Kitten in the bag’, ‘The loving wife’ or ‘Whether by knife or whether by gun, Losing your life can sometimes be fun’ and so on. These are games the killers theatrically perform, ‘spielen’ being the word for ‘acting’ as well as ‘playing’ in German, not unlike English in fact, these two concepts hence being closely connected in Haneke’s film-making (Peucker, 2010: 23). In traditional game playing though, all participants are not only willing to play, and familiar with the game-rules, but importantly enjoy amusement. See the family’s own innocent game playing at the film’s start (which I will return to shortly) for instance, which generates laughs from all, including young Georgie. As Peucker (2010:  23)  notices, see also Anne’s reference to Rolfi, the dog, wanting to ‘play’ when he jumps at the intruders, to which Peter responds with: ‘Funny game’. This sense of ‘games’ the film subverts, and invites a negative reading of, though. Where these ‘games’ are initiated by Paul, the victims are forced into taking part, have no real knowledge of the supposed ‘rules’, and become mere toys for the killers’ pleasure, the family experiencing misery rather than joy. In contrast to the film’s title, these games are severely ‘unfunny’. Asking them to playfully guess why he still holds a golf ball when he tried out Georg’s golf club outside, Paul eventually reveals he used the golf club to hurt the dog. A ‘hot and cold’ finding game that Paul forces Anna to take part in for her to find the missing family dog ends when she finds him dead in the family car. As noted, Paul viciously and playfully invites his victims to ‘bet’ on whether they will survive through to the next morning. Later, the ‘count-out’ game the men play results in young Georgie being shot, followed by Georg, with Paul here also playfully giving Anna horrific options, as to how he will kill Georg for example (by rifle or by knife), and as to whether she wants to die first. The games seem childish (‘hot and cold’ and ‘count out’, and also ‘cat in the sack’ and ‘eenie-meenie-minie-mo’ are children’s games they play) and simplistic (often of the ‘bet for or against a choice X’ and ‘choose between X and Y’ kind), this highlighting the contrast between the innocence we normally associate these to, and murder. To make matters worse though, the killers themselves highlight the nonsensicality and absurdity of their games. ‘If they’re dead, they can give us nothing and otherwise they don’t win anything from us’, says Peter, wondering about the point of the bet, to which Paul replies with ‘They lose both ways. Exactly’. Even more so, the killers also change the ‘rules’ at will, such as when throwing Anna off a sailboat to die, an hour sooner than the deadline they set themselves, winning their own bet. ‘Why? [. . .] She had almost an hour left’, asks Peter. Paul replies with ‘It’s hard sailing like that. Besides, I’m getting hungry’, to which they both ‘Beavis and Butt-head’-like laugh. Killers are making

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and breaking their ‘game’ rules, manipulating the unfolding action in such a way that they, and them alone, get to ‘win’. Their games are rigged and involve trickery; the ‘winner’ is predetermined by the only willing participants: the killers. Further to ensuring their victims ‘fail’, their games also result in the hurt, and ultimately death, of those forced into taking part. Secondly, with ‘games’ correlating with amusement and entertainment, another word meaning comes down to these ‘games’ actually referring to media thrills and violence. In accordance with this reading, viewers are somewhat asked to what extent the violence that unfolds on screen (and indeed in life, via the media’s portrayal) functions to amuse the rest of us who perhaps want it rather than not. Notice the underlying CRIME IS A GAME metaphor here (also see KILLERS ARE PLAYERS as extended metaphor discussion, in Gregoriou, 2007: 82), alongside the reference to humour or strangeness (‘funny’ itself has multiple senses), correlating violence not just with pleasure but also deviance. The TV car racing heard in the background alongside the sounds of violence in the film is also of relevance to this sense of ‘games’, in again suggesting there being a link between media, thrills, violence, games and entertainment. As Brunette (2010: 63) notes, ‘the lacerating aural violence of the televised automobile race on the soundtrack [. . .] meshes perfectly with the “real” violence we are also hearing’. Thirdly, the film creators are also genre game-playing here with their audience, this allowing yet another meaning of the word ‘games’ into the mix. ‘Just like inside the movie the family is the helpless victim of the villains, the audience becomes the helpless victim of the movie manipulation’ (Filmslie); while the family characters are toyed with by the criminals, the viewers are ‘toyed’ with by the film writer and director this time, through the character of Paul. And finally, with the title’s ‘game’ being plural (Funny Games), ‘games’ might well be interpretable along the lines of several levels, if not all, at once. While also pondering over the film’s title, Grundmann (2007) additionally proposes three different levels on which the word ‘game’ can be interpreted: the language game (referring here to Peter and Paul’s previously discussed ‘polite platitudes’, as Grundmann [2007] describes them, and which ultimately tricked the family into letting them into the house), the survival game, and the film’s explicit playful acknowledgement that these games are played because of, and for, us. In any case, the title invites a philosophical and metaphorical reading of ‘funny games’, however one chooses to read these words. Both versions of the film are peppered with irony. As Justice (2011: 102) notes, the family is tortured in their holiday house, a space which represents the

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antithesis of pain, pain they later endure. The murdering men wear tennis clothes, suggestive of their being innocent sport players, though it is sporting equipment, the family’s own golf clubs, they come to use as weapons. Similarly, Paul’s mocking of Peter’s weight functions to highlight the men’s youth and playfulness, an impression undercut by their serious murdering intentions through the film. As previously discussed in relation to the We Need to Talk about Kevin storyline, film viewers here again encounter young, innocent, yet also dangerous ‘folk devils’; Peter and Paul prove themselves to be contradictory young men, as has Kevin. They appear to be innocent (notice their tennis clothes being white, a colour reinforcing this impression), but are demonically criminalized also, precisely because they are acting murderously while young. As Johnston (2008) puts it when discussing the 2007 version of Paul, he is ‘a maleficent cherub, a golden vision of all-American innocence gone wrong’. These young men do not need protection; it is others that need protection from them, instead. Similarly ironic are the family characters’ near-misses at survival, these probably being what Grundmann (2007) refers to as the film’s ‘survival game’, a game he finds ‘perfidious because its outcome is preordained. All phases of it are mere alibis for the film to showcase sadism and victimization’. These near-misses are reflective of the horror formula, but also parody the genre at the same time, much like the metafictional scenes previously discussed. When little Georgie escapes in search for help, he is hindered by his own house’s high gates and the neighbours’ motion-activated garden lights, lights that betray his presence and location for Paul to come after him. The security measures originally meant to protect family members by keeping dangerous strangers out come to inadvertently hinder his escape, and contribute to his, and his family’s, own demise. As noted, the rifle the boy found in Fred’s house turns out to be empty, but when the men refill it, they kill the father and son with it. As Brinkema (2014: 100) herself notices, ‘the son had attempted escape, and now he has been dragged back to the living room (the irony of whose architectural naming begins to appear) along with the gun with which he attempted to gain his freedom and which anticipates the future violence that will be done to him’. Also, when Paul and Peter temporarily leave, Anna runs to the street in search for help. She hides at the sight of a car, fearful that the two men might be in it. When a second car goes past, she takes the chance and stops it. Thereafter, her being returned to the house gagged and tied by the two men suggests that it is them she found in the second car, her and us viewers hence realizing that she might well have survived had she simply chosen to stop the first car. Similarly, the ‘rewind’ scene makes us aware not just of the TV as a medium of violence, but also of the ‘irreversibility of time’

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(Eisenman, 2010: 128), victims not being able to rewind back time and relive or change previously lived moments. Rewinding in the film, however, enables Peter’s survival, when Anna had already shot him dead. Finally, when the two men take the last family survivor, Anna, out on the family boat, she is seen finding a knife her husband and son accidentally dropped in it earlier, though this proves yet another red herring. She does not get to use it to escape as we viewers are led to expect. Peter and Paul mock her trying to use it, and take it away from her, throwing it, and her in the river to drown, shortly after. Their killing of her is quick and unceremonious; the viewer does not get to see her in an underwater shot, drowning (as the horror genre has us expect), and she is from then on forgotten. As Messier (2014: 68) puts it, him pushing her overboard is an ‘anodyne’ gesture; ‘it not only falls short of providing a satisfying resolution, but is also frustratingly anti-climactic’. Lübecker (2015:  2)  describes the film producing a spectatorial desire only to then block its satisfaction as the ‘feel bad experience’: the film here ‘creates, and then deadlocks, our desire for catharsis’. Paul and Peter’s ensuing discussion carries on, almost uninterrupted by their murdering of Anna. Funny Games here lastly deviates from the evoked horror film norm by not featuring what Clover (1992) refers to as the ‘final girl’. Observed since the early 1970s, this is the slasher movie staple victim who not only survives but, even more so, wages revenge, offering viewers a satisfying genre-expected resolution (see, for instance, Alien, Scott, 1979). By denying us Anna’s survival, the film also denies viewers the catharsis we want, this being yet again another ‘unfunny game’ the horror writers manipulate for the killers’ pleasure. The film’s music is worth pondering over briefly; even though music segments are sparse, they are very impactful and importantly interpretable. At the film’s opening, viewers hear classical operatic music. Simultaneously, a car carrying a boat, is shown through extreme long shots moving from up above, before these shots turn less extreme to just long ones. As previously touched on, viewers hear off-screen Anna and her husband game playing when in the car and while listening to these soothing classical tracks. They each take it in turns, choosing and playing operatic tracks for the other to try and guess the opera, and the singer performing. The music here is character-chosen and ambient, in that it comes from within the scene, but is also loaded with civilized, orderly sophistication where its meaning associations are concerned; this is an upper middle-class family with bourgeois tastes, the viewer learns. Brunette (2010: 51) explains the opera ‘as a symbolic shorthand for what the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu would call “cultural capital”: those intellectual and artistic accoutrements that mark the upper middle class’. Also though, Palmer

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(2011:  182)  notes the couple here trivializing and fragmenting this classical music viewers hear. The tracks are not appreciated or played in full, and ‘the couple renders music an object of highbrow mass consumption rather than a revered work of art within an inseparable aesthetic and socio-cultural context’. Music often reflects the character, mood, tastes but also limitations of the people who choose to play it, after all. Even more so, for Price (2010: 39), ‘the satisfaction the couple takes in correctly matching name to sound, sign to signifier, is both an expression of cultural mastery and an expression of confidence in an essential bond between the word and sound’. It is when Georg loses his confidence in identifying the track Anna chooses that the Funny Games film title shows in large red lettering across the whole of the screen, part-covering the family seated in the car. At this point, and with Anna having last told Georg to ‘just listen’, loud, extreme noise-punk music shocks the viewer through the film soundtrack, and the colour red becomes interpretable along the lines of blood and violence. The music is from John Zorn’s avant-garde band ‘Naked City’, and its album Torture Garden, a soundtrack suggesting extreme violence. The soundtrack music is loud so as to overwhelm any ambient sound, features wailing and screaming, and is anything but pleasant. Being soundtrack rather than an ambient sound, this is narrator-chosen (extra-diegetic) rather than character-chosen (diegetic) music, and is cacophonous music that disturbs, even pains the viewer, particularly because it clashes with the calmness, pleasantness and sophistication of the car’s classical melodies viewers first heard. Haneke himself (in the interview with Sharrett, 2010: 583) clarifies that the conflict between the two is ‘false’ in fact, and Zorn’s style merely ‘tends to alienate the listener in a sense that heightens awareness, which was effective to the points [he] wanted to address’. As ‘deliberately “anti-musical” ’, the cacophonous Zorn ‘music is also selfreflexive’ itself, ‘consciously subverting the expectations and perceived parameters of the [music] medium’ (Palmer, 2011: 182, 183) this time. Most importantly, this is music that the family is oblivious to. Viewers continue to view the characters lovingly laughing and game playing with one another, the loud, disorderly filmic sound now being suggestive of the awfulness of what will possibly soon happen to them. The incongruent soundtrack is not atypical of the crime film genre. It helps provoke an emotional response, and challenges viewers to assess where their sympathies lie (Ireland, 2012: 110). The filmic crime genre sometimes features beautiful classical music as an accompaniment to moments of threat and violence (Link, 2004:  1), much like the long version of the Funny Games, and also Funny Games US official trailers, in fact do. Here, while the trailer’s ‘violent action ensues, we hear another classical piece, Grieg’s “In the

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Hall of the Mountain King” from the Peer Gynt Suite that carries its own death charge in the pulsing cadences, which increase in tempo with the manic editing’, the same ‘tune compulsively whistled by the child-molesting killer, played magnificently by Peter Lorre, in Fritz Lang’s M (1931)’ (Monk, 2010: 429), notably music that does not feature in neither the 1997 film nor its remake. In earlier work, I similarly discuss televisual scenes from the TV show Dexter (2006–13) featuring a criminal killing and dissecting bodies to the sound of Cuban and Latin music, this ‘guiding the audience to a favourable viewing of the show’s violent protagonist’ (Gregoriou, 2011b: 126). It is a different kind of musical conflict that the opening scene of the Funny Games main film features though. The film’s noise/punk/metal music accompanying the sight of apparent family bliss proves just as effective in drawing attention to incongruity but, in so doing, it invites viewers to side against the family on screen, who are soon to be victims. Contrary to the Dexter scenes inviting sympathy for the featured character, Dexter, the incongruent opening of Funny Games invites an unfavourable viewing of the featured characters, the show’s family members, summoning viewers to side with their attackers later perhaps (though the two men are yet to be introduced). Paul plays such noise-punk music at Fred’s house later on in the film, from Zorn’s same ‘Naked City’ album, while he tries to recapture the escaped young Georgie. Ambient, and character-chosen this time, the cacophony reflects Paul’s unappealing personality, and is meant to scare Georgie out of hiding. The Zorn track viewers heard during the film’s opening lastly replays at the film’s very end. Where Paul gains access to the next victim’s (i.e. Gerda’s) home and she innocently goes looking for eggs for him, he again metafictionally smirks straight at the camera. It is at this point that the shot freezes, and the familiar noise-punk music starts to play through the soundtrack this time, the viewers being left staring back at him, this stare ‘[sealing] a complicity between viewers and the PaulPeter team’ (Koehler, 2008). The film title shows yet again across the frozen screen, followed by end credits. The same album music playing both diegetically (where Paul plays the cd) and extra-diegetically (opening and end credits), both ‘on the “inside” and the “outside” of the film’ ”, ‘[blurs] the line between the “film world” and “real world” ’ (Filmslie), again generating self-reflexivity. Even more so, other than the few scenes discussed, the original film features no other soundtrack or ambient music, this being a conscious attempt to enhance realism and avoid sensationalization. As Derry (2009: 146) notes, Haneke ‘refuses for the rest of his film to use any extra-diegetic music to tell the audience what emotions to feel or when to feel them’. The lack of dramatic music discourages any sympathy for the film’s victims perhaps, though the contradiction, and tension, lies

