Miller, Catriona

English

Spring 2016 saw the release of the film Pride + Prejudice + Zombies (2016, Burr Steers). It is, entirely as the title suggests, a version of the Jane Austen novel with zombies. The originalconcept came from an editor at Quirk Books, a small publishing house based in Philadelphia, who contracted television writer Seth Grahame-Smith to realise the idea. The book was publishedin April 2009 and very quickly made it onto the New York Times bestseller list. By June the same year, it had been optioned by Hollywood production company Lionsgate, thoughit would be another seven years before the project was finally completed

ResearchOnline@GCU

Film Review: Pride+Prejudice+ZombiesMiller, CatrionaPublished in:International Journal of Jungian StudiesPublication date:2016Document VersionPeer reviewed versionLink to publication in ResearchOnlineCitation for published version (Harvard):Miller, C 2016, 'Film Review: Pride+Prejudice+Zombies', International Journal of Jungian Studies, vol. 8, no. 2,pp. 136-140. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19409052.2016.1160615>General rightsCopyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright ownersand it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights.Take down policyIf you believe that this document breaches copyright please view our takedown policy at https://edshare.gcu.ac.uk/id/eprint/5179 for detailsof how to contact us.Download date: 29. Apr. 2020FILM REVIEWPride + Prejudice + Zombies, directed by Burr Steers, screenplay by Burr Steers, Lionsgate, 107minutes, EnglishSpring 2016 saw the release of the film Pride + Prejudice + Zombies (2016, Burr Steers). It is,entirely as the title suggests, a version of the Jane Austen novel with zombies. The originalconcept came from an editor at Quirk Books, a small publishing house based in Philadelphia,who contracted television writer Seth Grahame-Smith to realise the idea. The book was pub-lished in April 2009 and very quickly made it onto the New York Times bestseller list. By Junethe same year, it had been optioned by Hollywood production company Lionsgate, thoughit would be another seven years before the project was finally completed.Grahame-Smith’s approach was an interpolation of zombies into Pride and Prejudice (firstpublished in 1813) rather than a complete rewrite; indeed, he remained largely faithful toAusten – at least in terms of plot, character and dialogue. However, he did shift the backgroundof the story to an alternative nineteenth-century England that is on its knees after a plague,imported from the colonies alongside spices and silks, causes those infected to hunger forthe brains of the living. The Bennet sisters, along with most of their aristocratic peers, haveenjoyed extensive weapons training courtesy of their doting father (though in China ratherthan in Japan, the more fashionable destination among the upper classes), while theirmother remains fixated on finding a good matrimonial match for her girlsFor many, first encountering the notion of zombies in the genteel literary world of JaneAusten is at least an irritation, if not an outrage; nonetheless, the novel and its film adaptationraise many interesting questions, for they bring together some very popular narrative tropes inone package – combining the nostalgic, and indeed romantic, appeal of Jane Austen with thegory rise of the zombie. This is a palimpsest of a text which demonstrates the complexity of acontemporary culture phenomenon – one that is intended to be playful, but at the same timecontains the tendrils of a very affect-laden anxiety about the apocalypse.Although Austen was only modestly successful in her own lifetime, her work rose steadily inestimation throughout the nineteenth century before being cemented into the literary canonby cultural critic F. R. Leavis in 1948; but from the mid twentieth century onwards, largely due tothe success of screen adaptations, her popularity has grown exponentially.This is demonstrated by the sheer diversity of the film adaptations, which range far beyondthe more obviously faithful – often playing with the Jane Austen world. Some transfer the storyto another culture, such as Bride and Prejudice (2004, Gurinder Chadha) which takes place inIndia; or to another time, such as the online web series The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, whichbegan in 2012 as a contemporary vlog-style web series. Others explore the biography of theauthor, such as Becoming Jane (2007, Julian Jarrold); play out the fantasy of being immersedin the past, such as Lost in Austen (2008, ITV) and Austenland (2013, Jerusha Hess); still othersextend the narrative world, such as Death Comes to Pemberley (2013, BBC sequel based onthe P.D. James novel of the same name).Fan activity around Austen is equally imaginative. Frommore traditional print media such asmagazine Jane Austen’s Regency World (published from Bath, of