Imelda Whelehan

Pulping Fictions: Consuming Culture Across the Literature/Media Divide, an anthology of critical essays, is the first volume in the Film/Fiction series from Pluto Press. The series, all installments of which are edited by Deborah Cartmell, I. Q. Hunter, Heidi Kaye, and Imelda Whelehan, aims "to interrogate the interface between English and media studies by unashamedly admitting to and taking full advantage of consumer demand, and thereby examining the construction and consumption of the reader/viewer" (Introduction 1). The title of the book is of course taken from Quentin Tarantino's film Pulp Fiction (1994), which was just two years old when Pulping Fictions was released. Even by then, however, the film's lasting significance was apparent; its script was already the bestselling film script of all time (2).

The editors differentiate between "pulp" fiction and more "literary" fiction by establishing that pulp function is more about genre and the needs of the audience, thus closely tying itself to mass consumer culture. In pulp fiction, they claim, the author is subordinated to the genre, which is the major determiner of the work. (The irony of this, then, is that Pulp Fiction is not a piece of pulp fiction at all, given its iconic significance as a film and the reputation it built for Tarantino.) The editors claim that the divide between "highbrow" and "lowbrow" culture is becoming increasingly murky-- especially thanks to mass-media adaptations of "highbrow" culture works, such as Kenneth Branagh's film of Henry V or the BBC miniseries of George Eliot's Middlemarch. Yet cultural elitism still reigns supreme. (As is evidenced by the authors' continuous use of the terms "highbrow"/"lowbrow" or "literary"/"pulp". Despite the connotations these words carry, however, there really isn't a better way to frame the distinction.) These adaptations are castigated for not being true to the text-- or even worse, what the writer "had in mind" (2). The aim of the volume, then, is to examine the tensions between highbrow and lowbrow culture, especially considering that cultural studies continues to display a reluctance to deal with mass culture, preferring to concentrate on more "literary" forms, art films and the like. This book attempts to rectify that, with articles on subjects as varied as Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire, and Mel Brooks's Robin Hood: Men in Tights, not to mention the titular Pulp Fiction.

The chapters in the book can be broadly grouped into three main clusters: those that deal with the choices made in specific adaptations, those that perform postmodern reads on postmodern films, and those that discuss the broader impact of the adaptations in culture.

The majority of the chapters directly deal with adapting books (or other literature) into films. John O. Thompson's "'Vanishing' Worlds: Film Adaptation and the Mystery of the Original" puts forth the idea that film adaptations serve as what he refers to "concretisations" of literary texts; they turn the somewhat abstract mental process of reading into a series of digestible images, ensuring that the essentials of the text (at least supposedly) are preserved. Seemingly following Thompson's lead, several chapters directly deal with book-to-film adaptations, examining the choices that they made and the reasons for those choices. These include Virginia Woolf's Orlando in Nicola Shaughnessy's "Is s/he or isn't s/he?: Screening Orlando", Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in Heidi Kaye's "Feminist Sympathies Versus Masculine Backlash: Kenneth Branagh's Mary Shelley's Frankenstein", Henry V in Deborah Cartmell's "The Henry V Flashback: Kenneth Branagh's Shakespeare", Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber (turned into a film called The Company of Wolves) in Catherine Neale's "Pleasure and Interpretation: Film Adaptations of Angela Carter's Fiction", and the Robin Hood mythos in Stephen Knight's "Robin Hood: Men in Tights: Fitting the Tradition Snugly". All of these chapters examine the choices made by the screenwriter and director in adaptation, with especial emphasis placed on the cultural implications or reasons behind those choices.

"Film Adaptation and the Mystery of the Original" is particularly interesting, as it is one of the only chapters in the book to lay out some general terminology and theory behind adaptations-- as stated above, the rest of the chapters focus on specific works and instances. In the opening pages, Thompson lays out a number of ideas that he believes influence the way adaptations are typically viewed (11):

• authenticity: the adaptation will never be anything more than a simulacrum
• fidelity: the adaptation is diluted or distorted in some way
• specificity: the adaptation lacks qualities intrinsic to the original medium
• massification: the adaptation is less cognitively-demanding because it is for a popular audience

He then says that these concerns are prepostmodern and that is no longer seen as valid within cultural studies to attack an adaptation generally on any of these grounds. However, he does wish to know why adaptations are so popular-- a valid question today, when five of the top ten grossing movies of 2008 (The Dark Knight, Iron Man, Twilight, Quantum of Solace, and Horton Hears a Who!*) were adaptations of material from other media. The idea that he develops is that part of the reading experience is a desire to concretely realize what one is reading about-- and film adaptations are a way that we achieve this "concretisation." He establishes a strong theoretical framework, citing a number of examples especially from Gone with the Wind, one of the earliest and still most successful film adaptations. Unfortunately, he does not really develop these ideas, as the second half of the chapter consists of a somewhat tortured reading of the two versions of The Vanishing, films adapted (by the same director, but for different markets) from the novella The Golden Egg, as a metaphor for the process of adaptation itself. The point of this isn't made clear even when he retraces his steps (23) and summarizes what he has done, and one wishes he could have spent his time instead developing concretisation further, since I think the idea fails to address a key part of adaptations-- the appeal of them to those who are not familiar with the original text. As stated above, the top-grossing movie of 2008 was The Dark Knight, a comic adaptation, yet concretisation of the reading experience cannot be the entirety of its appeal, as I doubt even a significant fraction of the audience has ever read a Batman comic book. Why, then, is adaptation still so appealing? Thompson almost touches on this question when he points out that many people see the film of Gone with the Wind before reading the novel, but he never outright asks it, much less answers it. Still, the chapter remains a good starting point with some interesting ideas.

