Adaptation, Parody, and Disabled Masculinity in Motherless Brooklyn

Abstract

In the 2019 adaptation Motherless Brooklyn, the story is transposed from the 90s to the America of the 50s. These changes were made because of star and director Edward Norton’s desire to have a less ‘ironic’ rendering of the characters present in the text written by Jonathan Lethem. What it results in is a shift in the context that changes the story altogether; not only that but the lack of parody alters the relationship to genre, and the portrayal of disability functions as a performance. This article argues that there are multiple levels of adaptation here: the adaptation of the text, of the present to the past, and an adaptation of disability to fit the understanding of genre and medium. These layers illuminate both societal understandings of masculinity and disability, and Norton’s own, through Hutcheon’s notion of adaptation as palimpsest.