In the wake of a truly bad Netflix adaptation of my favourite Austen novel, I have been having thoughts about adaptations, and I suppose they are a better use of my 4am can’t sleep energy than doom scrolling and screaming chaotically into the void, so here we go.
Now, I’m not what we’d call a purist when it comes to adaptations. I don’t think that by the numbers reproduction is the only way to go; some things that work well in one medium don’t work as well in another, and vice versa. Updating works to elide or change problematic elements is fine. My issues with Netflix’s recent offering for Persuasion is not that there are POC in it (although I take issue with the casting of the POC as the put-upon brother-in-law who wanted to marry Anne first, the well-meaning but blinded by class privilege family friend who gave the bad advice, and the closest thing the book has to a villain, while the romantic leads remain white) and if that’s why someone doesn’t like it, they’re wrong and racist.
What makes or breaks an adaptation, for me, are a few things, and the most important is whether it feels like what it’s adapting, and whether it feels like the people working on it understood and liked the original work. You can do a lot with an adaptation if you like and understand the original. Clueless is a good example. If you don’t know it’s based on Emma, sure, you probably won’t pick it, but if you do know, you can tell that the people working on it like Austen. It updates the basic story without going “ugh, this story is so dated and boring”. Cher Horowitz feels like an authentic, modern take on a girl like Emma Woodhouse.
Adaptations that don’t like or understand their original property often don’t feel right to fans of said property, and a lot of earlier comic book adaptations fell prey to this. The first X-Men movie had an exchange in it that was gently poking fun at the costumes of the comics – in the movie, they wear black leather, Wolverine asks if they seriously go out in this, and Cyclops replies “what would you prefer? Yellow spandex?” – and in meta-context, it’s a self-deprecating, funny little joke, because what’s necessary for a 2D comic medium – bright, often primary colours – tends to look silly in live action. The movie was acknowledging that and poking good-natured fun at it, but not going “ugh, comic books, am I right?”
However, a lot of comic book adaptations in the following years took the black leather and “bright colours are silly” and went too far with it, often in a way that felt like the people behind them didn’t actually like people who read comics. The DC studios’ movie side struggled for a long time, as opposed to its TV side with their much more successful range of shows, and I think that can be summed up by an exchange the then-head of the movie side had with a group of fans. He was talking about how they could never put the Martian Manhunter in a movie. Something about how the name sounded stupid. Then he asked people to raise their hands if they knew who the Martian Manhunter was, and then said “okay, keep your hand up if you’ve ever had sex.”
That sort of typifies the attitude of a lot of early 2000s comic book adaptations. They’re ashamed of being comic book adaptations. They want to be, generally, action movies instead, which is why we end up with a Superman who solves things with his fists, losing the reasons why Christopher Reeves’s Clark Kent was so beloved, and interminable Batmans who do no detecting despite being the World’s Greatest Detective.
Liking and understanding your original property doesn’t mean you can’t change things; changing things doesn’t mean you don’t have to pay attention to things like tone and atmosphere. Take Pride and Prejudice, the most adapted of Austen’s works. My favourite adaptation is the Colin Firth BBC production, but I’m also partial to Bride and Prejudice, a modern-day Bollywood-esque retelling, and I found myself oddly adoring Pride and Prejudice and Zombies – but only the movie, not the book.
The reason for that is that the book’s tone is all wrong. It takes the text of P&P and just slots in bits about zombies that fit neither the writing nor the story and seem to be almost gleefully saying “look, we’re making this dull old writing shocking! How daring of us!” It delights in being puerile for the sake of puerility and puts toilet humour alongside Austen’s class commentary in a way that clashes atrociously. It basically reads like someone who read P&P, thought it was boring (which is fine; you’re allowed to be wrong) and decided to paste zombies on with no real thought about how that would impact anything in the story.
The movie is another matter. They clearly put thought into the world building, such as it is. They thought about what changes they were going to make, both to the original text and to the P&P&Z text, and what would work to make an entertaining movie that melded together the best parts of Austen and the best parts of a good zombie flick, and in my opinion they did it really well. It’s atmospheric and still has social commentary and look, if you can’t get behind Wickham as the zombie Antichrist, I don’t know what to tell you. But importantly, the characters still feel like the characters they’re supposed to be.
That brings me to what I think is the biggest failing of Netflix’s Persuasion – in trying to “update” the characters, particularly Anne, it loses who they are. Persuasion is Jane Austen’s most melancholy work – hardly surprising, considering it was written while she was dying at 41 of either Hodgkin’s lymphoma or Addison’s Disease. Anne Elliott is a quiet, mature, sombre heroine. In an attempt to cash in on the “hot mess” heroines of today’s sitcoms, Netflix loses everything that makes Persuasion and Anne good.
That’s not me saying that hot mess girls and comedy are bad. I love The Good Place, I hear good things about Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (the Engineer is enjoying it a lot), and there’s a reason those characters and premises are popukar; they’re relatable to us when we feel like.ourives aren’t easy to hold together. But Anne isn’t Eleanor Shellstrop, and she shouldn’t have to be. Thinking that you have to take a quiet, sombre story about two people realising they’re still in love and dumb it down and add comedy to make it palatable to a modern audience is doing a massive disservice to the original text and is frankly insulting to modern audiences.
And I’m saying “dumb it down” deliberately, not because I think comedy is inherently less intellectual than Austen (again: The Good Place), but because Netflix’s Persuasion seems to actively think its audience is stupid. It inserts interminable conversations between Anne and Wentworth where they try to define their relationship, conversations that don’t exist in the book, because it doesn’t trust that we’ll be able to read between the lines and see their pining. It has Anne break the fourth wall to talk to the audience in a way that is incredibly jarring and completely breaks the pathos of any scene that might have been able to scrape some from the terrible script. It thinks the only heroine we can relate to is a sassy, snarky, messy modern girl who wears mens’ clothes because that’s how you can tell she’s forward-thinking, who drinks wine all the time and apparently likes to dance to Beethoven alone in her room with a bottle of red despite recorded music not being a thing for most people at the time. If she has a wax cylinder of Beethoven, I want to see it.
There are some specks of potential. I would love their Mary in a modern adaptation – she’s the epitome of a too-online “I’m an empath” girl, which could be a fun way to take Mary. But it would need to be a modern take. You can’t try to keep Regency trappings but have your characters say stuff like “he’s a 10. I never trust a 10” because you want to attract modern audiences but don’t think they’ll tolerate a slower story with slower language.
That’s the big failing of adaptations for me – you have to like what you’re adapting and trust that your audience will too. Nobody is watching an Austen adaptation expecting Fleabag. If that’s what you try to do in an attempt to bring new people to Austen, you’re going to disappoint everyone, because existing fans will.be disappointed in the lack of authenticity to the original work and the new people will be disappointed when they find out that Austen is not, in fact, The Good Place. You can’t take a tragedy and make it a comedy, or vice versa – or, at least, you have to really know what you’re doing, and most people can’t pull that off. Netflix’s attempt to comedify Persuasion certainly didn’t.
The Medical Snowflake Diaries 