As monarchy biopics go, Mary, Queen of Scots does its best to stay in familiar territory.  (Or, as one critic puts it, rather more harshly, "indulges in every threadbare period-film trope.")  The fictionalized secret meeting between the two queens is a dramatic device going back to Schiller; the gendering of the pair, with Elizabeth as "masculine" and Mary as "feminine," goes back even further (arguably back to the lifetimes of the queens themselves); the conflict between private romance and public duty is a staple of the form; even the moment of prophecy at the end has been popular in representations of the Tudors and Stuarts since Shakespeare and Fletcher (who pull this off at the end of Henry VIII).  Unfortunately, I don't remember whether or not I've seen the previous Mary, Queen of Scots biopic, but its trailer indicates that its 2018 descendant has borrowed the mise-en-scene for the moment when Darnley is forced to sign off on Riccio's death.  Strictly speaking, the only real nod to experimentation here is the color-blind casting for supporting actors and extras.

For this viewer, at least, the film's key problem is Mary herself--and, for that matter, what I felt was a discrepancy between the film's purported and actual approaches to her behavior.  On the one hand, the film represents Mary as the modern ideal of royalty: she valorizes emotional authenticity over realpolitik; yearns for real love (and sex, with ironic consequences); tries to model toleration for her subjects; makes a point of connecting with the common people; attempts to make proto-feminist (albeit monarchist) common cause with Elizabeth; and so on.  All of this is in contrast to the performative, insistently celibate, and increasingly made-up Elizabeth, who breaks down only rarely into raw emotional expression.  (Notably, Mary spends a lot more time out in nature than Elizabeth does; even Holyrood is rough-hewn out of rock.)  On the other hand, the film is also stuck with the real Mary's political acumen, or lack thereof, and so it's hard to avoid the conclusion that she self-inflicts more wounds than those suffered by poor Riccio.  Despite the explicit "men, amirite?" tone of the dialogue, Mary's brother James spends most of the film being correct.  No, Mary should not tick off John Knox (who seems badly in need of shampoo); no, Mary should certainly not marry Darnley; yes, marrying Darnley will blow up the Anglo-Scottish detente that James has worked so hard to achieve. While Mary's decision to spare James' life (pesky historical reality again) comes across as yet another example of emotional authenticity, not to mention Christian forgiveness, one can't help noticing that Bothwell has reason to be exasperated.  For that matter, Mary's complete misunderstanding of Bothwell's behavior sums up her utter failure as a politician, let alone a monarch.  Mary's "authenticity" consistently prevents her from listening to or learning from her brother, even though he has actually been running things for years.  It keeps her from judging Darnley's character (the film makes him more of a weasel than even the real Darnley, which is saying something).   And it makes her incapable of grasping that Bothwell, her apparently loyal protector, is as much on the make as anyone else.  Her climactic encounter with Elizabeth--a.k.a. the person with the upper hand--is a mind-boggling miscalculation of epic proportions.  ("Shut up, Mary," wails the viewer, as Mary shoots herself thoroughly in the foot with a cannon.)  Was the irony of the ending, in which a guy ascends the throne and everything is fine, really intended by the filmmakers?

Films set from the reign of George III and later usually face one problem head on: how to justify the ongoing existence of a monarchy in a country where the monarch no longer has any well-defined powers as a ruler.  A few years ago, I argued that from The Madness of King George onwards, the usual solution has been to narrate how the monarch gets his (or her) "glamour" back--how, that is, they reemerge as unifying national symbols who reside beyond the taint of the political, a process that often requires the help of a civilian guide.  Frequently enough, having rescued the country by rescuing the monarch, the all-too-helpful civilian finds himself kicked to the curb at the end (The King's Speech is an important exception to this rule).  All of these things play out before--indeed, require--an eager public to consume the monarch's image. But The Favourite tackles a different problem, yet one recognizably filtered through the preoccupations associated with symbolic monarchy films: what happens to the glamour conferred by divine right when the supposedly powerful monarch is merely a civilian tool? 

The Favourite opens with a nod and wink to King George: whereas that film begins with the king's robing for the opening of Parliament, The Favourite opens with the queen's disrobing after the speech.  Figuratively shedding the mantle of earlier monarchy films, which if nothing else are often Oscar-bait for costume design, The Favourite revels in announcing its disinterest in the history that purportedly underlies its plot.  The film has a complicated relationship to the satires of the real Duchess of Marlborough's friend Arthur Maynwaring; here, the satires don't exist, and are replaced instead by Abigail's initial attempt to blackmail Sarah and then Sarah's own attempt to blackmail the Queen with the Queen's love letters to her.   Abigail loses years off her age--she was considerably Masham's senior--while Sarah loses all her children and Queen Anne her husband. That Abigail was related to both Sarah and Harley goes similarly unmentioned.  Events that took about six years to unfold here appear to transpire in a matter of weeks.  So The Favourite does its best to emulate Her Majesty, Mrs. Brown (also known as the film with the missing Prime MInister) when it comes to cheerfully abandoning all pretensions to accuracy.  At the same time, the contrast between the period interiors and the twenty-first century women's costumes (geometrically-ornamented "sketches," as it were, of appropriate dress), language, and, most famously, dance moves continually reminds the viewer that this film is mediated through our own aesthetics and politics. 

One of The Favourite's most interesting deviations from the contemporary monarchy film, in fact, is that the focus is on Queen Anne's relationships to other women: films about Victoria and the two Elizabeths primarily focus on the queen and men, whether as political or romantic objects.  As has been oft-remarked by the critics, the film plays games with gender stereotypes: the men's more accurate costumes appear "feminine" to a modern viewer (men ought to be "pretty," Harley remarks), in contrast to Anne's and Sarah's masculine riding habits and shooting garb.  But the men also spend as much time as the bored queen playing silly games like racing ducks and throwing fruit at each other.  Arguably, the only character in the film with a gimlet-eyed approach to politics is Sarah--even her romantic relationship with the queen is integral to her agenda.   Moreover, because the Queen actually makes decisions, instead of being reduced to a ventriloquist's dummy (in theory, anyway), the division of power by gender becomes much more complex: the politicians can try to manipulate the Queen, but they can't make a move without her giving the OK; if they do manipulate the Queen successfully, it's through the medium of another woman.  Indeed, the women (even the Queen) are much more alert to the politics of sex and courtship than the men.   

