Oh man, this burns me up. Violet blogged about a review of an upcoming biopic on Jane Austen, and apparently the producers/writers/director saw fit to use this opportunity to allow Austen’s genius to be claimed as “really” belonging to men. The movie is controversial because it portrays Austen as having an affair with law student Tom Lefroy. Naturally, the media treats the controversy as being one mostly about sex, but more it seems to be that Austen was given a love affair because the idea of an independent woman who thinks for herself is too much for audiences to handle. Give her a boyfriend, and give the audiences a male figure that’s seen as the brains behind the novelist and we can all rest assured that women don’t do anything original or intelligent for themselves.
True, a 20-year-old Austen did flirt with a law student named Tom Lefroy when he visited in 1795. But the most dirt we have on the pair is that they danced at three Christmas balls before he went back to school and that Austen was “too proud” to ask his aunt about him two years later…..
The press materials released with the movie hedge any bets: The film “spins the few known facts” of a “seemingly brief” and “apparently rapid” romance into a “boldly imagined” love story about Austen and the man who “perhaps, might have stolen her heart” and “awakened” her talent.
It is this definitive love story that inspires such consternation.
“The idea that Tom Lefroy sparked Jane’s brilliance is totally foolish,” says Deirdre Le Faye, author of “Jane Austen: A Family Record.” “She came from a very smart family. By the time she met Tom she was already an accomplished writer.”
And yet, there Movie Tom is, roguishly criticizing a young Jane’s sophomoric writing and introducing her to grown-up novels like the racy “Tom Jones” - which historians say Austen had actually read long before meeting Lefroy.
Sickening. Women can’t have anything for ourselves, can we?
I shouldn’t be surprised. When I was an English lit major, I remember thinking how odd it was that there was very little noting in textbooks and survey courses that Austen seems to have written the first real novels on any quality. There was a lot of effort put into walking students through “novels” that preceded her writings by Henry Fielding and Daniel Defoe, but these kind of stories were more in the Miguel de Cervantes phase of novel-writing, where novels read like a bunch of adventures strung together, in the style of the legends of Paul Bunyan or the tasks of Hercules or something. The single, self-contained narrative with a bunch of subplots and characters that dominated the novel (and movies, though TV shows and comic books brought back the serial narrative)—well, I’m no expert, but the oldest books that are remotely readable I know of in that genre were written by Jane Austen. (I know there were older novels like that, but mostly they aren’t that interesting or good at characterization.) There was always generally some discussion of the fact that novels were considered something written mainly for female audiences at the turn of the 19th century, possibly to explain why so many of the great novelists of the era were women, which could be viewed as making excuses for why men didn’t dominate early on or could more charitably be viewed as an example of how women’s talents are so suppressed historically that they could only rush in where men hadn’t innovated or dominated yet. One thing that’s absolutely true is that Austen isn’t like Defoe or Fielding—interesting as much for historical as literary reasons—but a pleasure to read just for fun.
Anyway, I’m making it sound like a bigger thing that it is—the whole academic literature world gives props to Ms. Austen, and the sense that she’s downplayed in survey courses and textbooks seems to come from a tradition that’s being corrected. This movie, on the other hand, has no excuse. It’s the cinematic equivalent of the guy who sees that you have an extensive record collection and assumes straight off the bat that the Insufferable Music Snob must be some past boyfriend who taught you to like music, because god knows no woman could simply have her own tastes of any quality. We’re allowed to have our own tastes, if they’re for crappy romantic comedies, though.
And, like Violet says, the huge reach of movies makes this whole made-up biography of Austen even more troubling, since it will mean that huge percentages, probably the majority, of film-goers will see this and not do the research to find out what bullshit it is. Think about that for a minute—I can see a lot of parents encouraging teenage girls to see this movie because Austen is such a fabulous role model, a woman who cherished her own talents and seems to have avoided marriage in part because it was a very real danger to intellectual independence at the time, even if you had a relatively progressive husband. And instead your daughter gets the message that a) life isn’t complete without a man and b) a woman’s creativity and taste can no more exist without a man to have really created it on some level, even if said woman was one of the great geniuses of literature who basically taught the next two centuries of writers how to tell stories. Lynn Harris’ book Death By Chick Lit has some characters that belong to a guerrilla radical feminist Austenite group who picket chick lit book signings. In that book, they come off as a little wacky, but I think maybe the idea would be useful in this case—show up at showings of this movie and pass out brochures that explain (in properly cheeky terms) that Austen was not a simpering idiot who needed a man before she could have a brain.
I do think that there’s an interesting tragedy to the fact that women like Austen often couldn’t marry if they wanted to preserve their creative independence, and would be an interesting struggle in such a movie if you wanted to inject a fictionalized romance. Plus, I think women nowadays could still relate—the heavy emotional lifting of the matrimonial life does take a toll on women’s energies even today, though mostly they’re spared from some of the time constraints that a wife in Austen’s social class would have had at the time. But setting that aside, that Austen was willing to forgo marriage at a time when (according to her books at least) such a decision was something of a social disaster (still kind of is) makes her a role model, and I hate to see that taken away from audiences with this fictional romance.
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From the trailer, I had assumed that the pitch was something like: “It’s Shakespeare in Love, but from a woman artist’s point of view.”
Which really underlines the ways that gender is all tied up with creative authorship. In Shakespeare in Love, Gweneth Paltrow’s character is obviously meant to be a muse figure. There’s never even a hint of ascribing anything Shakespeare wrote to her, or talking about Romeo & Juliet in a collaborative sense. He fell in love with a woman he couldn’t have, who inspired him to write this great love story we all know today.
But for Austen, that can’t possibly work. Because Jane Austen was a woman, and you poke it, you own it, right?
There’s also this fairly common idea, and I’m not sure if it’s more frequently applied to women writers, that no writer could possibly have, you know, an imagination. If it’s in the books, it must correspond directly to something in real life! No way could Austen have created a love story if she hadn’t been in love herself!
The literary parlor game of trying to figure out who’s the “real” Mr Darcy (or any character) is so insulting to authors even when it’s not tied up in problematic gender issues. In this case, it’s adding insult to injury.
The press materials released with the movie hedge any bets: The film “spins the few known facts” of a “seemingly brief” and “apparently rapid” romance into a “boldly imagined” love story about Austen and the man who “perhaps, might have stolen her heart” and “awakened” her talent.
I’m not sure you can even read Austins short, quick books and come away thinking anyone had brief, rapid affairs back then, at least in the manner we think of them. That ballroom courtship crap was complicated and slow, and the constant obsessing the female characters do of every tiny detail of every encounter reminds me more of high school than high romance, when you’re still not sure of the social cues and it feels like everything hinges on your proper interpretation of the situation.
Maybe if they were making the argument that a woman could be “too proud” to ask after a guy two years after dancing with him three times is what inspired Jane to devote the rest of her career satirizing the courtship rituals of her day, maybe then I’d buy it.
Almost every significant female in history has been exposed to slander of some sort. It IS a somewhat strange phenomenon.
That’s the reason I don’t think I want to see this movie. I had hoped that its take on Austen was more along the lines of her being a talented writer who met a young man who was fond of her but dismissive of her talent, and instead of choosing to sacrifice her writing for a secure domestic life, she went on to be, well, Austen. But when I heard he was giving her “real” books and helping her writing “flower” into maturity, I was disgusted.
Well, and Stoppard wrote Shakespeare in Love and it’s clearly supposed to be a commentary on Shakespearean history. For the reasons you point out, you can’t just flip the genders and make it work. Plus the review made it clear that the movie doesn’t have that meta/ironic feel that Shakespeare had. Shakespeare is a long joke about the mystery of Shakespeare’s biography and how much of biographizing of him is just a shade to the left of fiction, since so very little is known about his life. The mistress who dresses like a boy and plays a girl is a joke at the expense of the conventions of theatre at the time, but also a commentary on the mystery love affairs he may or may not have had and then chronicled in his sonnets. The appearance of Marlowe (who plays the role of Tom to Austen in this movie and gives Our Hero all his ideas) is a joke about how some people think Marlowe must have been Shakespeare. These sort of jokes wouldn’t work with Austen, because there’s no mystery about her life and no contesting her creative processes, since she documented herself pretty extensively. In sum, you’d have to be slow-witted to think Shakespeare was a true account of his life, but the humor comes from the teasing possibility of it. I’d have to see this movie, but I suspect that’s impossible to pull off with Jane Austen.