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in viewers most probably having such sympathy anyway. ‘So even though our compassion and concern is clearly with the Schobers, we are “playing the game” on the wrong side, together with the killers, whether we like it or not’, Laine (2010: 57) says. In the interview with Sharrett (2010: 583), Haneke points out that he did not intend ‘for the Zorn music to be seen solely as the music of the killer [. . .] with the classical music strictly as the theme of the bourgeoisie. This is too simplistic’. He does, however, highlight that there is irony in the way the opening operatic tracks suggest the family’s ‘deliberate isolation from the exterior world’, when they are later contrastingly trapped ‘by their bourgeois notions and accoutrements, not just by the killers alone’. The camera angles and shot lengths are interpretable in relation to the viewers’ observance of, and engagement with, the unfolding filmic violence, and sometimes in a literal sense. Russell (2010:  143)  notes instances where the audience, that is, the camera, views from the back of Paul’s head as he looks at Anna herself observing, making the audience ‘uncomfortably aware of its role of complicit voyeur’. As Price (2010: 40) also highlights, often ‘Haneke absents the medium shot, the middle term in the convention of classical narration, which serves to orient us in space as we move steadily closer from an establishing shot to a close-up’, opting instead for either close shots or, mostly, long shots, and extreme long shots at that. Where viewers encounter the close shots, such as of the married couple’s faces during the attacks, these are uncomfortable to watch and suggest hopelessness, fear and suffering. Long shots, such as of the large dark night-time houses, are all buried in silence. Both long and close shots also occur unexpectedly though, and the viewer is not shown things in the order traditional film making has us expect. After we first hear their talking in the film’s opening, the camera shows us Anna and Georg’s hands, as they choose and play cds, before we actually come to see them. Similarly, the camera captures the inside of Anna’s fridge as she puts her groceries away, and Georg’s feet as he changes his shoes, important as it is to capture characters’ near-viewpoint while they carry on with their day, oblivious to the dangerous men approaching, ‘[t]he intentional tediousness of such scenes [enhancing] the realism of the movie’ (Filmslie). For Brunette (2010: 53), this ‘close up on the material object [. . . also] simultaneously emphasizes its anonymity and its intense facticity as commodity, in the Marxist sense in which the human aspect of its production is erased’. The two men force Anna to strip in front of them, threatening to torture her son if she does not, yet another indirect threat being that they could sexually assault her. When she takes off her dress, the camera settles on a shoulder shot of the woman while she does so, her facial reaction to this humiliating ordeal being

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the only thing that viewers get to see of her. Viewers are denied a view of Anna’s naked body, as in from Paul and Peter’s perspective, and she is asked to dress afterwards. She is only seen re-wearing a slip over her underwear, the whiteness of the underclothes being virginal, and suggestive of innocence (much like with Nanna, the victim in Forbrydelsen’s first series). Anna’s underclothes not being overly sexual discourages sexualizing the female victim, as many horror films in fact tend to do. As Russell (2010: 152) argues, ‘[t]his certainly flies in the face of many contemporary horror films that take cruel delight in the cinema appropriating (if not cinematically raping) the naked female form’. Nevertheless, in having Anna strip, the scene comes to suggest a link between sex and violence, further to its previous established link between entertainment and violence. Interestingly, when Anna’s boy dies, and she is left mourning for him in her slip, she starts to plan leaving the house to look for help. When her husband reminds her to put on clothes first, she finds herself surprised at the realization that she is in her underwear, the implication being that modesty does not matter when one suffers like she does. The editing being deliberately slow was a conscious decision by Haneke, the director wanting again to defy audience expectations and typical genre characteristics (Filmslie). Also expectation-defying is the film’s mainly static camera. And though unseen violence is not an uncommon horror film trope, Haneke denying viewers clear and sustained views of the attacks, killings and murdered victims is also somewhat contrary to what the audience expects. Haneke did not ‘want to be part of this violence pornography of the mass media’ (Filmslie), after all. Funny Games instead is perhaps a film offering ‘an alternative artifice which would address violence in a responsible fashion without succumbing to its allure’, McGettigan (2011: 236) proposes. Much like the We Need to Talk about Kevin (2011) film director Ramsay, Haneke too here favours the portrayal of unseen violent events; Haneke explains (Toubiana DVD extra interview) that much like the wider horror genre, the unseen violence invites one’s imagination to work and is ultimately scarier that what is, in fact, seen. Funny Games’ violence is mostly off-screen and implied, such as through the sound of violent attacks, the camera then capturing only the aftermath: injured or killed characters, their blood spattered on the family’s walls and television. Viewers do not get a clear frame of Paul hitting Georg with his own golf club, for instance; they only get to see Georg falling to the floor. The men’s shooting Georg in the arm, of killing the dog, and later of killing Georg too, also remain unseen, the acts played only within the viewer’s imagination, important as it is for the viewer to fill in the narrative gaps. Similarly, the viewers see Anna’s reaction to Georg’s torture,

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though the torture is heard and not shown. Peter shoots young Georgie in the living room while the camera stays with Paul, who calmly makes a sandwich in the kitchen, unaffected by the violence he and the viewers hear, but do not see. ‘Over that image [of Paul], spectators access the missing room only at an aural remove, hearing: a single piercing gunshot; the low, edgy drone of a car race on the television; the mother’s muffled gagging; a thump, a struggle, some causeless crash’ (Brinkema, 2014: 101). The next shot has little action, and in it, Brinkema (2014: 101) argues, ‘the living room is reimagined cinematically as a tableau’. The shot shows Georgie lying dead, while Georg’s death is also implied by this same shot showing the father’s still legs in the room’s other side, the mother tied and leaning forward in the middle, against the light of a lit lamp. This shot is wide and static, hence Brinkema (2014:  101, 106)  deeming it more theatrical than cinematic, the theatrical being a quality she also ascribes to the scene’s long white curtained windows. The scene is also ‘long’, first in terms of distance from camera to object, denying viewers close engagement with the characters. Brinkema (2014: 102) notices the room’s balanced composition: the room that houses three family members has three windows and three seating areas, all forming a harmonious conversational triangle (see Brinkema, 2014 for a detailed discussion of this pivotal scene’s lining, lighting and camera angles, framing and composition, movement and sound, objects and colour, which she interprets photographically and in terms of grief-related metaphors and the ‘heavy suspension of revelation in the frozen suspension of resolution’, Brinkema, 2014: 111.) Messier (2014: 70) describes it as a ‘time-image’ that ‘produces a crisis in our very understanding of time, replacing the sensory-motor schema of the movement-image characteristic of traditional narratives that pertain to a cinema of sensation that places an importance on seeing’. Further to being distant, the shot comes across as an image as it is ‘long’ in terms of time then, too. Lasting ten minutes, and being a single sequence, the camera is pivoted in place as it follows the mother moving towards the stricken father (Fiddler, 2013: 295), once she manages to switch the bloodied TV set’s loud car racing off, which she interestingly does so first. Later, Anna tells her husband the men have, temporarily it later transpires, left. ‘Sie sind weg’/‘They’ve gone’, she says, the plural pronoun for Brinkema (2014:  103)  perhaps indicating a ‘they’ inclusive of Anna’s son, and hence an utterance suggestive of extreme pain in addition to relief. Her conversing with Georg, and him making pained noises at this stage, show him to be alive still. This enables a frame repair for those viewers who, at this point, are likely to have thought Georg dead also. The father’s crying at his lost son is again seen at a considerable distance, the film disallowing intimacy with character emotions. Anna

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calms her husband down but, even here, the shot insists on staying static and long, keeping viewers away from the characters and their suffering. The scene can be described in terms of ‘hyperrealism’ (Wheatley, 2009: 106). This spatial discomfort that us viewers experience in becoming aware of our position in space and in relation to the family (i.e. us being far from them – desiring a close shot and not getting it) is linked to the emotional discomfort we experience while, but also for, as in because of, watching them go through it all. As noted, the family’s television ends up stained with the family blood, the TV set being ‘a recurring symbol in Haneke’s movies [. . . highlighting . . . ] the senseless and pointless depiction of violence in the media, particularly the “popcorn” American movies’ (Filmslie). Russell (2010: 158) describes the bloodied TV screen as ‘perhaps the most self-reflexive shot in the film, Haneke metaphorically [conveying] television’s insatiable hunger for blood-soaked violent imagery’. Note that Haneke himself made the switch from television to movie-making (Elsaesser, 2010: 61), hence now feeling freer to criticize it as a medium through his work. In imagining and hearing, but not seeing the violence, the audience arguably carries the violence out for the two men then, much like the televisual media ‘involves’ us in violence unnecessarily, as Haneke appears to suggest. Somewhat ironically, the only violence viewers clearly get to view is whereby Anna kills Peter, the bullet throwing him back, viewers seeing his bloodied body hit the wall before landing on the ground, an action that is subsequently ‘undone’ by Paul’s rewinding of the scene of course. With reference to the original’s casting, Haneke (Toubiana DVD extra interview) points out that two of the 1997 film actors, those playing Georg (Ulrich Muhe) and Paul (Arno Frisch) also starred in his earlier work Benny’s Video (1992). Much like Funny Games (1997), Haneke’s 1992 film is also preoccupied ‘with the dynamics of screen violence and the horrors of everyday life’ (Dawson, 2008). For Haneke (Toubiana DVD extra interview), the actors appearing in both is an ‘inside joke’, that he leaves ‘open to interpretation’. In an attempt to interpret the ‘joke’, Grundmann (2007) notes that further to Muhe playing the father in both films, Frisch (first playing Benny) ‘has evolved from punk rock consumer to punk villain’, this ‘self-reflexive bit of casting’ being ‘Haneke’s way of saying that the chickens have come home to roost’. Derry (2009: 156) also proposes that Muhe dies in Funny Games because he fathered Frisch’s character in Benny’s Video, and suggests that Haneke might believe that it is the Schobers, the ‘educated elite’, we ought to fear, because it is them that help propel ‘political disasters of international proportions’. As for actor performance, Haneke (Toubiana DVD extra interview) clarifies that he told the family to ‘play tragedy’ and the

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attacking men ‘comedy’, a merging of which is ‘horrendous’. As the interviewer Toubiana adds, it is the confrontation of the two genres that makes the viewers, who find themselves in the middle, to question whether the film is mocking or documenting violence. I next turn to briefly examine the remake process, which enables an understanding of the different ways in which Funny Games (U.S.) (2007) specifically can be read.

3.2.2 Americanizing the Games ‘Funny Games – no matter which version one sees – is itself about the remake. It is about the recurrence of torture with only slight variation, as if variation were a meaningful distinction in the arbitrary logic that someone else’s pain makes possible’ (Price, 2010: 43). Even if one accepts that remaking the film is itself about the previously discussed violence recurrence in the media, one could still well ask why the same director felt the need to remake his film for an American audience ten years after the original. Haneke’s own explanation for this transcultural adaptation comes down to the Austrian wanting to engage with an Englishspeaking, and specifically American audience all along (Dawson, 2008). Note the English title of the original, and the original’s house interior having been modelled against American architecture (Haneke, in Calhoun, 2007). The director first filmed in Austria only because of practical reasons (Koehler, 2008). The original film was also ‘commenting predominantly on violence in American cinema’, but because it was in German, it ‘stayed always in the arthouses and so didn’t reach the public that it [needed] to have’ (Haneke, in Dawson, 2008). Haneke ultimately preached to the converted with the original as it were, converted that most likely ‘did not appreciate being this abrasively preached to’ (Grundmann, 2010: 29); as Lübecker (2015: 11) puts it, the original is ‘perhaps even “aggressively didactic” ’. With the Americanized version, Haneke opted for more than an English speaking audience ‘unused to negotiating subtitles’ (Brunette, 2010: 70) then. He wanted a more susceptible audience. It was only when he found himself able to that he filmed the 2007 Funny Games (U.S.) American version in English, as intended all along, hence the remake being a near shot-by-shot replica of the original Austrian version. Even more so, and as Hutcheon (2006: 145) notes, ‘[a]lmost always, there is an accompanying shift in the political valence from the adapted text to the “transculturated” adaptation. Context conditions meaning, in short.’ The newer film was indigenized and Americanized, and hence the artwork’s provocativeness became more directly relatable to America’s treatment, and consumerism, of violence,

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than the original. Besides, the original was a horror about horrors. The remake was more than so. It was additionally ‘a movie in America about America’ and a movie ‘in Hollywood about Hollywood’ (Monk, 2010: 420). As Koehler (2008) argues, rewatching the film in another and, in his case, his own, language, ‘transforms the experience of the film itself ’. He adds that by remaking this film, its purpose and context also change, though. The remake came to be marketed as a thriller, with an eye to attracting a mainstream audience. Ironically, reflecting over Haneke’s interview with Toubiana (DVD extras), Koehler (2008) questions whether by Americanizing the film, and choosing well-known actors to commercialize it with, Haneke inadvertently came to add his 2007 film to those overly popular horror ones, consumed for their violence, despite these being precisely the sorts of films he meant to appraise with his 1997 version all along. Did Haneke find himself ‘exploiting the very structures he had set out to critique?’ (Johnston, 2008). Also ironically, Grundmann (2010: 29) argues that while looking for reliable reasons as to why the remake was a commercial failure, he is ‘tempted to agree with consumer comments that criticized the film for being [. . .] not (overtly) violent enough’. Others also pondered whether the fourth wall violations contributed to the remake’s commercial failure. Brunette (2010: 69) points out that self-reflexivity does not work in the commercial genre remake film the way it does in the original art-house version; for him, this device only works for commercial films when it is meant to be funny (see, for instance, Miller’s 2016 Deadpool). For Wheatley (2009) also, in both film versions, the self-reflexivity is second generation and ‘aggressive’; further to acknowledging viewers as spectators (i.e. first generation self-reflexivity), second generation reflexivity shames them into doing so, and hence realizing themselves as voyeurs. Overall, the remake perhaps then ultimately reached the American audience that Haneke originally intended, but its commercialization as ‘horror’ clashed with it being a critique of horrors, while its selfreflexivity alienated an audience used to this feature being used non-seriously and non-aggressively. Haneke used the blueprints of the original 1997 house to build a replica interior setting (Dawson, 2008), the staircase facing the front entrance, with the kitchen right by the door to the garden. The ‘identikit Ikea furniture has been replaced by all-American Pottery barn classics’, though ‘both living rooms [remained] dominated by an oversized TV set, foregrounding the medium consistently under fire in Haneke’s cinema’ (Johnston, 2008). Haneke also sticks to ‘the color schemes, props, and even the various day and nighttime light tones in exterior shots’, despite having different cinematographers for the two films

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(Koehler, 2008). Opting for exterior that would work similarly to the original, he ended up shooting the American version in the Hamptons, but also Shelter Island and southern Long Island. ‘A comparative screening reveals that amidst slight variations in rhythm, the timing of each shot and line delivery is grossly identical’ (Messier, 2014:  72). Though the remake’s dialogue is also very similar to the original, the remake needed to change slightly to account for such things as cultural differences: ‘we changed some things from the European way of life to [the American one]’ (Haneke, in Dawson, 2008). According to the same source, where the Austrian couple tries to call for help, for example, they ring a friend as they cannot think of the number for the police, something possible in Austria. Instead, the American couple immediately rings 911, a number people are unlikely to forget, particularly after 9/11. Even more so, the family dog morphing from a German shepherd to a golden retriever is, importantly for Monk (2010:  421), relevant to the differing depictions of class in the two cultural contexts. German shepherds are known for being guardian dogs associated with nobility, Germanic grandeur, and police security, as opposed to golden retrievers, known for their warm, eager-to-please, friendly disposition. For Monk, this change suggests very different outside world attitudes on behalf of the two families and cultures, and hence differing depictions of class. The Austrian upper-middle-class family guards itself from the outside world. Though the Americans are also of the same class, they live in a society that is – if mythically – often portrayed as classless, hence their being more welcoming, and their treating others as equals. And this despite, in both films, the danger posed to the bourgeois protagonists emerging claustrophobically from within their own class ranks anyway (Lykidis, 2010: 23). There are necessary updates related to technology too. The cordless late 1990s Austrian phone becomes American Ann’s cell ten years later. 1997 Georg understandably does not have a cell, but 2007 George accounts for his own cell being in the car. ‘In the first version of Funny Games the rewind function is registered as the rewinding of videotape, as if the film we were watching had suddenly become a home viewing of VHS. In the 2007 version of the film this effect is registered as the fast search function on a DVD’ (Rhodes, 2010: 102). Further changes were down to the linguistic differences between the two languages. Word plays are altered and adjusted to English, and the same goes for the wording of Anna’s prayers, which Paul forces her to recite. Brunette (2010:  68–9) also notes the ‘tiny, probably insignificant difference [residing] in the use of the word “awesome” by the nefarious pair, which thus becomes a kind of signifier of the new, American version’, while ‘Peter (a.k.a. Fatty/Tom) is

