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Rescuing Fidelity? Alain Badiou's Truth Event and Four Adaptations of The Great Gatsby

ABSTRACT The concept of fidelity has long been one of the seminal debates with regard to film adaptation—often roundly denounced by key critics as a reductive model in which the adaptation is routinely diminished. Equally, the very concept of “truth” has, until recently, been consistently under fire from relativist theorists. This article seeks to relocate the controversial concept of fidelity in relation to film adaptation, by using contemporary philosopher Alain Badiou's proposition that truth is produced through “fidelity to an event.” This premise is used to interrogate four film adaptations of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. By including an analysis of the directorial intentions and context of these films in the light of Badiou's ideas, we find possible reasons for their perceived failure within particularity and imitative approaches, an excessive concern with Fitzgerald's treasured cultural status, and commercial motivations, thereby moving the locus of fidelity well away from a traditional conception of homage and copying. In doing so, a case is made to reassert the value of a concept of truth and fidelity in relation to adaptation.