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Easy A(daptation): Sex, Fidelity, and Constructing the Unknowing-Knowing PG-13 Teen Audience
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Children, Film and Literacy explores the role of film in children's lives. The films children engage in provide them with imaginative spaces in which they create, play and perform familiar and unfamiliar, fantasy and everyday narratives and this narrative play is closely connected to identity, literacy and textual practices. Family is key to the encouragement of this social play and, at school, the playground is also an important site for this activity. However, in the literacy classroom, some children encounter a discontinuity between their experiences of narrative at home and those that are valued in school. Through film children develop understandings of the common characteristics of narrative and the particular 'language' of film. This book demonstrates the ways in which children are able to express and develop distinct and complex understandings of narrative, that is to say, where they can draw on their own experiences (including those in a moving image form). Children whose primary experiences of narrative are moving images face particular challenges when their experiences are not given opportunities for expression in the classroom, and this has urgent implications for the teaching of literacy.
Children’s metafictions have their roots in literacy pedagogy and entertainment, and remain enormously popular both with authors, readers, and teachers. But they pose a number of unique challenges to screen adaptation. While – arguably – audiences of children’s adaptations prefer that the adaptation adhere to the source as closely as possible, in the case of metafiction its defining ‘meta’ element does not directly transmediate. Yet a more direct filmic equivalence for metafiction – metafilm – reflects filmicity rather than bookishness. This book studies first what children’s metafiction purports to be and to do for the youth reader (infants to young adults). The second chapter examines the distinctive challenges in adapting children’s metafiction to film. The third chapter presents a number of children’s films, adaptations and not, featuring ‘bookish’ themes, characters, settings, and symbols, and develops a ‘film grammar’ for how these are traditionally depicted. The fourth chapter discusses children’s metafilm and draws from a selection of these films. The final, fifth, chapter presents a sub-type of children’s metafilm adaptations which ‘break the fifth wall’ by reflexively focusing not on a single medium (literature or film) but rather on the adaptation processes themselves. These adaptations are meta-adaptations. The book contains over fifty film stills and a glossary of terms. It discusses works like Inkheart , The Invention of Hugo Cabret , The Spiderwick Chronicles , and the Harry Potter series and the Series of Unfortunate Events. It is grounded in and contributes to contemporary adaptation criticism and theory.
Margaret Mackey draws together memory, textual criticism, social analysis, and reading theory in an extraordinary act of self-study. In One Child Reading, she makes a singular contribution to our understanding of reading and literacy development. Seeking a deeper sense of what happens when we read, Mackey revisited the texts she read, viewed, listened to, and wrote as she became literate in the 1950s and 1960s in St. John's, Newfoundland. This tremendous sweep of reading included school texts, knitting patterns, musical scores, and games, as well as hundreds of books. The result is not a memoir, but rather a deftly theorized exploration of how a reader is constructed. One Child Reading is an essential book for librarians, classroom teachers, those involved in literacy development in both scholarly and practical ways, and all serious readers.
Drawing on the work of Angela McRobbie, Rosalind Gill and Christina Scharff identify a form of double address within postfeminist culture, suggesting that ‘what is distinctive about postfeminist culture is the way in which a selectively defined feminism is both “taken into account” and repudiated’, and that this constitutes a ‘double entanglement [which] facilitates both a doing and an undoing of feminism’.1 As ‘postfeminism’ is a complex and fraught term, weighted with contradictory and confusing meanings and definitions, for the purposes of this chapter, I employ the construction (post)feminism as an indicator of such cultures of ‘bothness’ which situate themselves as a part of and apart from feminism. The (post)feminist cultural text takes a selective approach not only to feminism as a political position and cultural history but also to related cultural narratives, such as understandings of sexuality, and politically fraught generic forms such as the romantic comedy or rom-com. Such texts demonstrate a selective approach to feminist sensibilities, selecting certain aspects of normative models of gender and sexuality to interrogate, while validating others. In this chapter, I discuss one recent example of such texts, Easy A (2010), which provides a useful example of the ways in which cultural texts operate along these (post)feminist lines, offering neither a clearly defined progressive response nor a straightforwardly conservative reaction to ideas around sexuality and empowerment.
Ironically, the two films primarily responsible for keeping me a virgin until I was in my early twenties were both films about teenage girls who chose not to wait for true love- or even college-before they had sex: Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) and Little Darlings (1980). These films of the early 1980s, coming, as Chuck Kleinhans puts it, "on the [e]dge of the Reagan Era" reflect an all too brief period in American film history between the sexual empowerment of the 1970s women's movement and the "just say no" sexual abstinence campaigns of the mid-1980s and beyond. In this brief era, girls' sexual decision making is represented as intelligent, responsible, and important, and the films make their points about not rushing into sex in a way that respects and empowers teenage girls instead of romanticizing or infantilizing them.
In Virgin Territory contributors consider virginity as it is produced and marketed in film. With chapters that span a range of periods, genres, and performances, this collection proves that although it seems like an obvious quality at first glance, virginity in film is anything but simple. The essays in Virgin Territory destabilize assumptions about virginity and connect moments of virginity in film to their larger social significance. Editor Tamar Jeffers McDonald has assembled a range of contributions by noted film scholars to consider virginity from numerous perspectives, including both the male and female quest to lose virginity, the role of virginity in horror film, issues of sexual agency and desire in both historic and contemporary depictions of virginity, and the complications of self-pleasure and masturbation. Films considered include classics of the Production Code era, like Marjorie Morningstar, Pillow Talk, and Bonjour Tristesse, as well as more recent films like Porky's, Losin' It, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, American Pie, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, and Scary Movie. Contributors also consider particular stars like Elizabeth Taylor and Doris Day to investigate the positioning of virginity on an actor's physical body. Across different eras and genres, different films have different methods of representing virginity, relying on costume, mise-en-scène, and performance to convey the virgin status, while some film stars are associated with the quality to both the furtherance, and the frustration, of their careers. Virgin Territory explores the contrasts and continuities in films' attempts at representing this internal state to fascinating effect. Scholars of film and television history as well as cultural studies will enjoy this significant volume.