course!) to the web, there isevidence of many kinds of participation. There are numerous websites, for example – suchas Republic of Pemberley, where fan fiction is a popular way of engaging with Austen’sstories. There are organised trips to England and role plays of all kinds, from traditional ballsin stately homes and castles to more prosaic social gatherings. Parody and hybridity havealso been explored in the YouTube film Jane Austen’s Fight Club (2010, Emily Janice CardINTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF JUNGIAN STUDIES, 2016VOL. 8, NO. 2, 136–140and Keith Paugh) and The Real Housewives of Jane Austen (2012, PlayingwFireFilms). In fact,Jane Austen is a twenty-first-century transmedia success story.The ubiquity of this activity has led fans to refer to an ‘Austenverse’ – a field of activity that isbased on, plays with, intersects and extends the story world created by the Austen novels. Themany adaptations for film and television form part of this; but what is interesting, and why theterm Austenverse encompasses more than just the novels, is that, some time ago, the adap-tations began to refer and rely as much upon other adaptations as they did upon the ‘original’texts. Some texts have been adapted so often and with such gusto that it is easier to regardsuch works as a kind of jazz variation on a theme. For example, one has only to chart thewide reuse of the ‘wet shirt scene’ invented by Andrew Davies for his 1995 BBC adaptation,which saw Darcy (Colin Firth) encounter Lizzie Bennet (Jennifer Ehle) after an impromptu dipin a pond, then recreated memorably and quite consciously in 2008’s Lost in Austen amongothers. In the context of considering Pride + Prejudice + Zombies, it does raise the questionof a corresponding ‘zombieverse’.The zombie is not a new figure in popular culture, but unlike many other monsters, zombiesdo not arise from the folklore of medieval Europe – nor from Romantic and Victorian literature,such as the vampire or Frankenstein’s monster; but rather, if one is looking for origins, fromHaitian folklore. According to one writer, the ‘zombie myth enters western consciousness pri-marily as a result of the US occupation of Haiti from 1915–1934’ (Boon in Scott, 2007, p. 35)through the publication of stories such as William Seabrook’s Magic Island (1929), whichbegan ‘to draw the American public’s attention away from the Old World and toward theNew, specifically the island of Haiti’ (Bishop, 2008, p. 141). However, the zombie that inhabitspopular culture in 2016 does not owe much to this Haitian background, and, in fact, did notexist before George Romero’s ground-breaking film Night of the Living Dead was released in1968.Prior to Night of the Living Dead, the few zombies that had appeared in film – such as WhiteZombie (Victor Halperin, 1932) or I Walked with a Zombie (Jacques Tourneur, 1943) – were liketheir Haitian antecedents, which Halliwell described as ‘dead people who are revived, more orless intact, to serve the purposes of the living’ (Halliwell, 1986, p. 242). They are raised by blackmagic to become the mindless slave of the magician who creates them; in reality, the ‘monster’of these films is not the zombie but its master – but, as Halliwell went on to note, ‘GeorgeA. Romero changed all that’ (Halliwell, 1986, p. 248). In Night of the Living Dead, the deadrise up to consume the living, with little in the way of explanation but certainly no mentionof magicians. Since Romero, films featuring zombies are a new genre: the zombie is perhapsone of the few genuinely twentieth-century monsters.To generalise, the narrative tends to centre around a small band of humans trying to survivea zombie onslaught in a variety of locations – but in vain, as these mass outbreaks are highlycontagious. To be bitten is inevitably to turn into a zombie, eventually. The infected have nowill of their own, being intent upon devouring the living; their main characteristic is their relent-less hunger. All escape is temporary, for the genre is also marked by the nihilism of its endings –as zombies overwhelm the survivors, everyone dies. It is apocalyptic.Nearly 50 years later, zombies are more popular than ever. In 2012, America’s TV Guide notedthat the ‘zombie apocalypse has upended the entire television business. AMC’s The WalkingDead is now the No. 1 entertainment series on TV among adults 18–49 – a landmark accom-plishment for a cable show’ (tvguide.com). The Walking Dead (AMC, 2010 – ongoing) is a glob-ally popular series, based on an equally popular graphic novel series (2003 – ongoing). Spin-offseries Fear the Walking Dead broke records of its own in summer 2015 and there is now asecond series in production. There has also been a British series, In the Flesh (2013, BBC); aFrench series, The Returned (2012–15, Canal+); a blockbuster movie World War Z (MarcINTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF JUNGIAN STUDIES 137Forster, 