Fiction which is misrepresented in pop culture

[FriarTed]

@Hermione

Bumping up with something Halloweeny…

I’ve had a bit of Dracula on the brain since Halloween has just been here. It’s occurred to me that so many Dracula spin-offs of the last few years or so have had Dracula and Mina Harker having a consensual sexual relationship. For example, there have been no less than three sequel novels (Dracula The Un-Dead by a descendant of Bram Stoker’s,* Dracula In Love *and Dracula, My Love) that have taken this and run with it. It seems, from what I’ve heard, that the new NBC series has the whole Mina-as-reincarnation-of-Dracula’s-lost-love that the Francis Ford Coppola movie had. And the Frank Langella version (which, as some versions do, played musical names with Mina and Lucy–Lucy was the hero’s love interest, and Mina was the one who died, came back, and was staked–and was Van Helsing’s daughter to boot) had Lucy willingly giving into Dracula.

But that is NOT the case in Stoker’s novel. Mina and her fiancé-turned-husband Jonathan are very much in love, and she shows no interest in anyone else. Her encounter with Dracula was portrayed as a metaphorical RAPE–brutal, horrifying, and very much against Mina’s will. The implications of turning this into a consensual encounter are a little squicky.

The reincarnation-of-a-dead-wife business didn’t even really start with Coppola–the Jack Palance version, one of the first to portray Dracula as tortured and sympathetic, had Lucy Westenra as the reincarnation instead of Mina.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the Francis Ford Coppola movie despite its flaws and excesses–and the backstory of Dracula’s dead wife was actually taken from a supposedly true story about the first wife of Vlad The Impaler. But it just seems to me that poor Jonathan always gets the short end of the stick in adaptations–and a really terrific couple from the novel always gets screwed over in the process.

Oh, and the aforementioned Dracula The Un-Dead by Dacre Stoker? I was turned off it just reading the summary and the reviews, because it seems that the author just trampled on all the happiness that the characters had worked so hard for by the end of the original. Mina and Jonathan were unhappy, Van Helsing was disgraced professionally, Seward was a morphine addict, and Arthur’s marriage was loveless (when the epilogue of the novel revealed that both he and Seward entered happy marriages some years after the events of the novel). In fact, what with the Mina/Dracula pairing and Seward’s drug use, it seems to have been more of a sequel to the Coppola movie than to the Stoker novel! I won’t go into one of the major twists that Dacre came up with toward the end involving a major character.

I am almost a Dracula completist and when I saw the HB of Dacre Stoker’s book on the discount table, I took a look inside & thought “No thanks”.

I’m gonna say something very controversial - for his limited acting skills & uneven British accent, Keanu Reeves was not bad as Jonathan Harker. He was a young unimaginative solicitor starting out in the world & waiting to marry, who then becomes confronted & is forced to man up & fight supernatural horror. Keanu manages that very well IMO.

Coppola’s Dracula came very close to getting Renfield right, except that in the end, he cowers too much to Dracula. Jack Sheppard in the 1977 BBC Louis Jordan version shows Dracula as very much the tragic martyr. Dwight Frye made him quite sympathetic as well as somewhat comic, but not heroic or tragic.

[Dave_Hartwick]

Probably a dead horse misconception, but apparently impersonators of Cary Grant would use the catchphrase “Judy, Judy, Judy,” which Grant never said in a film. Sort of like Foghorn Leghorn and “I say”.

Holmes sometimes came across as merely cerebral in the presentations I grew up with, or at least that was my impression of him. I got around to reading the stories, I was surprised when performed feats of strength, like unbending an iron bar.

The thread kicked off with a mention of how Zapp Brannigan is nothing at all like Kirk. Not entirely unlike, no. It’s all greatly exaggerated, sure, but Kirk really was reckless, hammy, and, sometimes, stupid and sexist. I think the last two are more products of 60s television than the character and actor.

The (probably at least partly fictional) person that surely must be mis-characterized more than any other is Jesus. I’ve seen more portraits of him that look Irish than I have ones that look Jewish. And when I got around to reading what he actually had to say, I was surprised when he performed feats of strength, like unbending an iron bar. No, wait. I was surprised at how moderate he sounded to me-- and how radical his message must have been for the time and place.

