The South African film Boy Called Twist (2004) reimagines the Dickens novel Oliver Twist (1837-1839) as a simple tale set in modern Cape Town. While the film photocopies the major narrative beats represented in the novel, the lack of a strong narrator recasts those beats into a simple melodrama. The story that was once a protest, through satire, of unfair laws became maudlin and directionless. Boy Called Twist is more about one lost child miraculously rediscovering his family than anything else. This transformation occurs not because the film radically changes the narrative, rather it is the lack of a narrator and the lack of a narrator’s voice that causes the damage. The anthropomorphized narrator in Oliver Twist not only makes the horrific palatable, it offers reassurance that the violence that is depicted is not without purpose. The cold eye of the camera, which replaces the narrator of the novel, cannot replicate these powers. The constrast between these ‘voices’ is best understood in an important scene that is represented in both the novel and the film.
Consider the scene from the novel where young Oliver is beaten by Mr. Sowerberry for fighting with Noah, Charlotte, and Mrs. Sowerberry.
This flood of tears left Mr. Sowerberry no alternative. If he had hesitated for one instant to punish Oliver most severely, it must be quite clear to every experienced reader that he would have been according to all precedents in disputes of matrimony established, a brute, and unnatural husband, an insulting creature, a base imitation of a man; and various other agreeable characters too numerous for recital within the limits of this chapter…. So he at once gave him [Oliver] a drubbing, which satisfied even Mrs. Sowerberry herself.
If we ask, in the method of Stanley Fish, what is the text doing, it easy to see the text here is simultaneously creating distance between audience and violence against a child and damning Mr. Sowerberry for that violence. The distance is created by addressing both the reader and the narrative directly, “It must be quite clear to every experenced reader,” which is quickly followed by “For recital within the limits of this chapter.” This direct address breaks the narrative spell and reminds the reader this is, after all, only a story. Distance is also created here by the volumn of the prose used between the start of the incident and the actual drubbing. This distance makes the abuse of the child palatable to the experienced reader.
The damning of Sowerberry occurs in the list of adjectives and descriptive phrases the narrator uses to describe Mr. Sowerberry: a brute, unnatrual, insulting, a base imitation of a man. While in context the narrator is claiming Mr. Sowerberry would be these things if he did not beat Oliver, in fact he is listing the very thoughts the reader has of Mr. Sowerberry while he is beating Oliver. By subverting the narrative expectation, Dickens is making fun of Mr. Sowerberry which cast him as a powerless fool. This damning of Mr. Sowerberry assures the reader with something akin to a textual wink that the story exists in a just universe. The violence depicted here, it says tacitly, is not without purpose.
Next consider the same scene depicted in the film, Boy Called Twist. The action is essentially the same, the only major difference is the beating is handed out by Mr. Bedel (the movie version of Mr. Bumble) rather than Mr. Sowerberry. Mr. Bedel shows up at the Sowerberry residence, finds Twist locked in an armoire, and asks if he is afraid. Twist says, “No.” Bedel pulls the child out of the closet, throws him down, plants a knee in his back, and proceeds to whip him with a cane. And the camera must show us the entirety of the drubbing that would satisfy Mrs. Sowerberry as this scene sums up Twist’s motivation for the rest of the film. The audience must be convinced that whatever Twist may face from Fagin, Bill, and Cape Town, his experience in country was worse. To fail to show the violence here would be to undercut this important narrative support.
So the same scene with and without a narrator has two separate meanings. In the novel, the narrator uses the scene to undercut the power of Sowerberry and by extension the power of the system that so neatly trapped Oliver. Sowerberry is not a powerful man. He is a henpecked husband. The drubbing that Oliver receives is not serious or dangerous; the reader does not feel its power the way the reader might feel the death of Nancy for example. By contrast the scene in the film builds the power of Bedel. He was already the slave driver, or near slave driver, who wielded power over Twist and the other children from the orphanage. The beating Twist receives is not the first he has received in the film from the this man, and Twist is powerless against this man every time. Twist is not running from an unfair system. He is running from a very real and very dangerous dragon, who will continue to beat and humiliate him forever. The facts of the scene are the same, but the flavor is completely different.