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now more appropriately known as “Tubby” ’. There are also non-verbal behaviour changes to account for. American Paul does not look straight at the camera when responding to Georgie’s misfire. Similarly, Paul’s first knowing wink at the camera becomes a smirk in the US version, to add more subtlety to Paul’s first audience engagement (Johnston, 2008). The 2007 film relies pretty much on the same soundtrack as the 1997 one. The John Zorn extreme noise-punk, and the TV’s car racing announcement are ‘less loud and consequently less disturbing’ (Brunette, 2010: 69) in the remake though, possibly again to add more subtlety to the message. US Ann playing a little radio soft rock, and specifically Sophie Delila’s ‘All to Myself ’, while lighting a cigarette when on her own in the kitchen Palmer (2011) also finds interpretable, particularly as Austrian Anna plays almost inaudible, little, and lyrical-less music. US Ann is presented ‘as the familiar cinematic figure of a woman trapped in a domestic prison’, Palmer proposes (2011:  185). And, with respect to the composition of the US version’s long un-cut ten-minute scene after the boy dies, Brinkema (2014: 283) notes that, compared to the original, ‘the lines of dripping blood [on the US TV] are less even, the [US version’s] camera is inexplicably closer to the figures, and [US Ann’s] Naomi Watts continually wriggles movement into the stillness of the scene’. Beyond these changes, Haneke’s films are almost the same, important as it was to stick to the principle of creating a remake that was as close to the original as possible. Not only were further changes unnecessary, but Haneke also felt that the original 1997 version in a sense, felt relevant, and more up to date ten years later (2007), where violence (Columbine and Virginia Tech massacres, 9/ 11 and so on) continued to feature via the media, for entertainment purposes, and for viewers to consume; ‘consuming violence [. . .] is a big business’, Haneke says (Dawson, 2008). Even more so, these sorts of ‘minute yet noticeable differences’, for Messier (2014: 60, 72), ‘only aim to reinforce the similarities’, Funny Games (U.S.) addressing ‘questions of global consumption as it intersects with cultural and linguistic divides’, both films ‘[taking] into consideration the global expansion of consumer culture predicated on a capitalist ideology that identifies and organizes target audiences in homogeneous wholes’. For Messier (2014: 74), rather than a difference, the remaking of this film instead highlights that ‘audiences on both sides of the Atlantic have by and large co-opted ideologies of media violence’. One of the conditions Haneke had with respect to remaking the 1997 version was that Naomi Watts played the lead (Dawson, 2008). Watts, mostly known at the time for Mulholland Drive (Lynch, 2001,) and 21 Grams (Iñárritu, 2003), is

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an actress whose work Haneke was very fond of. As Lübecker (2015: 58) argues, ‘using Watts introduced a sexual, scopophilic dimension into the remake that had been largely absent from the Austrian version’. Watts being a younger, as well as more sensual, ‘Ann’ that Susanne Lothar was at the time (the ‘Anna’ of the original) is also interpretable, particularly since the image of Ann’s bra and knickers underwear, as opposed to Anna’s less revealing slip in the original, can be seen as reaffirming for the movie’s theme of senseless entertainment as much as selfcontradictory (Filmslie). Grundmann (2010: 30) similarly notes that ‘voluptuous blonde’ Watt being stripped to her underwear ‘provides a tantalizing contrast to the torture she receives’, with Haneke perhaps exempting sexual representation from his critique of the commodification of violence, though in fact representations of violence and sex operate similarly and are connected. Despite the somewhat sexualization of the stripped actress, Ann’s bra being beige and knickers being white, like Anna’s white slip, is suggestive of purity. And though Ann is also seen as a sexual object in some ways, her naked body remains unseen to the viewers, much like most of the film’s violence. Assuming an English rather than German speaking audience perhaps, Koehler (2008) argues that Hollywood movie stars are easier to identify with, and relate to emotionally than the Austrian ones of the original, though Watts is in fact British-Australian, and Tim Roth, who plays her husband ‘George’ in the US version, British. In fact, out of the main adult cast, only Michael Pitt (who plays, ‘Paul’) and Brady Corbet (‘Peter’) are Americans, though so is Devon Gearhart (who at the time played little ‘Georgie’). The American-ness of the film then is somewhat undercut by the nationality of some of its main cast members, and precisely the cast that takes most air time. Tim Roth, Koehler (2008) argues, is ‘more emotionally vulnerable than Ulrich Muhe’s characterization in the original’, who is more masculine. Contrary to the Austrian film’s Georg managing to keep a little bread he eats down after his boy’s shooting, the American film’s George spits it out in despair. And whereas Georg keeps collected when calling a friend and asking for the police to be sent over, George desperately exclaims ‘They killed my son’ over the phone, slightly less composed and through tears. ‘Poor George, the American family man, has a much tougher model of manhood to live up to, or fall short of ’, Monk says (2010: 424). In the film, Roth’s George becomes ‘the embodiment of the emasculated American male [as his wife] edges ever closer to the status of the immortal final girl’ (Johnston, 2008). Ann also comes across as more defiant and angry than Anna at first in fact; unlike the original Anna, the American reincarnation of the character spits at the men while they torture her husband, though she too

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later breaks down in tears. Brunette (2010: 70) suggests that Pitt and Corbet, ‘with their fleshy, full-lipped features, may even be more effective producers of dread and anxiety’ than the original Peter and Paul. The US audience that is familiar ‘with past dark performances by Pitt, who has a peculiar gift for sliding inside the minds of nefarious young men with outsized and disturbed intellects’(Koehler, 2008), such as in Murder by Numbers (Schroeder, 2002), is bound to relate this reading to the now American Paul. Monk (2010: 430) describes Pitt ‘the cinematic poster boy for disaffected sociopaths’. Having said that, Pitt also embodies the ‘cute boy next door’ persona, such as in the teen drama Dawson’s Creek (1998–2003), for which reason Johnston (2008) suggests the film might come to attract younger viewers too. As for Georgie, Brunette (2010: 70) proposes that young Devon Gearhart ‘seems like an adult and a child at the same time, a disturbing combination that fits the film’s dynamics quite well’. Reflecting further on the two versions, Koehler (2008) adds: While a non-German listener could at least detect the unctuous irony in the voice of Arno Frisch (who played Paul in the original), there’s an entirely greater, more chilling and infinitely funnier impact for the English ear when hearing the same lines delivered by Pitt, or for that matter by [Brady] Corbet as Peter [. . .]. For a film designed primarily as a visual analysis of how the urges for violence are shared by characters and audiences alike – and as a rebuke to the audience for not recognizing this point – the impact of words in the new Funny Games is unexpectedly overwhelming and creates a manifestly American filter through which all else flows.

In other words, assuming an English-speaking audience unfamiliar with German, who has access only to subtitles (such as myself) when watching the original, the Americanized remake is more readable and more relatable, the paralinguistic tone of the language one hears as well as understands being easier for them to take into account in interpretation. The fact that both films ‘are so uneasily situated between arthouse and grindhouse might be the reason for their commercial and, to some extent, critical failure’ (Hantke, 2010: 125–6). Even more so, further to offering a shocking experience, Funny Games and its remake offer a contradictory shocking experience; these are cinematic thrillers that critique cinematic thrillers, after all (Laine, 2010: 52). The films force the audience into being immersed in the violence, to the extent that it is itself held ‘accountable for [its] “perverse” desire to seek pleasure in violent cinema’ (Laine, 2010: 57); the characters’ violence is deemed ‘secondary to a primary violence of the media, from which it derives’ (Durham, 2010: 248–9).

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Stylistically and multimodally examining the two films, not to mention looking at the transculturation process, proves revealing in so far as the nature, function and effect of the various features are concerned: from language to plot, from music to cast, and from camera angles to shot lengths. Having said that, since ‘[c]ontext can modify meaning’ (Hutcheon, 2006: 147), such examination also proves useful in explaining the ways in which remaking Funny Games for an American audience generated misunderstandings, with the remake inadvertently coming to challenge the original’s very premise. Violence, the original suggests, ought not to be enjoyed, and yet the remake’s audience appears to have rejected it precisely for not offering violence and hence enjoyment, the remake’s commercialization and marketing leading it to miss its own point. The following section inspects the translation, and cultural shift out of, rather than into, the American cultural context.

3.3 On theatrical remaking: Greeking Shear stylistic Madness One of the longest running non-musical plays in the United States, Shear Madness is a satiric murder mystery play that has been translated, culturally adapted and remade the world over. According to the play’s official and commercial website (www.shearmadness.com [last accessed July 2016], available in relation to 2016 productions of the play in New York City; Boston, Massachusetts; and Washington D.C. in the United States), the creators Jordan and Abrams have turned Pörtner’s 1964 serious psychodrama into a 1979 interactive comedy whodunit. Though broadly and consistently dismissed by the most serious of theatre critics (Richards, 1987; Breslauer, 1993; Waites, 1998; Freed, 2011), the website claims that the play has been nevertheless watched by over 11.5 million people (by 2016 at least) around the world and has been inducted into the Comedy Hall of Fame, not to mention that it received the prestigious Raven Award from the Mystery Writers of America, among several other awards. The play is also said to be listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the longest running play in the history of the United States specifically. Despite its popularity, CollinsHughes (2015) says Shear Madness is ‘still being outpaced by Agatha Christie’s “The Mousetrap”, a fixture of the West End in London since 1952’ only as ‘Dame Agatha had a head start’. According to the same official commercial website, the play has been translated into 23 foreign languages, and played worldwide in a host of cities

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including Barcelona, Buenos Aires, Madrid, Paris, Reykjavik, Rome, Tel Aviv, Melbourne, Johannesburg and Seoul (not to mention Athens, Greece and Nicosia, Cyprus). Chow (2015) argues that it had thus far grossed 232 million American dollars. I  here focus on the play’s interactivity and metatheatricality, with an eye to productions of the play for the American, Greek and Greek Cypriot cultural context, stage, and linguistic variety (the Greek Cypriot linguistic dialectal variety is distinct from standard Greek – for more on Cypriot see, for instance, Newton, 1983; Papapavlou and Pavlou, 1998; Arvaniti, 1999). I base my analysis on –

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a viewing of a recorded performance of the 1997 American Shear Madness production’s 18th year (directed by Bruce Jordan and starring Matt Callahan – videotaped on April 14, 1997 at the Mason Street Theatre in San Francisco, the video recording located in the San Francisco Museum of Performance and Design); a viewing of a recorded performance of the 1999 Greek Σεσουάρ για δολοφόνους (which translates to ‘Hairdryers for murderers’) Athenian production’s 1st year (available at [last accessed July 2016]), directed by Konstantinos Arvanitakis and starring Christos Hatzipanagioti; my 2003 viewing of the Greek Σεσουάρ για δολοφόνους Athenian production’s 5th year (also directed by Konstantinos Arvanitakis and this time starring popular Greek sitcom and theatre actor Christos Simardanis); my 2011 viewing of the Greek Cypriot Kotziakaro Teza (which translates to ‘Dead old lady’) production’s 1st year (directed by, and starring, popular Cypriot satirist Loris Loizides), and a viewing of a recorded 30-minute, and therefore clipped, 2012 performance of a Pirgos Eleias version of the Greek play available online (‘Σεσουάρ για δολοφόνους’, 17-03-2012, Πύργος Ηλείας. [last accessed July 2016])

It is the availability of the original Pörtner (1979) play text alongside recordings of its American (1997) and Greek (1999, 2012) production remakes that enables close and paralleled analysis. Greek adaptations are especially worth analysing alongside the original base the American version offers. Besides, comedic forms and satire originate in centuries-old Greek dramatic play acting, and Greek dramatic chorus origins themselves prove relevant to the metatheatrical analysis of this play that follows.

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Charles (2003: 99) explains ‘the local color [the play] assumes in its various manifestations’: the opening portions of the script are not only tailored to its venue, but also leave room for current conditions, with optional spaces for amendments noted in the script, such as ‘comment on traffic or unusual conditions of the day’ (Pörtner [1964b]:7), dialogue cues to acknowledge the home town ‘of a large group in the audience’ (ibid. 14), and invitations for a ‘timely reference’ perhaps concerning the recent marriage of a celebrity (ibid. 17) [italics in original]. Later sections, combining a strategy of shuffling pre-written or suggested character responses with truly improvised banter, provide further opportunities for topicality and timeliness.

In other words, the original script specifically and significantly invites cultural, topical and temporal adjustment and updating, not to mention explicit satire (in the culturally humoristic sense of the term), by both producers and cast, an aspect I return to in a later section. Hurwitt (2001: 38) too describes the interactive play as ‘an audience-participation lampoon full of over-the-top stereotypes and topical references’. Most importantly, the play also invites improvisation. It is for this reason that during the most recent, 2011 Cypriot, comedic performance I attended, as well as the 1997 American and 1999 Athenian recorded ones, not only did the audience find themselves laughing at many of the actors’ newly encountered jokes but, inadvertently, so did many of the remaining cast members themselves; like the audience, some of the cast too possibly newly encountered some of the jokes in question, or at least could not help themselves from laughing in response to some. These performances themselves temporarily halted on a number of occasions in fact, allowing the cast members to compose themselves before carrying on with their role playing. This is a detail I also return to shortly. Even more so, the play’s audience is actually addressed in the text’s second act, specifically invited to ‘help’ construct the play’s ending. The spectators are here directly told that they are (indirect) witnesses to a murder, and that they should help establish the correct facts of that murder. In doing so, the spectators are given alternative murder mystery character culprits from which to choose. These culprits are put to an actual audience vote during each and every performance, the relevant play ending being ultimately performed by the cast so it coincides with the culprit whom the audience majority chose. As the original script (Pörtner, 1979) suggests, and indeed as one of the actors of the San Francisco performance says immediately after the play itself: ‘whichever way

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you vote, that’s the way we’ll play it’. In a video clip available on the NY production’s Shear Madness website, the NY cast members refer to it as ‘precision comedy’ and as ‘Clue [the interactive detective game known elsewhere as Cluedo] on steroids’, the second play part requiring ‘flashcard memorising’ as the cast performance is here dependent on what the audience will ‘give’ them. As Chow (2015) puts it, ‘[t]he show unfolds like a game of “Clue” – it’s up to the audience to use the various pieces of onstage evidence to name a lead suspect’. The play therefore has different second part manifestations and, as the relevant analysis below illustrates, challenges its own dramatic illusion by inviting the audience to act as active participants in the play’s outcome, all the while parodying the classical detective mystery genre the text originates from. A stylistic frame theory (see Emmott, 1997) analysis will also illustrate the ways in which the differing play manifestations deal with the text’s own variant performance ‘repairs’, and the varying casting of its own ‘episodic’ and ‘non-episodic’ information (though defined differently to Emmott 1997). The discussion that follows is narratological and hence mostly focuses on play structure rather than language (which copyright restrictions prevent me from directly quoting extensively).

