#re-reading the ‘controversial adaptation’ paper again

[cto10121]

I feel that the same people who think that RetJ is not a faithful adaptation of R&J would be the same people who call West Side Story an R&J musical without blinking an eye.

[mk-wizard]

Not Hiring Fans == Bad Idea

Hi, guys.

I refuse to be silent about Disney/Marvel’s latest bad idea which is how they actively refuse to hire fans of comics to write or have any professional hand in films or shows based on comics. Their exact words are that it is a “red flag” for someone to be a fan of the media. Now... I can understand not wanting to hire inflexible purists and looking at skill first, but actively refusing to hire people who love and respect the medium you want to work with is such a bad idea on so many levels. In fact, I have four counter arguments as to why you should hire fans.

1- Issue #___ may have been done, but NOT in film or TV. - And even if it has been, so what? How many times has Cinderella, been adapted multiple times just by Disney alone? Disney keeps re-adapting it with two sequels to the classic, a live action remake, a few films which re-imagine the premise completely and cartoon shorts which adapt the tale in some way or the other all the time. Great stories are worth telling again and again by anyone who is happy to do so and in the medium of their choosing. It is a part creative freedom.

2- Not everyone has read issue #___ . - People forget that a lot of these comic books have been around for decades, so not everyone has read every single one because they didn’t know about them, or they weren’t born yet. Just look at the Lord of the Rings trilogy. A lot of people didn’t even know the books existed until the movies came out and they have been around for a long time. After the films aired, people everywhere were getting their hands on the books. The same thing can and often does happen with Marvel movies. In a way, a superhero movie is just an elaborate comic book commercial, so when done right, it can be the reason comic sales skyrocketed.

3- A fan will reinvent the story right. - I understand that times change, and some heroes have not aged well, so you need to give things a face lift. However, you also need to know where and how to make those changes without breaking the character or the story. And I am not talking about little changes like updating the year, swapping rotary phones for cellphones, updating wardrobes and such. You need to know and accept what is and isn’t, as the Sorcerer Supreme would call it, a “constant point” as in something cannot be changed. This isn’t to say you cannot experiment with reinvention or pass on mantles, but even that has to be done right. You cannot turn Aunt May into a teenager while raising Peter. You cannot create a G-rated Punisher. You cannot turn Black Widow into a spoiled incompetent rich girl. You cannot change Captain America’s nationality. Some reinventions just don’t work no matter how funny, progressive or clever they sound on paper. A fan can differentiate between what changes are ok and may even make a story better while also knowing when to say no in order to avoid failure or worse, controversy.

4- Making art with love is more likely to be fantastic. - I admit not every fan can create good art, but amazing art has always been made by people who put their hearts into it. Just look at the original Star Wars trilogy. You can see, feel and even hear the love put into that, and that is why we are still talking about it to this day. Films and shows that are just made to pass a buck will be kind of fun, but they will not be memorable. If you are going to invest time, money and work into something, why not have people who want to do it? Who want to be there? Who want to make sure this project turns out great? Yes, it isn’t easy to work with people who get emotionally attached and argue about ideas, but when a project means something to the people working with it, they are more likely to be committed to it and really do their best instead of just doing things half-baked because their only concern is getting paid.

As for Disney, it has been clear for a long time that they stand by their choice, but I also think it has been coming back to bite them in the butt for a while now and it is only going to get worse before it gets better, I’m afraid. Then again, maybe it is the only way they’ll learn.

Thank you for reading and as always, stay safe.

-Mary

[letterboxd]

Life in Film: Ben Wheatley.

As Netflix goes gothic with a new Rebecca adaptation, director Ben Wheatley tells Jack Moulton about his favorite Hitchcock film, the teenagers who will save cinema, and a memorable experience with The Thing.

“The actual process of filmmaking is guiding actors and capturing emotion on set. That’s enough of a job without putting another layer of postmodern film criticism over the top of it.” —Ben Wheatley

Winter’s coming, still no vaccine, the four walls of home are getting pretty samey… and what Netflix has decided we need right now is a lavish, gaslight-y psychological thriller about a clifftop manor filled with the personality of its dead mistress—and a revival of one of the best menaces in screen history. Bring on the ‘Mrs Danvers’ Hallowe’en costumes, because Rebecca is back.