The word you’re looking for to describe those episodic adventure novels is “picaresque”.
There are a few psychologically realistic novels of the sort you’re talking about and that precede Austen. Fanny Burney’s Evelina comes to mind before I’ve had my coffee. But there aren’t many of them.
What upsets me even more than the patriarchy involved in a film like this is that it continues to propagate the myth that Austen’s novels were love stories, which they aren’t. They’re vicious satires of patriarchal society. They’re just so well written that they appear to be treating their subject matter with reespect.
Take a look at Pride and Prejudice, for example. The central motivating factor is that comfortable Mr. Bennet HAS to marry off his daughters because the rules of inheritance mean that the daughters will be thrown out onto the street when he dies because he has no son. So for the daughters, it isn’t about finding love (in fact, that’s the mistake the middle daughter whose name I can’t remember makes) — it’s about finding a meal ticket, all disguised hypocritically as finding someone to love. As I always tell students, “If you’re not understanding that this is a vicious satire, you’re not reading carefully enough.”
“The single, self-contained narrative with a bunch of subplots and characters that dominated the novel (and movies, though TV shows and comic books brought back the serial narrative)—well, I’m no expert, but the oldest books that are remotely readable I know of in that genre were written by Jane Austen.”
*cough*Tristram Shandy*cough*
Of course, some people may not consider it “readable”. And, regardless, Austen’s works are much more conventionally novelistic. That said, if Ulysses counts, then so does Tristram Shandy.
The family accounts of Jane Austen’s life are intriguing enough. She was writing fantastic and funny stories and satires and playlets well before she was 20. She read them aloud to amuse her family, and sent them to be published initially at her own expense, and became famous enough that the Prince Regent wanted one of her novels dedicated to him, and died (relatively) young, with three novels never to be finished and two still in final draft form. She seems to have been proposed to once by the son of a local landowner (there is an intriguing account of a rapid departure from Godmersham, perhaps in embarrassment after rejecting an unwanted proposal, or changing her mind after accepting it) who may have been “the real Mr Rushworth”. If there was a model for Darcy or Wentworth, it was probably among her brothers. There are family letters enough to indicate that Jane had a snarky wit, adored her sister Cassandra, loved her brothers and her nieces and nephews, but was devoted to her writing more than anything.
Why must a movie of her life focus on some imagined love affair?
Oh, I forgot: because that’s what’s matters in a woman’s life. Never mind her being one of the first, and acknowledged as one of the finest, novelists in the English language. Was she loved? Did she love That’s what matters, think men from Hollywood directors to Rudyard Kipling.
Jane went to Paradise:
That was only fair.
Good Sir Walter met her first,
And led her up the stair.
Henry and Tobias,
And Miguel of Spain,
Stood with Shakespeare at the top
To welcome Jane —
Then the Three Archangels
Offered out of hand,
Anything in Heaven’s gift
That she might command.
Azrael’s eyes upon her,
Raphael’s wings above,
Michael’s sword against her heart,
Jane said: “Love.”
Ginger, that’s not fair. Ulysses and the picaresque books (thanks for reminding me, felagund—I didn’t bother using the jargon, though, because of the anti-jargon rule of general audience writing) of the 18th century come in hugely different contexts. By the time Joyce was writing, the Austen style of novel was the convention and he was reacting to that. This isn’t “what is a novel” so much as “should Austen be allowed credit for innovative narrative practices despite having the wrong junk between her legs”?
@ Amanda — I didn’t mean to imply that the Austen film will actually be much like Shakespeare in Love. Just that this is probably how they pitched the movie. Most dumb hollywood types don’t really get that SIL is about a lot more than a romantic costume comedy where the male protagonist is Shakespeare.
I was more playing on the way that big studio folks are, in fact, encouraged to pitch ideas like that (take a popular film from a few years ago, change one minor detail, and voila! money in the bank, babe), without thinking through the ramifications at all.
Doesn’t the film title “Becoming Jane” also seem to fuel their plot contrivance that this man is the one who inspired her to become a great writer? That she was not in fact “Jane Austen” until someone handed her a copy of Tom Jones and “opened her eyes”. I also get tired of seeing women writers referred to by their first names. As much as I gripe about the title, I would rather see “Becoming Austen”. It’s my little battle to fight sexist language.
Or, hey, why not title it something that actually makes sense? I mean, she was born Jane Austen, no? It’s not a pen name.
Now had they made Becoming George Eliot, now that I could buy. I mean, at least you could argue that she wasn’t actually “born” George Eliot.
Also notice that nobody in their right mind would ever propose a film called Becoming Mark Twain.
There’s a Simone de Beauvoir joke in there somewhere, isn’t there?
I wonder—has anyone ever made a movie about how Collette’s husband took credit for her early writing?
Someone remind me to call all my ex-boyfriends and thank them for their manly essences and spermatalogigal gifts, since apparently I’m much more brainy and creative than I would have been had I never met them. By now I must be freakin’ brilliant!
Not to state the obvious, but this is Hollywood we’re dealing with here. Men blow things up or stop people from blowing things up. Unless they’re love interests in “chick flicks.” Women fall in love, then have it screwed up somehow (with the clear implication they should have known better.) The only way they don’t have a love interest is if they somehow come to hate their closest friends/mother/sister, they then spend the majority of the movie wallowing in the drama, then one of them gets cancer and they all make up. In the process some deep moral lesson is apparently learned.
Hollywood writers are generally hacks. The lack of strong independent female leads is partially the result of them writing the same damn story over and over, year after year.
I haven’t seen the trailer, though I know my fiancee is going to make me see the movie when it comes out…anyway…that’s not what they’re doing? Is that because the movie is saying that Austen’s abilities came from this made-up romance, or are you saying that society in general will interpret it as such even though when male authors are motivated by the same things they retain ownership over their creativity?What did you think of Ms. Potter? I got the impression that Beatrix Potter’s flirtation came out of the same drive and independence that enabled her to create her books, rather than the other way around.
And what of someone like Petrarch? Wasn’t his entire body of work devoted to and influenced by a married woman he could never attain? Does that mean she basically co-owned the work, or is that something society would only say of a female author?
Not to state the obvious, but this is Hollywood we’re dealing with here. Men blow things up or stop people from blowing things up. Unless they’re love interests in “chick flicks.” Women fall in love, then have it screwed up somehow (with the clear implication they should have known better.) The only way they don’t have a love interest is if they somehow come to hate their closest friends/mother/sister, they then spend the majority of the movie wallowing in the drama, then one of them gets cancer and they all make up. In the process some deep moral lesson is apparently learned.
Hollywood writers are generally hacks. The lack of strong independent female leads is partially the result of them writing the same damn story over and over, year after year.
When I was an English lit major, I remember thinking how odd it was that there was very little noting in textbooks and survey courses that Austen seems to have written the first real novels on any quality.
What!? Okay, someone’s already mentioned Tristram Shandy, my favorite, and I know it’s de rigeur to counter with other favorites when someone makes a claim like this–I love Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, and the bizarre fun of the intersticial commentary in Tom Jones, and I’ve taught the Madame de Lafeyette’s Princess de Cleves a couple of times, and love it–but, yeah, I see your point. This Austen film sounds like garbage. You know what else is garbage in the same line? The Elizabeth BBC production with Helen Mirren as Elizabeth I, which I just saw. All the actors in it are great, but they have to do a lot to rise above the terrible writing and worse music. Worst of all, they structure Elizabeth’s story as a story of two (or three) great frustrated love affairs, and instead of Elizabeth’s great political intelligence, we get Elizabeth driven by love who freaks out in ways that the men in the movie never do. Now, I can accept this with, say, Edward II, but with Elizabeth, it just cheapens her as a queen. I’d much rather watch The Scarlet Empress again…
And what of someone like Petrarch? Wasn’t his entire body of work devoted to and influenced by a married woman he could never attain?