3.3.1 A ‘mad’ detective play unlike any other I return to the play’s official website, according to which, this unique comedy-whodunit takes place [. . .] in the ‘Shear Madness’ hairstyling salon and is chock full of up-to-the-minute spontaneous humor. During the course of the action, a murder is committed and the audience gets to spot the clues, question the suspects, and solve the funniest mystery in the annals of crime. The outcome is never the same, which is why many audience members return again and again to the scene of the mayhem.

The play is first worth discussing in relation to the traditional whodunit mystery novel format, seeing that this is the format it builds on, defamiliarizes, deviates from, and parodies. Waugh (1976: 67) argues that a mystery novel must accord with the following set of rules: (a) every clue discovered by the detective has to be made available to the reader, (b) there must be early introduction of the murderer, (c) the crime must be significant, (d) there must be detection, and (e) the number of suspects must be known and the murderer must be among them. These ‘rules’ are certainly true of this play, and all of its variant manifestations in fact. Shear Madness features a total of six cast members whom the audience meet and accompany over the course of an afternoon, and in one and only setting: a

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unisex hairdressing salon. The setting explains the play title’s and salon name’s pun on ‘shear’ for ‘sheer’. Note also that a pair of shears is what was used as a weapon for the murder in question, the pun being differently interpretable at the level of the play titling as opposed to the titling of the play’s salon name (this double-meaning pun Schmitt [1998:  147] describes in terms of ‘bisociation’). The play itself is mostly chronologically ordered, meaning that its ‘discourse’, for the first act at least, coincides with its ‘plot’. As defined in a previous chapter, ‘plot’ is here used to refer to the chronology possible of events, with ‘discourse’ referring to the actual narrative design, the actual event ordering as narrated which, in many stories across cultures, differs from the actual event chronology. Two of the six cast of characters originally disguise themselves as hair salon clients but are later revealed to be plain-clothed police officers. In the Greek Pirgos Eleias production here analysed, the secondary officer’s role is female, and the primary one is male, though most productions, including the 1999 and 2003 Athenian, the Cypriot and the American one, employ male actors and hence male officers for both these character roles. The gender of the secondary, and somewhat more idiotic, officer appears to be rather unimportant, in contrast to the importance assigned to the gender, and sexuality in fact, of all other characters. In any case, the two inspectors investigate the murder of the salon’s rich, old and professional pianist landlady. This renowned pianist resides in the flat over the salon space, the audience do not get to meet her, and she is murdered, it is assumed, in the chronological course of the play, having been stabbed repeatedly, as noted, with a pair of hairdressing shears. The remaining four characters are all significant, and include her gay flamboyant hairdressing male tenant, his flippant and sexy female hairdressing assistant, and two of their customers: a rich female socialite preparing for a journey abroad, and a mysterious suitcase-carrying and antique-trading man, who is later said to be there to supposedly and potentially buy the concert pianist’s piano. These four characters’ gender and sexuality are deemed to be important and especially relevant to the action the four of them take part in, or are implied to take part in at least. It is for this reason that these elements are stable across the various productions of Shear Madness I  have encountered. Even more so, the typecasting of these four characters is further enhanced by their overacted and exaggerated performance: the female hairdresser, for instance, acting up to the ditzy and suggestive female persona while the flamboyant gay character overplays his queer persona with so-called gay speak (for more on queer speak see, for example, Boellstorff and Leap, 2003; Livia and Hall, 1997), itself too peppered with gay sexual innuendo. The use of a bright colour scheme in the character costuming too adds

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to the character stereotypicality; in the Pirgos Eleias, the 1999 Athenian and the American recordings, the gum-chewing female hairdresser is seen wearing uncomfortable high heels and revealing clothing, the male gay character feminine-coloured outfits and accessories (a bright yellow scarf in the 1999 Athenian version, for instance) to accompany his overplayed gay body language, and the female shopping-carrying socialite an expensive looking ensemble, including a hat to disguise her bad hairdo in need of styling. The male antiqueseller wears somewhat business-serious clothing, and the primary male officer masculine, yet casual, clothes in the form of a pair of jeans and shirts combo. The Pirgos Eleias version’s male Greek officer sports a black leather jacket, whereas the 1999 Athenian version’s a full-body white painter’s outfit, to disguise his professional identity with. The overall stage design too reinforces the characters’ role stereotypicality, with overly feminine, pink touches to the unisex salon design enhancing further the impression of the characters employed there as caricatures (for more on stereotypes, otherwise known as group membership schemata, see Culpeper, 2001). There being four suspects available for each performance, the play has four ending manifestations, each ending featuring one of each of them as killers, and therefore a separate killing story to go with each killer choice. In contrast to the above website claiming that ‘the outcome is never the same’, there are in fact only four possible outcomes to choose from, given that there can only be a single killer in each performance, and each of these four play endings is meant to be featuring one such murderer acting alone rather than with any of the remaining three stage characters as accomplices. Having said that, during the American San Franciscan, and the 1999 Athenian performances, the female client is eliminated as a main suspect early on, though not as an accomplice to the pianist’s murder altogether; variations to the original script are enabled in light of the improvisation and audience interactivity the text also allows. The same audience attending several performances might well come to observe the same outcome more than once, despite individual performances not being identical in their entirety. As noted, the texts being improvised, interactive and constantly updated, no two performances of each production are ever exactly alike, even accounting for the variant endings being somewhat constant. To return to the four variant endings though, what are classified as vital ‘clues’ in one performance are mere ‘red herrings’ in a differently ending other, the classifying of episodic and non-episodic information varying across performances accordingly. For analytical purposes, I next concentrate on the Pirgos Eleias performance of the Σεσουάρ για δολοφόνους 2012 Greek play (see YouTube clip

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above), here featuring only this play’s first act, and therefore none of the endings or interactive segments. This is a play version closely aligned with both the Athenian (2003) and Cypriot (2011) productions I myself also watched live. I discuss this Pirgos Eleias Greek text’s generic production structure with a focus on the play’s non-interactive parts, and the play’s first act’s clue incorporation, enabling me to deduce the four particular final act scenarios in relation to these clues. I avoid giving the characters names given that, with the exception of the male hairdresser being called ‘Tony’ in all productions I have come across, all remaining character names vary even within each cultural production range. While focusing on this particular Greek performance, I also draw on parallels to recordings of the play’s Greek (1999) and American (1997) productions, and also input from the original Pörtner (1979) script, in explaining the clues’ relation to the outcome-scenarios. The play begins with a bit of a ‘warm-up’ (Pörtner, 1979). The Pirgos Eleias play starts with the female hairdresser cheerfully dancing in the salon to the sound of loud Greek music, the flashing lighting enabling the stage to resemble a relatively modern, and typical, Greek nightclub scenery. She is joined by a client (the disguised female police officer we later realize), and then the male and showy gay hairdresser, who accompanies her dancing on stage, before a second client, the suitcase-carrying one, and then a third (the disguised male police officer we later realize) enters, and the original female client leaves. In the 1999 Athenian production too, this introductory segment takes as long as fourteen minutes of the two-and-a-half-hour-long play, and the music is so loud that the audience cannot hear what, if anything important, the characters on stage are saying to one another. The music eventually stops, enabling the remaining characters to casually chat about different cultural current affairs and related personal matters. Though the male antique-selling client character walks in first, he offers his place to the disguised male police officer who, much in accordance to the original Pörtner script, asks for a facial shave rather than a haircut. Much the same takes place in the 1999 Greek version, and also the American production in fact, events taking place in the same order, and during a big nonconversational introductory segment accompanied here by English language (in the US version) songs playing loudly in the foreground. The first act of the play is structured but allows improvisation where its dialogue is concerned (Pörtner, 1979). In the Pirgos Eleias and American productions, the same course of action follows. While the male hairdresser prepares for his client’s shave, the second female client walks in late for her appointment, announcing her travels and asking for a hair styling in preparation for this trip of

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hers. The disguised police officer next comments on a lingering smell, to which the female hairdresser responds by saying the upstairs lady is probably cooking for dinner guests that evening (though, in the 1999 Athenian production, it is the male hairdresser’s cooking that this smell gets linked to instead). Soon enough, the upstairs piano starts to play Rachmaninoff, something that annoys the male hairdressing salon tenant. He complains that his old landlady’s piano playing is driving his clientele away, particularly because it is repetitive, monotonous, and she never plays songs in full. In commenting on her age, the Pirgos Eleias, the 1999 Athenian and also the American production all use the same joke, that is, that the landlady is so old, she was ‘a waitress at [Jesus Christ’s] “last supper” ’. Once the music stops, the male hairdresser informs his female client and, indirectly, the play audience, that his old landlady is in fact currently recovering from a breakdown of sorts, at which point the antique seller excuses himself to use the bathroom, taking his suitcase with him. Other jokes also ‘translate’ literally and are used in all cultural contexts, such as the disguised officer saying he ‘does not believe it’, meaning he feels his shave is taking far too long, but interpreted by the story-telling hairdresser as meaning he finds the stories he hears more literally ‘unbelievable’. Here the pragmatic mismatch between what one character implies and what the other infers is what is humour-generating (for analyses of such a meaning mismatch, also known as a clash between a speech act’s illocutionary and perlocutionary force, see Gregoriou, 2009, chapter 8). The music restarts, at which point the male hairdresser accidentally ‘nicks’ (Pörtner, 1979) his client, and responds to the music by scissor-hammering on the salon’s heating pipes that interconnect into the flat above. The banging is meant to alert her to his annoyance and indeed, to his surprise, the music stops for a while. The male client re-enters briefly, before re-exiting suspiciously. The American and 1999 Athenian versions here both show this client sneakily kissing the female hairdresser before exiting. Meanwhile, in both the Pirgos Eleias and 1999 Athenian version, the salon tenant says that his assistant, the female hairdresser, has an unusually close relationship with the upstairs lady, his implication being that the relationship between the two women is also possibly sexual (a comment this character also makes in the course of the American version’s murder investigation later on). Soon enough though, in all three versions, the piano again starts to play. The male hairdresser leaves the hair salon to try and stop the piano playing altogether. The disguised police officer too leaves, supposedly and frustratingly changing his mind about the shave. Before leaving, he – in all versions – asks as to where ‘he’ has gone, it being unclear as to whether it is the salon tenant or antique-seller he enquires about. Meanwhile, the music stops once more, and

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the female hairdresser answers the phone: the female client’s husband is looking for her, but she is uninterested and does not take the call. The female hairdresser then suspiciously throws away some scissors, only to then leave to take out the garbage. At this point, the married female customer finds herself on her own on stage. She calls who the audience are led to assume to be her lover. Since she chose not to take her husband’s call earlier, and now makes reference to the man on the phone having been ‘wonderful’ (‘υπέροχος’, the Greek adjectival inflection being indicative of the receiver being male) earlier that day, the audience reasonably assume that she could well be talking to someone other than her husband. The American version here using the, of course, genderless adjective ‘wonderful’ allows the possibility that she could well be talking to someone female, but the sexual insinuation is still implied. Nevertheless, she talks to the person on the phone about having already done something: here, her saying ‘it’s already been done’ lets it be assumed that, upon reflection, she could well be talking about the salon landlady having already been killed. The use of the passive voice is useful, in allowing ambiguity as to the agent of this act; this could either be the socialite herself, or a different person altogether. Greek being a language with gender-specific articles allows further line ambiguity; the female character uses ‘την τακτοποίησα’, as in ‘I took care of “her” ’, the embedded indirect object pronoun ‘her’ of the Greek version potentially referring to either an actual female person or a different non-person specific matter/object altogether here (say, a thing, such as a cheque, a noun which is ascribed a female gender in Greek, and one that too could be ‘taken care of ’/ ‘paid off ’ in Greek-‘τακτοποίησα’ terms). At this stage, and in all three versions, the female client tests and then steals some perfume from the salon counter, and gets startled when the antique-selling male client swiftly returns from the bathroom to say he somehow cut his finger and needs help to stop the bleeding (catching glimpse of her thieving). On cue, the music restarts. He disappears into the salon supply closet looking for plaster, before the second disguised police officer, who is female in the Pirgos Eleias version, comes looking for another non-clarified ‘he’, and then leaves, and accidentally not from the same exit the antique seller chose. The female client again finds herself on her own on stage, and comments on a burning smell, at which point the flamboyant hairdresser returns. In both Greek versions, he wears a suspiciously different coloured robe whereas, in the American version, he is no longer wearing his work robe, and comments on himself having burned his goulash. The male client and female hairdresser too rejoin the stage, the latter shockingly announcing that she found the landlady dead, before fainting, at which point the two client-disguised police officers re-enter to reveal their true

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identities. The music carries on playing and the lights go out, marking the end of the first act. At the start of the second act, the audience and characters deduce that the upstairs lady was murdered during the chronology of the first act, the implication being that this, more specifically, took place in the period starting from when the cooking smell was noted and ending where the same cooking’s burning smell was mentioned. Admittedly though, seeing that in the American version the male hairdresser also burned some food, the murder could have taken place much prior to the burning smell being noted. The officers also disclose that at least part of the piano music they all heard playing from the upstairs flat was recorded and replayed rather than performed live, hence the repetitiveness the male hairdresser previously noted finding annoying. Seeing that the old lady passed away that same afternoon (they give a specific half-hour time frame), and no one but the present characters entered or left the general building premises during that time, the officers deduce that any one of the remaining four characters could have killed her, and any one of them alone (though Pörtner’s original script makes note of a delivery guy’s entry and exit also, 1979: 18). The killer in question is said to have left the recorder playing some of her previous piano performances to confuse the others as to the landlady’s actual time of death. The real murderer, the inspectors say, in short, is right there with them in the hairdressing salon. The two police inspectors start interrogating their four suspects. In the American version, the only explanation offered as to how the two officers came to be present in the salon that day, and from as early a time as prior to the murder having been carried out in fact, is that they were ‘staking out’ the place, as luck would have it. Why they were surveying the place is not explained. As the antique-selling character himself comments in the original Pörtner (1979: 1) script: ‘Very convenient. A couple of undercover cops sitting at the scene of a crime’, to which the officer responds with: ‘we were here to investigate another complaint [. . .] headquarters [. . .]’ve given us authority to proceed’. A 1999 Athenian production audience member similarly asks about the police officers’ presence from the start of the play, and prior to the old woman’s murder, to which the officers respond by saying that the pianist had asked them to come and see her, as she felt she would potentially be blackmailed by the antiqueseller, who she had a professional meeting with that day. As Dalglish (1997) notes, to some extent, ‘[t]he plot is full of holes and is not at all well thought out’. Each of the four suspects is shown to be equally suspicious in the course of the collective and individual interviews that follow. The flamboyant male hairdresser who kept complaining about the old lady’s piano playing now pretends to be

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supposedly upset about her passing. ‘She was like a mother to me’, he says in both Greek and also the (American) English speaking versions. The suggestion is that he may well have been jealous of the old lady’s money, success and/or relationship/s. He denies ever having argued with her, despite his previously admitting to having indeed come to blows with her in the past. The male hairdressing client is then investigated. He is revealed to be a petty criminal who has had professional dealings with the old lady, and in fact had a meeting arranged with her that same day. He claims the old pianist was selling her piano for some reason, despite the audience having been previously told that she was in fact preparing for a musical comeback following her previously noted breakdown. In the Pirgos Eleias as well as the American, recordings, the customer also has some trouble explaining how he cut himself, or where exactly he went when he disappeared looking for the bathroom. The female hairdresser is then interviewed by the police. She is joyful, something atypical of someone who has only recently discovered a close friend dead. As noted, she comes across as somewhat ditzy and, in both the 1999 and 2012 Greek versions, and the Pörtner (1979: 14) script, claims to be completely unaware of how much the landlady’s fortune is worth when asked specifically about the value of her piano. What is here implied is that this young woman could have a lot to gain by being ‘close’ to an elderly lady, and one who specifically had a big inheritance to pass on. The relationship between these two women becomes increasingly hard to define, and we learn that the young woman and the male client too had indeed some sort of dealings with one another in the months prior to the day of the murder. The female client is interviewed last. She is asked to explain the phone call she chose not to take, and she carries on not disclosing the one possibly adulterous call she made herself, or her reference to what or who exactly it was that was ‘done’. She is also anxious to leave and catch her flight abroad, the implication being that she would possibly be leaving the country for good, possibly literally getting away with murder.