The public/private split that takes up so much of the post-George films' attention here reappears as the conflict between Sarah (who manipulates the Queen for what she believes is the national good) and Abigail (who has no ambitions beyond ensuring her own safety after years of abuse).  The wider public is noticeably missing altogether: the Queen has no contact with anyone beyond the palace boundaries and only hears about their opinions (and riots) secondhand--foreshadowing the ultimate fate of Sarah's letter at the end.  Wheeled to a dance, the gouty queen must sit by herself and watch, and she clearly spends much of her time alone and self-absorbed.  Thus, instead of focusing on the Queen (re)learning how to perform in order to settle national unrest, the film emphasizes how Sarah and Abigail compete in their performances for the Queen--Abigail's flattery (but is it always?) vs. Sarah's truthfulness (but is it always?).  Sarah, the character who fits most neatly into the contemporary monarchy film's more traditional plot, suffers the usual fate of all non-royal advisers--but without accomplishing her goals.  In a sense, the film acts as a thematic prequel to the symbolic monarchy films, as Anne willingly (if not always wittingly) relinquishes the political power that later monarchs conspicuously fail to possess.  

A lot of viewers were baffled by those bunnies at the end, incidentally.  My own reading of that closing image was that the rabbits (her "children," standing in for the seventeen lost pregnancies and dead children) have represented throughout an emotional alternative to Sarah, Abigail, and all the rest: the rabbits are the Queen's emotional utopia of sorts, an escape to a psychological place in which nothing is demanded of her other than food, water, and petting.  The rabbits have no ulterior motives and make no judgments.  But as the juxtaposition to the Queen's physically and sexually abusive demonstration of power over Abigail suggests, the Queen's love for the rabbits is also amoral (and, of course, vice-versa).  The rabbits are the Queen's fantasy of uncomplicated happiness; Abigail, however, is what the Queen has.  

The selling point of Mowgli has been its "dark" quality, in comparison to the song-and-dance animated Jungle Book feature and, for that matter, the more recent live adaptation (the film which came, saw, and conquered this one, cinematic-release speaking).  In practice, this results in a kind of tonal dissonance: Mowgli's frequently light-hearted coming-of-age narrative runs smack into a much bloodier story about the ethics of hunting.  (TL;DR: hunting for food, good; hunting for sport, bad.)  As a result, it's not always clear whom the film is for, a problem accentuated by the sometimes odd CGI (Shere Khan and Father Wolf are especially...off) and the sometimes cartoonish, sometimes very brutal violence. Interestingly enough, Mowgli turns out to have its competitor's problem with the in-universe politics of Mowgli's identity as a human being, and yet solves them it in a way that arguably out-Kiplings Kipling.

Mowgli's narrative combines the Mowgli tales from the first Jungle Book, including Shere Khan's manipulation of wolfpack politics, Mowgli's kidnapping by the Bandar-Log (here just known as the Monkey People), and Mowgli's time in the village, although it concludes by foreshadowing his afterlife as Master of the Jungle in the Second Jungle Book (without mentioning that, in his late teens, he returns to his adoptive family).  Moreover, there is a new addition who serves as a pivot point, a deconstructed Great White Hunter (seriously) with a drinking problem and the perhaps somewhat odd habit of lugging all of his hunting trophies around with him.  (Lockwood's obsession with Shere Khan turns out to be a sort of discount Moby Dick plot.) . Much of the tension in the film's first half derives from a rite of passage nowhere in Kipling, the "running," which qualifies the cubs for full membership in the pack; Mowgli's physical inability to keep up with the other cubs, which marks him out as a "freak" alongside his runty albino friend Bhoot, would disqualify him, were it not that he learns to master tree-climbing instead.  It is only Bagheera's deliberate intervention that cheats Mowgli out of winning the contest and inadvertently leads him to being captured by the Bandar-Log.  Mowgli's desire to be accepted, just like everyone else--one of the most popular plots in all of children's and YA film--supplants the original story's explanation for the loathing with which the other wolves regard him: "The others they hate thee because their eyes cannot meet thine; because thou art wise; because thou hast pulled out thorns from their feet—because thou art a man" ("Mowgli's Brothers").  Instead of the film's more generic "we're special!" with which Mowgli's buddy Bhoot tries to console him, the short story very clearly insists on the animals' instinctive recognition of human superiority.  By the same token, the film displaces just about all of the nastiness of human nature (aside from some children being jerks) onto Lockwood, the aforementioned hunter; the villagers, it is made clear, have every right to want to eliminate Shere Khan (who is eating their cattle and, of course, has a history of eating them as well).  Notably, Mowgli never speaks with another human being, although the stories emphasize that he picks up the language very quickly--a kind of distancing that makes it easier for him to abandon the village at the end in order to return to the jungle.

Structurally, as the film makes explicit in Kaa's concluding voiceover, Lockwood and Shere Khan are two aspects of the same violation of jungle law.  Early on, Bagheera explains to Mowgli that hunting for food is both "sacred" and a "right," but one must never hunt for pleasure.  Shere Khan, who kills cows for the fun of it (an especial violation of the law, as it brings humans into the jungle seeking vengeance), is the animal equivalent of Lockwood, a sportsman who displays rather than eats his kills.  (It doesn't help that Lockwood's trophies include half of one of Hathi's tusks and, alas, the taxidermied Bhoot.) Lockwood's implied alcoholism functions similarly to Shere Khan's limp, inasmuch as both have problems with mobility (and, unfortunately for Lockwood, aiming).  Moreover, it is clearly the manner of killing that is also at issue.  First, in a reworking of the original, Akela evicts Mowgli from the pack for saving him with fire, a human weapon; later, Lockwood gifts Mowgli a knife with which to hunt.  Mowgli's success at killing Shere Khan (here, with the help of elephants instead of buffalo) is the moment when he truly establishes himself as a successful man-wolf hybrid: Mowgli can kill Shere Khan because he isn't a wolf, and uses the knife to finally finish him off, but he also kills using the same intimacy prescribed by jungle law.  Lockwood, by contrast, uses a gun, and the gunsight paradoxically makes him unable to see his own oncoming death.  Having erased both the law-breakers and the overly-hidebound from the narrative--Akela dies fighting with Shere Khan, another deviation from Kipling--the film leaves the field open for Mowgli's creativity to rejuvenate jungle law.  Being different, rather than being human, turns out to save the day--and yet, in the end, Mowgli's difference remains predicated on his being human.