Or Dante, at least with a few major works.
But of course it’s different with women. There’s no woman author before the 18th century, I think, whose work hasn’t been attributed to men. See, for example, Christine de Pizan, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the same has been said of Hildegard of Bingen, Julian of Norwich, Hroswitha, Marie de France, or (with more justification) Margery Kempe.
Amanda, thanks for this. I’m not sure I agree that Austen “seems to have avoided marriage in part because it was a very real danger to intellectual independence”; there is evidence from her own letters and from contemporary accounts that she hoped to marry Tom Lefroy, but that the romance was aborted by his wealthy relatives who considered the match below him. But the idea that he must have helped shape her writing is absurd. Her Juvenilia contain all of the elements of wit, sharp social observation, and the ability to twist conventional plot devices to make a completely original point, that flowered in her more mature writing.
I’m in with the boycott.
@ Petey:
I haven’t seen Becoming Jane, and to be perfectly honest, I have no particular plans to. Mainly because it just doesn’t look like that good a movie. It looks very blatantly like some obnoxious bit of focus-grouped “product”. Or, in other words, we’re out of actual Jane Austen novels to make into films, and the recent spate of author biopics has been moderately successful in an oscar-bait sort of way. Also, Anne Hathaway totally sucks. These are the thoughts that went through my mind upon seeing the trailer.
It seems, though, via all the information anybody has about the film, that indeed, the throughline of the plot is meant to be “Jane Austen was just some chick until a Real Man came along and showeded her how to write.” No idea if that’s how it will come off as a film, but it certainly seems to be the intent, as well as the major content of all the promotional materials. Not to mention, y’know, the title.
Ranylt Richildis @ Pajiba did a fantastic explanation of what’s so fucked up about most of the movie conversions of Austen:
And what of someone like Petrarch? Wasn’t his entire body of work devoted to and influenced by a married woman he could never attain? Does that mean she basically co-owned the work, or is that something society would only say of a female author?
Well, Petrarch was male. Which means that Laura was his muse. And we all know muses just sit there lookin’ pretty, they don’t actually have a collaborative role in the process of making art.
I don’t have any particularly good counterexamples where female artists’ work is explained away via their association with a man, but if you can call Hollywood films an aspect of “society”, and this particular film really does imply such a thing, then yeah, I’d say society would definitely say that of a female author.
Anybody see the recent Plath biopic? What was the gist of that, wrt this conversation?
Well apparently Georges Bataille learned about one of his key concepts, “sovereignty”, from the indifference his female lover had in regards to whether or not her writings were published.
My two cents’ worth (although I’m not planning on going to see the film) …
*Based on the trailer*, I assumed that it was basically a “good novelist actually experiences what she writes about and thus becomes a great novelist” tale. Just as I can always tell when a virgin is trying to write a sex scene, I can always tell when someone who has never been in love or had their heart broken or whatnot is trying to write about relationships. The writing may be good, but someone who has actually experienced those emotions tends to write better about said emotions.
It happens to be a young man she experiences said emotions with, but it could have been a young woman (gads, some of my most painful and wonderful relationships have been with women). The important point is the experience, and you *have* to have someone to experience them with.
Of course, this is Hollywood. The only movie I’ve ever seen that actually followed a book is Clockwork Orange, and unless it says “documentary”, I assume that all “biopics” are pretty much fiction with a few verifiable facts (okay, sometimes just 1 verifiable fact like their name) as a launch point. Why should this film be any different?
I’m going to answer Petey because I actually did see Ms. Potter. Funny, wonderful movie. But I can’t for one moment believe that much of it was close to the truth other than some of the more obviously verifiable. It completely skated over her scientific accomplishments, but did retain some of her drive and independence; the flip side of it made that drive and creativity a figment of insanity. Or at least something that was not altogether mentally healthy. But it seemd to be reasonably true to the events of her life and we know far more about Beatrix Potter than we do about Jane Austen.
I don’t believe Shakespeare ever committed murder, but I find the Macbeths and Claudius quite believable. Virginia Woolf wrote a compelling and realistic description of a suicide, necessarily before she committed her own. Writers are known for their ability to imagine events they haven’t experienced. Just saying.
I can always tell when someone who has never been in love or had their heart broken or whatnot is trying to write about relationships.
But in the vast majority of her writing, she’s not really writing about being in love, or having your heart broken over romantic love. She’s talking about the necessity of finding a good partner under the repressive social codes of 19th century England. “Good partner” not necessarily being someone you are wildly in love with, but someone who isn’t an absolute asshat, or someone whose asshattitude manifests itself in a way that doesn’t make you want to slit your wrists, and/or that is outweighed by their insane wealth. The gist of Pride and Prejudice isn’t “OMG I AM SO IN LURRRRRVVVVE!11!!” it’s “Whew, the fabulously wealthy man who might be willing to rescue me from some pretty dire straits isn’t as much as a tool as I originally thought.”
I would. It’s a fascinating story of how a small-town boy from Missouri turned himself into a world-famous writer. However, no one would propose that the film be called Becoming Mark like they would Becoming Jane.
it’s not super-uncommon for people to hypothesize that “great men” had a tragic romance in their pasts, like Abraham Lincoln and Ann Rutledge. But, again, the difference is generally that the “great men” are said to have been influenced by the romance, while “great women” are said to have had men doing all the work for them.
It’s not exactly a new tendency — when Frankenstein was published, all of the speculation was over whether Percy Shelley or Lord Byron had written it. No one would believe that Mary Godwin had written it herself.
Ok, I see the distinction: men get a passive muse to yearn for, women get a savior who actively remakes them.Even if I just glance at the past 10 years’ worth of titles I can find plenty of examples of similar stories: “Woman is incomplete until a man comes along and suddenly everything clicks.” I don’t know if we see this tale retold a million times because that’s just what a misogynistic romantic comedy is, or if it’s because Hollywood is trying to influence things or maybe just play up to already-accepted notions.
There are also the “Uptight white guy is incomplete until saucy female and/or ‘ethnic’ foil takes him out of his comfort zone” romantic comedies. These are apparently why Ben Stiller was born.
Yeah, I spent the rest of that evening googling/wiki-ing Beatrix Potter and found out just how much they glossed over. But, yeah, for a fluff movie it wasn’t all that bad.Anyway…Hollywood is always selling something, I just wish someone (Amanda) would spend some more time dissecting what they’re selling and why it’s harmful.
Behind every great man there is a woman doing all the support staff work in the shadows.
THEREFORE, behind every great woman there MUST be a great man leading the way!
[/snark]
@ Mnemosyne — What I should have said is that nobody in their right mind would propose such a project to a major film studio. Because in the mind of the media, Great Men spring fully formed from the head of Zeus (?), while the few Great Women who exist are only great by association with men who can bestow their knowledge or abilities or whatever upon them.
I agree that a film about how Sam Clemens became Mark Twain would be a fascinating film, and that Becoming Mark Twain would be a perfectly good title for such a movie.
I think oppoponax brought up an interesting point up top — there are plenty of portrayals of male writers who have women muses, but when a woman is a muse, all she does is, you know, exist and be lovely. When a woman writer has a male muse, that male muse is more of a guide/mentor/tutor/true-genius-behind-her-work.
Hedonistic Pleasureseeker, the cheering, whistling, footstomping and yelling up in the bleachers you hear is from me…
Off to get paper and pens so we can both make our lists now.
You want a great example of society not being able to handle a woman’s accomplishments without being able to assign some kind of male figure for them?
I give you Marie Marvingt, Fiancee of Danger!
As for the Austen thing, I seem to remember that Salon had a good article a couple of months ago about how Jane Austen is being turned into this romantic writer and “Mrs. Darcy” t-shirts abound.