3.3.2 Metatheatrical Madness Shear Madness is described by some as ‘hardly a great play’ (Waites, 1998: 13), a ‘no brainer whodunit’, as ‘tacky’, ‘generic’ and ‘not good farce’, its plot making ‘ “Murder, She Wrote” look like high art’ (Breslauer, 1993). Some even reject it as a ‘lowbrow tourist fare’ (Freed, 2011), with Richards (1987) going as far as to render it as ‘cabaret entertainment-cum-murder mystery’ and even ‘sheer torture’. It is even ‘[d]ismissed as beneath contempt by many theatre critics, primarily because of its stereotyped portrayal of [the] gay hairdresser’ (Schmitt,

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1998: 155). Breslauer (1993) refers to many of the play’s lines as ‘homophobic’ and Richards (1987) is similarly ‘[c]urious that such a flagrantly outrageous depiction of homosexuality passes for humor these days. If, say, a black, a Jew or a Catholic were depicted in such stereotypical terms, there would be all hell to pay’. The play being full of reductive gay (and straight) sexual innuendo is playful but also problematic, and even more so as the play strangely also appeals to school group theatre-outing organizers. To explain the appeal to an audience of all ages, reviewer Collins-Hughes (2015) argues that this is ‘not a “familyfriendly” show that will leave grown-ups stultified. There’s plenty of silliness for those in the grade school crowd, and lots of sly double entendres that will sail right over their heads.’ Adding to the play’s all-age appeal, performances of Shear Madness reincarnations are additionally described as (needing to be at least) ‘admirably performed’, ultimately offering ‘a pretty good evening’s entertainment’ (Waites, 1998: 13) precisely because of the exact audience-driven pressure that the cast needs to respond to each night. It is during this play’s second act that the real entertainment is said to start. Here, the playhouse gets fully illuminated, and the primary police officer, leading the cast, actually acknowledges the audience, interacting with them ‘as if they too had been there all along, asking them what they saw’ (Schmitt, 1998: 146). Though initially entirely taken aback by the audience’s presence in utter shock, the remaining stage characters come to actually engage with their audience, its ‘eavesdropping’ role here being called into the stage discussion. In engaging with viewers and allowing plot development choice and variation depending on what these viewers report they saw, the play resembles such genres as text adventure interactive game fiction, not to mention hyperfictional storytelling, among other types of modern digital fiction. Rather than digitally though, this Shear Madness second play-act starts to shift in a physical sense, breaking down the (fourth) wall between the stage and the audience, causing the theatrical focus to move ‘continually from the stage to the auditorium and back again, creating an atmosphere of participation and playfulness’ (Charles, 2003: 78), rather pantomimelike. In unfolding itself out of the stage then, the play becomes metatheatrical or metadramatic, highlighting its own theatricality and therefore challenging its own dramatic illusion. As previously noted, the related metatheatrical techniques include such elements as direct audience address, textual and real-life referentiality, ‘play within a/the play’ or ‘play about a/the play’, and chorus, among others. As Dobrov (2001) puts in his Figures of Play:  Greek Drama and Metafictional Poetics book blurb, ‘Greek tragedy and comedy were argued to be temperamentally metafictional in that they are always involved in recycling older fictions into

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contemporary scenarios of immediate relevance to the polis’. Borrowing from both the tragedy and comedy genres, Shear Madness too actually recycles the crime fiction genre, adjusting it to the audience and era in question. In doing so, it employs all such metatheatrical elements, as I next illustrate, and in turn. The audience is looked at, addressed, and interacted with, the text itself at least ‘display[ing] an inclination towards the inclusion of multiple voices’ (Charles, 2003: 221), if not actual polyphony. In transgressing its own narrative boundaries and inviting the fictional world to somewhat merge with the real one, the text, much like Funny Games, employs metalepsis. The logically distinct Shear Madness fictional stage world and real audience world here being illogically, and rhetorically metaleptically, combined, comes to generate both humour and fantasy. Invited to participate and contribute to the play themselves, viewers jump participant levels, actively helping construct the ending of it. In doing so, they somewhat help ‘solve’ it by becoming witnesses, detectives, playwrights and characters/actors all at once, the ‘result’ being ‘a captivating examination of perspective and memory that pits spectator against spectator’ (Gordon, 2015). They ask the suspects questions, but also accompany the cast on stage, looking through garbage and character belongings, dialling their last calls, and perusing their physical environment. Discussing a given British (Brits prefer the Scissor Happy title) production of this same play, Kingston (1997) too notes that not only does the cast stay in character but the adapters also ‘must have prepared answers to scores of possible inquiries, because documentary support for the explanations [the audience needs] is brought out from pockets and cupboards and briefcase’. When discussing another British production, Waites (1998: 13) argues that the cast and authors ‘have had the harshest training possible in audience involvement. There is absolutely no way they can be self-indulgent. It must be sheer professionalism from start to finish and the actors [. . .] have to think on their feet’. Even more so, some of the actors carry on acting in role even during the intermission, interacting with whichever bits of the audience remain in their seats, and discussing the case in accordance to whichever direction the audience takes them into (for a YouTube clip on the Cypriot performance’s female hairdresser and audience interaction during intermission, see [last accessed May 2013]). When discussing a Chicago production, Schmitt (1998:  147)  too notes that ‘during the intermission the detective solicits murder hypotheses from the audience in the lobby, while at the same time, the [female] hairdresser, remaining on the stage, distributes candy from the salon candy jar to those remaining in the performance space, and then converses privately with audience members sitting closest to the stage’.

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After the interactive spectator inspection, and the intermission, the four suspects are put to an actual audience killer vote, the rest of the play getting ‘acted out’ in accordance to this audience poll result so that the given performance’s majority vote preference is pronounced the supposedly ‘real’ killer. As Shuttleworth (1997) puts it, ‘alternative endings make [. . .] it quite arbitrary which events in the first act really are significant and which are red herrings – not even the performers can know at the time, since the variant to be played on a given evening is only decided later’. The information consistent with any given performance’s chosen killer is ultimately declared to be immediately relevant, or ‘episodic’ in frame theory terms, all other ‘clues’ now reduced to irrelevant, hence non-episodic red herrings, the frame repairs that follow comfortably embedded in the audience-chosen narrative outcome. Similarly, different kinds of repairs take place in the course of differing play manifestations. The audience is led to reread character behaviour and actions in accordance to their majority killer choice for the performance in question, all other character behaviour and actions being reduced to ‘wild and conflicting misperceptions’, as the play’s official site puts it (on the use of character underspecification for manipulative rhetorical purposes, writer garden path strategizing, reader assumption-making in relation to character plot status, and the strategic backgrounding of characters in relation to scenario-dependent roles, see Alexander, 2008; Emmott and Alexander, 2010; Emmott, Sanford and Alexander, 2010; and see also Emmott and Sanford, 2013). ‘As the audience decides who the murderer is, the principle that anyone could be innocent illustrates the same questions about perception as Scherenschnitt’, Rodger (1997) says. Scenario 1: In the narrative manifestation where the female hairdresser is pronounced a murderess, her silly and casual demeanour is read as misleading. She is here episodically read to be malicious and deliberately deceptive, killing the woman she befriended or otherwise came close to in a rage, so as to consequently inherit all of the pianist’s money in her will. The scissors she is seen handling could be revealed to be the murder weapon, and her taking out the garbage an attempt to dispose of this weapon. Here, all other characters’ deeds, such as the male hairdresser changing/taking off his original robe, are classified as explainable non-episodically. Similarly, the female client’s strange phone-call behaviour too can be deemed entirely irrelevant to the case at hand as is her reference to whatever it was she took care of, now revealed to be about a different random matter altogether. What the audience were led to read as dishonest behaviour where this last woman’s marriage is concerned could also be explained as non-illicit – she could well argue that it was, in fact, her husband

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she called, or that it was someone else who was ‘wonderful’ that morning, and not necessarily in a sexual sense. In the American and 1999 Athenian versions of the play, she explains the phone call by saying she in fact rang her butler to thank him for being ‘wonderful’ when ‘polishing her silver’. Also in the former, she dismisses the ‘already been done’ expression by explaining that it was in reference to her husband’s watch, which she herself collected from the repair shop. She even showcases a watch to justify this story of hers, taking it out of her purse for the audience to peruse. A 1999 Athenian production audience member comes on stage to call the same number the woman called, only to find the person at the end of the line confirming her story. In the same production, a different audience member misremembers what this woman said on the phone exactly; rather than the female gendered object pronoun ‘την’, the audience member argues she used the neutral-equivalent ‘το’ ‘τακτοποίησα’, as in ‘I took care of “it” ’ as opposed to ‘her’, and yet they are not corrected. In any case, the character justifies what she said along the lines of having taken care of her foreigner butler’s pending residence issue here, ‘issue’ being a neutral noun in gender-terms in Greek. As for her taking the perfume, Pörtner’s (1979) female client explains her supposed thieving as a purchase she intended to pay for later. Scenario 2: In the narrative manifestation where the flamboyant hairdresser is pronounced the killer, his annoyance at the old lady and his changed clothes come to be read episodically; he might well have killed her when leaving the salon to briefly call on her in the upstairs flat, to get her to stop piano practicing, hence his subsequently removing his (bloodied, we would assume) robe. This scenario suggests he might well have killed her under the influence of rage and on discovery of her actually playing a recording of a piano, just to taunt him. Alternatively, and as to motive, the audience implies he merely killed her out of some sort of spite or, as Pörtner’s (1979) script guides, to prevent her from renting the salon to the female hairdresser when its lease was up. His having said that the female hairdresser has an unusually close, perhaps sexual, relationship with the upstairs lady, is read as him trying to allude to his assistant having a supposed monetary murder motive, misleadingly pointing the finger towards her as the killer instead. He elsewhere makes similar innuendos as to her possibly having a sexual relationship with the antique seller as well. On the other hand, in this scenario, all other characters’ suspicious behaviour, such as the antique seller having cut himself, and having disappeared for a while, and more than once in fact, are read as merely incidental and non-episodic red herrings. In the American, and also the 1999 Athenian play version, the antique seller explains his hand cutting saying he picked up a broken bottle in the street.

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Scenario 3: In the scenario where the female client is pronounced a murderess, her phone call behaviour gets ascribed episodic importance, the old lady being the one she actually killed when saying she ‘took care’ of (in the Greek version at least) ‘her’, her partner on the phone being her sole accomplice in this murder. Notice here not only the gender-specific Greek pronoun use previously discussed (‘την’), allowing in Greek an ambiguous reference to a female person or impersonal thing/matter, but also the ‘it’s already been done’ expression in the American English version, which translates in Greek in the form of ‘την τακτοποίησα’. In both languages, this referring expression is one our schemata suggest is commonly used by criminals universally and euphemistically in their reference to murder. The use of such an expression allows the here revealed criminal persona the secrecy and concealment she requires, and therefore useful ambiguity in the event of phone surveillance and subsequent capture or, such as in the given play event, audience scrutiny. Like with other scenarios, this particular character-killer is here too revealed to have some sort of motive, whether personal or monetary. Besides, though rich, she does steal perfume, this alluding to her kleptomaniac tendencies. Her motive is not as clear through the play’s clues as it is for other character suspects; in neither of the performance scenarios I myself watched live was the female client voted, and hence pronounced as, the killer. In fact, her interview as part of the investigation is the shortest of the four; as previously noted, she was downgraded from potential killer to potential accomplice in both the American and the 1999 Greek performance, and rather early on in the investigative process. Having watched a more recent Manhattan performance, Finkle (2015) also notes this character having been eliminated at the start of the investigation. In the original Pörtner (1979) script too, a full scenario resulting in this character being declared a murderess is not supplied altogether. Perhaps it is unneeded, as the audience is unlikely to killer-‘vote’ for her anyway. Scenario 4: Finally, where the male client is voted into the killer role, this man is said to have disappeared saying he wanted to use the bathroom only to simply kill the old lady. It is at this point that he accidentally cuts himself in the process of stabbing her with a pair of shears. Given this character’s thieving background, his motive is also revealed to be monetary. It is his relationship with the female assistant that allowed him access to the old lady to begin with. Again, according to this scenario, his awareness of the two women’s now declared gay relationship (through some letters he found in a chest of drawers he previously purchased from the old lady) prompts him to blackmail the older woman; he would keep her gay affair secret, in exchange for her fortune. It is assumed here that this lesbian affair would be disapproved of by fans of the pianist’s work, which would

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result in the end of her career, a reaction most possibly adapted and varying across different culture play manifestations in fact. He killed her in a moment of frustration, in fear of losing all the money he could gain from her, perhaps to speed up the process of his female lover inheriting the old lady’s money even. In any case, the music recording coming from the room immediately above the salon is here said to have been manufactured by the antique seller (rather than any of the other characters), to give himself the alibi he needs for the murder he committed actually prior to some of the music we hear playing. In fact, his offering his hair appointment turn to the disguised inspector is explained as an attempt to buy a bit more time for himself in the salon, hence temporally disguising his involvement in the salon landlady’s murder. Note that each narrative version has the same set of elements. It is the flexible, interchangeability of these elements in relation to the episodic and nonepisodic categorizing that enables them to adapt into whatever narrative model ending the spectators appear to be ‘wanting’, or are led to want perhaps, that day. Interestingly of course, it may well be the actor performance, or the audience temperament, that ensures variability from performance to performance, and I would be inclined to propose that the Pirgos Eleias, 1999 Athenian, and American performances here analysed are likely to predispose the audience towards the male antique seller being pronounced the killer. His behaviour is more suspicious than anyone else’s, most other characters hint at or directly point to his potentially dubious behaviour, and the disguised police officers particularly inquire about his whereabouts more than once. The given American performance’s audience, and the 1999 Athenian one, also chose this male client for the killer role (an hour and thirty minutes/two hours, respectively, into the play), the subsequent twenty minutes being acted out accordingly; the man admits his guilt twenty minutes or so later, and right before the last act, and hence the play, comes to an end. Tracing the statistical frequency with which each of the four characters is preferred for the killer role, possibly connecting this to such things as culture and production, or closely investigating the factors contributing to each specific performance’s audience killer preference (assuming one could keep at least some of the given variables constant somehow), would be interesting tasks in themselves. In any case, it is in giving the audience the actual killer choice that Shear Madness ultimately proves itself to be very much unlike traditional detective novel writing. Mandel (1984:  16)  defines such writing as consistent with the genre’s ‘fair-play rule’ – that the reader must have as much information relevant to the solution of the crime as the detective – or what he calls a ‘battle of wits’, a

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so-called battle simultaneously unfolding at two levels: between the great detective and the criminal, and between the author and the reader: [i]n both battles, the mystery is the identity of the culprit, to which the detective and reader alike are to be led by a systematic examination of the clues. But while the story’s hero always succeeds, the reader ought not succeed in outwitting the author. Otherwise the psychological need to which the detective story is supposed to respond is not assuaged: there is no tension, suspense, surprising solution or catharsis. (Mandel, 1984: 16)