This is no doubt the sort of blog post that should be written around Christmas, when The Man Who Invented Christmas was originally released in the USA, but I fear that my sense of obligation did not quite equal my lack of interest in the travel time (round trip, longer than the film) to see it when it first came out.  However.  Writing a book is one of those activities that has historically resisted dramatization, given that its most interesting aspects are in the author's head.  Cinematic representations of novel-writing tend to adopt the "found object" approach, in which the novel exists in bits and pieces in the author's world, leaving the author nothing to do but assemble, reassemble, and scramble the components until the story somehow successfully emerges.  In its representation of Dickens, The Man Who Invented Christmas remains true to form.  We do in fact know that many characters from A Christmas Carol were inspired by people Dickens encountered at some point or another (including Tiny Tim), but the film consistently collapses the distance between "inspired by" and "transcription of"--as when a wealthy businessman delivers one of Scrooge's more miserly speeches word-for-word.  Everything is a quotation or an allusion, as if Dickens existed in the TV series Dickensian.  This approach coincides with another familiar trope: authorship as psychotherapy.  One of the key conceits of The Man Who Invented Christmas is that Scrooge is effectively Dickens' unconscious, the penny-pinching side of him that reacts against his father's spendthrift ways; Dickens only discovers how to work through his novel's conclusion when he has discovered Scrooge's "origin" in the blacking factory, in part thanks to the inspiration of his own personal Tiny Tim, the optimistic Irish servant Tara (who is perhaps more Pollyanna than anything Dickens wrote).    These two visions of literary creation exist in tension with the film's insistence on Dickens' imaginative prowess, the proof of which resides outside the film, in the audience's acquaintance with A Christmas Carol and everything else.   The film does rather better with its representation not of writing but of writer's block, as the characters turn comically uncooperative and Scrooge starts writing his own speeches on rational self-interest.  

In terms of its design and overall conception, the film is not Victorian so much as it is "Victorian."  The exterior sets look like what you would expect from a Hallmark adaptation of A Christmas Carol; the interiors are sometimes comically overstuffed, as if clutter was the essence of Victorianness.  ("Oh, look--Dickens' desk!" says the viewer.)  Even the darker images, like the children at work in the blacking factory, are filtered through a post-Oliver! lens.  That is, the film is unapologetically a nostalgic twenty-first century fantasy of Christmas in Victorian England, the fantasy that Dickens turns out to originate. A Christmas Carol, anachronistically substituting for, of all things, Varney the Vampire (which wouldn't begin its run for another two years), becomes the morally uplifting, socially transformative alternative to the kinds of sensational pleasures linked to vampires, blood, and damsels in distress.  (There are some eerily Victorian class and gender politics at work in Dickens swapping his Christmas Carol for Tara's Varney.)    Similarly, in its drive to make Scrooge and Dickens one, the film's happy ending grants Dickens the kind of character rebirth that rings rather hollow if one knows anything about the future of his marriage (although Dickens did in fact reconcile with his father).  It's as if we are in Dickens' own self-construction, not the more ambivalent accounts that became available during the twentieth century.  

The Jungle Book has, as they say, baggage.  The newest CGI + live actor version, which is more an adaptation of Disney's animated film than it is of Kipling's Mowgli tales (the opening credits to the contrary), does its best to sidestep and subvert the implicit (and frequently not so implicit) imperial and racial themes of its various predecessors, with sometimes more and sometimes less success.  Despite the new-and-improved Shere Khan, the film is certainly more upbeat than Kipling's tales, in which Mowgli's ability to find community in either the jungle or the village remains starkly limited, leaving him with an identity crisis that anticipates the one haunting Kim later on.  If we take "In the Rukh" to be the canonical ending to the Mowgli tales, even though it appeared first--Kipling liked to repurpose his characters--then the only way to make sense of Mowgli is, as Muller says, as "Adam in der Garden, and now we want only an Eva!"--or perhaps some narrative even older than that.  

As a technical feat, the film is certainly gorgeous to look at.  The CGI animals are all rendered with exquisite realism, with only occasional blips revealing their computerized origins (neither Shere Khan nor Bagheera looks quite right while jumping on rocks, perhaps because the sense of impact is absent from the rendering); so too is the jungle, filled with all sorts of tiny creatures, which shifts from sunny to ominous at a moment's notice.  Despite a fair amount of violence, there's no blood; however, some of the fight scenes involving Shere Khan seemed to be a bit much for the younger children at the matinee I attended, not least because one of them involves a jump scare that startled a bunch of adults, too.  Aside from a few strained line readings, Neel Sethi, the child actor playing Mowgli, does admirably under the CGI-heavy circumstances.  (The survival of his red underwear remains a wonder for the ages, although at least the film provides a flashback explanation.)  The voice acting is all convincing, enough so that it's only later that you wonder why everyone in the jungle, Mowgli included, has an American accent, except for the big cats.  Idris Elba is especially menacing as the murderous Shere Khan, who is far more dangerous than his urbanely unpleasant animated counterpart--who was, in turn, far more dangerous than the rather ratty original.  (Both films avoid the mockery that Kipling's characters aim at Shere Khan's disability.)    That being said, Christopher Walken's voice really didn't seem to go with a Gigantopithecus...  