This reminds me of the recent movie ‘Ms Potter’ about Beatrix Potter, that totally erases her early career as a biologist and biological illustrator. The British Royal Society refused to allow her in to read her brilliantly illustrated paper on lichens, demonstrating them to be a symbiosis of two organisms. Not only was symbiosis against the grain of the strict competition model of 19th century Darwinsim but the theory was first suggested by a Frenchman..so was anti-British as well! And to be proposed by a women..well, unacceptable. Beatrix’s uncle was finally permitted to read the paper to the society before and impassive (male) audience (she was not allowed to attend). After attempting to penetrate the patriarchal barriers of the profession she finally quit in disgust and went on to write Peter Rabbit, and do many other things. In 1997, the Royal Society published a formal apology, decades after her death. She is one of my heroes (heroines?)
The movie about her life makes absolutely no reference to her early career and paints her as a dumb little rich girl.
It’s hard to really put your finger on why Austen’s are the first novel-novels. It has a lot to do with the way the stories hold together internally. You can make an Austen novel a movie nowadays without taking any real artistic license and the audience gets it perfectly. Before that, not so much. The conventions of her novels became the conventions of the modern narrative.
Claiming writers before her as the beginning of the novel-as-we-know-it isn’t wrong so much as off. It’s sort of like calling Iggy and the Stooges or the MC5 the first punk band. You can make the argument, but the sound and idea of punk really became fully formed with the Ramones.
Yes, men get a muse while women get a guardian angel.
Interestingly enough, Mark Twain wrote probably the best biography of Joan of Arc…speaking of muses and guarding angels.
As someone who has just seen the film (it opened here in Seattle this past weekend), I’d say that the comparisons to “Shakespeare in Love”, while inevitable, aren’t entirely fair.
Imagine if “Shakespeare in Love” had been written by a twelve-year-old. Who had no concept of wit. And who hated Shakespeare. That film would be fair to compare to “Becoming Jane.”
The film does very explicitly show that Austen is unable to write anything especially good until Lefroy turns up and not only introduces her to the fascinating world of sex and violence, but also gives her some very specific instructions on how she needs to improve her writing is she ever wants to be seen as “the equal of a masculine writer.”
It goes on further to suggest that basically every detail of everything she ever wrote (except for the happy endings) comes directly from things that she saw around her. The film shows that the dialogue in her books, rather than being her own creation, was all taken word-for-word from what people around her were saying.
And this is all just the first half of the movie. The second half, they more-or-less just abandon the whole “Austen learning to be a writer” premise, and instead the film spends its time trying to somehow reconcile what’s happened in the story so far with how we know Austen ended up. Which it does through a long run of jarring plot twists and over-the-top melodrama.
So it ends up being both offensive, and just a very poorly-made film even outside of the offensiveness.
a joke about how some people think Marlowe must have been Shakespeare.
Does anyone really think Marlowe was Shakespeare, as opposed to the Bacon or Oxford, etc., being the “real” Shakespeare?
Marlowe died very early on in Shakespeare’s career, as Shakespeare in Love itself mentions, although contrary to the movie, Marlowe was killed about a year before Romeo & Juliet . . .
Imagine if “Shakespeare in Love” had been written by a twelve-year-old. Who had no concept of wit. And who hated Shakespeare. That film would be fair to compare to “Becoming Jane.”
To clarify again, I never said, nor did I intend to imply, that Shakespeare in Love is not an interesting and subtle film in its own right.
Simply that it’s pretty clear from seeing the basic concept of the film (period romantic comedy biopic with a major literary figure as protagonist) that the producers and studio executives must mean it as a “counterpart” to SIL, based on the kinds of things hollywood movie types take into account. Not that the two are exactly the same, or that SIL is just a sappy love story, or that because Becoming Jane looks to be pretty awful, therefore Shakespeare in Love was also awful.
Simply that it’s pretty clear from seeing the basic concept of the film
Said film being Becoming Jane, sorry if this isn’t clear. Lotsa stop-and-go commenting today.
I got an error message, so —
I suggest handing out copies of Joanna Russ’s How to Suppress Women’s Writing at all showings of this movie.
Actually, though, couldn’t this movie be good in a classroom setting? A way to talk about historical revisionism, cultural ideas of women and women writers, and the overpowering love narrative?
Or am I really naive?
It’s the Pygmalion thing. “My Fair Lady” always offended the hell out of me, particularly because it was always unacknowledged that Professor Higgins learned more from his muse than she did from her.
Mhorag:
I really dislike this sentiment that one has to have experienced something to write well about it. Down that road leads Fresh Air interview questions - I see your character’s father is abusive in this story. Was your father abusive?
It’s queasy. We don’t want stories so much as exposés, it seems. This is why Hemingway bothers me sometimes, and I think he’s a symptomatic of the disease. We don’t care about the story unless we know for a fact that some actual human being experienced almost exactly what was being written. What’s up with that?
Rar. é shows up in the preview as e with an accent. Silly me for using formatting codes.
Does anyone really think Marlowe was Shakespeare, as opposed to the Bacon or Oxford, etc., being the “real” Shakespeare?
Oh yeah. The theory is that Marlowe, who was a spy for the queen, only pretended to get killed so he could go undercover. Being undercover, he had to change his identity to Shakespeare. It’s all utter crap. So far, the main argument for why Shakespeare wasn’t Shakespeare still seems to be that people of a certain class can’t be that smart.
It’s hard to really put your finger on why Austen’s are the first novel-novels. It has a lot to do with the way the stories hold together internally. You can make an Austen novel a movie nowadays without taking any real artistic license and the audience gets it perfectly. Before that, not so much. The conventions of her novels became the conventions of the modern narrative.
Doesn’t this description apply to Richardson, though? Yes, Pamela was an epistolary novel, but if you’re going to define the novel via its content — which you seem to want to do — it contains all the elements you ascribe to Austen.
Of course, it’s also a terrible novel, which I’ll never re-read short of pain of death, whereas I re-read the Austen canon every two years or so, but still, I don’t think you can really say Austen was original in this regard, merely better.
So long as I’m being pedantic, there’s also Austen’s immediate contemporary, Charles Brockden Brown, who’s doing much the same thing (albeit inferiorly, and with more of the Gothic elements Austen explores in Northanger Abbey). All of which is only to say that I don’t think there’s any reason to defend Austen as the first. I think she’d be quite pleased to be remembered as the best.
It’s hard to really put your finger on why Austen’s are the first novel-novels.
Well, part of it has to do with the decoupling of the novel and smut.
More than a century before Austen, there were a number of British women writing scandalous fictions, drawn from the salacious things socialites male and female actually did or might plausibly do. Aphra Behn (not just Oroonoko), Eliza Haywood, and the incomparably named Delariviere Manley, for starters. Women do things like wonder what it would be like to live life as a prostitute, and discover that it’s kind of fun; or solve the problem of their presumed-dead husband’s reappearance by killing him and covering it up. It’s a generation thereafter that the novel begins to get made “respectable.” And in Austen, the women who do the kinds of things that used to drive the Behn/Haywood/Manley kind of novel get used as staging grounds for defining respectable behavior. Lydia Bennet might have been a hero in the kind of female-centered novel that was being written in the late 17th and early 18th centuries.
That’s a big chunk of the genre history that gets left out in the old-fashioned Rise Of The Novel scheme, which as you point out is heavily invested in the “series of comic adventures” model, which is to say a young-male-centered model.
OK, pedantry moment over.
I would say that Austen’s place in the canon/market has to do with a few factors besides pure genius:
* The language is elevated without being stilted.
* The plot machinery has to do with finding or losing the right partner.
* The books are relatively short.
So they fit well into course syllabi, and they likewise fit well into busy nonacademic lives.
(To get closer to _Becoming Jane_, I think it’s interesting to do a “Jane Austen movie” about… Jane Austen, because it ends up creating a weird feedback loop that reveals a lot about how Austen ™ gets received and marketed these days.)