In other words, Mandel (1984: 16) argues that the detective story need achieve the reader’s surprise when the murderer’s identity is revealed:  ‘[T]o surprise without cheating is to manifest genuine mastery of the genre’, . According to some such as Roth, this fair-play rule ‘is played out according to a fantastic scenario by which various triumphant readers solve the mystery as they read page 64, 91, or 113, respectively, at which point the rest of the book becomes redundant to them’ (Roth, 1995: xi). As Mandel (1984: 48) too admits though, reading such detective stories is – in fact – not fair play, but ‘fake play under the guise of fair play’. Classical detective writing, he admits, is more of ‘a game with loaded dice’, since the winner is predetermined by the author; neither the criminal ever wins, nor the reader ever outwits the author (for more on detective writing formulaic regularities, see Gregoriou, 2007). In accordance with this line of reasoning, a novel in which the ‘winner’ is not predetermined by the author, and the reader majority manages to effectively achieve this narrative ‘win’, is easily classifiable as a disused one, or at least a narrative that fails in its functional task somewhat. Very much in contrast to such traditional detective narrative structure then, Shear Madness ensures that the audience in fact is specifically designed to ‘outwit’, a design here not meant to render the work redundant. If anything, the spectators leaving the playhouse feeling they, in their majority, ‘solved’ the crime, is precisely what generates a pleasurable play outcome. The Shear Madness spectators actually ‘winning’ the crime-solving battle seems to be a benefit and a necessity, and certainly not a detriment to the play as such. By adopting the detective novel formula and yet changing this one significant element, the play text becomes a parody, that is, an amusing imitation which merely borrows the style and technique of the genre at hand (Wales, 2001:  286). As Bönnemark (1997:57) argues, such parodies can in fact ‘be regarded as a trustworthy indication of the existence of a genre: where there are parodies, the constraints of a particular genre are so well known that they create humour if exaggerated’. Shear Madness too can be described as

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a detective story ‘pastiche’ (Symons, 1981: 136), given that form borrowing is here lighthearted, and used for satirical and humorous purposes. Finally, the play can generically be described as a deviant crime novel text as a result (see discussion of other such generically deviant crime novels in Gregoriou, 2007). It meets many of the relevant generic formula’s elements, but selfconsciously neglects some. The play has other metatheatrical elements worth noting. Schmitt (1998: 147) refers to the previously noted actor repeated and deliberate ‘breakup in seeming amusement at what they are doing, thus calling attention to themselves as performers’. This, for Schmitt (1998: 147), additional ‘bisociation’ (as in, further to the double punning of ‘shear’ previously discussed) is also metathetatrical; it heightens ‘the self-consciousness of the audience’. Even more so, given that the text gets culturally and temporally updated, with mentions of current and local news, politics and gossip, it employs metatheatrical real-life referentiality as well. This is strangely unproblematic: ‘What good is a local joke when many theatergoers are tourists?’ Chow (2015) asks. Similarly, Dalglish (1997) says that the, in his case, London ‘show is aimed at a British audience, so some [most likely tourist] Americans may not catch some of the jokes’. Nevertheless, discussing one such Las Vegas production with respect to topical references, Brown (2009) notes: Ingenious in its cheerful dumbness, the ‘Shear’ script is sheer silliness, a rowdy pileup of sight gags, malapropisms and tossed-off jests. Nearly every joke is a setup for a local reference, and the victims so far include CityCenter, Super Summer Theater, Twitter and inescapable personal injury attorney Glen Lerner. And, of course, Vegas’ favorite punch line, poor ol’ Criss Angel.

With respect to the most recent NY play production (2015), Chow (2015) mentions table-read actors frantically flipping through pages, ‘spitballing pop culture punch lines. After a voracious back-and-forth about Winterfell, the lowbrow popemobile, Peter Dinklage and gaudy queens, the director, Bruce Jordan, decided that a quip about the pope’s dress was the way to go’. In response to another NY performance that same year, Finkle (2015) describes one instance in relation to an audience member’s mentioning of Mexico, to which a cast member says: ‘We’ll put her in a sombrero and send her to Donald Trump.’ As for a Chicago production, Schmitt (1998: 147–8) discusses as follows: the beauty salon is said to be on Oak Street, the street in Chicago where the fanciest salons are; the new beauty parlor smocks, its owner tells us, are ‘Cabrini

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green’ (Cabrini-Green is a dreadful Chicago housing project); when the salon radio is turned on, we hear Roy Leonard, a Chicago radio celebrity, reporting the murder that just took place in the play. When, in an August 1992 performance, the detective listed the suspects, the hairdresser said that, like Ross Perot, he wished to withdraw his name.

According to the play’s official site, Shear Madness ‘is such an integral part of Boston’ that the Mayor renamed one of its streets, Warrenton Street, into ‘Shear Madness Alley’. A Boston reviewer (Bisen-Hersh, 1999: 6) also comments on the play’s important topical referencing: The reason Shear Madness is still playing is because of its adaptability to its location and to today’s news. There are many different improvised jokes each night because thirty minutes before the show, the actors meet to brainstorm new material. Thus, the show is part script and part improvisation, which adds to the fun. Furthermore, the actors pick on the audience occasionally, leading to a good time shared by all.

As the last reviewer comments, the play’s improvisation in response to audience input is also noteworthy. This, too, is metatheatrical. Abram and Jordan’s Shear Madness is, after all, an ‘interplay’ (Kingston, 1997) and, as Charles (2003:  78)  puts it, a scripted/improvisational crossbreed:  it is a play that ‘combine[s] the perceived danger of improv with the predictability of a scripted core’ (Charles, 2003: 163), the text challenging its own theatricality as a result of this hybridism. Having said that, Chow (2015) notes there being a ‘cheat sheet of 73 audience questions at the back of the 150-plus page script that the cast members should be prepared to answer’, so the apparent improvised play bits might have been scripted all along. As a cast member admits, actors need remember what they actually did, and then remember the things that they forget, and then know the things they have to then potentially re-remember (Chow, 2015). And to further entice audience participation, and make the play as appealing as possible, the play’s official website even encourages groups of over 15 viewers to buy tickets collectively; doing so would guarantee the given group special mention in the show. Even more so, the play highlights its own theatricality not only in its interaction with the audience but also its own play-references and playacting within playacting. In the 1999 Athenian performance, the male hairdresser talks of a play club he is in, playacting being referred to as an activity within the Shear Madness play itself then (‘play about a play’) while, by debating, and re-acting scenes in

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all productions I  have watched, and in accordance with audience advice, the actors engage in ‘play about the play’ metatheatricality. As the Boston reviewer says (Bisen-Hersh, 1999: 6), ‘the suspects are asked to recreate the events leading up to the murder, and the audience is charged to correct any mistakes or fallacies in their recreation’. Schmitt (1998: 146) too comments on this process: ‘The [suspect] characters, all the while protesting their innocence, reconstruct parts of the action on the basis of [audience] remembrances, collectively corrected, or they attempt to provide their own false reconstructions, vociferously resisted by the audience.’ The Shear Madness actors physically come to loosely re-enact scenes then, supposedly helping the audience reconstruct the murder narrative. Once the votes are in, the re-enactments come to be specifically consistent with the culprit the audience, in their majority, chose, re-fitting the puzzle pieces in a way that ‘fits’ the audience preferred killer schema and scenario. Here, the text’s ‘plot’ comes to clash with its ‘discourse’, seeing that the audience is invited to return to physically re-watch, and rethink, previously seen scenes, again in relation to their preferred novel ending. The audience also supposedly ‘reminds’ the cast of its previous actions, while the actors play away as if ‘needing’ such help from the spectators to start with. Noticeably, the audience’s laughter is here explicitly acknowledged as well, and responded to with comments and gestures, as are their accusations, which are welcomed, either for congratulating or mocking. When in the 1997 American version of the play (I watched a recording of), for instance, a female member of the audience corrects the antique-selling character’s version of events by explaining he actually left the stage using a different door to the one he claims to have used, he compliments her on her strong memory before giving her a menacing, threatening glance. Similarly, again in this same performance as well as in the 1999 Athenian one, the audience ‘tells’ on the male hairdresser swearing and name-calling his landlady a ‘bitch’, and on the suit-wearing male client actually kissing the female hairdresser before leaving. Along the same lines, one audience member reminds the rest as to the female client making a suspicious phone call as well as stealing perfume, and on the female hairdresser tossing away some scissors. To mock the audience member who ‘told’ on her, the female hairdresser explains she tossed away the scissors as ‘the tip was broken’; she bought the cheap, hence breakable, scissors at the discount US K-Mart shop, which is where, she adds, that audience member must have got her top from. The 1999 Athenian production’s female hairdresser makes a similar joke at a female audience member’s expense, and in reference to cheap clothes-buying in the Greek context this time.

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Finally, the play employs choric dancing and even singing, yet another metatheatrical element worth noting. Like comedy and satire, exaggerated character archetypes and puns, chorus also originates in ancient Greece and, according to Weiner (1980: 205), specifically dates as far back as the beginning of the 5th century BC. As Ley (1991: 22) points out, ‘the Greek word “choros” describes a group of people expected to sing and dance’, hence Pavis (1998: 53) describing the theatrical sense of the term as referring to ‘a homogeneous group of dancers, singers and narrators who speak collectively to comment on the [theatrical] action in which they are involved in various ways’. The chorus is not an unproblematic concept, and many comment on its variant function. According to Ley (1991: 22), ‘the history of the chorus in Greek society is a long and complex one, and is bound up firmly with many varieties of Greek poetry, apart from drama’. He adds that certain aspects of the comic chorus in particular, as found in plays such as those of Aristophanes, include that traditional element of parabasis: ‘at a relatively central moment of the drama the chorus “steps forward/aside”, its members perhaps disencumbering themselves of any properties they may have, and addresses the audience directly in an apparently corrective manner and on behalf of the dramatist’ (Ley, 1991: 24). The Hennepin Theatre Trust Shear Madness Study Guide gives a further, even more specific definition for such a ‘chorus’: The chorus, which addressed the audience directly, was used to divide the plays into two parts. In the first part, the problem or conflict was introduced and discussed. An idea for a solution and a plan of action would then be proposed to the audience by the chorus. Serving as a moderator, the chorus established a set of standards the audience used when judging the characters and the action of the play. In the second part, the chorus frequently halted the action of the play to let the audience think about what had happened in order to come to a solution of the problem by the play’s end.

The Pirgos Eleias and American San Franciscan Shear Madness performances do not employ ‘chorus’ in the most ancient Greek traditional sense of the term, but they do employ dancing and a little singing/lip syncing to music lyrics accompanying vibrant songs playing in the background. The use of Village People’s ‘YMCA’ gay anthem at the entrance of the second disguised officer in the salon is fitting for the 1997 San Franciscan American version, nodding at the city’s large gay population, and the relevant officer’s masculine attire. This alludes to the kind of clothing associated with the same song group’s culturally stereotypical clothings, or supposedly fantasy figures, for gay culture in general. It

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was not until the sixteenth century and humanistic theatre context, Pavis adds (1998: 54), that the chorus separated the acts or was used as a musical interlude. Even more so, the problem-solution structure that this chorus act-separating enables, as described above at least, is most fitting for the play in question. In the two police inspectors collectively engaging the audience to the finding of a ‘solution’ (i.e. who did it) to a ‘problem’ (i.e. murder) through direct address and actual audience interactivity, the observers are chorically and hence metatheatrically reminded that it is a play they are watching. To find this solution, spectators employ particular ‘standards’ given to them by this moderating and policing cast (i.e. the principle specifying that there can only be one murderer among a specific set of four, and a murderer to whom the clues point). These standards suggested to the spectators point to the four-scenario play-ending options, and are ones against which the four suspects are ‘judged’, and the remaining action of the play is accordingly performed. Rather than serious theatre, Shear Madness is perhaps just sheer fun. Nevertheless, this is a play of a crime narrative that, like others explored in this book, illustrates the cultural versatility and persistent popularity of the genre at hand. Engaging with this play stylistically and narratologically allows an insight into the ways in which this genre’s clues are embedded in storylines, and such that crime narrative endings can be shown to be, in actual fact, more changeable than genuinely predictable. The play’s metatheatrical analysis helps highlight many of the originating whodunit genre’s formulaic regularities as well as how exactly the text pleasurably challenges its own dramatic illusion, allowing the audience to somewhat contribute to the play’s creative processes and, in ‘jumping narrative levels’, interactively enter the world of the stage. Finally, metatheatricality here proves useful in showing the genre’s medial, cultural and linguistic permeability and adaptability, important as these are in a modern era where crime fiction, to metaphorically survive, perhaps needs to carry on ‘moving’.

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Conclusion

‘[F]idelity [as in:  the concern with source-faithfulness] is in the eye of the beholder’ (Zatlin, 2005:  171). As subjective, otherwise problematic, and even didactic as the discourse of fidelity is in relation to adaptation studies (see discussion in Stam, 2000, for instance), such discourse persists. Nevertheless, Venuti (2007: 26) argues that ‘[i]n adaptation studies informed by the discourse of fidelity, the film is not compared to the literary text, but rather to a version of it mediated by an interpretation’. It is precisely because stylistic analysis explains readers’ interpretation of texts, and cognitive approaches shed light on their comprehension of these texts, that cognitive stylistic methodology has much to offer to what I have described as the ‘migration’ study of the crime fictional narrative form (though, despite any overlap, that is not to say that an adaptor’s interpretation of a text is the same as a reader’s – see Furlong, 2012). In employing stylistic methodology, one could, alongside Zatlin (2005), respond to Ray’s (2000:  41)  call for analyses of precisely ‘how stories travel from medium to medium’, and do so wanting to discover how exactly concepts are worked across semiotic modes, and how each medium utilizes its own means to accordingly ‘translate’ these concepts to its own audience, time and place. As ‘crime fiction texts lend themselves particularly to an analysis of the construction of culturally relevant meanings, the migration of culture and the processes of cultural transfer, transmediality and genre’ (Seago, 2014a), they are a suitable resource in this venture. This book’s six case studies have allowed an insight into the reader’s cognitive processing of crime fictional narrative, and an understanding of the meaningpotential of language alongside all other semiotic modes in the process of migration (from costuming to music, and from casting to use of space). Beyond exploring these six analysed works further (or indeed looking at Hewson’s 2013 and 2014 novelizations of respectively the Forbrydelsen II and III TV series, or Connolly’s English translation of Markaris’ second and third Greek Haritos