Which brings us to the plot.  Like both the original Mowgli tales and the animated adaptation, this Jungle Book is in part about what it means to grow up--a familiar enough theme in a Disney film.  In Kipling's tales, the answer is deeply bittersweet at best, as Mowgli is first rejected by his wolfpack (thanks to Shere Khan's machinations) and then by the villagers (after he kills Shere Khan); he eventually returns to the jungle, until his own burgeoning desires drive him out of it again for good as an adolescent.  But in Kipling, Mowgli's coming adulthood also confirms his superiority.  Mowgli's power is signified by his ability to stare: as a child, he can stare down Bagheera, even though the panther can resist him for a while; similarly, when Shere Khan tries to dominate him by snarling "Look at me, Man-cub!" Mowgli simply gazes at him "insolently" and the tiger "turned away uneasily" ("How Fear Came").  Contrariwise, Mowgli can gaze on Kaa's hypnotic pulsations without feeling any effect, even though Bagheera and Baloo are drawn in themselves.  By the final tale, Mowgli rules all the creatures in the jungle, his old friends included, and it is again his eyes that signify his powers: "'The mouth is hungry,' said Bagheera, 'but the eyes say nothing. Hunting, eating, or swimming, it is all one—like a stone in wet or dry weather.' Mowgli looked at him lazily from under his long eyelashes, and, as usual, the panther's head dropped. Bagheera knew his master" ("The Spring Running").  Mowgli's unreadable gaze overpowers, but gives nothing back; he comprehends the beasts, but his own psychology has moved beyond their comprehension.  The jungle was sufficient for childhood, not for adult passions.  (Again, though, assuming "In the Rukh" is part of this continuity, Mowgli meets his own match in the form of the white forestry officials.)  Both this version and the animated one play down this skill, inasmuch as Mowgli easily falls prey to Kaa until someone else rescues him, memorably Shere Khan (inadvertently, obviously) in the animated film and Baloo in this one.  In general, the animated film does its best to eliminate any hints of Mowgli's mastery altogether, even as it also quietly eases him out of the jungle at the end with the promise of adult sexuality.   Now, though, things are a little more complicated.

The 2016 film separates Mowgli from the other characters by identifying him with homo faber--man the maker.  Although fire is integral to both the original tales and the Disney adaptations, this film specifically insists that it is not just Mowgli's ability to use fire, but also to make and use tools, that renders him "other" to the jungle beasts; indeed, both the wolves and Bagheera repeatedly reprimand him for such "tricks."  Mowgli's mini-MacGyveresque engineering skills emphasize his status as that evergreen favorite of children's stories everywhere, the misunderstood outsider.  In the beginning, Mowgli tries to fit in with the wolfpack by running with them, something he obviously can't do, and Akela's warnings are all about the danger of sticking out.  Once he decides to leave the pack to protect them (not entirely successfully, as it turns out), he winds up with the solitary Baloo, who, in the beginning, is all too willing to abuse Mowgli's skills to fulfill his own hunger for honey.  Phases I and II thus swing between having one's individuality suppressed in order to conform and having one's individuality celebrated...in order to be exploited by somebody else.  It is perhaps not surprising that in phase III, the King Louie sequence, King Louie turns out to be a warped Baloo.  In the Mowgli stories, the monkeys or Bandar-Log introduced in "Kaa's Hunting" have some of the most overt racist overtones in the entire sequence, all the more loaded given the context of nationalist movements in 1890s India: "They were always just going to have a leader, and laws and customs of their own, but they never did, because their memories would not hold over from day to day, and so they compromised things by making up a saying, 'What the Bandar-log think now the jungle will think later,' and that comforted them a great deal."  Capable only of mimicry--one feels the urge to consult Homi Bhabha--the leaderless and therefore anarchic monkeys exist in stark contrast to the hierarchical regime of the Jungle Law that holds elsewhere.  The monkeys like to go on about being "free," and yet their freedom lies in ruins and forgetfulness.  While giving this group a leader eliminates at least part of Kipling's scornful satire, King Louie's song, "I Wanna Be Like You," brings the mimicry right back, with racial overtones yet again--nothing good is implied by a talking orangutan (in the animated version) or Gigantopithecus laying out his desire to turn himself into a distorted copy of a human being.  Still, the 2016 film tries to work their way around this yet again with the Baloo parallel: whereas Baloo uses Mowgli to satisfy purely personal hungers, King Louie wants to weaponize him for conquest.  Baloo's selfishness can be overcome through friendship--recognizing Mowgli as an individual, in other words, not a tool--but King Louie's desires, which require him to not pay attention to Mowgli as an individual (he wants fire; Mowgli doesn't know how to get it yet) can only lead to his own destruction.  It is only in Phase IV, when Mowgli returns to the pack in order to kill Shere Khan, that everyone "matures" via what amounts to an allegory for cultural diversity.  Although the pack acknowledges him as one of theirs yet again, Bagheera warns him that he must fight Shere Khan "like a man," instead of trying to copy the wolves, and so Mowgli does.  And so everyone (er, except Shere Khan) lives happily ever after, having accepted the importance of celebrating individual difference for the greater good of the whole.  Indeed, Bagheera's concluding voiceover tells us, Mowgli manages to unite the entire jungle against Shere Khan, despite having "no People" himself; far from maturing out of the jungle, Mowgli concludes the film essential to its fabric precisely because of his difference.   No future exile from the jungle even seems to be on the cards.  

Adaptations of Shakespeare are frequently spectacles, occasions for lavish costumes and flashy settings to underline the prestige of yet another Shakespeare production.  But the newest Macbeth sets out to be an anti-spectacle.  The hilly landscapes are bleak and virtually empty; costumes run the limited gamut from white to black; and except for Duncan's (presumably chilly) castle, the only visible manmade structures are Macbeth's tiny wooden house and the nearby church, both so full of cracks that the wind blasts through the walls and the rain pours through the ceilings.  Characters are alternately filmed in medium shots or tight closeups so that they fill the screen, blocking out all else, and framed in shots so long that they virtually disappear into the inhospitable surroundings, like gnats.  The gloom is only interrupted by occasional blasts of fire, accelerating from the child's funeral pyre with which the film opens to the burning Birnam woods (a new twist on the prophecy--the smoke and flames come toward Dunsinane, not the trees) to the apocalyptic red blaze with which it all ends.  