I knew the film was crap as a biopic the first second of the commercial. They hired a super hot young woman to play Jane; have you ever seen a picture of her?
Ack, I can’t say _Pamela_ is “terrible.” Disturbing, maybe, in ways it almost certainly doesn’t realize. But IMHO _Pamela_ is the novel that completely alters the form.
FlipYrWhig: I agree completely — as do the people who actually know what they’re talking about, like Michael McKeon — it’s just that the experience of reading Pamela was the single worst of my graduate school career. It’s the only novel assigned in a seminar that I seriously considered not finishing. This isn’t, by the by, an academic complaint. De gustibus, you know.
It reminds me of Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle and its “thesis” that Dorothy Parker’s writing was fueled by an unrequited love for Robert Benchley. Certainly her romantic and sexual encounters and desires did have a major influence over her work, but I think that’s true for many (if not all) writers. I just remember how insulting it was to both imply that Parker owed her fame to one male muse, and to maintain that her close friendship with Benchley just HAD to have been an unlit romance.
Anyway, Amanda and whoever else might read this, there’s a book on women in film you may be interested in. The title is “Complicated Women.” It argues that the period 1929-1934 was a golden age for actresses in Hollywood, not simply because of the depth of creative freedom or because successful actresses had considerable influence over the direction of their careers, but also because films that were women’s narratives were both common and embraced by the public. In the last two chapters, the author stresses that this is what makes that era different from today’s films. The Hayes Code is dead and buried and topics like divorce are no longer taboo, but Hollywood still ignores women’s narratives. I think this film, despite being marketed for a female audience, is an example of that.
But if you don’t finish it, you’ll never be able to internalize all the rules of wifely conduct!
Fear not, I finished it. I’m the best wife my wife could ever want. I only lock myself in the closet once or twice a week, tops.
Zuzu:
Oh, it’s worse than just that. Have you seen the Pride and Prejudice “sequels?” They start, it seems, with Mr. Darcy Takes a Wife — !!!
In other Jane Austen feature film news, it looks like Karen Joy Fowler’s The Jane Austen Book Club is becoming a movie as well.
As long as you and your partner want the same thing — your own freely-chosen self-abasement — then we’ll chalk it up as a Richardsonian lesson well learned.
(Yes, it _is_ nice that this isn’t Austen’s preferred romantic outcome.)
As an Austen fanatic who has been disappointed in the declining quality of Austen adaptations, this movie made me so angry that I couldn’t even review it. I wrote a nasty parody instead and I’m still walking around fuming. Thanks for re-energizing me, Amanda.
I also think it’s interesting to look at the different Lizzy Bennets on film–as the times change, so does the interpretation of Lizzy, from Greer Garson’s spirited starlet to Jennifer Ehle’s spunky strong Lizzy, to Kiera Knightley’s somewhat more girlish, insecure and love-struck Lizzy.
Grr.
*sigh* What is it about American cinema that just enjoys kicking Jane Austen in the face?
When I heard that a movie about Jane Austen’s life (starring Anne Hathaway, an actress whom I love), I got really excited. (I sort of assumed it would be something along the lines of Shakespeare in Love, with LeFoy being a muse figure as oppoesd to a “let me show you how to make your subjects and verbs agree while spreading your ‘horizons’, nudge nudge wink wink” figure). Just like I got really excited when I heard that there was going to be a new film adaptation of Pride and Prejudice starring Kiera Knightly. Sadly, the latter wound up being one of the biggest film disappointments I’ve suffered in the past three years (and that’s saying a lot), and it sounds like this is going to be the same damn way.
Perhaps if we ask nicely, Andrew Davies will do a miniseries fictional biography of Jane Austen that stars a group of unknown actors and treats Jane Austen like the significant historical figure she actually is.
Fellow-ette, your parody is hilarious!
Especially Maggie Judy Smith-Dench. My coworkers are still looking at me funny for that one.
McLean: It goes on further to suggest that basically every detail of everything she ever wrote (except for the happy endings) comes directly from things that she saw around her.
Forget “Shakespeare in Love.” That sounds a lot like the short film “George Lucas in Love.”
the opoponax: To clarify again, I never said, nor did I intend to imply, that Shakespeare in Love is not an interesting and subtle film in its own right.
Sorry for any misunderstanding - I wasn’t intending to say that that was what you were saying, just pointing out that, while the initial appearance of the films looks comparable (and I’m sure that studio folks were indeed discussing it in exactly the terms you described), once you see the film you realise that it’s really not a fair comparison at all.
And I missed a closing tag for the bold at the beginning there. Apologies.
dr. sue: Writers are known for their ability to imagine events they haven’t experienced.
Precisely. Which is why I limited it to emotions and relationships, as opposed to events. I’m sure I could write a pretty good description of slalom racing just by observing one (an event I assure you I will *never* participate in), but if I were to try and write about the *experience* of slalom racing from the point of view of the racer, I think it would be better writing if I had actually experienced some of the sensations and emotions involved, either in slalom racing or a similar sport.
Speaking of Virginia Woolf, since she did indeed end up taking her own life, she was certainly experiencing the *emotions* that often lead to suicide. It is my belief that her experience of those emotions is what made her description of suicide “realistic and compelling”, compared to someone who has never experienced that kind of emotional pain attempting to write a similar piece.
I do see where you’re coming from, but I did qualify my two-cents’ worth with “based on the trailer.” I didn’t actually expect to be right.
oppoponax: The gist of Pride and Prejudice isn’t “OMG I AM SO IN LURRRRRVVVVE!11!!” it’s “Whew, the fabulously wealthy man who might be willing to rescue me from some pretty dire straits isn’t as much as a tool as I originally thought.”
True. If “I’m in lurve!” lit was what I was after, I could always read Barbara Cartland (Princess Diana’s step-grandmother) who wrote some of the most simplistic, cheesiest, “OMG, I AM SO IN LURRRRVVVVEE!!!” stuff you will ever find (gives Harlequin romances a run for their money). When I made the comment about people who have experienced similar emotions/relationships to what they are writing about, I wasn’t talking specifically about romantic love. Austen wrote brilliantly (and caustically) about the hypocrisies of her society because she experienced them and the attendant emotions. Combined with her natural talent, this made her writing *better* - not just good, but great. (/response)
Just as a final note, perhaps we shouldn’t get too worked up over a Hollywood-ized “what if” movie. After all, she is remembered when an unknown number of contemporary male authors of her time period have faded into oblivion. I consider it a version of “Living well is the best revenge.”
Based on my own dealings with screenwriters, I get the sense that they really do feel that they can only write about what they’ve experienced. The problem is that they haven’t experienced much and have not developed much capacity for drawing any conclusions from what they observe.
The general run of people trying to break into the business have gone to film school, which in most cases means they’ve spent more time intensively studying brown-nosing instead of cinema. They then leap directly into the belly of the beast without ever spending much time rubbing shoulders with people who are not obsessed with making it in show business. A very common tendency among this crowd is the belief that you can learn more about writing by watching a lot of videos than listening to the way ordinary people talk about their lives and interests.
The result is that you find a lot of glib but shallow trust-fund types both writing and greenlighting films that fit their narrow definition of literary class while expressing little of interest. As noted above, the Beatrix Potter film didn’t really find much to say about her genuine achievements. Instead, the writer twisted the biography to fit a frankly childish agenda of parental resentment, based on a conflict between Potter and her parents that cooled off in a matter of weeks. The script ended with hip Beatrix getting married to a stuffy old coot and her literary career ending at once (ignoring that a quarter of her books were published after her marriage).
These writers ALWAYS work backwards from their prejudices instead of trying to find the nuances in a particular subject that would require them to step outside of their own limited perception.
Well, even if you’re not going to count Richardson (who already was parodied e.g. by Fielding and the Marquis de Sade), one could mention Goethe’s “Werther” (1775), which caused an immediate international phenomenon called Werther Fever (although the actual number of people who committed suicide like the novel’s titular hero was hugely inflated by legend). That this novel was largely a thinly disguised treatment of young Goethe’s unhappy love for Charlotte Buff is of course well documented. But of course “Werther” was an epistolary novel and had an unhappy ending, both factors which tended to be a lot less popular in the 20th and early 21st century.
