lirazel | (no subject)

A non-exhaustive list of books that no one can seem to visually adapt correctly¹:

+ Dracula. A zillion different movies and TV shows and not ONE of them is a faithful adaption. I deserve Jonathan and his wife Mina and her girlfriend Lucy and Lucy's harem and their Dutch thesis advisor. I deserve paprika and Dracula crawling down the wall like a lizard and all of the nuns giving Jonathan good grades. It does not seem like it would be difficult to do this, and yet it has never once happened.

+ Any Anne book besides Anne of Green Gables. Literally what are the Sullivan sequels? It is so weird that the first sequel decided to adapt Windy Poplars (kind of--where is Little Elizabeth????), objectively one of the worst Anne books, and give her a random love interest. And then the second one just made up the story entirely! It has nothing to do with anything and Gilbert did not fight in WWI, his sons did!!!

And then Anne with an E just started making shit up, which is fine, except it's not what I wanted! Imagine that cast actually doing the canonical story!

The entire Maud Squad is sitting over here begging for a faithful Anne of the Island adaptation and it will never happen. At the very least, someone should give us a good adaptation of Rilla--you'd think that someone up in the Great White North would be interested in adapting the first (and for a long time only) book about the Canadian home front experience during WWI.

+ Mansfield Park. I just haven't ever seen one where I went, "Yes, this gets the book." (Which reminds me: I need to reread this one. It's been years and years.)

+ Wuthering Heights. I suspect this book is unadaptable², I really do. Frankly, I kind of wish people would stop trying to adapt it because I always end up more frustrated than anything.

+ Faulkner. Just...all of it. Stop trying to adapt Faulkner. It's impossible.

Feel free to add on!

¹ By this I mean that there have been at least two attempts to adapt it for either film or television.
² The framing story is so important, but it would be so hard to do it! This is one of those books where perspective is everything.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I would suggest that no one's adapted Rilla because we as a country have moved past the jingoism of the book but that is, uh. Sadly not the case. More likely there just isn't a budget for it. We have a film/tv industry, but the period dramas tend to be stalwarts that have been running for nine hundred years and frankly barely count as period. (Murdoch Mysteries.)

I think you could pretty easily undermine the jingoism. In fact, I think the story (especially Walter's death) does that itself, but portraying the jingoism is an important thing, because it was very real at the time.

More likely there just isn't a budget for it. We have a film/tv industry, but the period dramas tend to be stalwarts that have been running for nine hundred years and frankly barely count as period. (Murdoch Mysteries.)

That makes sense!

Ah, but that's the catch - Canada is still very much in that jingoistic mindset, but we don't like to admit it. Every year at Remembrance Day, we still read In Flanders Fields. We're very proud of being "peacekeepers." But at the same time, discussing it in any kind of detail is just . . . gauche. So anyone adapting Rilla would have to thread that needle of "Canadians nobly sacrificed themselves in WWI, but we know the British Empire was bad but we're past that now but we love our WWI heroes but we don't talk about the attitudes that went with supporting that war." In some ways, Rilla is too complex for Canada in 2024 - we're past that initial blind allegiance to God and Country, but we haven't really replaced it with anything either. And that's a paradox nobody wants to acknowledge.