2013), based on the bestselling novel by Max Brooks, with a sequel in production duefor release in 2017; and Maggie (2015, Henry Hobson), to name but a few highlights. However,as with Austen, the zombie phenomenon extends beyond simple consumption to enthusiasticparticipation. There are zombie walks and runs (where participants are ‘encouraged’ along byzombie attacks) across the globe, including cities as culturally diverse as Singapore, Stockholm,Toronto and Sydney.Understanding the Austenverse and the zombieverse as successful transmediatisedphenomena makes the blending of the two seem less unorthodox than at first glance. Pride+ Prejudice + Zombies offers the viewer a heterogeneous diegesis; though this was oncethought of as a way of jolting viewers out of their suspension of disbelief (Wollen, 1972), con-temporary audiences are much more practiced in accommodating such things – even takingludic pleasure in the intersections of previously discrete story worlds. In this terrain, zombiesat Pemberley are as acceptable as Batman and Superman coexisting in the same story. AsBarthes put it in 1973, ‘any text is an intertext: other texts are present in it, at varying levels,in more or less recognisable forms: the texts of the previous and surrounding culture. Anytext is a new tissue of past citations’ (Barthes in Young, 1981, p. 39) and in the era of Web2.0, intertextuality is the natural state.What makes Pride + Prejudice + Zombies particularly complex is that intertextuality in thiscase does not just mean resituating the Bennet sisters as zombie killers. As already described,the film follows in the practice of referring to other Pride and Prejudice adaptations (including ashot of Darcy [Sam Riley] diving into a pond just as Colin Firth did back in 1995) while also refer-encing the post-Romero zombie canon, though it also – as any good genre should – introducessome new ideas.The zombies themselves in Pride + Prejudice + Zombies are not necessarily mindless – atleast, not initially. The cause is presented as a highly infectious disease that makes theperson infected hungry for brains, and consuming a human brain causes the disease to accel-erate. However, if the infected resist the hunger and eat animal brains instead, they keep theirwits and their personality. Part of the background story, which is new for both the Austenverseand the zombieverse, is the idea that zombies can organise themselves. The audience is offeredthe possibility of zombies with agency and a specific grudge against humanity – a fairly newevolution of the trope, only hinted at in Romero’s own Land of the Dead (2005) but followedthrough in Warm Bodies (2013, Jonathan Levine).However, the film does revert to an ending that is consistent with the traditional zombie-verse. Things appear to be coming to a close with the traditional double wedding – inkeeping with the Austenverse; but there is a final mid-credit sequence that reveals thezombie hordes, led by an angry Wickham (Jack Huston), thundering towards Rosings andthe happy couples, thus reinstating the nihilistic ending so typical of zombie films. This is achange from Seth Grahame-Smith’s novel, which ends quite demurely in marital bliss, witheven a possible cure for the disease on the horizon. As an already intertextual appropriation,the story had to be further reworked in order to craft it appropriately for the screen – a trans-lation of a translation, if you will – with the distinct possibility that it might have disintegratedentirely under the pressure, which goes some way to explaining the seven-year stint in ‘devel-opment hell’. Steers was the fourth director attached to the film, with at least as many writerssearching for the right balance; and although Natalie Portman remained as a producer, sche-duling conflicts meant she stepped down as the star. Even a popular culture mash-up is notimmune from the vagaries of the adaptation process.However, this is a Jungian journal, so what can a Jungian perspective bring to bear upon thephenomenon? Cartmell, in her book dedicated solely to Pride and Prejudice adaptations,attempts to answer the question of why we seem to have a ‘seemingly insatiable cultural138 FILM REVIEWneed for so many versions of the same story’ (Cartmell, 2010, p. 126). This is a very good ques-tion, which pertains to apocalypse and zombies every bit as much as to Pride and Prejudice.Ortiz-Hill (1994/2004, pp. 3–4) suggests a way of understanding this imaginative hinterlandof contemporary culture, which contains these ‘unreal’ obsessions and fantasies, as true of theAustenverse as it is of the zombieverse.Just as the Australian aborigines speak of a ‘dreamtime’ parallel to ordinary, mundane reality, Itake the geography of apocalypse to be a real and vivid territory running alongside or beneaththe day to dayness of our lives. We live, in effect, in two worlds – in the foreground our dailypreoccupations and activities; and behind that, a