In Ben Wheatley’s new film adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s best-selling 1938 novel, scripted by Jane Goldman, Lily James plays an orphaned lady’s maid—a complete nobody, with no known first name—who catches the eye of the dashing, cashed-up Maxim de Winter (Armie Hammer).

Very quickly, the young second Mrs de Winter is flung into the intimidating role of lady of Manderley, and into the shadow of de Winter’s late first wife, Rebecca. The whirlwind romance is over; the obsession has begun, and it’s hotly fuelled by Manderley’s housekeeper, Mrs Danvers (Kristin Scott Thomas, perfectly cast).

Each adaptation of du Maurier’s story has its own quirks, and early Letterboxd reactions suggest viewers will experience varying levels of satisfaction with Wheatley’s, depending on how familiar they are with both the novel and earlier screen versions—most notably, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 Best Picture winner, starring Laurence Olivier Joan Fontaine, and Judith Anderson.

Why would you follow Hitchcock? It’s been 80 years; Netflix is likely banking on an audience of Rebecca virgins (the same kind of studio calculation that worked for Bradley Cooper’s A Star is Born). Plus, the new Rebecca is a Working Title affair; it has glamor, camp, Armie Hammer in a three-piece suit, the sunny South of France, sports cars, horses, the wild Cornish coast, Lily James in full dramatic heat, and—controversial!—a fresh twist on the denouement.

A big-budget thriller made for a streamer is Wheatley coming full circle, in a way: he made his name early on with viral internet capers and a blog (“Mr and Mrs Wheatley”) of shorts co-created with his wife and longtime collaborator, Amy Jump. Between then and now, they have gained fans for their well-received low-to-no budget thrillers, including High-Rise, Kill List and Free Fire (which also starred Hammer).

Over Zoom, Wheatley spoke to Letterboxd about the process of scaling up, the challenge of casting already-iconic characters, and being a year-round horror lover. [The Rebecca plot discussion may be spoilery to some. Wheatley is specifically talking about the du Maurier version, not his film.]

Armie Hammer and Ben Wheatley on the set of ‘Rebecca’.

Can you tell us how you overcame any concerns in adapting a famous novel that already has a very famous adaptation? How did you want to make a 1930s story relevant to modern audiences? Ben Wheatley: When you go back to the novel and look at how it works, you see it’s a very modern book. [Author Daphne du Maurier is] doing stuff that people are still picking up the pieces of now. It’s almost like the Rosetta Stone of thrillers—it tells you everything on how to put a thriller together. The genre jumping and Russian-doll nature of the structure is so delicious. When you look at the characters in the book, they’re still popping up in other stuff—there’s Mrs Danvers in all sorts of movies.

It remains fresh because of its boldness. Du Maurier is writing in a way that’s almost like a dare. She’s going, “right, okay, you like romantic fiction do you? I’ll write you romantic fiction; here’s Maxim de Winter, he’s a widower, he’s a good-looking guy, and owns a big house. Here’s a rags-to-riches, Cinderella-style girl. They’re going to fall in love. Then I’m going to ruin romantic fiction for you forever by making him into a murdering swine and implicating you in the murder because you’re so excited about a couple getting away with it!”

That’s the happy ending—Maxim doesn’t go to prison. How does that work? He’s pretty evil by the end. It’s so subtly done that you only see the trap of it after you finish reading the book. That’s clearly represented in Jane Goldman’s adaptation that couldn’t be done in 1940 because of the Hays Code. That whole element of the book is missing [in Hitchcock’s Rebecca]. But I do really like this style of storytelling in the 1930s and ’40s that is not winky, sarcastic, and cynical. It’s going, “here’s Entertainment with a big ‘E’. We’re going to take you on holiday, then we’re gonna scare you, then we’re gonna take you around these beautiful houses that you would never get a chance to go around, and we’re gonna show you these big emotions.”

