Thanks to Twitter, I came across a blog post by one Racecar Brown referencing one of my earlier rantsdiatribesexplorations of the topic of bad boys and nice guys in fiction. And, naturally, I was reminded that I never did finish that series. I suppose that’s a good thing, as now, in the midst of an entirely new book, with a very different sort of romantic pairing than I’ve ever written before, my thoughts have changed again.
Racecar Brown talks mainly about the intense fan reaction to two odious but popular characters: Chuck Bass of the Gossip Girl television show, and Draco Malfoy of Harry Potter. I am most of the way through the second season of Gossip Girl now, and I think Chuck falls on the “love to hate him” side of the spectrum. He’s awful, and he whores around, and etc., but leaving aside the pilot episode in which he tries to rape both Jenny and Serena, his “awfulness” is mostly posited as a sort of rich guy boredom. This is the dude that flies in high priced call girls from Asia — usually two at a time. He opens strip clubs, he takes dirty pictures of Skull & Bones members who try to get him to hurt his friend, and, in a total 180 from his behavior in the pilot, he drops off an underage girl who is throwing herself at him in his limo.
Sailor Boy says that you should usually take everything you see in the pilot of a television show with a grain of salt. The characters aren’t really set yet. How often have you gone back to see the pilot of a show you loved and been like — wait, who IS that person? So I’m willing to give the Gossip Girl people a pass with the whole Chuck Bass: Rapist thing — at least, as far as I’ve seen the show (I just watched the Snowflake Ball episode where Jenny puts Vanessa in the see-through dress.) So I agree with Racecar on that one. The pilot is the problem. He gets it together later on — which is not unlike what the Veronica Mars people do with Logan, though aside from the bum fights and the whole [spoiler spoiler spoiler] at Carrie Bishop’s party, most of what he does isn’t too heinous (and is in fact very similar to Veronica’s shenanigans, and even those two things are certainly no worse than what Weevil pulls. Remember, he and Veronica were actually friends before Lilly died.
(I actually started watching Gossip Girl because I got so many letters from readers saying that Chuck Bass reminds them of Poe and now, having seen it, I can honestly say — Whaaaaaaa? They are both manipulative and given to cruelty, but loyal to the people they love, I’ll grant you that. But Chuck’s every action and entire lifestyle comes from a place of enormous privilege — no one has ever said no to him, and he is depraved because he’s so rich that he’s bored. He is a modern day Valmont. Poe is…. none of those things. His cruelty and manipulation actually come from the fact that he was not born into privilege and he feels he constantly has to fight for it, prove it, and hold on to it by any means necessary. And he isn’t bored because he does have to work so hard ot get what he has — as well as to protect himself from any idea that he might not deserve it. So… I don’t really see it. George and Chuck have more in common, except George is too happy go lucky. A bit more like Nate, perhaps.)
The other example of excessive fan-love Racecar points to is Draco Malfoy. Now, though a fan of Harry Potter, I’ve never participated in the vast, vast world of Harry Potter fandom. I’ve never read the fanfic that some of my writer friends are actually famous for. I don’t know what people like in Harry Potter fandom. I’ve read the books, I’ve watched the movies, I have a Griffindor t-shirt and a sorting hat keychain. That’s it. The nearest brush I ever came to was when a writer friend of mine were at Dragon*Con last year and she went to a panel with Tom Felton on it. Felton, who plays Draco Malfoy in the movies, is I’m sure a very nice young man, and he’s certainly an excellent actor. He was apparently discussing on the panel how a lot of times, the actors visit children’s hospitals and the like on goodwill tours, and he feels bad because the children always want to see the folks who play the “good guys” but never him.
However, this is not the case with the fandom. They love Draco Malfoy. Sometimes they may love him a little too much, as my friend who attended the panel told me that someone came up to him and asked him to autograph a photo she had, which was an erotic photo with his and Daniel Radcliffe’s heads photoshopped onto the bodies of naked men. Understandably, this 22 year old young man refused to do so, which apparently made the fan very upset. But I don’t blame Tom Felton at all. That was not a picture of him and why should he “legitimize” a fake naked photo of himself by signing it? Draco Malfoy may be a fictional being that you can do whatever you want with, but Tom Felton is a real person.