The Jesus as strongman idea is a thing, of course, and is recent, so far as I can tell.

Body-builder Jesus breaking the cross, although I’ve only seen this used as a joke.

Northern European Jesus arm wrestles Satan. I’ve seen this posted without irony on Facebook, but I thought the version I saw had a Satan that looked like Obama.

[CalMeacham]

@Hermione

Bumping up with something Halloweeny…

I’ve had a bit of Dracula on the brain since Halloween has just been here. It’s occurred to me that so many Dracula spin-offs of the last few years or so have had Dracula and Mina Harker having a consensual sexual relationship. For example, there have been no less than three sequel novels (Dracula The Un-Dead by a descendant of Bram Stoker’s,* Dracula In Love *and Dracula, My Love) that have taken this and run with it. It seems, from what I’ve heard, that the new NBC series has the whole Mina-as-reincarnation-of-Dracula’s-lost-love that the Francis Ford Coppola movie had. And the Frank Langella version (which, as some versions do, played musical names with Mina and Lucy–Lucy was the hero’s love interest, and Mina was the one who died, came back, and was staked–and was Van Helsing’s daughter to boot) had Lucy willingly giving into Dracula.

But that is NOT the case in Stoker’s novel. Mina and her fiancé-turned-husband Jonathan are very much in love, and she shows no interest in anyone else. Her encounter with Dracula was portrayed as a metaphorical RAPE–brutal, horrifying, and very much against Mina’s will. The implications of turning this into a consensual encounter are a little squicky.

The reincarnation-of-a-dead-wife business didn’t even really start with Coppola–the Jack Palance version, one of the first to portray Dracula as tortured and sympathetic, had Lucy Westenra as the reincarnation instead of Mina.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the Francis Ford Coppola movie despite its flaws and excesses–and the backstory of Dracula’s dead wife was actually taken from a supposedly true story about the first wife of Vlad The Impaler. But it just seems to me that poor Jonathan always gets the short end of the stick in adaptations–and a really terrific couple from the novel always gets screwed over in the process.

Oh, and the aforementioned Dracula The Un-Dead by Dacre Stoker? I was turned off it just reading the summary and the reviews, because it seems that the author just trampled on all the happiness that the characters had worked so hard for by the end of the original. Mina and Jonathan were unhappy, Van Helsing was disgraced professionally, Seward was a morphine addict, and Arthur’s marriage was loveless (when the epilogue of the novel revealed that both he and Seward entered happy marriages some years after the events of the novel). In fact, what with the Mina/Dracula pairing and Seward’s drug use, it seems to have been more of a sequel to the Coppola movie than to the Stoker novel! I won’t go into one of the major twists that Dacre came up with toward the end involving a major character.

as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, the Dracula She-Is-My-Reincarnated-Love thing seems to first have been used in Richard Matheson’s script for the Dan Curtis* Tv production of Dracula that starred Jack Palance. Only in that script, it was Lucy who appeared to be the reincarnation of Dracula’s wife. They clearly got more mileage out of Mina being in that position.

Matheson, in turn, seems to have been inspired by the 1932 Universal film The Mummy, which has the heroine being the reincarnation of Im-Ho-Tep’s lover. The screenplay was written by – John Balderston! He’s the guy who “punched up” Hamilton Deane’s original play Dracula for its Broadway (and London? I’m not sure) appearances, and later wrote the script for the Universal film with Lugosi. So at least the idea was stolen from the same well. It’s certainly not in Stoker’s novel.

*The guy who created Dark Shadows. He also did TV films of Dr. Jeckyll and Mister Hyde (Also with Palance in the lead) and Frankenstein. One featuture of his films is that the settings are always so clean. Dracula’s abodes look like big suburban homes, with plenty of light, well-ventilated and free of cobwebs. Frankenstein’s and Dr. Jeckyll’s labs are pristine. The whole Universal studios damp-castle-walls-and-darkness-and-cobwebs vibe is completely missing.

[astorian]

I can think of two literary works that are regularly and wrongly depicted as anti-war.