After High-Rise, you ended up circling back to more contained types of films, whereas Rebecca is your lushest and largest production. How was scaling up for you? Free Fire does feel like a more contained film, but in many ways it was just as complicated and had the same budget as High-Rise, since it’s just in one space. Happy New Year, Colin Burstead is literally a contained film, that’s right. What [the bigger budget] gave me was the chance to have a conversation where I say I want a hotel that’s full of people and no-one says you can’t have any people in it. You don’t have to shoot in a corner, so that scale is suddenly allowed.

Elisabeth Moss and Tom Hiddlestone in Wheatley’s ‘High-Rise’ (2015).

The other movies I did are seen as no-budget or, I don’t even know the word for how little money they are, and even though High-Rise and Free Fire were eight million dollars each, they’re still seen as ultra-low budget. This is the first film that I’ve done that’s just a standard Hollywood-style movie budget and it makes a massive difference. It gives you extra time to work. All the schemes you might have had to work out in order to cheat and get around faster, but now it’s fine, let’s only shoot two pages today. We can go out on the road and close down all of the south of France—don’t worry about all the holidaymakers screaming at you and getting cross! That side of it is great.

You had the challenge to cast iconic actors for iconic roles. What were you looking for in the casting? What points of reference did you give the actors? I don’t think we really talked about it, but [Armie Hammer] definitely didn’t watch the Hitchcock version. I can understand why he wouldn’t. There was no way he was going to accidentally mimic [Laurence] Olivier’s performance without seeing it and he just didn’t want to have the pressure of that. I think that’s quite right. It’s an 80-year-old film, it’s a beloved classic, and we’d be mad if we were trying to remake it. We’re not.

The thing about the shadow that the film cast is that it’s hard enough making stuff without thinking about other filmmakers. I’ve had this in the past where journalists ask me “what were your influences on the day?” and I wish I could say “it was a really complicated set of movies that the whole thing was based around”, but it’s not like that. When you watch documentaries about filmmakers screening loads of movies for their actors before they make something—it’s lovely, but it’s not something I’ve ever done.

The actual process of filmmaking is guiding actors and capturing emotion on set. That’s enough of a job without putting another layer of postmodern film criticism over the top of it—“we’ll use this shot from 1952, that will really make this scene sing!”—then you’re in a world of pain. Basically, it’s my interpretation of the adaptation. The book is its own place, and for something like High-Rise, [screenwriter Amy Jump] has the nightmare of sitting down with 112 pages of blank paper and taking a novel and smashing it into a script. That’s the hard bit.

Armie Hammer and Lily James in ‘Rebecca’.

Current industry news is not so great—cinemas are facing bankruptcy, film festivals in the USA are mostly virtual, Disney is focusing on Disney+ only. How do you feel about a future where streaming dominates the market and the theatrical experience becomes, as we fear, an exclusive niche? Independent cinema was born out of very few movies. If you look at the history of Eraserhead—that film on its own almost created all of cult cinema programming. One movie can do that. It can create an audience that is replicated and becomes a whole industry. And that can happen again, but it needs those films to do that. They will come as things ebb and flow. The streamers will control the whole market and then one day someone will go “I don’t want to watch this stuff, I want to watch something else” and they’ll go make it.

It’s like The Matrix, it’s a repeating cycle. There’ll always be ‘the One’. There’s Barbara Loden in 1970 making Wanda, basically inventing American independent cinema. So I don’t worry massively about it. I know it’s awkward and awful for people to go bankrupt and the cinemas to close down, but in time they’ll re-open because people will wanna see stuff. The figures for cinemagoers were massive before Covid. Are you saying that people with money are not going to exploit that? Life will find a way. Remember that the cinema industry from the beginning is one that’s in a tailspin. Every year is a disaster and they’re going bust. But they survived the Spanish Flu, which is basically the same thing.

Two months ago, you quickly made a horror movie. We’re going to get a lot of these from filmmakers who just need to create something this year. What can you identify now about this inevitable next wave of micro-budget, micro-schedule pandemic-era cinema? I’ve always made micro-budget films so that side of it is not so crazy. There will be a lot of Zoom and people-locked-in-houses films but they won’t be so interesting. They’re more to-keep-you-sane kind of filmmaking which is absolutely fine. Where you should look for [the ‘pandemic-era’ films] is from the kids and young adults through 14 to 25 who’ve been the most affected by it. They will be the ones making the true movies about the pandemic which will be in like five years’ time.

