A Cock-and-Bull Story? A Study of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and Michael Winterbottom’s Film Adaptation

This essay attempts to explore Michael Winterbottom’s daring film adaptation of Laurence Sterne’s Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Winterbottom’s film, Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story 2005), should more appropriately be renamed The Life and Opinions of Steve Coogan, Actor because it focuses mainly on Steve Coogan’s triple roles as Tristram Shandy, his father Walter, and the actor himself. By paralleling Steve’s life and opinions with those of Tristram in the original novel, Winterbottom tries to materialize and re-present the almost unfilmable bstractions in the novel with regard to the linguistic play and its endless associations, the latent conflicts between the characters, the protean narrative structure, and the ever-present sexual innuendos. Interpolating the life experiences of actors and crew into the film adaptation, Winterbottom ingeniously creates a film as fragmentary and disjointed as the original novel. Nonetheless, the film also presents a simultaneously progressive and digressive story line as Tristram claims in the novel. Just like the world of Sterne’s novel which is filled with neurotic preoccupations and personal eccentricities, such as Toby’s hobbyhorse of fortifications and battles, Walter’s pseudo-scientific philosophy, and Tristram’s special kind of writing, Michael Winterbottom successfully, to a great extent, creates a cinematic world of unintelligible asterisks, incomprehensible dashes, impenetrable spaces, and never-ending digressions.