Apparently, even JK Rowling is of the opinion that people’s obsession with Draco is a product of their confusing Felton, who imbues his character with pathos (and good looks) with the very bad person that Rowling created in the book.
“People have been waxing lyrical [in letters] about Draco Malfoy, and I think that’s the only time when [pulling for a certain relationship] stopped amusing me and started almost worrying me. I’m trying to clearly distinguish between Tom Felton, who is a good-looking young boy, and Draco, who, whatever he looks like, is not a nice man. It’s a romantic, but unhealthy, and unfortunately all too common delusion of girls that they are going to change someone.”
(And yet, Malfoy gets off scot-free in the books. I never understood that.)
As I said in my previous post, I was never into the fantasy of the bad boy. I don’t buy that we can really change someone. There’s a part in Pride & Prejudice where Elizabeth explains to Mr. Wickham that Mr. Darcy improves upon acquaintance, but not in “essentials.” She is saying to him that she now understands that Darcy is prickly, closed-off, etc. but essentially, he’s a stand-up guy. (Also that she knows Wickham is lying about Darcy, but that’s a whole other thing.) But that is pretty much where I draw the line, too. I’m okay with bad boys who are essentially okay.
Darcy is not changed by Elizabeth, except in the minor way that he realizes he needs to stop being such a snob. His changing is not from cruelty to kindness, but from impoliteness toward people of a lesser social station to politeness. Still, this is not a major change in who he is. Yes, now he can be friends with Mr. Gardiner. But one imagines that, had he met Mr. Gardiner before, he would not have been cruel to him, but perfectly cordial and distant.
I think we can all agree that getting a snob to lighten up is on a whole different scale than getting an accessory to murder/attempted murderer (which Draco Malfoy is) to “change.”
Jane Austen loved writing about the bad boy/nice guy dichtomy. There’s one in almost all of her books. Yes, even Persuasion. But enough about that for now.
Yay, I found my camera cord! So now you can see what I’ve been up to recently.
A little of this:
And a lot of this:
Note the Kindle. I’m not head over heels in love with it, but it did come in handy when Sailor Boy, on the next beach chair over, said “I feel like reading Snow Crash,” and five seconds later I gave it to him. Now, of course, he wants this t-shirt.
We also went sailing, but not as much as I thought we were going to.
My mom’s in town this week, so I’ve been hanging out with her, and her awesome sheepdog, Harry. (Or Uncle Harry, as we refer to him to Rio, who is his niece if you do the familial math.) Rio and Harry are the approximately the same age, and they love playing with each other. They also love each other’s food, and we spent the first half of the week devising creative ways to keep them in their own kibble bowls, and the second half of the week giving up and letting them do what they wanted.
I am a big, big fan of retellings, in general. I think the first time I was aware of one was when my parents introduced me to West Side Story. My dad is not the biggest musical fan, but he loves West Side Story, because ballet-dancing gang members are totally awesome. I saw West Side Story way before I saw or read Romeo and Juliet, in fact.
(My husband, Shakespeare lover that he is, is probably even now drawing up divorce papers. Nah, just kidding. In fact, last year, he got me tickets to the new bilingual WSS when it was in DC gearing up for its Broadway run.)
Anyway, thus began my long love affair with retellings. I love Clueless, I love Bridget Jones’s Diary, I love Valiant, I love O, Brother, Where Art Thou.
And of course, given my long and devoted love, I’ve come to several conclusions about what makes for the best kind of retellings,or indeed, what even constitutes a “retelling” as opposed to an “adaptation” or a “reboot.”
For instance: The Baz Luhrman film Romeo + Juliet is not a retelling. It’s an adaptation. Though set in modern day California, it uses Shakespeare’s dialogue. West Side Story, on the other hand, takes the general plot (two young people from feuding groups fall in love, igniting street warfare and death) and certain character relationships (the “Romeo” and the “Mercutio” are best friends, the “Juliet” and the “Tybalt” are closely related) from Shakespeare’s play, and creates something entirely new.
On the other hand, I think the Drew Barrymore film, Ever After would definitely count as a “retelling.” The framing device reveals that the story is going to be about the “truth” behind the legend of Cinderella. There’s no magic, and the fairy godmother is really Leonardo Da Vinci. (Oh, and the prince recognizes a heck of a lot more than Cinderella’s slipper!)
