Peiratikos

(I suppose I’m back and I’d like to stay this way, though such an absence felt surprisingly good. I’m quite sick, too, so weirdness will probably be a result of that more than anything else. I have tons more knitting to post and other things I’ve been thinking about, but perhaps we should finally take ourselves off the Comic Weblog Update Page.)

Steven and I watched Pride & Prejudice a few weeks ago now, I suppose, although I’d watched it on my own a week before that and I finished rereading the book this weekend. I’d read it first when I was 10 or so and it seemed so alien, less because of the social machinations than the love, I suspect. I may not understand what love feels like now, but certainly didn’t then when I expected I’d grow up to be a writer who lived alone with cats and perhaps foster children. The joke’s on me, I suppose, since everyone who’s dropped by here has seen how much writing I do, though at least there is now a cat.

At any rate, before seeing the movie or embarking on the novel again, I’d read Rachel Hartman’s lovely posts about the place of Romanticism and her detailed thoughts post-viewing. I haven’t seen any of the other Pride and Prejudice adaptations and don’t imagine I will. (The much-beloved Colin Firth seemed like such a square-headed, lumpy creep in Love Actually and made no impression in the dreadful recent The Importance of Being Earnest, the only two times I’ve ever seen him.) Oh, and I have to add that the North American ending wouldn’t be so bad if there weren’t dialogue, but there decidedly is. Ack.

Where I’m going with this is that in Rachel’s second post she complained about some of the goofy, sappy choices in the movie, particularly when Lizzy and Darcy are dancing and all of a sudden ooooh, they’re the only couple in the room. And when you put it like that, yes, gag, but I was going to argue it’s something I’d accept in shôjo manga and that’s why I allowed it here. It’s been a progress for me, first allowing superheroes to work as metaphors for mundane life, then learning to see the angry scowls in Nana as perfectly normal and understandable, finally ending up not minding in my movie romances when the scene ends as the heroine blows out her candle. And while there’s probably something to the argument that Pride & Prejudice is a Bollywood film, I think I’d have been on equally strong ground explaining that it’s got shôjo elements, moments when emotions get so strong they skew reality. But then I remember that before I called that shôjo I called it focalization.

Rachel touches on this, too, that in the book (and, apparently, prior conversions to film) when Lizzy meets Darcy again after having rejected his unexpected offer of marriage (in part because she’d found him insufferably self-absorbed and antisocial) only to find him a changed man, open, generous, shy. It seems that many readers want this moment, want to see that love has changed Darcy, and that’s not quite there in this current version. While I wouldn’t say that’s not the case in the novel, what’s more apparent to me is that love has changed Lizzy and that she’s the focalized(/focalizing) character. While it’s not a first-person book, much of what we see is swayed by her eyes, which is part of the reason her father is a fuller character even though her mother gets more “airtime.” While the movie uses an even more distant third-person setup, I think the effect is the same. We get to see one of Lizzy’s dreams, including the reddish look of light from within her closed eyes, but less literal is the way the world melts away when she and Darcy dance or becomes an unchanging cage when she has rejected his love. If I were still 10, this might bother me because I’d doubt love was like that. I do doubt that a bit, I guess, but I think life is like that, with moments of excitement or pain we capture and turn into metaphors, and I thought the movie handled it beautifully.

And after all that is it still important to note that I covet Lizzy’s coats? I like Keira Knightley to begin with and I did believe her as Lizzy, giggles and raised eyebrows and lewd stares at nude statues’ privy parts and all. And while I don’t look the least bit like her and probably couldn’t pull it off, I keep hoping this is going to jump-start some sort of fashion trend and those boots and coats will be readily available (and maybe not too popular so they’ll end up on clearance and I can buy them myself). Then you could draw me with tiny dot eyes and a huge, huge smile.