The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

In the twenty-first century, film adaptation studies shifted to the reworking of the literary text within the new sociopolitical situation of the time. Such literary theories as cultural materialism can explicate the film adaptation. Here, Daneliya’s Hopelessly Lost (1973) is investigated focusing on the political orientations of the Soviet-American Cold War. Hence, through cultural materialism a window is opened unto the past literary text of Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to be read within the political presence of the Cold War. Per se, Sinfield’s practice of reading known as a ‘theater of war’ is applied to show the cracks and the faultlines that the director has used to depict his narrative of the Cold War. Therefore, it is demonstrated that Hopelessly Lost (1973) is a film adaptation that has focused on those parts of the novel that contain the dark images of the United States and attempts to develop the types of mutations that are in line with this orientation. Altogether the narrative of the film adaptation promulgates a grim reality that implicates the inevitable downfall of the United States amidst the political alignment of the Cold War through the character of Uncle Sam.

Adaptation studies gained a renewed focus on the understanding of the mutations contained in the area of film adaptation namely by drawing on theorists like Linda Hutcheon and Robert Stam. This being the case, studying the film adaptation is to work as a platform to detect the social, political and cultural changes of the history. Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as a nationally definitive work for the American literature has been persistently adapted to films since the advent of cinema. Mostly these adaptations occur at specific historical times in American history like Taurog’s adaptation of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1931) that studies the existential reality of the novel during the 1860s. And as adaptation studies, in this perspective, expand the horizon for cultural materialists who investigate the historicity of the text, the type of thinking that is promoted in this study is how the film adaptation ideologically has challenged the core of this nationally definitive text of American literature to further probe into the social and historical issues of the time of adaptations.