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novels  – see Markaris, 2006a, 2009 which are translations of Markaris [1998] 2010 and 2003) one could examine various crime fiction migrations using this book’s proposed approach. To name but a few example texts, with respect to novels’ filmic adaptation specifically, one could engage with the migration of crime fiction writer Flynn’s (2009) Dark Places into director Paquet-Brenner’s (2015) namesake film (starring Charlize Theron), or Donoghue’s (2010) Room: A Novel into director Abrahamson’s (2015) Oscar-winning film Room, or Sebold’s (2002) The Lovely Bones book into Jackson’s (2009) same-named film (for an analysis of the latter book in relation to ‘mind style’, see Gregoriou, 2014). Also see Gregoriou (2011b) for an analysis of Moore and Campbell’s (2000) Jack the Ripper graphic novel From Hell alongside its screenplay adaptation by Terry Hayes and Rafael Yglesias, then directed (by Albert and Allen Hughes) into the blockbuster Hollywood film, From Hell (2001). With respect to the televisual mode, again see Gregoriou (2011b) for an analysis of Lindsay’s Darkly Dreaming Dexter (2004) novel, which formed the basis of the much acclaimed, and also analysed, Showtime television series Dexter (2006–13) (see also Gregoriou, 2012, for an examination of serial murder ideologies and metaphors from TV’s Dexter internet forum). As for television-related texts to engage with, one could consider the update-adaptation of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes detective stories into the popular CBS Elementary (2012–), which notoriously reformed the famous detective’s sidekick character from male to female (i.e. Doyle’s John Watson played by Lucy Liu), while I  would also recommend analysing the popular Danish/Swedish show Broen/Bron (2011–), alongside the Americanoriented Fox adaptation of its US/Mexican version The Bridge (2013–14), and/ or its British/French remake The Tunnel (2013–) even. In so doing, one could investigate such crime fiction ‘travels’ not only from one domain (medium/ language/culture) to another, but also whatever other domains that fictional work found itself travelling to next, or at the same time even. Besides, as Stam (2000: 66) notes, certain adaptations ‘are caught up in the ongoing whirl of textual reference and transformation, of texts generating other texts in an endless process of recycling, transformation and transmutation, with no clear point of origin’. It is these multiple genre-crossing texts’ shifting process that cognitive stylistics can explain. In fact, using the kind of cognitive, linguistic, narratological and multimodal approach this book proposes, a range of adaptation-types could be explored, not limiting oneself to the kinds of prose, filmic, televisual and theatrical-related adaptations this book was framed by. One could consider this crime fictional ‘effect’ (as in ‘phenomenon’) in relation to media such as songs, musicals and

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operas, paintings, graphic novels, various forms of dance (such as ballet), not to mention radio- and game-related adaptations, to name but a few. An example of the latter kind of migration one could engage with is the adventure videogame adaptation of the Showtime Dexter show into Dexter the Game (2009). Even more so, the fan fiction phenomenon could be explored, its relationship with the related source texts unpacked (see Gregoriou, under consideration, for an analysis of the fan fiction generated in response to Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss’ televisual BBC Sherlock, 2010–now,  – arguably itself fan fiction). As noted in this last source (Gregoriou, under consideration), media producers presently themselves strategically incorporate fans’ creative works into new productions (Zeng, 2012: 199), with fan fiction prosumers (Toffler’s 1980 term for ‘producing consumers’) ultimately influencing series production in various interesting ways. The televisual BBC Sherlock (2010–) show producers do more than interact with fans via social media; they respond through the show itself, indirectly allowing fans to shape the show, hence redefining the relationship between television shows and their fans (see Lawson, 2014). In other words, fan fiction itself merits analysis given the impact that it can potentially have on the source texts it responds to, whether that source form is novel, televisual, filmic or otherwise (where that form is in serial format, of course, with fan fiction being generated, and hence potentially affecting, later ‘source’-like texts). I here focused on texts generated during the economic crisis-related era, given that, as previously noted, adapters turn to safe bets more so at times of economic downturn (Hutcheon, 2006: 5), and yet case studies need not be limited to this era alone; altogether other, and narrower/wider, periods could be explored instead. Even more so, one need not limit themselves to the genre of crime fiction, as undoubtedly true as the ‘migration phenomenon’ is to it. One could extend such research to analysis of true crime narratives in relation to this effect (narratives which, in any case, like media narratives – see, for instance, Surette, 1998, and Gregoriou, 2011b  – blur fact and fiction). Looking at such films as director Goold’s True Story (2015), for instance, could prove fruitful, particularly alongside the memoirs which inspired it (namely Finkel’s 2006 True Story: Murder, Memoir, Mea Culpa, which was shortlisted for a 2006 Best Fact Crime Edgar Allan Poe award). Verbatim music-theatre London Road (2011) (book and lyrics by Alecky Blythe, music and lyrics by Adam Cork) and its 2015 same-named filmic adaptation (directed by Norris) also merit such analysis, given these having been inspired by witness interviews following the October– December 2006 Ipswich serial murders, which an analyst can also access (for critical discourse analysis of the press media’s reports on Ipswich serial killer

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Steven Wright, see Gregoriou, 2011b). Finally, Blacklock’s (2015) I’m Jack merits such stylistic attention, this being a multilayered novel inspired by real life reports, interviews and letters relating to the story of John Humble, also known as Wearside Jack, a hoaxer who misled the 1970s British investigations into serial killer Peter Sutcliffe’s whereabouts. Further to having been inspired by various sorts of texts, Blacklock’s (2015) I’m Jack is being adapted into a film and would be worth exploring. Needless to say perhaps, but non-crime related fictional/non-fictional migrations would also be worth analysing with tools of the kind I here employed. Such analyses can be employed in relation to Boyne’s fable-novel (2006) The Boy in the Striped Pajamas (the title spelling of ‘pajamas’ being American) having been adapted into Herman’s (2008) film for instance (for a ‘mind style’ analysis of the book, see Gregoriou, 2014). The Fifty Shades erotica book trilogy by E. L. James (2011–12) evolved from Twilight fan fiction published by the same writer on www.fanfiction.net (Warner, 2012), and itself inspired director Taylor-Johnson’s Fifty Shades (2015–18) film trilogy in turn, which one could look at alongside it. Suzanne Collin’s young adult science fiction Hunger Games (2008–10) books might also be explored, their (cognitive stylistic) relation with the (2012–15) films (the first directed by Ross, and the rest by Lawrence) unpacked. With respect to filmic remake analysis of crime fiction, one could compare the Stieg Larsson (2008) The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo namesake film adaptation (Män som hatar kvinnor in Swedish, which literally translates to Men Who Hate Women, directed by Niels Arden Oplev) – which ‘quickly attained the status of the most successful Swedish film of all time’ (Forshaw, 2012: 188) – with its US filmic counterpart: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011, directed by David Fincher). Even more so, various translated texts (and filmic, theatrical, and other remakes) could be employed in analysis by those who speak the languages in question without one restricting themselves to adaptations in, out of, and across, English media alone, like I effectively have here. In fact, several translations of the same text are worth stylistically exploring, comparing, and contrasting simultaneously, by those who speak the relevant languages. At the same time, and as Milton (2009: 54) notes, ‘[t]he tendency is to adapt much more when we are translating from a language which is much further away from the source language than a language which is grammatically much closer’, so the family/grammatical ‘closeness’ of the languages in question needs accounting for also. And, as Venuti (2007:  29)  says, ‘[t]he structural differences between languages, even between languages that bear significant lexical and syntactical resemblances stemming

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from shared etymologies or a history of mutual borrowing, require the translator variously to dismantle, rearrange, and finally displace the chain of signifiers that make up the source text’. As stylistics is literary language-focused, it has much to offer to crime fiction translation study in and of itself. Even more so, the present book, as well as Alexander (2008), Emmott and Alexander (2010) and Emmott, Sanford and Alexander (2010), highlight the ways in which language can be used so as to control, manipulate and cognitively misdirect the crime fiction reader, and it is such rhetorical and stylistic features that one might want to closely explore when it comes to translation. In section 2.2 , which focused on Shriver’s (2003) We Need to Talk about Kevin, I draw attention to the ways in which the reader is manipulated into thinking that Franklin is alive and well for a big chunk of both the novel and its filmic adaptation. Turning the focus to the translation of a given crime novel, like I have in section 3.1 , how have a particular book’s source writer, and also their translator, managed to manipulate their respective readerships, maintaining illusions so as to generate narrative surprise toward the text’s end? Such genre-specific, and linguistic, issues are worth investigating in relation to translation, particularly where the target language problematizes such manipulation, and the translator is challenged into maintaining such illusions as the source producer has, but in the target language this time. See also Seago (2014b) for a discussion of inference exploitation (gaps in the text which the reader fills on the basis of their own background schematic knowledge), and also rhetorical manipulation (where plot-significant information is presented in such a way that the important is hidden and the unimportant is prominent), themselves problematized in German translations of Agatha Christie’s crime novels. In one of the examples Seago discusses, the translation of grammatical gender introduces shifts and makes things explicit that the source text deliberately left open while, in another, the translator’s ‘tidying up’ of a text comes to undercut the author’s intention to confuse the reader. I referred to such translating challenges in my analyses in sections 3.1 and 3.3 too. As Griggs (2016: 257) points out, ‘[a]daptation is not a neat painting by numbers exercise; it is instead a complex process that involves complex transitions, both cultural and ideological, in response to changing modes of storytelling and adaptive intent’. A  cognitive and multimodal stylistic approach offers an understanding of this process, and of the interplay between verbal and nonverbal semiotic systems, important as these interchanges are particularly when it comes to the ever so popular genre of crime fiction now more than ever perhaps, while it finds itself persistently migrating worldwide.

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189

Index Abrams, Marilyn 9, 141 adaptations of literature and film 2–8, 26–8, 54, 56, 77–8, 166–9 as advertisement 5 and fidelity 54, 165 novelization as atypical 26 reasons for 5 timings of 6 transculturated 135 Agger, G. 14, 16, 17, 20 Aixelá, F. 106, 108 Akass, K. 17, 23, 25 Alexander, M. 154, 169 Altheide, D. 40 Amazon 5, 50, 77 Amyna Zonis/ Zone Defence (2007–8) 105 Anderson, J. 9 Andrew, D. 6 ‘anodyne’ gesture 128 Archer, N. 22, 27, 32, 34 Arvaniti, A. 142 Asperger’s syndrome 68, 70, 82 audiences American 23, 25, 135–6, 139–41 concept of ‘fourth wall’ see ‘fourth wall’ hunger for violence 120–4, 131, 132, 138 ‘knowing’ 4, 24, 26, 28, 37 new 5 participation of 143–63 ‘unknowing’ 4, 7, 32, 36 as victim of movie manipulation 126, 130 Austin, J. 11 author, linguistics of 7 autism 67–77 characteristics of 69–72 Christopher in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003) 67–77 creative imagination 81 inability to synthesize information 71 and Sherlock Holmes 69

‘autistic savants’ 68 awards, 6, 18, 40, 63, 67 Best Fact Crime Edgar Allan Poe 167 British Academy of Film and Television Awards (BAFTAs) 18 Olivier Award 8, 79, 82 Orange Prize 40 Raven Award 141 Tony Award 8 Baetens, J. 25–6, 27, 31, 33 BAFTAs, see British Academy of Film and Television Awards (BAFTAs) Bak, Frans 22–3 Baker, P. 94 Baldick, C. 11, 87 Barbeito, P. 94 BBC 11, 17–18, 70, 81–2, 83, 167 ‘The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time: From Page to Stage’ 81–3 BBC4 17–18 Becker, Judy 57 Benedict, D. 81–4, 88 Benny’s Video (1992) 134 Berger, J. 68 Bezos, Yannis 103 ‘bisociation’ 145, 159 Bitter Lemon Press 93 Blackford, H. 69 Blacklock, M. 168 Boellstorff, T. 145 Bolton, J. 77 Bönnemark, M. 158 Bordwell, D. 56 Borger, J. 94 Boyle, K. 25 Boyne, J. 168 Boyum, J. 4, 54–5, 78, 83 Bradshaw, P. 120–1 Breslauer, J. 141, 151–2 Brinkema, E. 117, 127, 133, 138

190

190

Index

British Academy of Film and Television Awards (BAFTAs) 18, 27 Brown, J. 159 Brown, P. 11, 49, 74, 96, 115 Brunette, P. 9, 120, 122, 124, 126, 128, 131, 135–40 Büchler, A. 18, 93 Burks, A. 68, 79 Busse, K. 3 Calhoun, D. 135 Callery, D. 77 Cannes 124 Cardwell, S. 2, 3 Carter, J. 70 Cartmell, D. 2, 26 cataphora 30, 110–11 Charles, D. 143, 152, 153, 160 child trafficking 98 choreography 80, 82–3 Chow, A. 142, 144, 159–60 Christie, N. 20 Ciocia, S. 73, 84 Clemens, T. 18 Clover, C. 128 ‘Clue on steroids’ 144 Cobley, P. 17, 19 cognitive poetics 1 cognitive stylistics 1, 7, 10, 25, 27, 38, 40–1, 54–5, 67, 71, 78–9, 91, 95, 106, 109–10, 141, 165–6 Colbran, M. 19 Collins, J. 5, 6, 141, 151 Collins-Hughes, L. 141, 152 Columbine massacre 38–9 Comedy Hall of Fame 141 commercial novelization 27 conceptual metaphor theory 10 Connolly, David 8, 95, 106–14, 114, 165 see also The Late-Night News (2004), translation from Nichterino Deltio (Νυχτερινό Δελτίο) [1995] (2009) Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide 7 Costas Haritos series 8, 94–6 costumes 36–7, 47, 56, 63, 63–4, 88 crime fiction migration effect 2, 3–4 crime fiction migration categories 6–7 popularity of 3, 4–5

‘critical stylistic noticing’ 7 cross-cutting 22 ‘crossover’ novels 67 Culpeper, J. 146 ‘culturally specific items’ 101, 106, 108 Curious Incident of the Dog in the NightTime, The (2003) (book) 8, 67–77 as articulation of disability 68 lack of emotional empathy 76–7 film adaptation 77–8 frame theory 74–7 ‘metafiction’ 83–4 mind as computer 70–1, 82–3 MIND IS A RECORDING metaphor 68 ‘mind style’ 10–11, 67, 68 ‘miscuing’ 75–6 over-elaborating tendency 72 plot 69 politeness theory 74 theatre version see The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003) (theatre) transitivity analysis of 71 visual elements 70 Curious Incident of the Dog in the NightTime, The (2003) (theatre) 8, 68, 77–91 adaptability 83–4 awards 79 BBC 81–3 choreography 80, 82–3 costumes 88 ‘metafiction’ 83–4 metatheatrical elements 83–7 mind-blindness 79 multi-role playing 82 music 82–3, 86–7 National Theatre Live 78, 81 proscenium arch version 78, 81 special effects to portray Christopher’s mind 80–3 translation for Greek theatre 77, 89–90 Cypriot 7, 9, 142–3, 145, 147, 153 Dalamanga-Kalogirou, Margarita 77, 89 Dalglish, D. 150, 159 Damien: Omen II 59 Davies, Paul 64 Davis, J. 94 Deadline in Athens 8

19

Index Death in a Cold Climate: A Guide to Scandinavian Crime Fiction 15 Derry, C. 130, 134 ‘deviance’ model 8, 68, 115, 126 Dexter (2006–13) 58, 60, 130, 166–7 Diderot, Denis 86 directors 54–5, 82, 84–5, 101, 118, 126, 132, 135, 159, 166–8 ‘discourse’ 34–5 defined 19, 45 versus plot 39, 103, 124, 145, 161 Dixon, S. 105 Dobrov, G. 152 Dodd, S. 71 domestication 8–9, 25, 106, 108 Downing, L. 38–40, 42 Doyle, Conan 3, 70, 84, 166 Draaisma, D. 68 dubbing 13 Duer, Rocky 63 Durham, S. 140 Eisenman, P. 128 Elliott, K. 54, 79 Elliott, Marianne 79 Elsaesser, T. 118, 134 Emmott, C. 10, 21, 50 English language, prominence 13 Enos, Mireille 23–4 Euronoir 28, 93–4, 102–3 Evans, L. 3 ‘Everyday’ 64 Ezard, J. 77 fan fiction 3–4, 167–8 Fiddler, M. 116, 119, 133 fidelity 6, 54, 165 film communicative power of 54–5 humour and sarcasm of book version lost 55 Filmslie 123, 124, 126, 130, 131, 132, 134, 139 ‘final girl’ 128 Finkel, M. 167 Finkle, D. 156, 159 ‘flashcard memorising’ 144 Flynn, G. 166 food, and crime fiction writing 32, 101, 109–10