It starts to get a little sticky at times. Now they’ve even got these “remixes” — stuff like Pride & Prejudice and Zombies, which takes the actual text of P&P and mixes it up with original material. (And no, since i get asked this all the time… my book is not one of these.)
Adaptations (by their very nature) and “reboots” (due to the rights issues involved) are much more common in film than in books. (I say, just as John Scalzi announces his sale of the “reboot” of the Little Fuzzy series.) So what differentiates these things? Might be one of those “I know it when I see it” things. It usually requires a very different setting. Batman Begins is a reboot, because there have been other Batman film franchises. Otherwise, it would have been an adaptation, because it was adapted from the comics.And yet, Ever After, which takes place in a frocks and swords European fairy tale-ish setting, is a retelling.
Gah, now I’m even confusing myself. Perhaps I should just stick with “I know it when I see it.”
How excited am I about the movie adaptation of the Beauty and the Beast retelling BEASTLY, by Alex Flinn? 1) I totally loved the book, 2) I love how many adaptations are coming out of YA novels these days, 3) Neil Patrick Harris.
Also, dudes in hoods are hot. I think I spent four books detailing that little insight into my psyche.
In passing, is it me, or does Beauty and the Beast, in particular, lend itself very well to retellings? I can’t tell you how many romance novels I’ve read that are retellings of that book, and one of my favorite YA novels of all time, Valiant (my troll love is vast), is also a retelling of that story. I think because it has a really great theme about loving someone for their insides, and the magic in that story is so metaphorical in nature, that it can truly be whatever you want it to be.
Speaking of Holly Black, I definitely credit a few conversations I had with her in Ireland last year with my decision to move forward with this project. Holly has tacked several retellings, and done it so skillfully that more than one person I know has said to me, “Oh, yeah! Valiant *is* Beauty and the Beast! Now I see it!” Her newest retelling is, of course, White Cat, which is based on the (rather obscure) fairy tale by the same name. Having read both Holly’s incredibly awesome fantabulous book and the fairy tale, I would argue that even fewer people would make the connection. You know, if they’d ever read the fairy tale. Which most people haven’t.
My point being, is that Holly’s way of thinking about retellings freed my mind from some of the doubt demons I had about tackling my own. And basically, what I got from the conversation was this: fair game. No matter what the source material, that’s THEIR story. Your story is your own, and you can feel free to jettison, combine, and remix whatever elements you need to to make your story the best it can be.In fact, the more it is your own, the better I like the retelling.
For instance, the troll in Valiant (unlike the boy in Beastly) is not under a curse. He is, in fact, a troll. True love will not make him “beautiful” again. Because that wasn’t the point of Black’s retelling, which was more about Val (the “Beauty” character) and her personal journey. Whereas it is the point of Flinn’s retelling, because her story focuses on Kyle’s (the “Beast”) personal journey and how his “curse” was the catalyst for that to occur.
In Bridget Jones’s Diary, it’s not Bridget’s little sister who runs off with a disreputable man, thereby ruining the family’s reputation, it’s her mother, whose lover scams the Jones family friends out of their savings. (If you’ve only seen the movie, you are probably wondering what the heck I’m talking about, since they cut this plotline.) But in both cases, the fact that Darcy (it’s so convenient when characters get the same names in retellings, isn’t it?) tracks down the scoundrel in order to save Bridget/Lizzy’s family is the catalyst for them to reunite. In West Side Story, Tony (Romeo) still kills Maria’s (Juliet’s) beloved relative after the man kills Tony/Romeo’s best friend, sending him on the run and forcing Maria/Juliet to make a horrible choice between her family loyalty and her one true love.
The point is, in a retelling, you are taking a particular part of a story (a plot, a character, a story question, a theme) and using it as a jumping off place from which to create something entirely new. West Side Story used the plot and characters of Romeo & Juliet to talk about race relations in mid-century Manhattan. Valiant took plot elements and themes from Beauty and the Beast to tell a story about dark fairies, murder, and drug addiction. Clueless cut and combined and jiggled around character relationships from Emma to fit into a late 20th century lifestyle. And you can do those things because you are serving the needs of your story, and in order to create that omelet, well, you might have to break a few of the old story’s sacred eggs.
In other words: No fairy godmother? No problem. Use Da Vinci.
