lirazel | (no subject)

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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.

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Re: Anne of the Island -- Green Gables Fables is a group vlog series that is a modern-day adaptation the Anne books, with season 1 as Anne of Green Gables and season 2 as Anne of the Island, skipping Anne of Avonlea because it doesn't make sense in a modern setting. But season 2 is pretty good at adapting Anne of the Island into modern-day college student hijinks!

I'm glad that exists and I've heard good things about it, but that does not scratch the itch of "late Victorian coeds" that I want!

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!

Oh Dracula. The yearly Tumblr discourse is so lovely. Maybe one day Tumblr can crowdfund a faithful adaptation...

Yes, I only trust Tumblr to properly adapt Dracula!

I would adore an adaptation of Rilla, no matter how low-budget.

I know! *wistful sigh*

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.

Yeah, that's a hard itch to scratch (especially in moving picture form).

Why do you think adapting Faulkner is impossible? (just curious, as I'm from nz and haven't read his books)

There actually is one pretty faithful and lovely Dracula adaptation - I think people understandably don't look back this far, but it's the BBC 1977 Count Dracula. It was a big one-off 'event' TV for Christmas that year, so it's not a full on accurate-to-the-last-word serial of the kind they normally did back in the day, but in compensation it's about as big budget as the 70s Beeb ever got and it really is still very watchable. (I may be a hardened old TV watcher, but even I don't usually just want it never to stop, and that was my reaction to this both times I've watched it.)

It should be around by various means, but if you can't find it, it's up on YT in full - just type in Count Dracula 1977.

I actually started with a random adaptation rather than the book, so while it'd be great if the modern BBC would do a full-on serial for it (the only way we're ever going to get that level of everything), I really enjoy all the Dracula remixes I've seen so far. They all have their own charms & are frequently in conversation with each other & even sometimes the book (lol) - the 1931 is basically the play version filmed for posterity, Hammer is doing its own thing, but it has Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing and doesn't really need anything more, the ITV 1968 is only for the hardened old TV afficionado (hello GUESS which one I started with? XD) but the scriptwriter knew the book, knew the other adaptations and other vampire stories like Carmilla, so it's very intertextual, riffing on the 1931 film visually, Hammer's ending and throwing down the gauntlet to Hammer, while putting all the queer back into the narrative, then you have the lovely much more book-accurate 1977 BBC film (although it does pause to give a visual nod to Hammer and Lee in passing), Bram Stoker's Dracula, which despite some annoying things, weirdly does also riff on the ITV 1968, of all unlikely sources. There's another one-off TV CHristmas special which is SO pretty and has the perfect casting but decides to waste all its time on an Arthur has syphillis plot (don't ask), but it had some very interesting takes in the rest of it, and riffed on the 1977 at some points too. (I'm most frustrated with this one. It would never have been 100% faithful by any means, but it could have been one of the best of the remixes! They have the most book-like Mina and Jonathan casting to my mind. I keep rewatching it in the hopes it will transmute into gold, but alas! EVery time I try, they still cast David Suchet as Van Helsing and then literally lock him up in a cupboard until the last five minutes, which is high my list of most inexplicable adaptation choices of all time.)

--> Drac 2006 Jonathan & Mina:

And there are still loads more I haven't yet managed to get hold of! I think someone will do a more faithful one eventually, but it may need a collective memory wipe of Christopher Lee first and we can't wish that on ourselves too soon.

Anne is such a weird one, though. It's so popular - you'd think someone would have done more of it by now!

Also re. Mansfield Park, this one does depend, but I am getting fonder and fonder of the Beeb 1980s one, I have to say. It is satisfactorily faithful, though, with a good cast, and its faults are the usual old time beeb ones (people aged up or down a la the theatre, pacing etc), so it depends on people's tolerance for that, of course. It is disappointing that they never really seriously tried even during the big Austen phase everyone went through for a while, though. The 2005 wasn't anything to write home about, the 1999 is an interesting film that I kind of like as its own thing, but it is a terrible adaptation.

Continuing my contrary determination to like versions of these unadaptable/not adapted well books, I watched the 1998 (? I think) ITV Wuthering Heights this year and I'm not entirely sure how I felt about their Heathcliff (not that he was bad or anything, but just: hmmmm, is he my idea of him? probably not???) and with the caveat that it has been a hundred years since I read it, so I may have missed some crimes, it seemed to me that it got it and included everything I rememered and had a very young Matthew Macfadyen as Hareton, Peter Davison as Lockwood, and Orla Brady as Cathy.

Personally, though, I'm still sulking that Andrew Davies never tried to do The Mysteries of Udolpho. I think he could have had so much more fun with it than whatever it was he was trying to do with Sanditon. (BBC Radio had my back, but blew it, which is unusual for them.) But there's not even a terrible film version! Whhhhyy? (Is it the 250 page travelogue? Does it put everyone off? lol)

On that line, I think The Castle of Otranto might well be unadaptable, but. If someone tried, I would be there with popcorn. XD

Well, I shudder to think of how they would adapt Emily of New Moon today. They’d probably turn the whole (necessarily!) fucked up thing with Dean Priest into some TikTok dark romance schlock.

Every time Mina falls in love with Dracula in an adaptation and casts aside Jonathan like yesterday's whatever, an angel loses its wings!!! (p.s. For some reason saying "angel" in this context has me picturing the Buffyverse Angel frowning very broodily. I like to think he would be Team Jonathan.)

You're not wrong, honestly! I cherish my dislike of nearly every P&P adaptation close to my heart, but none of them are off to the extent that all MP ones are, probably even including the Greer/Olivier P&P. I think some really interesting things could be done with MP—and I guess I would concede that the Rozema MP is at least interesting, but it's so removed from MP the novel that at times it feels less critically engaged with MP than not really about it at all.

In particular, I've always found it interesting that Fanny and Mary are both charity cases (and family rejects) in different ways, though Mary has money, but the parallels between them fall apart in adaptation. The basic structure that makes them such glaring foils for each other (underscored by Fanny's antipathy-attraction towards Mary, since Mary is probably the most complex and structurally tragic of any of the female rival-figures in Austen) fails if they're just not that different.

And I'm honestly just sort of baffled by the apparent difficulty of recognizable LM Montgomery. One of the benefits of a shift to a visual medium is that narrative or descriptive passages that feel inappropriate to 2024 can quite naturally not show up in a cinematic adaptation, and dialogue shifted where necessary, since shifts to dialogue always need to happen regardless. (I also feel this way about Tolkien's painfully colonialist descriptions of his few heroic dark-skinned characters—you can still allow those characters to exist in a meaningful way, and drop the awful descriptions that would be weird and forced to include in cinematic form anyway). My favorite Montgomery books were the Emily books and A Tangled Web (the latter of which would probably benefit from a TV show rather than trying to pack all the drama into a feature film, lol), and it's difficult to see an industry that can't handle Anne doing right by either.

It's so, so weird with Dracula. So many Draculas!

YES OTRANTO. Or Udolpho. Evil monks! Giant helmets crushing people!

Yes! XD

They're both so extra, I can't believe no one's done at least one terrible and OTT version of both or either at some point.

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