While decades of criticism have echoed Dudley Andrew’s 1980 call for an end to fidelity discourse, more recent criticism (including
by Andrew himself, in 2011) is reconsidering fidelity’s usefulness. This article posits a post-millennial resurgence in fidelity
criticism in order to make a (final?) recuperative claim for fidelity as one essential tool in the intertextual toolbox of
adaptation studies.
In studies of children's preferences for film content, form and technique, the most-liked films were those that were most like books.1 Indeed, the film which children rated the highest of the twenty-four used in my studies was THE CASE OF THE ELEVATOR DUCK (Learning Corporation of America), adapted from the book by Polly Berrien Berends.2 This preference would not be a particularly significant aspect of film interest studies were it not for the fact that so many discussions of films for children focus on the topic of film's value as literature. I sometimes wonder, however, if we aren't limiting our view of the complex relations that must exist between books and films to how well one medium has been translated into another.
Some films have very little to do with any text; the question of their literary value, then, is moot. There is more to the puzzle of film's connection to literature, however. Perhaps some distinctions in discussing the film/literature connection are in order. Exploration of each of these may not lead us to easy answers, but we may emerge with a deeper appreciation of the complex question of film's connection to literature.
Historically, educators have often treated film as the three ugly step sisters treated Cinderella-with marginal tolerance and mild exploitation. For decades, film was forced to make its stealthy entry into the classroom in one of three guises: 1) screen education to combat undesirable moral values fostered by the movies, 2) the instructional film (LIFE CYCLE OF THE MONARCH BUTTERFLY), and 3) film as an aid to the teaching of literature (Laurence Olivier as Henry V).
In a 1913 issue of English Journal, Robert W. Neal advised "Making the Devil Useful," and gave tips on using the commercial film as motivation for English composition and literature appreciation. In a 1927 investigation, Mary Abbot of Columbia concluded that movies had an ill effect on children and convinced many teachers that film values should be taught to protect youth from the immoral movie. The Payne Studies of Ohio State came to a similar conclusion in the 1933 publication Our Movie-Made Children. As one historian summed it up, "Here is a book showing the movies for what they really are—a monster Pied Piper, with marvelous trappings, playing tunes irresistably alluring to the youth of the present day." World War II ended the missionary zeal of the 1930's approach to film study, but use of the instructional film, a spin-off from the Hollywood documentary genre, was prevalent. In the late 1940's and early 1950's interest in the media was renewed with the advent of television, but it remained misguided. Many school systems listed study objectives for the mass media while at the same time regarding film as an aid to the teaching of literature. In Minneapolis, for example, students were to see one entertainment film annually ". . . to promote the reading of fine books and to increase enjoyment and appreciation of films" in that order. Again, film played Alice to literature's Queen of Hearts.3
Scholars have often attempted to dignify films by demonstrating how much they resemble literature, or the theatre, sculpture, painting, music, and even architecture. Unfortunately, this creeping ecumenicalism has often served only to convince people that film is not a worthy art form in itself, but one which needs a crutch to support it in the presence of the other established arts. Film is still the unwanted stepchild of the arts.4
Ingmar Bergman attacks the idea that the motion picture is the poor foster child of literature, or that the two are even distant relatives:
Film has nothing to do with literature; the character and substance of the two art forms are usually in conflict. The written word is read and assimilated by a conscious act of the will in alliance with the intellect; little by little it affects the imagination and the emotions. The process is different with a motion picture. The sequence of pictures plays directly on our feelings.5
There does exist a body of film work that...
The Scarlet Letter, Book Review by Michael Berry
- Michael N Berry
2010. The Pedagogy of Adaptation
- Dennis Cutchins
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Directed by Will Gluck. Film. Screen Gems
- A Easy
Live to Tell: Teen Movies Yesterday and Today
- Adrian Martin
The Keg Party’s Over: Why Gross-Out Comedies Are Going Down the Pan.” The Guardian
- Gwilym Mumford
Directed by Paul Brickman. Film. The Geffen Company
- Risky Business
Mixed Messages: Slut Shaming in Mean Girls and Easy A
- Laurie Mcmillan
Directed by Greg Motola. Film. Columbia Pictures
- Superbad
8 Things You Didn’t Know About ‘Easy A,’ Because There’s a Whole Jar of Olives in the Fridge
- Lindsay Denninger
10 Great Gross-Out Comedies
- Oliver Lunn
Directed by Andy Fickman. Film. Twentieth Century Fox
- Parental Guidance
The ‘A’ List. (Cover Story).” Back Stage (1946-5440)
- Janelle Riley
‘The Town,’ ‘Catfish,’ and ‘Easy A
- David Edelstein
Emma, Cher, and the Maze of Unknowing
- David Kelly
Just Once I Wanted My Life to Be Like an [sic] 1980s Movie!”: Female Adolescence and the Flapper Youth Spectator
- Christina Petersen