This bleakness, not to mention the apparent sparsity of the population, makes the play's game of thrones seem even more pointless: what, exactly, is the rationale for all this traumatic bloodshed, save the naked lust for power? The filmmakers accelerate the speed of Macbeth's rise, decline, and fall by sharply abridging Shakespeare's text.  The Weird Sisters glare ominously, but actually have little to say.  Virtually all of Malcolm's dialogue is gone, including his test of Macduff's virtue; so, surprisingly, is Lady Macbeth's admission that Duncan looks too much like her father for her to kill him, along with her sleepwalking (and, for that matter, all references to insomnia).  Perhaps not so surprisingly under the circumstances, the Porter at the gate is also out (no humor allowed here, plus there's no gate in sight), and, given the scenery, so too is Duncan's praise for the "pleasant seat" of Macbeth's castle (which, here, is pretty much one step above a hut).  The murderers neither speak nor are spoken to.  Various minor characters are nowhere to be seen.  Other moments have been rearranged, so that Duncan's proclamation of Malcolm as his heir happens after he arrives at Macbeth's home, while Malcolm actually walks in on Macbeth right after he murders Duncan (and, understandably, takes a hike immediately thereafter, without chatting with Donalbain).  

What is the effect of all these cuts? Most importantly, the characters' motivations are stripped down to their starkest elements--greed and revenge predominant among them.   In the original text, Duncan is worthy of being followed in part because he is virtuous, and ditto Malcolm (the point of testing Macduff); here, Macduff follows Malcolm because it gives him ample opportunity for avenging the murders of his wife and children, not because Malcolm is the rightful and virtuous heir.  Similarly, moving Malcolm's proclamation as heir both delays Macbeth's initial expression of greed--he was quite cheerful enough about his promotion before--and alters its resolution, as it offers a more immediate psychological reason for him to change his mind about murdering the king.  Lady Macbeth sans sleepwalking and sans angst about Duncan's looks becomes even more the manipulative woman behind the weak man; her crash into insanity is largely prompted by Macbeth's decision to murder the Macduff family, which the film represents as the moment at which she clearly realizes that she has lost control over her husband.  That moment also brings into focus the question of her maternity: the film opens with the cremation of her child and, in a shocking echo, Lady Macduff and her three children are burnt alive at the stake.   Having lost a child, Lady Macbeth ultimately implodes at the sight of her husband murdering more.  Macbeth, who murders Banquo in part out of rage that his children will become kings, is haunted by the ghost of a young soldier killed during the opening battle--an obvious substitute for his own lost child--who comes bearing the fatal dagger during Macbeth's soliloquy; instead of representing future potential, the dead soldier only impels Macbeth to yet more bloodshed.  Indeed, the only children who make it out of this adaptation alive are the silent baby and equally silent girl accompanying the Weird Sisters (a reference to the children who appear in the original prophecies of Macbeth's death), both apparently devoid of fathers in a world in which avenging fathers and fathers avenging alike are a prime cause of bloodshed, and Fleance, whose race towards the hellish apocalypse at the end, sword in hand, promises that the play's end is no end at all.  

The most striking thing about Pan, the "origin story" for the Peter Pan we all know and love (?), is its desperate quest to be as unoriginal as possible.  It's not just that, as Alison Willmore points out, the film's "chosen one" plot has become the default mode in contemporary science fiction and fantasy, but that Pan spends much of its time quoting other genre films in a heavy-lidded wink to the adult audience.   Bilge Ibiri, among others, notes that Hook is clearly drawn from Indiana Jones, but the character's disappearance/reappearance to save the day at the end isn't Jones--it's Han Solo from Star Wars, complete with a "flyboy" reference, no less.   The orphanage is Oliver! with the addition of monstrous nuns (surely Peter's mom could have thought this through a little better).  The extreme long shots of characters wandering through the Neverland landscape have been lifted from Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy.  All the fight sequences look depressingly like the Wachowskis crossed with wuxia.  And Peter's triumphant flight scenes have all been lifted from, well, Superman.  (Yes, there are Peter Pan references too, from Hook breaking and entering with a hook to his complaint that Peter doesn't need to "crow" about flying.)  It's big-budget cinema as Frankenstein's monster, really--dead material from other movies, stitched together and animated with CGI.

Pan also attempts to have some politics.  Blackbeard's obsession with eternal life clearly derives from the old story about Ponce de Leon's quest for the Fountain of Youth, and his destructive mining project, his enslavement of orphans, and his genocidal plots against the natives are similarly supposed to evoke European imperial conquest.  Twentieth-century England doesn't appear to be much of an improvement, not least because the convent is actually in the business of selling children to Blackbeard--the Church, far from providing some sort of safe haven, here goes hand-in-hand with the vicious conqueror.  In a bit of heavy-handed symbolism, the statue of the Virgin Mary operates a trap door; the real Mary is Peter's mother Mary, who, far from being a pure virgin, was a warrior and Blackbeard's lover before being impregnated by a fairy prince.  (Peter may be a Messiah figure, as Hook quite explicitly points out, but he's Peter Pan, not Christ.)   So: anti-imperialism and pro-environmentalism, yay? Well, no, not really.  For starters, while the film is indeed multiracial--the orphans, pirates, and natives are all indeed, as even Blackbeard says, of all nations, races, etc.--the leads who Get Things Done, for better or for worse, are all, shock and surprise, white folks, while the only non-white folks who get any lines are outright villains (Bishop), weasels (the Smeagol-ish Smiegel), doomed (the Chief), or resentful of the chosen guy (Kwahu).  On the one hand, the film makes a point of being supposedly colorblind; on the other, it, just, um, makes all the leads white.  Including the faux Native American-with-a-jumble-of-other-ethnicities-thrown-in princess, "the only Caucasian among a multi-cultural band of insurrectionists."  Meanwhile, because this is a children's film, we have the strange experience of watching Blackbeard systematically murdering Tiger Lily's tribe, leaving behind, not corpses (that would be distressing), but poofs of colored powder.  Having dispatched the natives, Blackbeard can wait for their remains to simply blow away (which is an allegory in its own right, but not one, I think, that the film intends).  Pointedly, we are not allowed time for any of the deaths to resonate; the only character worth mourning, it seems, is Mary, by both Peter and, ironically enough, Blackbeard (who murdered her in the first place).    This has not, to put it mildly, been thought through: the film wants to have a veneer of "adult" politics (imperial exploitation is bad!) while not shocking the kiddies (no dead people on our screen, please, despite the film's rather high body count).  The result is a cynical product that fails to learn its own cliched lessons about believing in yourself.  