“It’s hard to really put your finger on why Austen’s are the first novel-novels. It has a lot to do with the way the stories hold together internally. You can make an Austen novel a movie nowadays without taking any real artistic license and the audience gets it perfectly. Before that, not so much. The conventions of her novels became the conventions of the modern narrative.”
I do have to wonder about this. With novels like Don Quixote and Robinson Crusoe it is mainly a matter of paring down extremely long texts to the length of a standard movie, mainly by leaving out episodes but leaving the main plot intact. Voltaire’s novel “Candide” has been quite faithfully adapted into a musical, “Werther” was turned into movies, as were for instance many of the novellas (short novels unencumbered by secondary plots) of Heinrich von Kleist (e.g. “The Marquise of O…” (1808)).
BTW, to put Jane Austen into perspective, I wonder how great her influence actually was outside of Britain. An 1893 German encyclopedia before me has a fairly long and largely favorable article on her, but it lists no German translation of any of her novels and no biographical or critical work about her in German (according to another book where I looked it up, “Pride and Prejudice” was not put out in a German edition until after World War 2).
Based on my own dealings with screenwriters, I get the sense that they really do feel that they can only write about what they’ve experienced.
Well, based on my own dealings with screenwriters, I damn well hope that they don’t feel they can only write about what they experienced. Because if that’s true, a fair number of my coworkers are probably serial killers (I work on a police procedural TV show).
which in most cases means they’ve spent more time intensively studying brown-nosing instead of cinema.
To be honest (and keep in mind here I don’t live in Los Angeles), most screenwriters I know came to it from other literary disciplines, like theatre or prose fiction. Some do have film school backgrounds, but I wouldn’t by any means say that “all” or even “most” of the screenwriters I personally know (which is a fair number) did. I’d also mention that I know a good amount of film school alums, and I think your characterization of them is unfair. Are they generally living in a fantasy world? Yes. But A) most college students are, anyway, and B) most film students spend their time studying cinema and learning the technical aspects of filmmaking, not “how to brownnose”. Or at least not any more than any other academic discipline.
They then leap directly into the belly of the beast without ever spending much time rubbing shoulders with people who are not obsessed with making it in show business.
This is also not really apt, for a number of reasons. The main one being that it’s basically impossible to go from “film school undergrad” to “working screenwriter” in one easy step. In between, even if they work other industry jobs, they live normal lives, just like you and me. And most screenwriters are pretty ordinary, anyway, even once they do have a few credits to their names. Additionally, very few people whose ambition is not acting, directing, or producing/studio exec see their career as “making it in show business”. It’s a craft, a job. Just like yours is. Very few people outside of acting, and maybe directing, are ever going to “make it big” (quick, think fast: how many cinematographers can you personally name?) in the way most people outside the industry understand the concept. Sure, lots of industry folks are ambitious. And some people do get wrapped up in the stupid hollywood crap (usually people who are trying to track into high level production or studio exec positions). But for the most part, we’re ambitious in exactly the same way people in other fields are ambitious — we love our jobs and want to be the absolute best in the world at them, even if it would never bring fame or fortune.
The main problems with the sort of thing you’re blaming on screenwriters tend to rest on producers and studio executives, who tend to be out of touch in exactly the way you’re wrongly characterizing screenwriters.
JoeBlue: I really dislike this sentiment that one has to have experienced something to write well about it. Down that road leads Fresh Air interview questions - I see your character’s father is abusive in this story. Was your father abusive?
It’s not the physical experience I meant - it’s the emotions that make the writing come alive. Just because my father never beat me doesn’t mean that somebody important to me didn’t occasionally say cruel things which hurt me. Abuse? Hardly. But to take that pain, what it felt like to be belittled (for example), and extrapolate it to what it must feel like to have that feeling *all the time* (which would be abusive) and assign it someone important to the character (i.e., a parent) - I think someone who’s experienced the feeling (or at least a similar one) will write about it better than someone hasn’t. (shrug)
I first read Romeo and Juliet in the 8th grade. I thought the characters were stupid, as only an 8th grader can. Of course, I read it several more times while in school. I saw a couple of versions of Romeo and Juliet growing up. I was emotionally untouched. My reaction to Romeo and Juliet? Meh.
Then I fell in love with the man I ended up marrying. The next time I saw Zefferelli’s version of Romeo and Juliet, I *got it*. My emotions were touched. I didn’t have to marry secretly or have my parents in a feud with his parents or be exiled. But I did need to know what romantic love felt like to get that aspect of the play. I had to know what it *felt* like to want to be with someone, to fear their loss, to worry about them, to be willing to do anything for them. Trust me, the writing I did regarding love relationships (I was an English major) prior to that “got it” moment STANK. It was all just parroting of what others said about those relationships. Utter bullshit, I assure you. Afterwards, I had my *own* words to say about those relationships, because I “got it”. Not surprisingly, my grades on those essays improved, because my teachers could see that I “got it”.
I am no Jane Austen or William Shakespeare or heck, even John Saul (a hack of the first order). But the writing I did regarding romantic love relationships was *better* after I experienced the emotion myself than it was before I experienced the emotion. And if it could happen to me, surely it could happen to people who actually have the talent for writing.
That’s all I’m saying.
Based on my own dealings with screenwriters, I get the sense that they really do feel that they can only write about what they’ve experienced. The problem is that they haven’t experienced much
That’s really fucking disturbing to me, as much as the lame-brained misogyny of this particular film. No wonder characters in movies never seem to talk like normal people, and someone like Judd Apatow stands out so garishly because his characters actually sound human.
Odanu: It’s the Pygmalion thing. “My Fair Lady” always offended the hell out of me, particularly because it was always unacknowledged that Professor Higgins learned more from his muse than she did from her.
George Bernard Shaw is probably spinning in his grave. Or at least, muttering audibly into his beard about damned directors who invent different endings to his plays that exactly reverse his own.
But the writing I did regarding romantic love relationships was *better* after I experienced the emotion myself than it was before I experienced the emotion.
Please go back upthread and read the many posts on the subject of what Austen was really writing about (hint: NOT how tewtally ahsum it is to be in love).
Odanu: It’s the Pygmalion thing. “My Fair Lady” always offended the hell out of me, particularly because it was always unacknowledged that Professor Higgins learned more from his muse than she did from her.
George Bernard Shaw has been muttering audibly into his beard for decades abut directors who invent new endings for his plays that are the exact opposite of what he intended.
The result is that you find a lot of glib but shallow trust-fund types both writing and greenlighting films that fit their narrow definition of literary class while expressing little of interest.
As someone who has gone to film school — twice! — it’s interesting that you brushed against the real problem without actually identifying it.
The problem is that breaking into film or television as a screenwriter or director is very money-intensive. You have to be able to intern for free on a full-time basis for at least a year before someone will even consider maybe reading your script, if you’re lucky.
Of my graduating class of MFA screenwriting students, exactly one (1) got a writing job right out of school. Why? Because she interned for “Everwood” for a full year and they finally decided to hire her as a writer’s assistant (which, despite the title, means you get to write at least one teleplay during the season). I was very happy for her, because she’s a nice person and a talented writer, but I knew that she was able to do that because she is, literally, married to a rock star. (Not joking. Band initials are “LP,” if that helps.) The rest of us either went back to our day jobs or started looking for one.
If you want to write for film and television, you have to be either (a) rich or (b) willing to live in absolutely abject poverty with collections agencies calling you every day wanting their money. The group of people who are able to do it are self-selected to a frightening degree, but they will never see it, because they really did have to work their asses off to get where they are, so they don’t understand why other people complain about the barriers against them.