People going through GCSEs and A-Levels [final high-school exams in England] will have had their social contracts thoroughly smashed by the government after society tells them that this is the most important thing you’re ever gonna do in your life. Then the next day the government tells them “actually, you’ve all passed”, then the next day they go “no, you’ve all failed”, and then “oh no, you’ve all passed”. It’s totally bizarre. Anyone who’s in university at the moment [is] thinking about how they’ve worked really hard to get to that position and now they’ve had it taken away from them. That type of schism in that group will make for a unique set of storytelling impetus. Much more interesting than from my perspective of being a middle-age bloke and having to stay in my house for a bit, which was alright. Their experience is extreme and that will change cinema.

Kristin Scott Thomas as Mrs Danvers in ‘Rebecca’.

It’s time to probe into your taste in film. Firstly, three questions about Alfred Hitchcock: his best film, most underrated film, and most overrated film? It’s tricky, there’s a lot to choose from. I think Psycho is his best film because, much like Wanda, it was the invention of indie cinema. He took a TV crew to go and do a personal project and then completely redefined horror, and he did it in the same year as Peeping Tom.

There’s stuff I really like in Torn Curtain. Certainly the murder scene where they’re trying to stick the guy in the oven. It’s a gut-wrenching sequence. Overrated, I don’t know. It’s just a bit mean, isn’t it? Overrated by who? They’re all massively rated, aren’t they?

Which film made you want to become a filmmaker? The slightly uncool version of my answer is the first fifteen minutes of Dr. No before I got sent to bed. We used to watch movies on the telly when I was a kid, so movies would start at 7pm and I had to go to bed at 7:30pm. You would get to see the first half-hour and that would be it. The opening was really intriguing. I never actually saw a lot of these movies until I was much older.

The more grown-up answer is a film like Taxi Driver. It was the first time where I felt like I’d been transported in a way where there was an authorship to a film that I didn’t understand. It had done something to me that television and straightforward movies hadn’t done and made me feel very strange. It was something to do with the very, very intense mixture of sound, music and image and I started to understand that that was cinema.

What horror movie do you watch every Hallowe’en? I watch The Thing every year but I don’t tend to celebrate Hallowe’en, to be honest. I’m of an age where it wasn’t a big deal and was never particularly celebrated. I find it a bit like “what’s all this Hallowe’en about?”—horror films for me are for all year-round.

What’s a brilliant mindfuck movie that perhaps even cinephiles haven’t seen? What grade of cinephile are we talking? All of the work by Jan Švankmajer, maybe. Hard to Be a God is pretty mindfucky if you want a bit of that, but cinephiles should know about it. It’s pretty intense. Marketa Lazarová too.

‘Marketa Lazarová’ (1967) directed by František Vláčil.

What is the greatest screen romance that you totally fell head over heels for? I guess it’s Casablanca for me. That would be it.

Which coming-of-age film did you connect to the most as a teenager? [Pauses for effect] Scum.

Who is an exciting newcomer director we should keep our eyes on? God, I don’t know. I would say Jim Hosking but he’s older than me and he’s not a newcomer because he’s done two movies. So, that’s rubbish. He doesn’t count.

[Editor’s note: Hosking contributed to ABCs of Death 2 with the segment “G is for Grandad” while Wheatley contributed to The ABCs of Death with the segment “U is for Unearthed” and also executive produced the follow-up film.]

What was your best cinema experience? [Spoiler warning for The Thing.]

Oh, one that speaks in my mind is seeing The Thing at an all-nighter in the Scala at King’s Cross, and I was sitting right next to this drunk guy who was talking along to the screen. It was a packed cinema with about 300 people, and someone at the front told him “will you just shut up?” The guy says “I won’t shut up. You tell me to shut up again and I’ll spoil the whole film!” The whole audience goes “no, no, no!” and he went “it’s the black guy and the guy with the beard—everyone else dies!” That made me laugh so much.

Do you have a favorite film you’ve watched so far this year? Yeah, Zombie Flesh Eaters.