...An Academy Award really is a bit on the heavy side.  It's not like you want someone to go, "Hey, catch!" (unless you're prepared to experience serious bodily harm).   If nothing else, they must make excellent dumbbells.  I suspect my relative lack of upper-body strength disqualifies me from winning an Oscar at any time in the future--too much danger of my dropping the thing during the telecast (and you know how embarrassing that would be).  Someone needs to do a survey of Oscar-nominated performers' gym attendance in the weeks leading up to the ceremony.  

(No, I didn't win an Academy Award.  Yes, I did get to hold one this afternoon.)  

Early on in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, the apes go through a captured bag and discover a sketchbook that includes, among other things, a photograph of a woman who is probably the deceased mother of Alexander (teenage son of Malcolm, the human good guy).  Later, Dreyfus (the human not-so-good-guy) weeps over the electronic photographs of his own lost family.  Caesar, taking brief refuge in the house in which he grew up, sees a picture of himself with scientist Will Rodman, and later finds a brief video clip of them interacting.  These moments momentarily unite all the characters through the phenomenon of recorded memory, brief snippets of time captured on camera or video, but they also emphasize that all of these images are of the dead (Will presumably having died of simian flu between films).  Notably, these images are all easily lost or alienated from their owners: the sketchbook can be stolen (and returned), the electronic photos were obviously inaccessible for years, and Caesar's images of his life with humans remain in the human house.  The fragility and potential disappearance of these memory traces seem connected with the film's emphasis on moving on, dramatized in Alexander's changing relationship with his stepmother (who has herself moved on from the death of her daughter, Sarah) and, in general, its call for a kind of strategic forgetfulness that goes beyond forgiveness.  By contrast, Koba, the bonobo who tells Caesar's son Blue Eyes that "scars make you strong," carries his past experiences inscribed upon his body; it is no coincidence that suffering and rage constitute his identity.  During the assault on the city, Koba tells his human prisoners in their cage that now they'll get to have the same experiences as the apes did--in other words, he avenges his own tortures by reenacting history.  But the film offers a different lesson about scarring in the form of Blue Eyes, who is mauled by a bear at the beginning.  For Caesar, the scarring is the opportunity to learn about how to "think" before behaving impulsively, about how to avoid the same situation in the future.  For Koba, as I have suggested, scarring carves the past into the present.  In effect, the film leaves the humans scarred in Koba's sense, not Caesar's. 

Specifically, the Vasili Livanov/Vitali Solomin Hound of the Baskervilles (Sobaka Baskerviley), which we're discussing in the Sherlock Holmes and adaptation course next week.  One of the telefilm's most striking revisions of the original comes in its treatment of Sir Henry Baskerville.  Sir Henry, as Holmes fans will recall, has spent most of his life out in the wilds of the USA and Canada before returning to take up his place as heir to the Hall; he's certainly rather less polished than his English counterparts, but "there was something in his steady eye and the quiet assurance of his bearing which indicated the gentleman" (ch. 4).  Arguably, the moment in which he casually hands over his "old wardrobe" to Barrymore, as his new English clothes have been delivered (ch. 8), counts as a subtle moment of naturalization: the Americanized Englishman returns to his proper roots, despite his desire to update Baskerville Hall to the latest American technological standards.  Nevertheless, as is frequently the case in the Holmes stories, the outsider doesn't fare well at the plot's hands: the gentleman winds up with "shattered nerves" (ch. 15) and must make a global grand tour before he can once again begin to think of his grand plans for modernizing Baskerville Hall.  (In that sense, he's a reverse Watson--Watson, after all, begins the series in a bad way, thanks to his time abroad.)   

The Russian Sir Henry is no gentleman at all.  He enters the story loud, impolite, appallingly dressed (a gigantic fur coat), and carrying...a saddle.  (Quipped one reviewer, "Overacting doesn't come much better.")   He puts his feet up on the table.  He's a sloppy drunk (and is drunk for a good chunk of the film).  Indeed, he's the source of most of the film's comic relief, whether it be his would-be efforts to dress up as a proper English gentleman, or his running battle with Barrymore over the locked drinks cabinet.  In a particularly bizarre moment, he lets off steam by galloping around the moors in a set of Western chaps while shooting off his pistol--a transplanted cowboy stereotype.  (Or, as another reviewer marveled, an "over-the-top cowboy motif and a bonhomie verging on psychosis.")   In other words, the film never propels us towards thinking about Sir Henry as carrying even the potential for revitalizing the decaying Hall; indeed, he conspicuously fails as an authority figure, as his inability to properly handle Barrymore implies, and his consistently bizarre behavior suggests that he cannot be rescued for proper "Englishness."  The comic ending is, in its execution, exceptionally creepy.  Sir Henry, bedridden and voiceless, is infantilized by Barrymore's chattering wife, who baby-talks him while feeding him the English "cereal" (porridge) he loathes; eventually, he smiles back at her and obediently eats his cereal, while Dr. Mortimer and Barrymore look on approvingly.  The would-be aristocrat becomes an overgrown child--the condition in which he has, it seems, really existed all along, enabled by his wealth.  In this 80s-era Russian translation, revitalizing the aristocratic traditions of the Hall is not, then, the way forward...