Thank you all so much for your congratulations! I am so excited about this book. It’s a project that has both been a long time in the making, and that kind of flashed up on me quite suddenly. I thought I’d take this opportunity to answer some of the questions that were batted around in the comment section yesterday:
Lell asks: Given just the depths of your love for PERSUASION, was it at all daunting to write a retelling? Or was it one of those fun “This is what I was meant to write” situations with singing and bluebirds?
Actually, it was a little of both. For the better half of the decade, the words “a retelling of Persuasion” has been sitting in my “idea” file, with nothing to hook it onto. I’m a big fan of retellings in general, and I love Austen retellings like Clueless and Bridget Jones’s Diary. (BTW, the Bridget sequel is a very loose retelling of Persuasion.) After participating on a Dragon*Con panel last fall with Heidi Anne Heiner of Sur La Lune Fairy Tales (a fantastic woman and a fantastic site) I started thinking more seriously about how to attempt such a project (even though it’s not a fairy tale).
Around the same time, I started having conversations with my critique partner, Carrie Ryan, about how I, a great lover of Post-apocalyptic fiction, hadn’t written anything post-apocalyptic while there was a post-apocalyptic boom happening all around me. At some point, the words “Post-apocalyptic” and “Persuasion” came together and everyone involved had a lot of fun trying to pronounce it (especially after a few glasses of wine).
Of course, that was just the beginning. I had a lot of other questions I needed to answer before I could turn a phrase I had a lot of fun watching my agent try to pronounce five times fast into a book proposal.
Stacy asks: How the heck did you make it into a post-apocalyptic story?
Obviously, that was question number one. What was the apocalypse? Why did it happen? And, sorry guys, but I’m not going to tell you that yet. But, like all post-apocalyptic writers, I worked backwards. I’m writing about a very particular society so I had to craft an apocalypse that would result in that society. My husband (also a big science fiction fan) and I spent a lot of time trying to figure out all the details.
Stephanie asks: though what age will the heroine be? because i don’t think of Persuasion as a young adult book.
That was the other big question. As I said in my last post, I think of Persuasion as one of Austen’s most “mature” novels. The characters are older and wiser and have been burned before by the time of the story’s action. They aren’t giggly teenagers.
Then again, a lot of characters in contemporary post-apocalyptic YA aren’t giggly teenagers either: Katniss of The Hunger Games, Mary of The Forest of Hands and Teeth. Additionally, Astrid of Rampant and Ascendant is not a giggly teenager either. So once I started thinking about who these characters are, and how they’ve been shaped by the society they live in, it wasn’t difficult at all.
Just because you are diong a teenage retelling of Austen doesn’t mean you have to make the characters into something they are not. Cher of Clueless is clueless because Emma was as well. (And they took what? Twenty years off Paul Rudd’s Mr. Knightley character?) And, despite the fact that Anne and Wentworth are supposedly “older and wiser” they still have their fair share of silly behavior. After all, Anne has been moping for seven years, and Wentworth sets out initially on a petty quest to make her pay for rejecting him. That translates quite easily into the YA realm.
So, to answer your question, the main characters are teenagers.The book is YA.
Regular readers of this blog have long heard me wax on and on about my love for Jane Austen’s last novel, PERSUASION. It’s my favorite of all the Austens. I own about seven different editions of the novel, and three (count ‘em) three versions of BBC movies made from the novel. I even have the 1970s one, where Anne Elliot looks like this:
My love, she is deep as the ocean.
So why, oh why do I love Persuasion so much? What is its hold on me? Do I prefer Captain Wentworth to Mr. Darcy? (Um, jury’s out, actually). Anne Elliot to Emma Woodhouse (okay, yes on that one, definitely). The follies of Sir Walter and Mary Musgrove to those of Mrs. Dashwood and Lucy Stone Steele (nice catch, JJ)? (Really, can there ever be too much of a good thing?)
I admit, (as did one Elizabeth Bennett, once upon a time) that I did not always love this novel as I do now. When I was in high school, and discovering Austen for the first time, I enjoyed the brash and outspoken charms of Elizabeth to Anne’s soft silence. I didn’t understand how the hell she put up with her horrid family. But as I got older, I began to appreciate the book more and more, until eventually, it beat out Pride & Prejudice in my heart.
How do I love Persuasion? Let me count the ways:
1. I love that Persuasion is such a mature novel. Even in modern romance, I’ve always been a sucker for a reunion story, and Persuasion is the pinnacle of all reunion stories!