1. Dr. Richard Hornberger, who wrote*** MASH** under the pseudonym Richard Hooker, was a hawkish, militaristic patriot. He certainly didn’t shy away from showing the horrors of war and the black humor that helped soldiers and doctors alike survive, but he LOATHED Alan Alda and the pacifistic TV show.

2. This isn’t “fiction,” but it is extremely misrepresented literature, and we’ll all be seeing it in a few days, as we always do right around November 11th.

Come Veteran’s Day (or, in Canada, Remembrance Day), we’ll inevitably see a reprinting of the first verse of the poem “In Flanders Fields.” It’s always treated as a sad, anti-war poem. in which once healthy, happy, vital young men mourn their deaths from the grave. But we almost never see the subsequent verse, in which poet McCrae’s real intentions are made clear.

The subsequent verse cries out to the dead soldiers’ countrymen NOT to give up war, but to take up arms, slaughter the Germans, and AVENGE them!

[bup]

@Irishman

I agree with the Holmes ones, especially Moriarty and Adler.

Moriarty was originally a one-off villain that Doyle created to off Holmes. In order to off Holmes, Doyle wished to create a villain that was Holmes’ intellectual equal, someone to make Holmes’ death appropriate. Otherwise, having Holmes hit by a [del]bus[/del] carriage would be totally unsatisfying.

Well, Conan Doyle was alive when the play was written (featuring Charlie Chaplin as the pageboy Billy!) and was OK with Moriarty’s growing importance, and after the play did well, was fine with a renamed Irene Adler being a love interest of Holmes.

If the creator buys into it, I don’t think one can call it misrepresented in pop culture.

[Penfeather]

@FriarTed

WIND IN THE WILLOWS-
Mole & Ratty in their boat
Mr. Toad’s reckless driving & jailing
Badger’s repentance lecture
Weasels taking over Toad Hall & being ousted
Mr. Toad’s change in character

SOMETIMES Little Otter being lost.

I was in a community play we did for kids, who wrote reviews for their classes. Most loved it but one wrote “There’s no wind, there’s no willows. This play was stupid.”

We all got a big laugh about that as he was correct.

The title comes from the hearing of Pan’s pipes & attributing it to the wind in the willows, but in searching for little Otter, Mole & Ratter are awed at finding him under the protective care of the Great Pan.

THAT usually gets left out, as it did in our play.

Toad basically hijacks Wind In The Willows: once he’s been introduced as a character you can’t wait for him to come back on, and on later readings you wait impatiently for him to show up.

[Irishman]

Doyle accepting those depictions does not negate my point.

From the works as a whole, Moriarty plays a small role and really is only present once and mentioned a couple other times to try to back-fill his supposed reputation.

Before The Final Solution, Doyle had no need for a master villain every bit the equal to Holmes. Each mystery was sufficient in itself, each villain sufficient for the needed purpose. There are a few that Holmes mentions having heard of or knowing their reputation but not having set himself fully against. But Doyle found himself with a dilemma when he wished to kill off Holmes - it just would not do for Holmes to fall to a run-of-the-mill villain, so Doyle dreamed up a villain who was the intellectual equal to Holmes. And then tries to create that level of detail in one story - not very convincingly IMO. When he resurrects Holmes later, he throws a couple other references to try to back-fill the reputation for Moriarty. But overall, Moriarty just doesn’t carry the weight in the stories that his reputation suggests. That others try to work him in to other stories helps fulfill the reputation that Doyle proposed for Moriarty.

Similarly, Doyle’s attitude toward Irene Adler is not entirely clear. Holmes sees her as the only woman that is his intellectual equal. Watson tells us he will upon occasion be caught reflecing on “The Woman”. Does that mean he has wistful romantic inclinations to what could have been? Otherwise, Holmes is never depicted as someone to which romance makes any sense or purpose other than to manipulate others.

My point, though, was not whether Doyle intended Moriarty or Adler to have any particular role, but rather that the literature as he wrote it only presented a small showing for either character, whereas the pop culture has come to think they were there to a much greater detail.

[astorian]

I think Irishman is spot on- that Doyle accepted others’ depictions of Holmes without cpomplaint does not mean he agreed with them.

SOME authors are extremely (almost insanely) protective of their work and their characters, and go nuts over adaptations of their work in other media that don’t do things exactly the way they wanted. Tom Clancy comes to mind.