"Feminist Sympathies Versus Masculine Backlash" deals with the issues of authorship in adaptation. Kaye discusses how Branagh is as much an author of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as Shelley herself, if not more so, bringing his own interests and ideas to the film despite his claims that he was creating a more faithful adaptation (66). She also shows how his authorial image was built in the media, despite the film's title-- after all, it was actually chosen to avoid a copyright dispute. Not only does Branagh reappropriate Frankenstein for his own creative purposes, but Kaye sees him as aligned with literary critics in the type of work he is doing in adapting (57-8), an interesting notion. Branagh's work is also the subject of "The Henry V Flashback", where Cartmell spends her time discussing the way Branagh chooses what to include and exclude from the original text-- and what to add altogether. She often uses Olivier's Henry V film as a point of comparison, talking about how each version fits into the ideas and anxieties of its own time.

"Fitting the Tradition Snugly" looks at Robin Hood: Men in Tights, a satirical Mel Brooks film, through the lens of the continuing readaptation of the Robin Hood mythology, concluding that it falls squarely within the mythology's traditions of comedy, parody, transgression, and farce. Brooks might be mocking the Robin Hood myths, says Knight, but he is as much recreating them as any other interpreter over the years. To be honest, this chapter feels somewhat defensive, compelled to justify the existence of a piece of humorous popular culture by saying it fits into "a myth whose traditional vitality is in part embodied in its power to be trashed, that is referentially, relocationally, transgressively mocked" (133). But it is still useful to point out that though he is making a piece of light entertainment, Brooks is working in a long-standing tradition.

"Screening Orlando" primarily looks at the gender issues present in the adaptation of Woolf's novel. A sound chapter, but more preoccupied with gender roles than issues of adaptation or levels of culture. "Film Adaptations of Angela Carter's Fiction" offers a decent enough read of the adaptations of Carter's fiction in particular, but has seemingly little to say about the ideas of adaptation in general.

Another two chapters seem to comprise postmodernist reads of "lowbrow" films, examining these movies for what they tell us about the way that modern popular culture consumes and absorbs elements of culture from everywhere, highbrow and lowbrow, past and present. This is done by analyzing Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure in I. Q. Hunter's "Capitalism Most Triumphant: Bill & Ted's Excellent History Lesson" and Pulp Fiction itself in Peter and Will Brooker's "Pulpmodernism: Tarantino's Affirmative Action". Similar to "Fitting the Tradition Snugly", both of these chapters feel somewhat defensive, compelled to offer postmodern reads of what ought to be pieces of, well, "pulp fiction." But, of course, that is the point of this book-- to demonstrate that all culture is equally valid of being read critically, even adaptations. And though neither Bill & Ted nor Pulp Fiction is literally an adaptation of a preexisting work, the authors of both chapters demonstrate how their films borrow from myriad cultural elements to generate insightful critiques on modern culture.

The last group of chapters looks at the consumption of these film adaptations and their receptions in the culture at large. Ken Gelder's "The Vampire Writes Back: Anne Rice and the (Re)Turn of the Author in the Field of Cultural Production" looks at the process of adapting Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire, primarily as a public process carried out via interviews and other activities-- viewers could read about Anne Rice's objections as they occurred and react to them accordingly. The other, Jenny Rice and Carol Saunders's "Consuming Middlemarch: The Construction and Consumption of Nostalgia in Stamford", looks at the consumer culture implications of the BBC television adaptation of George Eliot's Middlemarch in the town of Stamford, the place that it was filmed.

Like "Feminist Sympathies Versus Masculine Backlash", "The Vampire Writes Back" analyzes the role of the author, making the interesting point that in modern adaptations, the author is no longer "dead," so to speak, as she can often take an active role in the adaptation of her own work-- as Rice did, both in terms of contributing to the screenplay of the film and commenting on the casting of Tom Cruise in the lead. Gelder discusses the various roles occupied in adaptation, claiming that everyone is subordinated to the author of the original work. He cites several examples of the film's director, Neil Jordan, being deemphasized as a potential author, and points out that Tom Cruise is granted almost no authorial voice at all, despite (or because of?) being the most visible aspect of the film. It is a good analysis of the role of the author in the production of popular culture, though the chapter is weakened by a somewhat self-aggrandizing digression about the way an academic work that Gelder once wrote about Rice's novels was mocked in the film magazine Venue, which primarily seems like an exercise in making him feel better about himself.

