Reading a Film: Character Interiority in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club (1989) and its Film Adaptation (1993)

Film is an audio-visual medium; as such it ‘shows’—rather than ‘tells’—what is happening from an outside perspective. Geoffrey Wagner consequently suggests that in film, “we cannot see what we cannot see; in fiction we can” (183). George Bluestone similarly postulates that film “can lead us to infer thought [but] it cannot show us thought directly” and therefore “the rendition of mental states—memory, dream, imagination—cannot be as adequately represented by film as by language” (47). Film theorists and narratologists have thus maintained that film, as opposed to written works of literature, is inherently less well equipped to handle and represent character interiority—that is, to delve into a character’s mind to reveal their thoughts, dreams, fantasies, memories, as well as emotional and psychological states. However, more recent analyses have demonstrated that there are indeed various “cinematic types of consciousness representation” (Alber 265) that closely mirror novelistic techniques for character interiority.