I saw the film on Friday and I have to say I enjoyed it. I thought it was going to be awful, and let a friend of mine drag me there, but it was actually quite good. The pacing was nice, the acting was nice, and it the film was written in the style of a Jane Auston novel, I thought. Which meant that love and affection were pretty central to the story. I usually can’t get the feminist take on things out of my head when I was watching it, but I have to say, nothing raised alarm bells for me at all.
So, to give a brief thesis statement, I totes disagree with the people who worry about or who saw and didn’t like Becoming Jane. I liked it, and I think it’s not bad to the ladies. I also saw it only once, so if I get a few phrases wrong, please treat them as honest mistakes. My credentials to say what I do consist of most of a master’s degree in english and scads of performance work. Also, I read Pride and Prejudice every year, but I have to confess that I’ve never been able to read Sense and Sensibility. I know, I’m less good of a person because of it.
(spoilers follow)
The big criticism seems to be that Jane wouldn’t have been Jane without the lawyerboyfriend, who somehow the film makes out as being responsible for her later achievements. I don’t think that’s really supported by the movie. There is no real implication that the lawyerman has any ownership of what Jane creates. In fact, the images of him at his profession mostly center on him learning by rote and repeating what has come before - and not liking it much - not creating anything new on his own. Whereas Jane is already writing up a storm and well-known for it in her circle when he comes to town. He doesn’t start her writing at all.
Sure, he looks down on her writing when they meet. It creates some dramatic tension in their relationship. But she snaps back at him when he offers some politely couched insults about her writing. She snaps, “It was a SATIRE!” You could argue that there’s some ambiguity in the film as to whether his critique is really warrented. The thing she reads is long, and he nods off, but everyone else seems to sincerely enjoy it. He characterizes everyone there as a country idiot, but the film makes it clear that he’s incredibly wrong on that count.
Now, the film does say that he gave her a copy of Tom Jones, and that she really enjoyed it and it challenged her. However, her first words about it aren’t “you opened my eyes” but a critique of the book. The lawyerboyfriend also says that she’ll have trouble writing about life until she experiences it. I’m not sure that that’s not a valid critique. At the time, he was pretty seriously flirting with her, and given his whoring at the beginning of the film, I imagine that he wanted to get her into bed. Poke it, conquer it, etc. Not to ruin it for you, but that doesn’t happen. She doesn’t fall for it, they fall for each other. No poking at all, actually, just a lot of tension and one or two sweet kisses that are equally desired on both sides.
So, sure, Jane may be “awakened” in the film. But a pretty good case could be made that the film says that it’s the events of that summer that do it: not just love, but her sister’s engagement, the death of someone close to the family, the interactions with Maggie Smith’s character, her mother’s blantant comments about the marriage market, and her own - HER own - huge and life changing decisions about what to do about lawyerboyfriend in the end. The film makes it clear that to not marry was entirely her call and that she knew what she was doing.
I think the most valid awakening in the film actually happens to one of the secondary main characters, the wealthy nephew of a landowning woman (that woman being the only character who really speaks out against Jane’s writing). He goes from being a literal mute to speaking his mind, and it’s pretty much because of Jane’s example. When he finally does speak, he asks Jane what she’s going to do and approves/wishes her luck with her life of the pen.
The critique up above that it was not like Shakespeare in Love was absolutely right, but I find that I preferred this movie. SiL was fun and silly and this film has little to no camp at all. It’s sincere. It’s sweet. And it’s the second good movie I’ve seen this year where romance doesn’t mean having sex (poke it!) or being in a permanently committed relationship (own it!).* The movie is aware of how revolutionary that idea is, but it’s constructed so well that you sort of hope it’s going to mess with history even more and just give Jane a traditionally happy ending. But it doesn’t, which is downright brave in Hollywood.
(Can you imagine trying to sell this to studio executives? “Yes, it capitalizes on Jane Austen fever, but it’s not a modern love story. We’ll pace it like an eighteenth century novel. The girl won’t even get the boy in the end! …no, no nudity. No, I’m not kidding.”)
The film does play fast and loose with some historical facts. It implies that Jane’s early satirical essays were not as good as her later, more developed novels. It implies that Jane herself worried about being merely “accomplished” and not a real, true-to-life writer. But while that may not be true, it makes for good character development. The movie would have been less interesting if Jane was a monolithic genius incapable of needing improvement.
Frankly, love makes for good stories. And heartbreak makes for good writing, at least about the heart. I really recommend the movie, actually. Suspend your disbelief, all of you who’ve read Jane Austen biographies, and just go enjoy it. It’s really very moving.
* The first film was Once.
If I sounded like too much of a bear in my previous post, opoponax, it’s because at heart I really do love writing and writers. Nothing makes me happier than getting in a workshop and helping a hopeful break through a storytelling knot. At the same time, something in me dies every time I find yet another wannabe insisting that craftsmanship is for suckers and regarding screenwriting as a get-rich-quick scheme. It’s difficult to keep from burning out when I hear open contempt for the people paying to see films, which happens more often than not in LA.
It’s not only those outside of the business dreaming of getting in, either… I’ve done uncredited work patching up really sloppy work by supposedly “hot” scripters. One time, I found out completely by accident that a friend of mine had been hired to insert basic research in the same script I was trying to fix dramatically. The film came out and I found myself wincing at an interview where the author went on at length about all the books he’d consulted to insure the greatest possible accuracy, etc. I know empty hype is part of the publicity process, but what sticks in my craw is seeing how someone like that comes to honestly convince themself that they had made a complete job of what came to me as a half-baked series of vague ideas. You might assume that it’s just sour grapes on my part because the other guy was famous, but I feel the same way about anyone who doesn’t want to put in real work for whatever they do.
Mnemosyne makes good points about both the financial requirements needed to survive long enough to find a slot in the industry and the nepotism that opens doors quickly for a few. Sometimes money and connections go beyond merely being able to endure the wait to get a chance. I’ve seen a lot of people touted as hot prospects simply because they came from the same economic rung as the executives hired to find talent. They speak the same language as the suits, and have a similar attitude of entitlement, but generally turn out to be totally out-of-touch with the concerns an audience member is likely to have about making a living or developing healthy relationships.
I do worry I get too jaded seeing this depressing behind-the-scenes stuff over and over. I’ve done some stuff I’m very proud of and tried to help some genuinely talented people, but most of the time I find myself trying to make a difference in a very corrupt system.
If I sounded like too much of a bear in my previous post, opoponax, it’s because at heart I really do love writing and writers. Nothing makes me happier than getting in a workshop and helping a hopeful break through a storytelling knot. At the same time, something in me dies every time I find yet another wannabe insisting that craftsmanship is for suckers and regarding screenwriting as a get-rich-quick scheme. It’s difficult to keep from burning out when I hear open contempt for the people paying to see films, which happens more often than not in LA.
It’s not only those outside of the business dreaming of getting in, either… I’ve done uncredited work patching up really sloppy work by supposedly “hot” scripters. One time, I found out completely by accident that a friend of mine had been hired to insert basic research in the same script I was trying to fix dramatically. The film came out and I found myself wincing at an interview where the author went on at length about all the books he’d consulted to insure the greatest possible accuracy, etc. I know empty hype is part of the publicity process, but what sticks in my craw is seeing how someone like that comes to honestly convince themself that they had made a complete job of what came to me as a half-baked series of vague ideas. You might assume that it’s just sour grapes on my part because the other guy was famous, but I feel the same way about anyone who doesn’t want to put in real work for whatever they do.
Mnemosyne makes good points about both the financial requirements needed to survive long enough to find a slot in the industry and the nepotism that opens doors quickly for a few. Sometimes money and connections go beyond merely being able to endure the wait to get a chance. I’ve seen a lot of people touted as hot prospects simply because they came from the same economic rung as the executives hired to find talent. They speak the same language as the suits, and have a similar attitude of entitlement, but generally turn out to be totally out-of-touch with the concerns an audience member is likely to have about making a living or developing healthy relationships.