Related content

Classic Gothic Literature to Film—Jennifer Boddaert’s list

Ava’s Dark Romance list

Ben Wheatley’s Life in Film list

Follow Jack on Letterboxd

‘Rebecca’ is in select US theaters on October 17, and streaming on Netflix everywhere on October 21.

[veryfantasticstudent]

What happens after Evangelion? Posthumanity in 新世紀エヴァンゲリオン (Neon Genesis Evangelion)

I finally watched (and subsequently re-watched) the classic (and highly controversial anime) Neon Genesis Evangelion, thanks to Netflix’s partial acquisition of the rights to the show—they somehow forgot “Fly Me to the Moon”[1]. Evangelion is an anime about a lot of themes—too many, thanks to Hideaki Anno’s dodgy responses regarding its interpretations. Alienation and depression are at the center of it all. Countless articles will tell you that Anno was suffering from depression while working on Evangelion. Further, Japan had recently faced terrorist attacks in Tokyo, as well as a series of devastating earthquakes. In the face of such tragedies, Evangelion asks, what will become of us in the future? In a world where lives are arbitrarily lost, where we have no direction to go towards, how can humanity itself continue?

These are some of the bigger questions that Evangelion asks, and they connect to the more intimate, the more human questions it poses as well. How can two human beings form any connection when disasters like the Second Impact occur? The English title of the fourth episode of the series is “Hedgehog’s Dilemma”. Philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer coined this term to express the complexity of human relationships; moving closer together—physically or mentally—means that we will hurt each other. And yet, this proximity is what we humans crave the most. How do we reconcile these conflicting desires and keep moving on in the face of tragedy? For many of us, these thoughts may not result from Second-Impact-scale disasters, but personal tragedies—the death of loved ones, or even the break-up of friendships or relationships. These feelings seem unconnected to the future of humanity, but as the series repeatedly emphasizes, the two are linked. Evangelion asks: how do we face tomorrow. In my essay, I propose that there multiple ways that Evangelion answers these questions, and all of them are linked to the notion of posthumanity.

Before I get into Evangelion we must clarify what I mean by “posthuman”. An umbrella-term, “posthuman” is literally what comes after humanity. It is the posthuman who must adapt to the new world that is altered by climate change, nuclear wars, alien life contact, and endless numbers of (not entirely) science-fictional scenarios. Bio-technological invasion of the human body alters the limits of a human being, extending us into our electronic environments, interfacing us with machines and artificial intelligence. This is a kind of posthumanity, often leaning towards calling the current human being a “cyborg” (in Donna Haraway’s term). A central aspect of posthumanity tends to be the displacement of the “rational thinking machine” of the Renaissance humanist. “Man” is no longer the measure of all things. The posthuman is as much an animal as any, and no longer claims a moral stature higher than its fellow earth inhabitants. It suggests an equality with everything, especially if we look at vitalist materialist Rose Braidotti’s stance in her book The Posthuman. These are the broad notions of the posthuman that I will work with for this essay.

The people in Evangelion are, in at least the bio-technological sense, posthuman. This is especially true for the three EVA pilots, who meld with their EVA Units. However, that is not enough to survive in this world. Humans are no longer allowed their aspirations, displaced as they are by repeated Angel attacks. They still do not connect with their environments—the futuristic landscapes of Tokyo-3 little more than blast shelters. Animals do not even survive in this world. There is something missing in even the humanity of the Evangelion human beings, and all characters can feel that. That is why there is a thrust to the posthuman in the show with the 人類補完成計画, translated as the Human Instrumentality Project, comes into play. 「人類方完成計画」means different things to different people and organizations—is not surprising, considering this is Evangelion. I see three major interpretations of this phrase, and these are the posthumanities of Evangelion, the humanities after the Evangelion series. These are the posthumanities of Seele, Ikari Gendō, and Ikari Shinji.