Other authors accept that, once you sell rights to your characters, you no longer have any real control. You hope for the best, but accept that artists in other media may go in very different directions. Pat Conroy is one such author.

Robert B. Parker, creator of Spenser, used to say that the only way he could accept TV adaptations of his work was to pretend the TV character was a wholly different detective, like Magnum or Rockford.

Doyle PROBABLY took a practical view- so long as any film or theater piece involving Sherlock was entertaining and popular, it was making him money and selling more books, which was all to the good. If these adaptations made Lestrade look more foolish, Irene Adler more important, Moriarty more brilliant and Watson more oafish than Doyle had intended… that was a small price to pay.

[CalMeacham]

@Irishman

Doyle accepting those depictions does not negate my point.

From the works as a whole, Moriarty plays a small role and really is only present once and mentioned a couple other times to try to back-fill his supposed reputation.

Before The Final Solution, Doyle had no need for a master villain every bit the equal to Holmes. Each mystery was sufficient in itself, each villain sufficient for the needed purpose. There are a few that Holmes mentions having heard of or knowing their reputation but not having set himself fully against. But Doyle found himself with a dilemma when he wished to kill off Holmes - it just would not do for Holmes to fall to a run-of-the-mill villain, so Doyle dreamed up a villain who was the intellectual equal to Holmes. And then tries to create that level of detail in one story - not very convincingly IMO. When he resurrects Holmes later, he throws a couple other references to try to back-fill the reputation for Moriarty. But overall, Moriarty just doesn’t carry the weight in the stories that his reputation suggests. That others try to work him in to other stories helps fulfill the reputation that Doyle proposed for Moriarty.

Similarly, Doyle’s attitude toward Irene Adler is not entirely clear. Holmes sees her as the only woman that is his intellectual equal. Watson tells us he will upon occasion be caught reflecing on “The Woman”. Does that mean he has wistful romantic inclinations to what could have been? Otherwise, Holmes is never depicted as someone to which romance makes any sense or purpose other than to manipulate others.

My point, though, was not whether Doyle intended Moriarty or Adler to have any particular role, but rather that the literature as he wrote it only presented a small showing for either character, whereas the pop culture has come to think they were there to a much greater detail.

as reported by Vincent Price in the wraparound when PBS broadcast the BBC/WGBH/Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes series on Mystery, Doyle himself had tried to put Holmes on stage, without much success*, so when actor/writer William Gillette got the rights, he asked Doyle if he could marry off Holmes at the end, to which Doyle replied that he could kill him or marry him or do whatever he wanted with him. he didn’t care. So anything showing up in a play adaptation doesn’t imply Doyle’s literary approval.

On the other hand, as I’ve indicated elsewhere on these Boards, Doyle himself is responsible for bringing in the character of Moriarty where he wasn’t really needed – he shows up in The Valley of Fear, where he isn’t essential to the plot, and where his existence screws up the chronology of The Final Problem. TVoF appeared 15 years after the Gillette play, though, so Doyle wasn’t the first to institute “creeping Moriarty-ism”.

Moriarty has been dragged into Sherlock Holmes works as the Napoleon of Crime many times, though, by other hands. He’s in the Rosa adaptation of The Sign of Four for the stage, the PBS Jeremy Brett adaptation of The Red Headed League, the Basil Rathbone movie The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, the Roger Moore TV movie Sherlock Holmes in New York, Akan Moore The League of Extraordinatry Gentlemen, and lots of others.
*I wonder if this might refer to Doyle’s original play that got turned into the only third-person Holmes story from him, The Mazarin Stone, which I know started life as a play. Once you read it, you know why neither Holmes nor Watson could have narrated it.

[Diceman]

@BrainGlutton

Well, no, not a lot more.

Having seen Deliverance in the not-too-distant past, I’m inclined to agree with you. It’s actually a pretty boring movie for the most part, and the “Squeal Like a Pig” scene really is the most memorable part of it by far.

[Diceman]

On a different note, I have to wonder why the play Rent is held in high regard. I’ve seen it recently. For those who haven’t seen it (probably most of you), the characters all have AIDS and are living in a shitty run-down loft in New York.