I do worry I get too jaded seeing this depressing behind-the-scenes stuff over and over. I’ve done some stuff I’m very proud of and tried to help some genuinely talented people, but most of the time I find myself trying to make a difference in a very corrupt system.
opoponax, you’re probably right that I tarred too many people with the same brush. It’s just that I love writing and writers, and something in me dies every time I run into yet another hack with contempt for the audience and a view of writing as a get-rich-quick scheme. I do worry that I get too jaded sometimes, and then I wind up in yet another meeting with someone who reinfornces my worst feelings about the Hollywood system.
Mnemosyne makes good points about the advantages of money and connections to get ahead in the film industry. It actually has more to do with the matter than mere survival. Executives often push for writers who speak their language, which means you get upscale scribes with the same sense of entitlement. Neither the writers or the suits are fully aware that they may have an entirely different view of relationships or the need to earn a living than the supposed audience.
something in me dies every time I run into yet another hack with contempt for the audience and a view of writing as a get-rich-quick scheme.
A. Clearly you have not set foot in a Barnes & Noble recently. Just about every literary or artistic medium that is seen as a marketable product will always encourage the development of product before real works of art. The only areas I can think of that don’t have serious “contempt-filled hack” problems are things like poetry, conceptual art, and modern dance, which just aren’t marketable to enough of a level for anyone to think they can “get rich quick” from it.
B. From what I know about screenwriting, it’s about the stupidest career path ever for someone who wants to “get rich quick”. That’s what investment banking is for. And even within the entertainment industry, “screenwriter” is one of the areas least likely to result in fame and fortune. Most screenwriters are lucky to break even, in fact lucky even to work consistently. People who want money and power go into production.
As I’ve said before, it’s producers and executives who are your targets here, not the writer, who, on a film like this, is likely to be little more than one of 5 or 10 hired hands with basically no say in the finished product. Blaming the screenwriter for a bad hollywood movie is like blaming the waitress for your poorly grilled steak.
Yeah the concept of this movie pisses me off, and I don’t even like Austen. I freaking hated Pride & Prejudice, but I respect Austen for what she did both as an innovative writer and as an independent woman in a time and situation when that was extremely rare. So to take away the one thing about Jane Austen I actually totally dig… Bah.
If it makes anyone here feel better, a friend of mine saw it and said that the one thing it had going for it is that they didn’t sleep together, which is I suppose a plus.
And what of someone like Petrarch? Wasn’t his entire body of work devoted to and influenced by a married woman he could never attain?
Or Dante, at least with a few major works.
I still think someone should make a film about the life of Catullus (and honestly I can’t see why they haven’t. Come on! Shakespeare in Love meets Gladiator! tell me you don’t want to see that movie).
Anybody see the recent Plath biopic? What was the gist of that, wrt this conversation?
My mum saw it, but I guess “Gwyneth Paltrow is an overrated actress” isn’t exactly relevant.
Mnemosyne makes good points about the advantages of money and connections to get ahead in the film industry.
Please stop. You have absolutely no fucking idea what you are talking about wrt the film industry. I am kind of getting tired of trying to explain why your generalizations are extremely wrong and stupid. But at the same time, I am also really tired of seeing people who listened to the commentary on a DVD one time try to pass themselves off as industry insiders.
Mnemosyne was talking about students in an MFA screenwriting program looking to get full-time writing gigs that would pay enough to make a good living. This is not something you can use to generalize about “the advantages of money and connections to get ahead in the film industry”. Most of the people I work with every day did not “come from money” and did not previously have connections within the industry. While I’d agree that it’s almost impossible if you’re really poor, don’t have access to a college education, have a family to support, etc, if you come from a middle class background, it’s really more about hard work and luck than having shitloads of money and insider connections.
What’s hard is getting a plum job straight out of school, if you opt to take the grad school path, which is just one of a great many possible ways to get into the industry.
You know how I got started working in film/tv? The bookstore I was working for to support myself through college closed, and we all got laid off. I ended up going on unemployment, and randomly found (via craigslist, not “connections”) a casual job doing filing and organizational stuff for a producer. For fun in my extra time, I agreed to come in for a week to help out on one of her projects. I worked my fucking ass off. By the end of the week, I was on the payroll. The rest is pretty much history. I hate to sound all “boostraps!” about it, but seriously, most people who work in film didn’t grow up in the lap of luxury, don’t lead glamorous lives, and are basically just like you except they know what a gaffer actually does.
My last comment vanished somewhere and I’m too tired to repeat it. Let me just say that I can well believe most of the people in movies are nice, hard-working folks. The few times I’ve been on sets, the crew pulled together like people who work together should. Once you get into the offices where people are hustling scripts and trying to push deals, it’s not so nice, and by an amazing coincidence a locker room sensibility filters into a lot of the scripts being pushed.
Anybody see the recent Plath biopic? What was the gist of that, wrt this conversation?
Regarding the whole man-as-mentor theme? She and her husband are presented as poets who respect each other’s work but aren’t exactly happily married. He doesn’t inspire all her creativity, and isn’t the sole cause of her depression. Though at a certain point in the movie the depression and marital troubles become a vicious circle.
I hate to sound all “boostraps!” about it, but seriously, most people who work in film didn’t grow up in the lap of luxury, don’t lead glamorous lives, and are basically just like you except they know what a gaffer actually does.
Opo, here’s the problem — yes, there are plenty of people working in film and television who didn’t get there by having money and connections. But those aren’t the people in charge.
The classmate I was talking about above will probably work her way up and become a showrunner one day. Yes, she will have worked her ass off to get there … but she also got that leg up by having rich parents and marrying a rock star, which freed her from having to actually scratch out a living like the rest of us were so she could concentrate on her career.
And let’s not even get into the age thing. Fortunately for me, I’ve been wearing sunscreen since I was 19, so I can probably pass for about 30 when I’m really 38. Because once a producer finds out how old I am, that’s the end of the meeting.
“What did you think of Ms. Potter? I got the impression that Beatrix Potter’s flirtation came out of the same drive and independence that enabled her to create her books, rather than the other way around.”
I don’t know how accurate it was, but I very much liked the way that the young publisher fell in love with her books first, and then with her because of them. I’ve always found the best love stories involve some kind of ‘meeting of minds’ rather than doe-eyes across a crowded room. Like in the French film Amelie, where Amelie falls in love with a photo album, and Nino falls in love with cryptic messages and a treasure trail, before either of them set eyes on each other.
Another of my comments vanished, but I still want to thank Mnemosyne for talking about the Hollywood I have personally observed.
I marvel at the logic of people who would think that, in an era where women would never earn nearly the money or recognition from their work a man would, women who achieved something anyway had strong mentors guiding them. Mentoring takes work and experience in the field. Editing takes a good deal of time. Why would a male nobody be assumed to have the experience and taste to guide the woman. If he was that great, why didn’t he write? And for that matter, when would he have had the time to dedicate to mentoring, and why do that?
On a different note, I thought the film of “Emma” did capture class issues and commentary on the gossipy nature of small town life very well. It helped me appreciate the wit of the book all the more.
Thank you.
I was avoiding any and all mention of this movie just because it gave me unidentifiable heebie jeebies and you quite eloquently put into words what bugged me about this.
But those aren’t the people in charge.
Screenwriters, except maybe for showrunners, by and large aren’t the people in charge, either.
I was hardly trying to give the whole industry a complete pass on everything ever. But sorry, mercmesh doesn’t know what he/she is talking about, and is making sweeping generalizations that are not only quite wrong (”Screenwriters are all a bunch of spoiled little rich bitch sycophants who are ruining movies!”), but really unfair to the vast majority of people who work in the industry.
I get annoyed sometimes at the ways that people assume, because I work in the film industry that therefore I must be some spoiled little ass-kisser who only wants to lead the glamorous life and isn’t worth a damn. Yeah, sorry, when you’re picking cigarette butts off parking lot pavement in the rain at 4am, then maybe you can tell me that I’m living in a cushy ivory tower and don’t understand the plight of the little people, which is why I’m single handedly ruining entertainment in this country.
the Hollywood I have personally observed.
Oh, fuck you.
Watching Entourage is not the same as personal observation.