Of all the screen adaptations of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, (1) Jonathan Miller's haunting, daring and generally bizarre 1966 television version is arguably both the most faithful to the source text and the most unexpectedly dense and troubling; a fact that—for the first-time viewer, at least—consequently renders it somewhat impenetrable as well. Adopting Carroll's penchant for surrealism and transposing it, necessarily, from the realm of literature to the more Buñuelian terrain (in this case) of cinema, Miller's methods for adapting Carroll's famous 'children's story' may at first strike the audience as being somewhat confounding, though in transposing Alice's dream-like visit to Wonderland in this way, Miller's is ultimately a more aesthetically faithful adaptation of Carroll's work than any seen before or since.

"Distortion is often a way of leading people to see the truth." — Flannery O'Connor

The two key elements of Carroll's original text are both its surreal exploration of Alice's dream state (2) and its implicit (or is it explicit?) social criticism, which is often rather cutting. Importantly, these elements are by no means exclusive, but instead are almost wholly interdependent. Carroll cleverly exploits the surreal, dream-like nature of Wonderland and its inhabitants in order to support his biting social critique, aiming to expose (in as strange a way as possible) the hypocrisy, absurdity and all-round general silliness of the upper-class Victorian society that he himself belonged to. The book's surreal (primarily linguistic) distortions are used by Carroll to highlight some of these criticisms.

Unable to create distortions in the written sense like Carroll can, Miller instead utilises his own language to establish Wonderland's surrealist, dream-like state for the audience. His is the language of cinema, of course, and the film's editing patterns, mise en scène and occasionally perplexing use of voiceover (all of which he uses to distort the audience's perceptions of time and space) can be used to support the argument that Miller's faithfulness to Carroll's work is significantly—if not exclusively—aesthetic in its nature.

The film's editing style, for example, which employs a lot of cross-fades, dissolves and dislocating jump cuts, helps to instil in the picture the narrative 'logic' of a dream. Things happen and events occur, of course, but we're never really sure how, why or even when; time becomes almost completely irrelevant, just as it does in the original text. As in a dream, the audience never really knows how much time has passed or how much of it is currently passing—an experience that, importantly, they share almost directly with Alice.

Indeed, the idea of 'shared experience' is very integral to Miller's adaptation and is reinforced by both the mise en scène (namely in terms of framing and camera placement) and the film's intriguing use of voiceovers, both of which are constantly used to put the audience as close to Alice as 'physically' possible. In doing this, Miller is suggesting to the audience a profound proximity or similarity between Alice's perceptions and their own. Her dream-state, in all its surrealist glory, becomes ours, and Miller as a result is able to force us to see, though Alice's eyes, "a picture of upper-middle-class Victorian society, pompous, stuffy, irascible and addicted to absurd ritual". (3) Clearly, as mentioned earlier, the form (surrealism) and content (social criticism) ultimately become intrinsically and inseparably linked in the final analysis.

Thus, in taking on board Lewis Carroll's aesthetic ideal and rendering it applicable to the cinema by way of editing, mise en scène and voiceover, (4) Miller's adaptation of 'Alice in Wonderland' is ultimately, like its source text, a work of deft social criticism, passing judgment (often harshly!) on the general absurdity of the bourgeois world. The surrealistic methods for distorting the world that are so integral to Carroll's work are adopted with absolute conviction by Miller, and the results—while wholly unlike what we've come to expect from a story that's been arguably compromised by "the Disney and Noddy stuff that has hung around it for so long" (5)—are remarkably faithful, not only to the source text itself, but also to the ideas behind it.

Notes

1. There's no need for a full filmography, of course, suffice to say that almost every decade of the twentieth century saw an adaptation of Alice in Wonderland; from Disney and Czechoslovakian animations to television specials, mini-series and series (such as that which ran in Japan) and from musicals to Hollywood star vehicles to biopic portraits of Lewis Carroll's life.
2. It should be noted that, although Alice in Wonderland is also a favourite of Freudian analysts, Carroll's exploration of the dream state is not openly theoretical but aesthetic.
3. Kemp, P. 'Alice in Wonderland' BFI DVD Sleeve Notes (2003).
4. Though Miller's adaptation was, of course, a television special for BBC1, I personally have no qualms calling it a 'film' or a 'piece of cinema'. It is as much a 'piece of cinema', in my opinion, as, say, Dennis Potter's 'The Singing Detective' (1986) or other such critically acclaimed television works.
5. Miller, J. In: Kemp, P. 'Alice in Wonderland' BFI DVD Sleeve Notes (2003).