A film adaptation can erase a novel’s enabling doubt and exoticize its content

Evidence

The same is true of Mira Nair’s somewhat curious film adaptation of The Reluctant Fundamentalist in 2012, starring Riz Ahmed and Liev Schreiber. In this movie, the prevailing suspense of the book is dispensed with almost immediately as Changez unfolds his story to a man we know from the outset to be a CIA agent. This change immediately turns the film into a more conventional thriller and removes that enabling doubt through which prejudices can be confronted. Even more curious is the fact that Nair—director of the successful movie Monsoon Wedding (2001)—at one point decides to send Changez back to Pakistan to attend a relative’s wedding that is every bit as colorful and conventionally exotic as that in her previous feature. (There appears to be nothing very “strategic” about Nair’s exoticism here.) — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 937

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Directly relevant to reader’s hinge — the film’s removal of ‘that enabling doubt’ is the negative mirror of what makes Hamid’s novel contest Islamophobia. Pairs with the novel’s framing device reliance.
• SEED: An essay angle: when does an adaptation betray the political work of its source text, and is that betrayal itself diagnostic of how the culture wants to consume Muslim stories?