2. I love the psychological complexity of the main characters and their love story. I love the skill in which Austen arranges their complex dance. You think that Darcy gives smoldering glances? Re-read Persuasion sometime. The characters hardly ever speak to each other, and yet, if you read carefully, you see that they are at every moment aware of one another. Entire conversations with other people revolve around sharing the smallest fact (usually meant to injure) with the person they really, really want to be talking to.
3. I love the secondary characters. Austen often includes fantastic secondary characters in her stories, but in Persuasion, she really outdoes herself. I adore the Crofts, especially. In most Austens, you see an example of a happy, equal marriage for the main characters to aspire to (The Gardiners in P&P) but in the Crofts, you see a real insight into their love story. The Musgroves and the other Navy men are similarly well-drawn.
4. Two words: The. Letter. Oh wow, y’all, the letter. The letter, the letter, the letter. The letter might be one of the most favorite single pages in all of literature. Austen men give good letter, as any fan of Pride & Prejudice knows (heck, even Willoughby’s horrific letter is a work of art for its purposes), but no one — no one– writes a letter like Frederick Wentworth. “You pierce my soul…” I tell you, I never read that letter without crying. I never watch the scene with the letter in any of my versions of the movie without crying (even in the most recent one, where they totally screw up the whole POINT of the letter and send Anne on some bizarre marathon through the streets of Bath…)
5. And I love this reason most of all:
Children’s: Young Adult
Author of the Secret Society Girl series and Rampant Diana Peterfreund’s FOR DARKNESS SHOWS THE STARS, a post-apocalyptic retelling of Jane Austen’s Persuasion, to Kristin Daly at Balzer & Bray, in a good deal, for publication in 2011, by Deidre Knight at The Knight Agency (NA).
John Scalzi and Justine Larbalestier are talking about “owning” your one star reviews on Amazon. I went to go look mine up, only to discover that, to my shock, I don’t have any one star reviews on Amazon. Given the angst I’ve felt over Amazon reviews in the past, I was sure that some of them had to be one star. No, apparently only two stars. I have my fair share of those.(Don’t worry, though, I have plenty of one star reviews on Goodreads!)
Yet none of them, I think, can possibly top the one I just received for Rampant. A snippet of its (two star) fabulosity:
“I felt as if the author is very self-impressed and narcissistic. Which I guess is fine until it permeates the writing. If you read the jacket cover – all about how wonderful and adventurous she is – and then realize she’s attempted to weave in the myth of Diana goddess of the hunt and that her name is Diana….well too much self homage for me. Nothing redeems this insipid tale.”
Finally, someone calls me out for making the magic system in my book something that was invented by a goddess whose name is the same as mine. I was wondering when that would happen.
Justine’s post is all about Jane Austen’s one star Amazon reviews for Pride & Prejudice. I haven’t read through them, but I sincerely hope that someone calls that chick out for naming her most beautiful Bennett sister Jane, not to mention that annoyingly perfect Jane Fairfax from Emma.
There has been a lot of chatter on Twitter lately about the role of gender in YA books. On one hand, women writers and female-centric books dominate the YA market. (An interesting phenomenon given the “general knowledge” that a girl will read a book by or about any gender, but most boys will only read books about–or sometimes by–males.)
On the other, there’s still a lot of sexism. Female characters are held toridiculousstandards (especially by female readers!) and vilified for having faults. In YA fiction, as in adult fiction, male writers are showered with praise and awards while comparable books written by female writers are not. Year after year, critics “best of” lists are all about the men. In that post, critic Lizzy Skurnick writes:
I got a glimmer of an answer last year as I sat in a board room hashing out the winners for one of the awards for which I am a judge. Our short list was pretty much split evenly along gender lines. But as we went through each category, a pattern emerged. Some books, it seemed, were “ambitious.” Others were well-wrought, but somehow . . . “small.” “Domestic.” “Unam –” what’s the word? “– bititous.”
Oh, those damn scribbling women and their little domestic novels!
A few months ago, I visited the Jane Austen exhibit at the Morgan Library in New York City. The exhibit displayed some of Austen’s letters, first editions of her works, things like that. But the exhibit that stuck with me the longest was on on Nabokov. Seems he wasn’t such a fan of Jane (along with Emerson, Twain, and other males):
“I dislike Jane, and I am prejudiced, in fact, against all women writers. They are in another class. Could never see anything in Pride and Prejudice.”
