PBS (in North America) and ITV (in the UK) are currently broadcasting a "Jane Austen Season", comprised of six TV adaptations of Austen's novels (four of them brand new). As such, it's an excellent opportunity to send Andrew Davies, screenwriter and adapter of the 1995 wet-T-shirt Pride and Prejudice and the latest Northanger Abbey, out on the publicity circuit, resulting in this infuriating, kind of stupid, and just plain weird fluff piece on CNN.com.
To sum up the main points:
1. Mr. Davies claims that Austen's plots are actually driven by sex and that the stories are more contemporary than people think they are.
Me: By trying to overcome a popular misconception, Davies overstates the issue. Austen's plots make use of the traditional structure of the marriage plot, meaning that sex could be one of the driving points. However, the plots are also often driven by social forces like lack of money (Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility) or encroaching changes in the class structure (Emma). And by concentrating so much on sex, Davies neglects the importance of love, of Austen's exploration of what it means to love someone feelingly but also rationally. And it's not like there isn't sex in the novels. Sex is what drives Lydia towards Wickham and what, one generation earlier, attracted Mr. Bennet to Mrs. Bennet. And look where that got them.
2. Mr. Davies likes to emphasize the physicality of the characters, admiring the heroines:
"Their bodies are quite a substantial part of what they bring to the whole sexual equation. Their hair and their shoulders and their necks and their breasts" -- ripe in decolletage -- "are all on show, part of the whole deal."
(
Me: Ew?)
and the heroes:
"And the men, too," he goes on. "I have men on horseback riding very fast, working up a sweat, in boots and tight breeches, all that kind of thing."
Me: Okay, look. Yes, they had sex in the eighteenth-century. In fact, they had lots of sex, and lots of bastard babies, and lots and lots of STDs. But none of that appears in Austen
for a reason. A lack of physicality in characterization and plotting means that whenever characters
do move (dance, walk, move to a closer chair, inch a chair forward ever so slightly), its significance is greater. It is a matter of scale, and the scale Austen was working in was the drawing room, not the red light district.
3. Mr. Davies has mother issues:
"My mother was a difficult and unfathomable woman," declares Davies, "and I started trying to understand women at an early age."
Me: No comment.
4. Mr. Davies also seems to base his creative decision on his personal whims, not whether the new additions further overrated components such as plot, theme or characterization:
"All these novelists choose the scenes that they're going to write, and imply the scenes that they don't write -- and quite often I think the scenes they DON'T write are the scenes I want to see."
Me: I know that fidelity criticism in film adaptation is unproductive. I know that a more useful approach is to think of an adaptation of a novel as another reading, another interpretation. I know that adapations of classic novels often say more about the time that the adaptation was made rather than the time period that it portrays. But
damn if I don't want to strangle Davies for his arrogance. I have yet to see Davies' version of
Northanger Abbey so I'll reserve judgement on that. But that won't stop me from hatin' on his interviews.
P.S. I actually really like the Davies adaptation of
Pride and Prejudice (wonkily paced ending notwithstanding). Why must creative people give interviews?
Which direction do I turn the dials in order to make the fridge colder? (The writing below the letter dial unhelpfully reads "Start controls at "5" and "C". Adjust for warmer or colder.") What do the up arrows mean? If I want colder air, does that mean I should turn the dial in that direction? Does it mean that higher numbers/letters indicates colder? Or does the arrow indicate that the letters/numbers on the higher part of the dial is where it's colder? GAH!
