“Rushing to defend a literary source against a supposed cinematic mauling,” he says, “is often little more than an attempt to signal culturedness and education.” Books don’t need protecting, Brody suggests. Only our fragile egos do. Is that true? Is a bad adaptation a victimless crime? I can tell you that there was at least one victim of Fennell’s adaptation: me. I saw the film in theatres with friends when it came out. I’ve been a fan of the Brontë sisters since before I outgrew young adult novels, but I figured that, even if Fennell’s movie presented a shallower version of the story, it would at least be fun. Reader, it was not. Adapters bring varied contexts to their work, and so, too, do readers. Hutcheon distinguishes between two types of audiences—the knowing audience, who has some familiarity with the source text, and the unknowing audience, who might not even know they’re encountering an adaptation at all. These audiences will come in with different sets of expectations; the knowing audience will expect the adaptation to be in dialogue with the source material, while the unknowing audience will expect the adaptation to be legible and interesting all on its own. For Hutcheon, a good adaptation must satisfy both desires. An adaptation, then, has two responsibilities: to carry an interesting conversation with the text that inspired it and to be a good movie. Frankenstein’s creature is green and vaguely square shaped. Sherlock Holmes wears a hunting cap and smokes a curved pipe. Charlotte Lucas is twenty-seven years old, with no money and no prospects, already a burden to her parents, frightened. It doesn’t matter that Mary Shelley, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Jane Austen never wrote those details; the stories have ballooned past their narrow literary beginnings, destined to be eternally rewritten by culture. https://thewalrus.ca/is-a-bad-jane-austen-adaptation-a-victimless-crime/