Читать книгу From Page to Screen / Vom Buch zum Film - Группа авторов - Страница 36

Whether the process of meaning construction is led by audiences or industries (Altman, 1984: 9) or by a negotiation between the two (Gledhill, 2006: 118), it is clear that family films and blockbusters tend to obfuscate political struggle, difference and inequality. In the context of world confinement, these “sanitary” (Bell, Haas, Sells, 1995: 6), “wholesome” (Booker, 2010: 31) and “apolitical” (Bell, Haas, Sells, 1995: 4) products elevate this sort of “sanitization to pedagogy” (Bell, Haas, Sells, 1995: 8). However, intermedial analysis lays bare the mechanisms behind this cleansing process.

In the works analysed here, secondary female characters undergo a series of changes in their passage from book to blockbuster. Many are subject to purge, made to disappear from plots overcrowded with men in a man’s world that serves as the backdrop of the protagonist’s adventures. Another mechanism involves downgrading secondary female characters, reducing their relevance for plot development, ridiculing them or giving them relational roles as romantic partners. Furthermore, the inclusion of a heterosexual romantic relationship, often absent in the book, is a common strategy that perpetuates traditional heteronormative notions of love and underscores, from a typically male-gaze perspective, women’s main reason to exist. Also, because women do not hold any substantial relationship with one another (another common deviation in the passage from book to film), viewers are left without models of female bonding.

There are also films that make use of cosmetic upgrading by introducing female characters that either are male or do not appear in the book. Whereas this can and has been used to showcase a more forward attitude by raising female representation, intermedial analysis reveals a return to dominant models and plots that do not contest or problematize traditional gender representation, perpetuating long-standing visions of women as caring mothers, romantic partners or evil enticers. Indeed, earnest upgradings, that is, true attempts at feminist reimaginings of secondary female characters in book-based family films, are rare. In these, women are given, in spite of not being completely rid of patriarchal constraints, more active and independent roles as they transfer from book to film.

In spite of the recent upsurge of films with strong leading female characters and all-women casts, the use of purging and downgrading strategies is still common when it comes to secondary characters: many new adaptations and sequels such as the whole Jurassic Park franchise (1997, 2001, 2015 and 2018) and the very recent live-action adaptations of Beauty and the Beast (2017) and Mary Poppins Returns (2018) fall back again on the old tropes of femininity in spite of the feminist push behind them (Koushik, Reed, 2019: 132).

This is the backdrop of the informal gender education of whole generations of viewers over the decades to which young audiences under lockdown are now being exposed at home. Some of the solutions to the problems raised in this chapter include situating critical “pedagogy far beyond the boundaries of schools” (Bell, Haas, Sells, 1995: 9), offering “representations that work with a degree of fluidity and contradiction” (Gledhill, 2006: 118), abandoning a capitalist logic when accessing media texts (Koushik, Reed, 2019: 125), and more women directors and screenwriters (Lauzen, 2019: 6). It is still difficult to find film adaptations where secondary female characters fare better than (or at least as well as) their book counterparts. From a gender standpoint, reading the book is still a more liberating experience than watching the film.