He was called out by Edmund Wilson, a famous literary critic. Great, huh? Well, wait until you see the manner of the calling-out:
“You are mistaken about Jane Austin. I think you ought to read Mansfield Park. Her greatness is due precisely to the fact that her attitude toward her work is like that of a man, that is, of an artist, and quite unlike that of the typical women novelist, who exploits her feminine day dreams . . . She is, in my opinion, one of the half dozen greatest English writers.”
So she’s good, but only because she writes like a man. Astounding, huh? Because no male writer (and certainly not Nabokov), ever made a great work of literature out of exploiting his own daydreams. Right? Anyway, Nabokov revisited Austen, found an appreciation for Mansfield Park, and proceeded to teach it in his lit classes at Cornell. All’s well that ends well, I suppose.
As I said in yesterday’s post, I watched the new PBS version of Emma. I have to say it won me over in the end, but only because I am a sucker for the proposal scene and the way the two characters, who have had such an unequal relationship throughout the entire book come together in a moment of true mutual respect. Yes, it’s due to a big misunderstanding, but it’s quite moving, and it makes you realize that when they are married, he won’t treat her like the child he spent the first half of the book treating her as.
But I digress. My point here is that each episode of the mini-series began with actress Laura Linney addressing the screen and lecturing: “Is Jane Austen too ordinary and narrow for today?” she asks us. Linney’s point turns out to be that Emma Woodhouse is not Harry Potter or Edward Cullen or Wolverine. That she’s just a normal human with normal flaws. (Those magical guys all have “normal flaws” too, though.) However, the use of the word “narrow” is suspect. Ordinary? Fine. But narrow far too closely echoes another famous critic of Austen’s, Ralph Waldo Emerson:
I am at a loss to understand why people hold Miss Austen’s novels at so high a rate, which seems to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in their wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. The one problem in the mind of the writer is . . . marriageableness . . . Suicide is more respectable.
Oh, Ralph, tell us how you really feel!
It must be nice to live in a world where your options are wider than “marriageableness” or not. I feel like Emerson must have read the first line of Pride & Prejudice, took it at face value, and then went for a walk in the woods. The women in Austen are concerned about marriage because marriage was the only “business” they were allowed to conduct. And Austen’s characters do in fact realize the folly of bad marriages. Elizabeth Bennet would rather risk the kind of poverty that ends up befalling the Dashwoods than wed Mr. Collins. Her friend Charlotte decides that the stigma of being an old maid rates higher on the humiliation scale than that of being married to a fool with good prospects. In Austen’s novels, the onset of love goes hand in hand with the onset of respect. They are romantic within the realm of practicality. Talk about a woman’s daydream! Those were high hopes for the 18th century gal. (And if you want to read about how easily it can all go wrong, check out Millenium Hall by Sarah Scott.)
So Austen is narrow. But it doesn’t stop in the 18th century. I recently read a New York Times profile of the writer/director/producer Nancy Meyers. Meyers is famous for her women-focused domestic comedies. She writes about affluent women and their families and their romances. Sounding familiar? Something’s Gotta Give, The Holiday, It’s Complicated — these are hers. The first page of the long article is devoted to talking about how Meyers was asked to move from her table at a tony LA restaurant. Ha, see? Even powerful Hollywood moguls get no respect — you know, if they’re women.
Then the writer goes on to talk about how important and influential and successful Meyers is — never letting go of the fact that gosh, it’s hard since she’s a chick. In response to a complain about the number of takes she likes to do of every scene, her (male) agent is quoted as saying there wouldn’t be a complaint if Nancy was Mike Nichols. And gosh, Jack Nicholson respects her, too! I especially loved this bit:
It would be tempting to attribute Meyers’s uninflated manner to her being female — to having been trained from birth in the art of the soft sell — except for the fact that she is more straightforward than girlish, more clear than coy. “She’s just really smart and doesn’t seem to be impeded by all the weirdness that everyone brings to whichever gender they are,” says Helen Hunt, who starred in “What Women Want.”
In other words, just because she’s powerful, don’t fear that she’s that horrible, aggressive kind of female. Don’t fear that she’s a bitch.
