From last week’s month in charts for the National Post.
A weird little side note about Emma Approved: I didn’t realize until the spurt of publicity that surrounded Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin’s “conscious uncoupling” how much Bernie Su’s version of Emma evokes the real-life Gwyneth. I realize that the whole phenomenon of goop.com and things being “Goop Approved” is very old news for anyone who actually follows those sorts of things, but what can I say? I’m more into birds and plant galls and weirdly specific long-dead artists.
So it was surprising for me to take a look at what Gwyneth has been up to and realize, oh, Emma is at least in part a parody of her. The whole lifestyle-coach-who-is-independently-wealthy-and-dispenses-clueless-advice thing. And I guess that’s actually kind of funny, especially given the iconic position Gwyneth occupies among screen Emmas.
Parody can be tricky to pull off. If someone in the audience doesn’t get the reference, a parody is apt to just come off as weird. Which, honestly, is how EA came off to me while I was watching it. But noticing this feature of the show was a reminder to me that just because it didn’t connect with me doesn’t make it inherently bad. It just makes it bad for me.
The funniest moment in Emma was when Knightley, exhausted from a ball and heartbroken because he thinks Emma is in love with Frank Churchill, rips off his outer clothes and lies on the floor of a giant room to have a breakdown and in the background you can see a servant just fucking nope out the back door
On my second viewing watching the servants as an awkward Greek chorus/play within a play/audience stand-in was pretty much my favorite thing.
fun fact: the swimming monkey is a male proboscis monkey. i wrote an o’reilly animal book* and they chose to put that animal on the cover, so I read up on them. they’re good swimmers.
*having written an o’reilly animal book means something to a particular kind of early-stage Internet geek, but the o’reilly animal book I wrote was arguably the least-deserving of such status out of the many such books, so I’m not claiming any specialness for having done that. just wanted to explain why I feel a special fondness for the male proboscis monkey.
some fucker: “If you arent paying for a product, you are the product!”
me using tumblr costing yahoo a billion dollars:
good
excellent news
fyi, my tumblr account is worth a lot to *me*. I come here when I can’t take the political shit I follow on twitter. seeing the mutuals and aesthetic bloggers and fellow lovers of fandom meta I follow here is like being able to breathe again, sometimes, which, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, is exceedingly valuable. especially now.
Joan of arc is a very popular figure in media so her image is subject to a lot of bending. Sometimes it’s very subtle, and other times it’s very apparent. There’s no official pictures or paintings of her that survived from her time, but there are several trial transcripts that describe her, as well as first hand reports and letters from those who worked beside her that do the same.
The general consensus within these that I found on her appearance was that Joan was pretty short and stocky. Her eyes were far apart, and somewhat large, her hair was black/dark brown and close cut, and she had a fairly common looking face. Multiple people report that she had a red birthmark behind her left ear and a low but sweet voice. A surprising amount is written about her physical strength despite her small stature. I would suggest you read De Boulainvilliers’ (Chamberlain to Charles VII) letters, among others. He knew her first hand and goes into a lot of depth about her appearance and aura.
A big part of her rebranding is making her seem older, more feminine, paler, and blonder. Due to color/racism as well as light representing purity, renditions of her make her whiter (she was a poor farmer from mid/south France which means she was on the darker side of white complexions) to show holiness. People also make her more feminine due to stigma against women who “don’t look like women” and to lean into her Virgin Mary esk aura.
(Here’s two paintings I found that more accurately represent her image)
I think our disagreements often mask a deeper agreement, in which one person is manifesting their love of something by focusing on its perceived flaws, highlighting how those shortcomings are so in contrast to the loved essence of the thing, while the other is performatively disregarding those flaws, blithely ignoring them to celebrate the same loved essence.
Anyway, I don’t know how you feel about this adaptation. I know some people don’t like it much. I liked it a lot.
I liked its gentle persistence in being thoroughly and deeply not the 1996 theatrical-release adaptation. I loved its female gaze. I loved its awareness of the servant class, and of the lens provided by their halting and embarrassed efforts to inhabit the margins of their ridiculous and self-absorbed employers’ lives.
I loved the clothes.
I loved the Weston’s ball at the Crown. Loved it so much. Harriet’s face when Knightley approached her was heartbreaking, and de Wilde’s handling of the rest of the evening was the sort of thing I watch this kind of movie for.
Box Hill was excruciating. Miss Bates’ reaction, and Knightley’s subsequent remonstrance at the carriage, were among my favorite and least favorite moments in the film, if that makes any sense.
Knightley and Emma’s big scene under that beautiful tree was wonderful, and then, as if the storyteller was toying with the characters, it pulled back into farce, and you know what? I loved that too. I loved that it subjected Emma to that gentle indignity, the Emma who in this adaptation was so unrelentingly cold and imperious, so unlikeable. To humanize her in that moment, to have her emotion manifest in that way, felt earned to me, even as I get why some have said they found it off-putting.
I haven’t mentioned a bunch of other performances that I loved: Mr. Woodhouse, the Eltons, the Taylors, Frank and Jane. I thought they were all wonderful.
So yes, I liked it a lot. At a time when the real world has conspired to layer a number of unpleasant associations onto the 1996 theatrical release (at least in my mind) it’s a relief to have this new interpretation, to enter into a new imagining of the world of the novel, without any of that.
I know there’s a lot here you might disagree with. “But if you have any wish to speak openly to me as a friend… I will hear whatever you like.” :-)
