I am all astonishment!
A college friend of mine is teaching an Austen class at her university, and against her wishes, she had her students watch the recent film of Pride and Prejudice, the one with Keira Knightley (P&P3). (Apparently some of the students had decided to take the class because they'd really liked the movie, so she made it a part of the syllabus.) This week, she had them watch the first half of the 1995 miniseries with Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth (P&P2).
Which they hated. They thought it was boring and had ugly actors (!). More worryingly, they thought that P&P3 did a really good job of "filling in some of the stuff that was missing from Austen's novel."
*sigh*
I can't help thinking that this is a problem of the lack of instant gratification. I really hated P&P3 (sorry, Keira fans!), mainly for its blatant disregard and clear distaste for its source material, but also because the movie never makes you work for anything. Everything is telegraphed in the simplest, most obvious ways: "Elizabeth and Darcy come from Different Worlds, and you can see this because the Bennets let their pigs into the house!" "They are totally going to Get Together, and it's obvious because they are Standing About In the Rain and About to Kiss, Even Though They Hate Each Other!" (TM) "This story is Romantic, which is why they spout Soppy Nothings at each other at the end of the movie!" I feel that the filmmakers took this great novel, which is all about the process by which two people revise their judgments about the world and fall in love with each other, and turned it into a paint-by-numbers romance. But my friend's students appear to have liked the movie, certainly more than P&P2 and perhaps more than the novel itself, because it jumps straight to the romance and the happy ending.
All of which begs the question: how do you get students to appreciate the ways in which a work of literature is *not* like a film--the bits where everything doesn't tie up neatly or takes longer to get somewhere than you might expect? Some of my own students have been really worried when scenes in Shakespeare's plays seem to be inconsequential and don't directly advance the plot; they're quick to call whole scenes and characters pointless, because they don't seem to be willing to look for a point beyond the immediate storyline. And Austen might be even more prone to this, because people so often expect the novels to be like the films they've seen.
In related news, I really, really want to reread Mansfield Park. I don't know why, and I just reread it around this time last year.
Which they hated. They thought it was boring and had ugly actors (!). More worryingly, they thought that P&P3 did a really good job of "filling in some of the stuff that was missing from Austen's novel."
*sigh*
I can't help thinking that this is a problem of the lack of instant gratification. I really hated P&P3 (sorry, Keira fans!), mainly for its blatant disregard and clear distaste for its source material, but also because the movie never makes you work for anything. Everything is telegraphed in the simplest, most obvious ways: "Elizabeth and Darcy come from Different Worlds, and you can see this because the Bennets let their pigs into the house!" "They are totally going to Get Together, and it's obvious because they are Standing About In the Rain and About to Kiss, Even Though They Hate Each Other!" (TM) "This story is Romantic, which is why they spout Soppy Nothings at each other at the end of the movie!" I feel that the filmmakers took this great novel, which is all about the process by which two people revise their judgments about the world and fall in love with each other, and turned it into a paint-by-numbers romance. But my friend's students appear to have liked the movie, certainly more than P&P2 and perhaps more than the novel itself, because it jumps straight to the romance and the happy ending.
All of which begs the question: how do you get students to appreciate the ways in which a work of literature is *not* like a film--the bits where everything doesn't tie up neatly or takes longer to get somewhere than you might expect? Some of my own students have been really worried when scenes in Shakespeare's plays seem to be inconsequential and don't directly advance the plot; they're quick to call whole scenes and characters pointless, because they don't seem to be willing to look for a point beyond the immediate storyline. And Austen might be even more prone to this, because people so often expect the novels to be like the films they've seen.
In related news, I really, really want to reread Mansfield Park. I don't know why, and I just reread it around this time last year.