Later, the writer, Daphne Merkin, calls Meyers’s women-centric, romantic films “retro” and “post-feminist” — tags I find rather shocking. Because they are romantic? The women in Meyers’s films are successful and (usually) wealthy from their own accomplishments. Diane Keaton’s character in Something’s Gotta Give is a hit playwright with a tenured professor (in Women’s Studies, yet!) for a sister. Cameron Diaz’s character in Holiday owns her own movie trailer production company (and a mansion in Beverly Hills). Diaz puts it bluntly in that film when she tells Jude Law’s single-dad character that she feels comfortable telling him about her success because she knows he won’t be intimidated, having been raised by a mother who was a high level executive editor at Random House. The romantic elements of the film do not detract from the feminist ones.
And the writer momentarily agrees:
“These women are self-sufficient and notably energetic. They may not have men, at least when we first meet them, but they make do with friends and children and siblings, for whom they whip up tasty dinners and homemade pies and laugh over their own situations. When men do appear on the scene, whether in the form of a babe-chasing player like Jack Nicholson’s Harry or Alec Baldwin’s renewedly impassioned Jake (or Dennis Quaid’s Nick Parker in “The Parent Trap,” for that matter), they awaken dormant desires that nevertheless have to be fit into pre-existing, busy lives.”
But then she spends a few pages obsessing over the filmaker’s focus on set dressings. She criticizes the thread count in the upholstery as being needlessly lush and overindulgent. Let us unpack the following quote:
“Whether her insistence on “softening the message” [Meyer's quote, which I for one believe was taken out of context] through plush surroundings ultimately weakens the films — renders them more glossy and insular than they need be, even for a genre that is inherently fizzy — is a question I have debated with myself and others.”
So, because women-centric romantic comedies are “inherently fizzy” we should make doubly sure to grit them up in a visual sense? I wonder how many other filmmakers are asked not to put their characters in fancy cars or film in exotic locales in order to, you know, make something real. These damn domestic female stories!
“At worst, her films can give off an air of tidy unreality — and it is this unexamined aspect, I think, this failure to even hint at darkness, that most fuels critical ire. Richard Schickel condemns Meyers with faint praise, hinting that she and the studios have struck a devil’s pact of sorts. “Clearly there is an audience for sweet little middle-class romances of the kind she makes, and it pleases the studios to indulge a woman, whom they would not trust with more vigorous projects. It’s as if they’re trying to say: ‘Hey, we’re not sexists. We make Nancy Meyers movies.’ ””
“Sweet little middle class romances.” (First of all, anyone who lives in a house like the Hamptons mansion in Something’s Gotta Give is NOT middle class, fwiw.) But can’t you just hear Emerson’s or Nabokov’s dismissal of Austen in those words? Can’t you hear the dismissal of that roomful of critics deciding on literary awards? Why is domestic a dirty word? Why is a character driven movie about a successful person dealing with their personal lives a Best Picture nominee if it stars George Clooney, but not if it stars Meryl Streep? I think I’m inclined to agree with Meyer’s agent. An article like this would never be written if Nancy was Ned.
I leave you with this (there’s a little bit of language at the end):
I awoke to the wonder of a sunny sky and a plowed street. Yay! The downside, of course, is that Sailor Boy and I both seem to have caught some kind of crud, and neither of us feel like spending hours shoveling out to said plowed street. Rio, however, is once again interested in visiting the outside world, and our visiting dog has decided to grace us with her presence (she spent all of yesterday hibernating upstairs).
I just want to lie around drinking soup and watching Emma on PBS. I’m enjoying it, though years of watching the Gwyneth Paltrow version makes it all seem to be moving super slowly. It’s like every offhand mention of anything occurring in the book requires an entire scene in this film. Mr. Knightley tells Emma that Robert Martin came to see him? The film shows several scenes worth of Robert Martin coming to see him: Robert Martin approaching the estate, Robert and Knightley talking, and then, you know, just so we get the full and complete picture of the situation, Robert Martin leaving the estate.
Seriously?
Also the casting is giving me fits. I can’t really picture Johnny Lee Miller as anything but the kid from Hackers (and the imagined image of him and a young Angelina Jolie getting married in blood spattered t-shirts is indelible), and Romola Garai is the chick from the Dirty Dancing sequel. Didn’t like her in that, either. I wish she’d close her mouth every once in a while.
