The benefits of knowing the source material

If you're watching an adaptation of a famous text, it can be better not to have consumed the text in question, as it can create more opportunities for surprise in the filmgoing experience. That's not to say you should not watch the adaptation if you've already read the book -- there are plenty of ways that can be a satisfying experience, and I'm usually eager to do it -- but there can be benefits to coming in fresh. 

If you're watching a parody of a famous text, though, it's usually a good idea to have the frame of reference going in.

And that's why I was really eager to get back to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies after finally reading Jane Austen's seminal novel last year. On Friday night, I did just that. 

Back in 2016, when I first watched the movie, I wrote a whole post about not being qualified to judge the film's success, because I'd never read -- or seen any filmed version of -- Pride and Prejudice. It's probably good that the finer details of the plot went in one ear and out the other during that viewing, as it didn't impact my eventual reading of the novel. (I knew that there was a happy ending for all the characters you care about, but I think I knew that anyway just from random references to Mr. D'arcy in the culture.)

After finishing the novel last June, I was eager to get back to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies pretty quickly, so the details of the novel would still be fresh when I watched it. At that time it had temporarily disappeared from streaming, though, and I was not quite so keen as to pay for a rental. In recent months, I noticed it appearing on Netflix again, setting up Friday night's viewing.

Now that I know the book, I can recognize this as a pretty faithful adaptation of it -- and a pretty credible one at that. I still wouldn't say this is a great movie, but it's probably at least a half-star better than the 2.5 stars I gave it upon first viewing. 

I was worried that it wouldn't seem very faithful when the film opens with a prologue involving D'Arcy -- a zombie hunter, in addition to being a wealthy gentleman -- arriving at an afternoon of cards among the social elite, and proceeding to decapitate the one who's been hiding a festering zombie bite that has not yet fully transformed him. (In a clever bit, he can identify the man through a vial of flies he carries with him, who are attracted to dead flesh.) This scene obviously has no corollary in the novel, and I feared similar liberties would be taken throughout.

But no, actually, once the proper plot gets going, it hews pretty closely to the details of Austen's novel. Sure, there are some characters excised or at least underrepresented, some moments in the plot that are transformed a little to accommodate the zombie skin, as it were, that the film wears. But a lot of what happens is basically what happens in the book, and since I knew that book now, I found this a lot more engrossing than the periodic moments of zombie mayhem.

When I originally watched the film, I was curious about the blunt disconnect between the two genres represented, without much care for the finer details of the story. Intricate character dynamics can be lost on a film viewer, to the point that you even stop trying to sort them out, whereas the reader of a novel has more time to live with the characters and go back over paragraphs that they may have read too quickly if their mind was on other things. Now that I'd had this experience, I found the character dynamics more rich this time around, such that it was the zombie stuff I was brushing off as kind of inessential to my viewing experience.

A lot of the zombie stuff does seem sort of shoehorned in, as is an obvious component of this type of project to begin with. But one thing I appreciated about the film this time is how conflicts between characters in the novel, which obvious remain genteel and non-physical, are here played out as action set pieces. When two characters clash in the book, here they clash with actual swords and fisticuffs in keeping with the desire to please those who have come to this movie for its action/zombie trappings. It works as a metaphorical exploration of the novel's linguistic clashes, and allows for some humorous moments.

Overall I still find it to be a trifle, a novelty act at a core level. I'm not suddenly interested in reading Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Seth Grahame-Smith's 2009 parody novel. I don't think I'd get anything out of it that I wouldn't get in a lot more satisfying fashion with a re-read of Austen's novel. 

But I'm glad for its existence and find it interesting as a dedicated realization of a genre mashup containing two genres that are diametrically opposed. The Austen stuff is better than it had any right to be, and the zombie stuff ain't half bad either. 

Unqualified to appreciate Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

I lost interest pretty quickly in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and that's probably because I had nothing to compare it to.

That's right, not only have I never read Jane Austen's seminal novel Pride and Prejudice -- a bit unusual for an English major like me, who's read any number of seminal novels from that same period -- but I haven't seen a film version of it, either.

Hence, I really have no idea what was faithful, what was unfaithful, and what was fun about the dissonance between the original novel and Seth Grahame-Smith's opportunistic co-opting of Austen's work.

Merely seeing people kill zombies was not all that fun, even if they were wearing cravats and corsets. People are killing zombies in nearly every form of entertainment we consume these days.

What surprised me most was the fealty to the novel's classic tone, especially in the (many) scenes that don't involve the undead. You'd figure that whoever they got to direct this would be stronger on the zombie stuff and only a minimal level of attention would be paid to the angst among eligible youngsters being married off to one another, but if anything, it's probably the other way around. Burr Steers is more a veteran of movies about relationships than movies about gore. (And that's clear from some of the lackluster staging of the action.)

But even as I recognized the actors' unusually formidable commitment to something that was intended as little more than a joke, I just couldn't get into it because I couldn't get past that joke -- and that joke didn't work for me because I had barely even a passing familiarity with the thing being parodied.

It didn't seem worth it to do the hard work of following every minute social permutation between the characters if those dynamics were inevitably undercut by the zombie stuff. In other words, I didn't really want this to be my first attempt to appreciate the nuances of Jane Austen's novel. So I eventually kind of just shut off my brain and appreciated it -- or more often, failed to appreciate it -- on a very superficial level.

But I am sort of the right audience for this otherwise, as a person who is interested both in classic literature and zombies. I doubt there are many of us.

Which is probably why most people are actually unqualified to appreciate Pride and Prejudice and Zombies -- and why it was not a hit. The Pride and Prejudice people are not interested in zombies, the zombie people are not interested in Pride and Prejudice, and never the twain shall meet. The result is a novel that was somehow a best seller, surely only on the strength of its status as a novelty and a joke, and not because anyone consumed it with a really satisfying appreciation of the way the two texts interacted. A friend of mine who loves zombies assessed it as something like this: "Too much Pride and Prejudice and not enough zombies."

If pressed, I'd probably fall on the other side. I do like a good zombie, but more than that, I like a good costume drama -- especially if it's a text I feel guilty for not knowing better.

In fact, I probably could have determined this about myself when I made my other comically unsuccessful attempt to inteface with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Back when I was living in Los Angeles and commuting about 45 minutes a day to work, I tried to listen to it as an audio book. But something about the opening line so turned me off that I didn't listen to more than a single minute before shutting it off.

I guess how I would have done Pride and Prejudice and Zombies -- that is, if I thought it was worth doing more with it than just revealing the title as a funny idea -- was to have zombies suddenly interfere with the novel. You get through 30 pages of the regular text and then suddenly one of the characters starts trying to bite one of the other characters. It would be a great surprise -- that is, if you didn't know the title of what you were reading.

Instead, P & P & Z imagines a world where zombies have been a part of reality for ages. Decades? Centuries? I can't remember. But the characters take fight training in the Far East -- debating whether China or Japan is better -- just to be able to defend themselves against these menaces. That's a lot less funny a realization of the joke, methinks.

Maybe I will go out and either read, or at the very least watch a good version of, Pride and Prejudice. It's long past time.

And then maybe -- MAYBE -- I'll watch Pride and Prejudice and Zombies again.

But probably not.