I will admit from the outset that my enthusiasm for Baz Luhrmann's aesthetic has always been, shall we say, minimal--which means that I am not The Great Gatsby's ideal viewer.  Then again, most critics have already singled out what struck me as the film's greatest problems, especially Tobey Maguire's half-note performance as Nick and Luhrmann's overall substitution of glitz for serious engagement with Fitzgerald's novel.  (Shallow people are the subject; it does not follow that the film itself must be shallow.)  But I'd like to add two things:

1.  The triumph of writing.  The Great Gatsby invokes and inverts one of the classic Hollywood signifiers for "adaptation on the screen!": putting the book on film.  In the notorious example of Robert Stevenson's Jane Eyre (1943), for example, the "book" is not Bronte's Jane Eyre at all, but an entirely new and more overtly political chunk of text.  (You can see the book beginning at 1:13.)   Luhrmann doesn't put The Great Gatsby at the beginning; instead, the frame shows us Nick rediscovering himself through writing-as-therapy, with the completed typescript at the end.  The spartan quality of the typescript, in stark contrast to Gatsby's tacky glamour and the Buchanans' old money luxury, suggests the possibility of a disciplined way out from the film's meaningless revels, sexual escapades, and general debaucheries.  Unlike either Gatsby or the Buchanans, Nick turns out to be capable of focused labor, "authentic" creative production; writing transforms him because it is work, even physical work (we see his handwriting, see him collapsed in front of the typewriter, etc.).  Nick has, in a sense, earned his redeemed identity, in a way that the endlessly self-inventing Gatsby has not.  

2.  Race and realism, except when it isn't.   We figure out pretty quickly that Tom Buchanan must be a bad guy, because he goes on about the dangers of rising African-American power and miscegenation, then later uses an antisemitic slur for Meyer Wolfsheim.  Racism/antisemitism function as historical markers, that is: the twenty-first century viewer knows that these attitudes are bad (or we're supposed to, anyway), and that Buchanan represents something rotten.  And yet the film tries to play with race.  The African-American characters are almost entirely in the background, true, thinking goodness-knows-what about the whites they're serving or entertaining--but then the speakeasy is strangely well-integrated, and there's Nick's encounter with a group of African-American partiers in a car driven by a white chauffeur.  In other words, is Buchanan anachronistic then or now? Or is it supposed to be both? Or, again, should we take the simultaneous omnipresence and invisibility of the African-American characters as a symptom of Nick's own mindset, a fantastic, distorted mental camera? Casting Amitabh Bachchan as Wolfsheim distracted me for a slightly different reason, as it felt like Luhrmann was trying to subvert Jewish stereotypes without knowing that there was a Jewish community in India.  (Not being a telepath, I could be wrong--and, granted, one would not expect a Jew from India to be called Meyer Wolfsheim.)  More to the point, though, the film does nothing to evade the antisemitic implications of having a Jew be, in effect, the true, new-money power behind Gatsby's glitzy facade; making Wolfsheim scarier than the novel's original is not exactly much help.   

The success of Lincoln and Argo, along with the tense debates over Zero Dark Thirty, has been responsible for reviving a centuries-old question: what is the proper status of the historical in historical fiction (or, in this case, film)?  Strictly speaking, this is really a subset of a far older question about the right relationship between any fictional representation and reality, which we could pursue all the way to Plato and Aristotle.  And that question, in turn, brings up an equally old problem: what does fiction do to its readers/viewers?  In the early modern and modern era, for example, we have Don Quixote and its descendants (e.g., Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote);  the anti-Gothics of Jane Austen, E. S. Barrett, and William Beckford; Flaubert's Madame Bovary;  and the like, all criticizing the deadly combination of fictional excess (or inaccuracy) and readerly gullibility.  Of course, modern readers may scoff at the assumption that some people really believed that romance narratives were somehow "real," and yet we have our own equivalents--the notorious "CSI effect" (which may or may not be true) being an example.  From the flip side, arguments in favor of fiction suggested that narrative could provide the innocent reader with guides to courtship (How and How Not to Do It), make us better people (by learning to identify with characters and, thus, other humans), or even clarify the existence of God (divine providence being "clearer" in fiction).  Everyone agrees that we learn something from fiction.  But what?

These questions are understandably more pressing when it comes to historical fictions, where cultural memory (and, not infrequently, national politics) are at stake.  Maureen Dowd tells us that her "pet peeve" is "filmmakers who make up facts in stories about real people to add 'drama,' rather than just writing the real facts better." But she doesn't really wrestle with writer Tony Kushner's argument about Lincoln: "He said that in historical movies, as opposed to history books where you go for 'a blow-by-blow account,' it is completely acceptable to 'manipulate a small detail in the service of a greater historical truth. History doesn’t always organize itself according to the rules of drama.'"  There's a conflict here, that is, between the demands of genre conventions and narrative form, on the one hand, and facts, on the other.  Kushner describes standard operating procedure for historical novelists from Walter Scott onward: to the extent that an imaginative work can make truth-claims about history, it does so through the overarching narrative, reserving the right to move things around/rewrite inconvenient details/consolidate characters/whatever in order to make the narrative function successfully within its generic constraints.   Emphasizing narrative gets you Waverley; emphasizing facts gets you, well, Queenhoo-Hall.  (And yes, I've read Queenhoo-Hall.  I nearly fell asleep over it--and given what I normally read for my research, that tells you something.)  We expect history to aspire to objectivity, even if its reach exceeds its grasp; historical fiction tends to be more pronouncedly presentist.  (Is Lincoln about the Civil War era, or is it about twenty-first century politics? Or both?) But then, as critics have long pointed out, what does it mean to determine that this or that fact can be twisted or tweaked?  I can recall the historian Kali Israel being deeply annoyed about what happens to Sir Charles Dilke in Her Majesty, Mrs. Brown (blink and you'll miss him--he's the guy screaming about how we should get rid of the monarchy), for reasons very similar to Dowd's.  Here's the thing: we cannot separate this new "fact" about Dilke from the film's narrative arguments concerning the role and nature of modern monarchy.  And so we're back to that tension between narrative and fact again.  There's a reason why these questions remain forever unresolved...