fantastic landscape of terror or ecstasy.For some time now, science fiction, horror and disaster movies have been presenting us withimage after spectacular image of the end of the world as we know it – whether it be throughdisease, natural disaster (volcanoes, asteroids), ecological meltdown, or invasion. Without drift-ing into a discussion about which is a subset of what, it is fair to say that the zombieverse canencompass all forms of apocalypse – even, it seems, bursting into the warm nostalgia of theAustenverse. The landscape of the imagination (perhaps the term ‘cultural unconscious’could be employed here) is lively, unruly, often dystopian and messy; some audiences atleast seem to accept crossovers, hybrids and alternate universes, and are prepared toimagine the unimaginable, even the extinction of our species.I have already proposed that this film brings together two popular imaginal spaces in con-temporary culture; however, I would like to finish by suggesting that the popularity of the Pride+ Prejudice + Zombies phenomenon might lie in the combination of the Austenverse and thezombieverse, which gives space for a third trope.The Bennet sisters are all brave and strong, good fighters, which in this narrative gives theman element of independence that Lizzie (Lily James) especially is quite unwilling to give up forthe sake of marriage. Towards the end of the film, there are rescues a-plenty, but while Darcydoes rescue Lydia from Wickham, Lizzie then rescues Darcy. Even sweet Jane (Bella Heathcote)leaps to the physical defence of a rather limp Bingley (Douglas Booth). Part of the pleasure inwatching the film is seeing the Bennet sisters break out of demure prettiness to hack off somelimbs. Ultimately, this may be the key to this hybrid narrative’s success. Lizzie and Jane are notjust feisty conversationalists and freethinkers. They are robust rescuers of their men. The rise ofthe heroine with agency and her own story to tell is a growing trope in film and television, andone that audiences seem ready for. The screening I attended included some very distinctgroups of young women who laughed the loudest. The fans discussing the film on the Republicof Pemberley site seem to have taken to the film as a giggle and as another fan said elsewhere,as ‘a long-time fan of Jane Austen and Elizabeth Bennett I thoroughly enjoyed this adaptationof the story. I loved the book as well but to see Elizabeth and her sisters KICKING *** [sic] wasjust great fun’ (fandango.com, 2016).In the end, the appeal at the heart of this strange hybrid phenomenon is neither Austen northe zombie apocalypse, but the Bennet sisters, combining their pretty dresses with killerinstincts, taking charge of themselves and riding out to save their men. As the poster for thefilm says, ‘Bloody lovely’.Notes on contributorCatriona Miller teaches TV script writers and media students at Glasgow Caledonian University, andpublishes in the field of film and television studies, with a particular interest in Horror, Cult TV andScience Fiction genres from a Jungian perspective. She is currently working on a joint book TheHeroine’s Journey: Female Individuation on Screen for Routledge.INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF JUNGIAN STUDIES 139ReferencesBishop, K. (2008). The sub-subaltern monster: Imperialist hegemony and the cinematic voodoo zombie. TheJournal of American Culture, 31(2), 141–152.Boon, K. (2007). Ontological anxiety made flesh. In N. Scott (Ed.),Monsters and the monstrous: Myths and metaphorsof enduring evil (pp. 33–43). Amsterdam, Netherlands: Rodopi.Cartmell, D. (2010). Screen adaptations: Jane Austen’s pride and prejudice: A close study of the relationship betweentext and fil UK. London: A&C Black Publishers Ltd, p. 126.FandangoWebsite. (2016). Retrieved February 20, 2016, from http://www.fandango.com/prideandprejudiceandzombies_138600/moviereviewsHalliwell, L. (1986). The dead that walk. London: Grafton Books.Ortiz Hill, M. (1994/2004). Dreaming the end of the world: Apocalypse as a rite of passage. New Orleans, USA: SpringPublications.The TV Guide Website. (2012). November 2nd, 2012. Retrieved January 18, 2013, from http://www.tvguide.com/News/Cable-Vs-Broadcast-Walking-Dead-1055456.aspxWollen, P. (1972). Godard and counter cinema: Vent d’Est in Rosen, P. (ed) (1986) Narratives, apparatus, ideology: Afilm theory reader. New York: Columbia University Press.Young, R. (Ed.). (1981). Untying the text: A post-structuralist reader. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.Catriona MillerGlasgow Caledonian UniversityC.Miller@gcu.ac.uk© 2016 Catriona Millerhttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19409052.2016.1160615140 FILM REVIEW

Film Review: Pride+Prejudice+Zombies

https://researchonline.gcu.ac.uk/files/23831778/RIJJ_A_1160615_1_.pdf

Film Review: Pride+Prejudice+Zombies

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

ResearchOnline@GCU