I think the problem is that I don’t much like Emma. I think it’s probably fourth or fifth on my list of Austen, and while my two favorite Austens (Pride & Prejudice and Persuasion) are among my favorite books of all time, I’ve discovered that I’m not going to fall all over an Austen just because it’s an Austen. I feel the same way about Mansfield Park. There are parts of it I really like, but Fanny never did it for me, and her relationship with her cousin? (I mean, aside from all the squicky cousins-raised-as-siblings-still-in-love thing that was apparently appropriate in Austen’s day.) Meh.
But I’m only through part 1 of 3, so we’ll see. I did find the Emma/Knightley romance arresting as a teenager, but now I don’t think I can handle the patronizing way Knightley treats Emma. I find their age difference more unsettling now.
Okay, I think I’m feeling a little better now. Time to get up and see about shoveling that driveway.
As a modern woman, I’ll admit, I may have pined at one time, but not for 8 years!Good God!3 months maybe & then have moved on.I realize in the 1800’s a woman is probably more apt to pine for a longer period of time, but to relate this story to today’s reader, isn’t 8 years a bit much?
Because Sue, you see, is obviously very well-adjusted. But we don’t read romances for well-adjusted people. We want larger than life! We want drama! We want desperate, star-crossed lovers fighting against all odds to make it work!
Let us look at my favorite story of long-term longing and deliciously painful pining of the first order: PERSUASION, by Jane Austen. If I want a nice cathartic cry, I pull out my dog-eared copy of Persuasion and turn to Captain Wentworth’s letter. Or I watch the movie. ANY version of the movie. Waterworks. In fact, nothing is guaranteed to produce waterworks in my as quickly as that scene in Persuasion except for that scene in Before Sunset where Julie Delpy goes off on this beautifully wild rant about the reason she never tried to have romance in her life again is because she was afraid it would never live up to the fantasy she’d created in her head about the boy she went to Vienna with that one time — which, you will note, is also pining.
Ahem.
Now, part of the pathos of PERSUASION is that, well, though both Anne and Wentworth are pretty intelligent, practical people (compared to the rest of their acquaintance), neither of them have the chance to act on their well-adjusted impulses, because their community is just too small. There is practically no one else that Anne can marry in her neighborhood, a point that her friend makes to her whenever she starts bringing up Wentworth as The Perfect Man She Never Got Over. Well, he’s not perfect, he’s just way more suited to you than that Musgrove dude you foisted off on your sister. If you ever met a nice guy (the friend argues), maybe you would have gotten over Wentworth and married some other perfectly nice guy.
And Wentworth spends the whole time at sea.
So, Austen cheats — or, to be more polite about it, she crafts a supremely awesome and skillful complication. She gets her perfectly well-adjusted characters and she gets some seriously emotional pining. And then she tortures her characters even further by putting them in the path of some perfectly nice people that they could probably be perfectly happy with — Louisa Musgrove and Captain Benwick — were they not simultaneously in the presence of their One True Love, who, by comparison, no one else will do. Which is when the pining really ratchets up, because what’s worse: wanting something when there’s nothing on the horizon and the whole concept is just kind of vague and impossible, or wanting something when there’s something okay there, but just beyond it, a little ways away, untouchable but so infuriatingly close, is the thing you really, really, really want?
And these guys pine for years. YEARS. Anne’s pining is right up there with Penelope of Ithaca’s. Pining is the backbone upon which romance is built. If you get over someone in three months, it wasn’t a love for the ages, was it?
I for one can’t wait to read NINE RULES. Pine away.
In Bridget Jones’s Diary, it’s not Bridget’s little sister who runs off with a disreputable man, thereby ruining the family’s reputation, it’s her mother, whose lover scams the Jones family friends out of their savings. (If you’ve only seen the movie, you are probably wondering what the heck I’m talking about, since they cut this plotline.) But in both cases, the fact that Darcy (it’s so convenient when characters get the same names in retellings, isn’t it?) tracks down the scoundrel in order to save Bridget/Lizzy’s family is the catalyst for them to reunite. In West Side Story, Tony (Romeo) still kills Maria’s (Juliet’s) beloved relative after the man kills Tony/Romeo’s best friend, sending him on the run and forcing Maria/Juliet to make a horrible choice between her family loyalty and her one true love.