ETA: As I continued to think about this topic overnight, I was suddenly struck by Dowd's choice of facts.  In the very same newspaper, Kate Masur had noted the distorted representation of William Slade and Elizabeth Keckley, who were political activists, not simply White House servants.  And yet, this depature from facticity doesn't make it into Dowd's article.  In other words, objections raised at the level of fact have their own political valences; they're not simply cries of "objectivity!" and "reality!" raised against narrative distortions.

Some people were asking about what "The Curious Case of the Adapted Detective" looks like, so here it is.  Bear in mind that this is my department's upper-division theory seminar, so that the post-Doyle Holmes universe becomes a case study for talking about adaptation, appropriation, and the sometimes exceptionally fuzzy line between the two.  Because of in-class tech constraints, we're dealing with fairly conventional media--novels, film, TV--but the students have leeway to research Whatever They Want, which, when it comes to Sherlock Holmes, is a stunningly wide range of material...

Given the immense quantities of Holmes out there, and the necessity of giving the students ample time to prep and discuss the secondary texts, I had to make some v. sad decisions--chief among them being that I wound up eliminating the RDJ/Law Holmes  (OK, I don't actually like the films as Holmes films, but they're significant in terms of certain trends).  Ultimately, for pedagogical purposes, I opted for a straight run of variants on the Hound, giving us a baseline for comparison.  

The class assumes no prior knowledge of the original stories.    The literary pastiches come in groups: two very different (and either bleak or sardonic) accounts of how the Holmes/Watson partnership "ended"; two attempts to rethink Holmes and his methods in the context of WWII and the Holocaust; and two more...unusual...takes on the canon. 

WEEK 1 (1/28)

Introduction and tour

A Study in Scarlet

WEEK 2 (2/4)

“A Scandal in Bohemia,” “The Five Orange Pips," “The Speckled Band,” “The Engineer’s Thumb” (Adventures)

Leslie Haynsworth, “Sensational Adventures: Sherlock Holmes and His Generic Past” (Project Muse)

Hound of the Baskervilles

WEEK 3 (2/11)

Hound of the Baskervilles

Watch “A Scandal in Bohemia” ($1.99 on Amazon Instant Video, or you may borrow DVD from me); Hutcheon, Theory of Adaptation, ch. 1

1^st group presents: Hutcheon, ch. 2

WEEK 4 (2/18)

Hound of the Baskervilles (1939)

Short paper due 2/22

WEEK 5 (2/25)

2^nd group presents: McFarlane, Novel to Film, Pt. I

Dibdin, Last Sherlock Holmes Story

3^rd group presents: Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation, chs. 2, 7

WEEK 6 (3/4)

Dibdin, Last Sherlock Holmes Story

Marowitz, Sherlock’s Last Case

WEEK 7 (3/11)

Individual meetings with instructor; prospectus due 3/15

WEEK 8 (3/18)—Spring break

WEEK 9 (3/25)

Chabon, The Final Solution

4^th group presents:  Stef Craps and Gert Buelens, “Traumatic Mirrorings: Holocaust and Colonial Trauma in Michael Chabon’s The Final Solution” (Project Muse)

Research discussion day—post queries and finds to the Wiki

Annotated bibliography due 3/29

WEEK 10 (4/1)

Cullin, A Slight Trick of the Mind

WEEK 11 (4/8)

Vote by 4/1: watch EITHER the Livanov Hound of the Baskervilles OR the Brett Hound of the Baskervilles, both available on Amazon

5^th group presents: Neil Caw, Adapting Detective Fiction: Crime, Englishness and the TV Detectives, ch. 2 (eBrary)

WEEK 12 (4/15)

Watch The Hounds of Baskerville from Sherlock, season 2, available on Amazon

6^th group presents: Balaka Basu, “Sherlock and the (Re)Invention of Modernity,” Sherlock and Transmedia Fandom (eBooks Library)

Read through the fictional “blogs” and “tweets” by the Sherlock characters: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b018ttws/features/disclaimer

Newman, The Hound of the D’Urbervilles, “Preface,” “A Volume in Vermilion”

WEEK 13 (4/22)

Newman, The Hound of the D’Urbervilles, title story

Gaiman, “A Study in Emerald” (http://www.neilgaiman.com/p/Cool_Stuff/Short_Stories)

Research presentations

WEEK 14 (4/29)

Research presentations

WEEK 15 (5/6)

Research presentations

Final reflections and individual conferencing

Research projects due Monday of finals week

More seriously, like a number of professional and amateur reviewers, I felt that this film couldn't make up its mind: was it a film about a Great Man or about a post-idealistic politician? As a general rule, Lincoln is much more interesting when it is the latter than the former.  Lincoln raging at his insubordinate cabinet, frustrated son, or unhappy wife, or Lincoln musing over the tension between his oath of office and the technical legality of his actions, co-exist uncomfortably with the Lincoln stared at reverently by his servants and subordinates.  (Gore Vidal's novel Lincoln, which lets us inside Lincoln's head only once, takes a more hardheaded approach: there's considerable fear leavening the reverential lump, as all of the characters slowly realize that, in one way or another, they've deceived themselves about who Lincoln is and what he's capable of doing.)   In particular, the assassination struck me as a structural misstep, not least because of the sentimentalized tableau around his bedside (complete with gentle halo of white light, no less).  We know he's going to die, but that doesn't mean that the film needed to include the assassination (especially not offstage); if anything, moving straight to the second inauguration speech from the amendment's passage would have been more fitting.  Finally, there's the film's odd split between its political rhetoric and what appears on the screen.  On the one hand, some of the politicans (especially Thaddeus Stevens) sound like they've been reading up on contemporary social justice rhetoric; on the other hand, as Kate Masur and others have noted, the film pays virtually no attention to the existence of Black activism in the period--even though two notable activists, the White House servants William Slade and Elizabeth Keckley, are featured prominently in the film! (Masur rightly calls their portrayal here "generic, archetypal characters.")  Only the pointed queries from the soldier at the beginning hint that the Black population was not simply watching from the sidelines.