Let us start with Seele. “To return humanity to its original form”—this is the posthumanity of Seele. All individuality must be extinguished, and we must return to the primal forms of Lilith and Adam. Why Lilith? This is where my knowledge of the Christian tradition fails. As far as I know, Lilith was Adam’s first “companion”, but she never lay with him. Instead, she gave birth to all the monsters of the world. Often, she has been thought of as a witch. If you want an instance of Lilith close to the world, Jean E. Graham’s paper “Women, Sex, and Power: Circe and Lilith in Narnia” compares the White Witch of Narnia to Lilith. In fact, she is explicitly noted to be a descendant of Lilith. This is speculation, but it seems that we are all, then, descendants of Lilith. Not even those of Adam and Eve, we are irredeemable monsters, unless we go back to the form that bore us, and resume the innocence of the formless. This needs the destruction of the human, and in some ways, this is the end that Ayanami Rei almost leads us to.

Ikari Gendō’s posthumanity is a rogue form of Seele’s plan, insofar as is it wishes to bring together all the living and the dead. The show repeatedly tells us that Ayanami Rei is somehow connected to Ikari Yui, Ikari Gendō’s deceased wife. Most people seem to find this form of posthumanism twisted and somehow fundamentally wrong. Akagi Naoko found it disturbing enough to find Yui still shadowing her that she committed suicide.

Finally, we have the posthumanism of Ikari Shinji. This is how I read the last two episodes of Evangelion, the two episodes that make the least sense in an anime where few things make sense. Over the two episodes, the EVA pilots and other NERV personnel face the monsters that have haunted them throughout their lives and try to overcome them. Shinji’s fear is the fear of intimacy, of becoming close to people. He does not know how to open himself up without getting hurt, primarily because his father never showed him any warmth even after his mother gave herself up to EVA – 01. It is the Hedgehog’s Dilemma all over again. The primarily-teenage audience of Evangelion possibly relates the difficulties that Shinji faces, the inability to somehow “let loose” and connect with people freely. How can one do that when it is so easy to not only hurt others but also hurt oneself? This is what stops Shinji often taking decisive action and stops him from fully realizing himself.

The purpose of the last two Evangelion episodes is to show us how Shinji admits that he has been drawing walls in the way he imagines the world to be. In the alternative world that he dreams of, he acts the same way as his classmates—a carefree, horny, uninhibited, Japanese teenage male. It is just an altered version of a scene we have already witnessed before. It is important that this world is not radically different from his own world. The people are the same—his classmates and Misato still make the experiences of this world. If it can be done in that imaginary world, why not in this world? Shinji realizes that the world he has been looking for does not need to be an LCL-fuelled dream, but a world that he can inhabit. When Shinji rejects the dream world that Lilith-Rei gives him, Shinji accepts the difficulty of human existence. He accepts the borders that characterize the individual human and yet also looks to the possibility of moving beyond our borders and bonding with other people. The “congratulations” sequence in the original ending and the final scene of the 1997 movie (where he almost strangles Asuka), both accept the fact that people are always distinct, but there is no reason why we cannot connect with each other.

The show then inevitably puts its weight behind the last form of “perfection” or 「完成」(Kansei). This is how human realization should function. The show not only addresses teenage anxieties through this, but its rejection of other forms of perfection is important too. It rejects forms of human perfection that try to take us into some primordial past or try to erase all our distinctions. The erosion of borders, the assertion that we are all the same is, is as threatening as the assertion that some shadowy organization that does not even live among us can decide who is or is not a part of a community. Evangelion is prescient in the fact that not only does it see the creation of rigid borders as a problem, but it also sees that the complete dismissal of borders is not a solution either. I would like to think that it gives us tools to think about the problems of borders that we face in many regions of the world—whether it is the wars in the Middle East, the anti-immigrant agendas of Trump’s America and Modi’s India, the slowly digesting monster that is the PRC in Hong Kong, or even the xenophobia that countries like Korea and Japan still struggle with. Every individual must revaluate themselves before we blindly forge on this path that we call “humanity”. Maybe we all need to pause for a few days and watch Neon Genesis Evangelion before we create the cataclysm of the Second Impact.

[1] Before pointing out that Netflix’s dubbing and subbing has horribly altered the anime and therefore Evangelion has lost its essence, please note that I know Japanese. You can find that on my LinkedIn Page. Of course, I haven’t linked that anywhere on Tumblr, so don’t look for it.