191

footnotes 108–9 Forbrydelsen 8–9, 13–24 awards 18 costumes 16–17, 20, 23–4, 26 evocation of society’s injustices 17, 22 music of 22–3 nominations 18 plot 16–19 leisurely development of 18–19 red herrings 21–2 reversal of masculine and feminine stereotypes 20 ‘single mother’ role 20 ‘undeserving victim’ 19–20 Forshaw, B. 3, 14–18 ‘fourth wall’ 86, 121–2, 124, 136, 152 cinematic versus theatrical 86, 121, 152 Fowler, R. 10, 68, 117 frame repairing 10, 21, 22, 50, 52, 75, 76, 100, 104, 120, 133, 154 frame theory 10, 52, 53, 74, 144, 154 framing, crime fiction 10 Franklin 38–54 free indirect discourse (FID) 34–5 Freed, B. 59, 127, 141 Frisch, Arno 134, 140 Frost, V. 17, 36 Funny Games (1997) 9, 104, 115 audience’s enjoyment of violence 121–2, 130 camera angles and shot lengths 131–4 ‘fourth wall’ 121–2, 124, 136 ‘game’ rules 123–6 irony 126–8 link between sex and violence 131–2 miscuing 119–20 music 128–31 plot and structure 115–20 red herring 128 ‘re-do’ scene 123–4, 127–8 title’s meaning 124–6 unseen violence 132–3 Funny Games (US) (2007) 9, 115, 135–41 audience alienation due to selfreflexivity 136, 138 cultural differences 137 ‘fourth wall’ as violation 121–2, 124, 136, 138 linguistic differences 137–8 Naomi Watts 138–9

192

192 soundtrack 138 updates 137–8 Furlong, A. 165 Furst, L. 19 Gambaudo, S. 41 Gavins, J. 43 Genette, G. 3, 104 Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The 168 Gold Dagger 94 Grabol, Sofie 16–17, 24, 105 Graham, Scott 82 Greek writers 8 Greenwood, Jonny 64 Gregoriou, C. 3–44, 118, 126, 130, 148, 155, 166, 168 Grice, H. 71 Griggs, Y. 2, 6, 69 Grundmann, R. 9, 120, 123, 127 Haddon, Mark 8, 67–79 Hale, T. 13, 47, 93, 108 Haneke, M. 9, 115, 118–39 Hantke, S. 140 Haritos, Costas 8, 94–114, 165–6 Hark, I. 26, 27 Hartmann, Troels 17–18, 21, 29–31, 36 Hatzisavvas, Minas 95 Haut, W. 15 HBO The Wire (2002–8) 16 Hewson, David 8, 15, 16 book marketing 27–8 high-art novelization 27 Hoggett, Steven 82 human trafficking 98 Hurwitt, R. 143 Hutcheon, L. 3–6, 23, 26, 55, 56, 95, 135, 141, 167 interactivity 9, 43–4, 55, 95–6, 141–2, 143–4, 146–7, 152, 154, 163 interiority, of novels 55 Jacobson, E. 106 James, E. 168 Jenkins, H. 7 Jeremiah, E. 41 Johnston, D. 55, 65 Johnston, S. 120, 127, 136, 138, 139

Index Jordan, Bruce 9, 141, 142, 159, 160 Justice, C. 126 Karatzogiannis, Manos 89–90 Kärrholm, S. 14 Kenny, D. 106 Killing, The (TV series) 8, 17, 23–5 Americanization of 23–4 Killing, The, novelization of 8, 15, 25–38 author 28 chain as ‘stupid’ 37 costuming 26, 28, 30–1, 36–7 differences from source text 28, 29–31, 32–6 empathetic characters 35 as high-art 27–8 narrative device 31–2 character perspective 33–4 reminders of Danish cultural origin 32–3, 36 script-like prose 33 similarities to source text 29 Kingston, J. 9, 153, 160 Klotzko, A. 81, 82, 88 Kloves, Steve 77 ‘knowing’ audience 4, 24, 26–7, 28, 37 Koehler, R. 120, 124, 130, 135–40 Kokkinopoulos, Panos 101 Kotziakaro Teza (2011–13) 9, 142 Krebs, K. 8 Labov, W. 19, 44, 88 Laine, T. 23, 32, 46, 131, 140 Lakoff, G. 10, 57 Larsson, Stieg 93, 168 Late-Night News, The (2004), translation from Nichterino Deltio (Νυχτερινό Δελτίο) [1995] (2009) 8, 95, 106–14 allusion to source text being Greek 106–7 cataphora 30, 110–11 dictionary translations 113–14 ‘direct’ translation 106 explicitation 108, 109 footnotes 108–9 linguistic transculturation 107–14 phonetic misspellings 111–12 politeness-related markers 112

193

Index translation of food 108–10 transliteration 108, 109 Latham, M. 41–9 Laverty, C. 64 Lawson, M. 167 Leech, G. 35 Leitch, T. 4, 24, 54, 55, 83 Lekaki, Maria 104 Levinson, Barry 68 Ley, G. 17, 19, 68 Lindsay, J. 120, 166 linguistic politeness 11, 115–16 linguistic transculturation 107–14 Livia, A. 145 Lübecker, N. 123 Luckin, N. 123, 135, 139 Lund, Sarah 16–17, 19–20, 22, 23–5 appearance 36 attire 16–17, 26, 36–7 as empathetic in book 35 ‘single mother’ role 20 sweater 16–17, 26, 36–7 Lykidis, A. 137 Mahlknecht, J. 5 Malinowski, C. 73 Malling, Soren 16–17 Mandel, E. 157, 158 Maris, Yannis 94 Markaris, Petros 8, 9, 93–8, 101, 104–14, 165–6 financial-crisis related fiction 94–5 nation-crossing fiction 94–5 McFarlane, B. 54 McGettigan, A. 117, 120, 132 McGill, H. 59 McIntyre, D. 56, 71, 78 ‘media’ 2–3 ‘in medias res’ narrative 143, 149 interdependency 5 meaning 2 portrayal of violence in 121 producers 167 transmedia stories 7–8 ‘melodrama’ 57 defined 16 Messer, J. 41, 46 Messier, V. 3, 118, 120, 124, 128, 133, 137–8 metadrama 11, 87, 104–5, 152

193

‘metafiction’ 83–4, 90–1, 105, 121–4 ‘metafunctions of deviance’ model 8, 115 metalepsis, narrative 104, 153 metaphors 33–4, 44–8 blood 59–60 CRIME IS A GAME 126 COALITION IS SEX 18 cognitive 10 DARK IS BAD 57 DOWN IS BAD 57 KILLERS ARE PLAYERS 126 LIFE IS A STORY 45 MIND IS A RECORDING 68 POLITICS IS WAR/ A (VIOLENT) GAME 18 UP IS GOOD 59 metatheatre 9, 11, 83–7, 142, 152–63 Miller, Ezra 40, 58, 60, 62–4 Milton, J. 168 Mimic 59 ‘mind style’ 10–11, 67, 68, 73, 117, 166, 168 Miramax 5 miscuing 50–3, 119–20 misdirection 37, 97 misspellings, phonetic 111–12 ‘mode’ defined 1–2 Monk, L. 130, 136–40 ‘monstrous doubling’ 41–2 Montoro, R. 10, 70 Moore, A. 166 Morvern Callar (2002) 55 Muhe, Ulrich 134 Muller, V. 48, 60 Mulrooney, M. 28 multimodality 8 Murray, S. 5, 7, 68 music diegetic 104, 129–30 Forbrydelsen 22–3 Funny Games (1997) 128–31 non-diegetic 104, 129–30 self-reflexivity 104–5 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003) (theatre) 82–3, 86–7 We Need to Talk about Kevin (film) 64–5 mystery novel, rules 144 Mystery Writers of America 141

194

194

Index

National Theatre 8 ‘negative politeness’ see politeness theory Neon Noir 15 Nestingen, A. 14, 16 Newell, Jasper 63 Nichterino Deltio (Νυχτερινό Δελτίο) [1995] (2009) 8, 95–105 cognitive reprocessing 100 food 101 linguistic migration 95–6 naming strategy 99 racism 95, 97 red herrings 97–8 suspense-generating cataphoric referencing in opening 96–7 televisual adaptation (1998–99) 95, 101–5 translation into The Late-Night News (2004) 95, 106–14 ‘noir’ genre 15 Nordic noir 3, 93 defined by temperature/climate 15 deviance from expected norm 15–16 melodramatic conventions 16 observations relating to injustice 15 popularity 14–15 ‘single mother’ depictions 20 sociopolitical urban injustices 22 Nordic Noir: The Pocket Essential Guide to Scandinavian Crime Fiction, Film and TV 14 novelization 5–6, 8, 25–7 as typical adaptation process 26 commercial 27 as commodification of art 26–7 high-art 27 novels’ filmic adaptation 166

Pepper, A. 105 Peucker, B. 125 Phipps, G. 42 phonetic misspellings 111–12 ‘plot’ defined 19, 145 versus discourse 39, 103, 124, 145, 161 police procedural 1 defined 16 politeness theory 11, 49, 74, 96–7, 112, 115–18 politeness-related markers 112 Porter, L. 3 Pörtner, P. 9, 141–3, 147–8, 150–1, 155–6 ‘positive politeness’ see politeness theory Povlsen, K. 15, 18, 20 ‘precision comedy’ 144 Price, B. 120, 129, 131, 135 Priestman, M. 16 Quinn, M. 60, 62, 65

O’Hagan, S. 52, 55, 56 O’Neill, M. 40, 41 Olivier Award 8, 79, 82 Onega, S. 2, 64, 65 Orange Prize 40

racism 95, 97 Rainman (1988) 68 Ramsay, Lynne 8, 40, 54–65, 132 interest in photography 55 taboo subjects 55 Ratcatcher (1999) 55 Raven Award 141 Ray, R. 5, 10, 11, 22 recycling 7, 26, 152–3, 166 red herrings 21, 97–8, 128, 146, 154–5 remakes 3–6, 9, 16, 23–4, 105, 115, 121, 130, 135–42, 166, 168 Rhodes, J. 120, 137 Richards, D. 141, 150–1 Robbins, R. 41 Robey, T. 58, 60, 61, 66 Rodger, J. 154 Rosemary’s Baby 59 Roth, M. 64, 139 Roth, Tim 139 Russell, D. 116, 119, 120

Palmer, L. 129, 138 parallel editing 22 paratexts 27–8, 81, 91 Pavis, P. 162, 163 Peacock, S. 14 Pelecanos, George 94

Scaggs, J. 16 ‘Scandinavian crime fiction’, see Nordic noir ‘schema theory’ 48–9 Scherenschnitt 9 Schmitt, N. 141, 152–9

195

Index Se7en (1995) 17 Seago, K. 165, 169 Searle, J. R. 11 Sebold, A. 166 Seger, L. 5 Semino, E. 68–74 serial killer narratives 19, 47, 60, 167–8 series, crime fiction migration 9 Seward, Robyn 81 sex, and violence 131–2 Sharrett, C. 119, 129, 131 Shear Madness 9, 141–63 audience addressed 143–4 double-meaning pun 145 improvisation 143, 146, 147–8, 160 interactivity 9, 141–2, 143–4, 146–7, 152, 154, 163 metatheatrical 9, 142 audience participation 152–9 ‘bisociation’ 159 choric dancing and singing 162–3 ‘play about the play’ 160–1 real-life referentiality 159 Pirgos Eleias performance of Greek play 146–7 plot 147–51 re-enactments 161 topical references 159–60 website 141, 144 Sherlock Holmes 3, 11, 70 Shklovsky, V. 116 Shriver, Lionel 169 We Need to Talk about Kevin (book) 8, 25, 38–54 Shuttleworth, I. 154 Siegel, L. 14, 15 Sierz, A. 77 Simonsen, K– 14 Simpson, P. 19 Sorfa, D. 120 speech act theory 11 ‘speech acts’ 11 ‘spielen’ 125 Stacey, J. 63 Stafford, Mark 55, 60, 63 Stam, R. 65 Stanley, A. 78 Stephens, Simon 8, 68, 77–91 Stockwell, P. 9, 71

195

subtitling 13 dislike of 13–14, 23 ‘super crips’ 68 Surette, R. 167 Sutton, Adrian 82, 83 Sveistrup, Soren 27 Sweeting, A. 23 Swinton, Tilda 40, 58, 63–4 Symons, J. 159 Talley, H. 68, 69 televisual adaptation of Nichterino Deltio (1998–99) 95, 101–5 humour 103–4 metadrama 105 metafiction 105 ‘thriller’, defined 16 Tony Award 8 Toury, G. 106 translations Anglophone resistance to 93–4, 105 awards 93–4 challenges of task of 105–6 ‘deficit’ 93–4 ‘direct’ versus ‘indirect’ 106 Nichterino Deltio (Νυχτερινό Δελτίο) [1995] (2009) 95–105 statistics 93 transliteration 108, 109 transmedia stories, defined 7 Treadaway, Luke 79, 82, 83, 88 Tzarmagias, Takis 89 Valdrè, R. 40, 42, 62, 67 ‘vampire’ criminal archetype 118 Vanacker, S. 3 Venuti, L. 6, 106, 160, 165, 168 Verdaguer, P. 101 Vervenioti, E. 94 ‘victim deservedness’ scale 19–20 Viding, E. 10, 30, 41, 128 violence adolescent 40, 41 portrayal by media 121 viewers’ enjoyment of 120–4, 130, 131, 132, 138 ‘voice-overs’ 13 Wagner, G. 6 Waites, A. 141, 151–3

196

196

Index

Wales, K. 158 Walsh, C. 71, 74 Warner, K. 168 Watts, Naomi 138–9 Waugh, H. 144 We Need to Talk about Kevin (book) 8, 38–54 adolescent violence 40, 41 award 40 Celia 40, 42, 47–54 colour red 47–8 difficulties for dramatization 55–6 epistolary novel 38 Eva 38–54 bad mothering 41, 67 irony and humour 48 lack of emotional connection with son 38, 45–6, 67 miscuing 50–3 travelling 44, 45, 47 unwilling motherhood 38, 41, 45–6 film adaptation 40 Kevin 38–54 enjoyment in killing 38–9 linguistic style 43–54 ‘evaluation’ 44 ‘monstrous doubling’ 41–2 nature/nurture question 38, 39 Oedipus complex 42 ‘schema theory’ 48–9 ‘whydunit’ 50 We Need to Talk about Kevin (film) 8, 54–67 ‘acting’ 57–8 actors’ performance 62–3 ambient sound 65 background images 61–2

background noise 56, 63, 65–7 bad seed 59 costume 63–4 fidelity 54 ‘masks’ 57 metaphor 59–61 blood 59–60, 67 mirrors 57, 67 ‘mise en scene’ 56–7 music score and sound design 64–5 objectification of Eva 58–9 silence 55, 65 similarities and differences from book version 56 subtitling 65–6 unwilling motherhood 60–1 Webb, J. 41 Weiner, A. 162 Werth, P. 43 Wheatley, C. 120–3, 134 Whitbread Book of the Year (2003) 67 ‘Who killed the dog at midnight’ 77, 89–90 whodunit 1, 19, 50, 67, 141, 144, 151, 163 Wiedenmayer, A. 101, 109 William, J. 51, 79 Wulff, H. 30 X Files 59 Zatlin, P. 165 Zeng, L. 167 Zunshine, L. 79 ‘μαλάκας’ 96–9, 102, 111 ‘Ποιός σκότωσε το σκύλο τα μεσάνυχτα’ 77, 89–90 Σεσουάρ για δολοφόνους (1999–2012) 9

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