"Consuming Middlemarch" also talks about the broader reception of an adaptation in popular culture, though it takes a much different tack. Under discussion is the town of Stamford, England, where the 1994 BBC adaptation of Middlemarch was filmed. Rice and Saunders discuss how the adaptation gave rise to an entire consumer culture in Stamford based on its association with the fictional village of Middlemarch: there has been an increase in tourism (both foreign and domestic), there are Middlemarch tours, local vendors sell Middlemarch merchandise. Rice and Saunders primarily attribute this to nostalgia-- having seen the "better" past on the screen, viewers can now literally step into it and experience it for themselves, if only briefly. It seems to me that a connection could also be drawn with Thompson's idea of concretisation; if the television version of Middlemarch represents a concretisation of the experience of reading Middlemarch, then actually visiting Middlemarch represents a concretisation of watching it. The work has become so real that the viewer can literally step into it. It's a notion that I'm not unfamiliar with myself-- I did, after all, visit Cardiff primarily because I wanted to see locations where the new Doctor Who had been filmed! Nostalgia is part of the equation, as the authors rightly say, but I do not think it is the entirety of the answer.

Pulping Fictions does not seem to exactly fulfill its stated aim to examine the tensions between high- and lowbrow culture-- which is for the best. The distinction that the introduction makes is actually very rarely taken up throughout the rest of the book, which tends to just look at all forms of culture as culture, nothing more, nothing less. The book never does find the "abiding hostility to mass culture and a reluctance to engage with a wider postmodern field of cultural production" (3) stated to exist within current criticism, since it simply gets on with the business of examining all aspects of culture for what they can tell us. Though there is a somewhat defensive tone to some of the chapters (perhaps due to the fact that the book is ten years old and this form of cultural studies would have been less accepted then), most of them raise a number of interesting ideas about adaptations and the decisions that must be made in undertaking them. Some of the chapters do little more than examine the texts under question, failing to raise broader questions of implication, but most present thought-provoking ideas about the original, concretisation, the role and the location of the author, and consumerism, all important aspects of our adaptation-centered modern culture.

* I had no idea that Horton had been so successful. Though I did contribute to its success myself, I suppose. Actually, I saw all five of these movies!… (altro)

In my ongoing quest for critical books on chick lit, I decided to buy The Feminist Bestseller from Amazon. I figured, if anything, I could get a feminist perspective on my genre, if not some information to use in my required genre essay.

A lot of the book talks about early feminist bestsellers written during the 70s, such as Erica Jong's Fear of Flying (which I'm kind of tempted to read now, to be honest). It isn't until the latter chapters of the book that Whelehan begins to cover chick lit, and then it's a look primarily at British chick lit, with some Irish chick lit thrown in (such as Marian Keyes).

Whelehan makes some interesting statements about chick lit, a lot of which I found myself agreeing with. Whelehan contends that part of the appeal of chick lit is that the heroines are fallible, they're loved warts and all, and that the novels employ self-deprecating humor. These things are all definitely true of the genre. She also states that another appeal of the genre is that women in my generation (meaning 20s and 30s) are "faced with the burden of Having It All." She goes on to say that "Having It All in the 1990s comes to mean being torn in two by the twin pulls of career and home life, and these negative connotations underpin all contemporary chick lit." That's a feeling most women my age can relate to--we've been told our entire lives that we can "have it all," but in reality having it all isn't as easy as one would think.

Many of us are faced with the choice of career or family. For a lot of us there is no both. If we choose career over family, we're seen as hard, cold, unfeminine and turning our backs on "our true purpose in life." If we turn our backs on career and choose family, we're seen as setting back the feminist movement, working against everything our mothers and grandmothers fought for during the women's rights movement, not realizing our true potential. Despite that, though, most of us want to achieve some sort of balance between family and career and at least attempt to have it all. Is it easy? Of course not. And that desire to have it all--and the conflict that desire causes--runs through any chick lit novel you pick up.

Whelehan also states that "there is no space for large girls in chick lit except at the beginning of novels waiting for their makeover." This statement I do not completely agree with.

To some extent she is correct. In earlier chick lit women who start out plus-sized end up losing their weight, becoming skinny, and achieving everything they've ever dreamed of (see: Jemima J). However, authors such as Jennifer Weiner take that idea and flip it on its head. Weiner's heroines attain happiness even while remaining big. (In Whelehan's defense, she does state that she eventually wants to look at North American chick lit and ethnic chick lit to see if the messages vary depending upon the culture.)

Overall, it's a very informative book, but one that definitely won't appeal to everyone (meaning anyone who has no interest in literary feminist criticism *grin*).… (altro)

Overloaded looks at "laddishness" and the cult of the "girlie" in film, TV, advertising, music, politics, literature and society. It asks what the current cultural climate means for women, men, and the way we relate to each other. Imelda Whelehan argues that we have entered an age of retro-sexism where media images of men in crisis and neurotic single women abound, and where any criticism of such images is greeted with a howl of postmodern ironic laughter. But what if the joke is on feminism, and who, in the end, has the last laugh?… (altro)