The thing is, the characters are pretty much all unlikeable losers. Most of them seem content to just mope around waiting to die from AIDS. Only one character is determined to make something of himself. He lands a job as a photojournalist, but this is portrayed as a major mistake, and by the end of the play he quits the job and is back to being a professional welfare bum with his buddies :rolleyes:

It really did make me wonder what the appeal of this play is supposed to be.

[CalMeacham]

@Diceman

On a different note, I have to wonder why the play Rent is held in high regard. I’ve seen it recently. For those who haven’t seen it (probably most of you), the characters all have AIDS and are living in a shitty run-down loft in New York.

The thing is, the characters are pretty much all unlikeable losers. Most of them seem content to just mope around waiting to die from AIDS. Only one character is determined to make something of himself. He lands a job as a photojournalist, but this is portrayed as a major mistake, and by the end of the play he quits the job and is back to being a professional welfare bum with his buddies :rolleyes:

It really did make me wonder what the appeal of this play is supposed to be.

Well, it’s based on the opera La Boheme, which had very similar characters, but with tuberculosis instead of AIDS. Like La Boheme, both had great music. Plus, standard-bending artists are always entertaining.

[Irishman]

@CalMeacham

On the other hand, as I’ve indicated elsewhere on these Boards, Doyle himself is responsible for bringing in the character of Moriarty where he wasn’t really needed – he shows up in The Valley of Fear, where he isn’t essential to the plot, and where his existence screws up the chronology of The Final Problem. TVoF appeared 15 years after the Gillette play, though, so Doyle wasn’t the first to institute “creeping Moriarty-ism”.

As I pointed out, Doyle had a problem: Moriarty was supposed to be this master criminal of the underworld equal in intellect to the great Holmes, yet the first we heard of him was “The Final Solution”. Once Doyle went back to writing Holmes, he decided to work Moriarty in more to help back justify that reputation. Doyle was not all that concerned with internal consistency - he relocates Watson’s war wound, and swaps Watson’s first name. The details were less important to him, but to a degree he wanted to embed Moriarty a bit more to support the “spider in the web” description. Ergo, his The Valley of Fear plot involves a Moriarty informer and a subplot on the fringes where Moriarty has interest in the outcome in order to put more conflict between the two earlier in the timeline. But yes, it does make the minor inconsistency when Watson hears about Moriarty in Fear but then doesn’t know the name in TFS.

The Valley of Fear could definitely have been told without any Moriarty involvement, but that didn’t suit Doyle’s interests.

[KneadToKnow]

@Diceman

On a different note, I have to wonder why the play Rent is held in high regard.

I couldn’t even finish watching Rent. Switched it off about halfway through.

[AncientHumanoid]

@grude

There is probably something in the VAST extended universe about a sentient star, or you could watch Andromeda if stars getting involved in galactic politics is your thing

A movie treatment (even SyFy) of Herbert’s Whipping Star could be interesting.

What religion are the Veggie Tales supposed to be?

Wally isn’t trying to not be found. He just likes crowds is all.

[ISiddiqui]

@Diceman

On a different note, I have to wonder why the play Rent is held in high regard. I’ve seen it recently. For those who haven’t seen it (probably most of you), the characters all have AIDS and are living in a shitty run-down loft in New York.

The thing is, the characters are pretty much all unlikeable losers. Most of them seem content to just mope around waiting to die from AIDS. Only one character is determined to make something of himself. He lands a job as a photojournalist, but this is portrayed as a major mistake, and by the end of the play he quits the job and is back to being a professional welfare bum with his buddies :rolleyes:

It really did make me wonder what the appeal of this play is supposed to be.

Oh God, do I agree with this 100%. My girlfriend LOVES Rent. I watched it because she told me I have to see it (I like musicals, she thought I’d enjoy it). Here is the thing - I’m from New Jersey. I remember (somewhat) was New York City was in the 1980s… so from the beginning I’m rooting for the guy who wants to gentrify the area.

And the holding up of bums? Really?!

[Diceman]

@ISiddiqui

Oh God, do I agree with this 100%. My girlfriend LOVES Rent. I watched it because she told me I have to see it (I like musicals, she thought I’d enjoy it). Here is the thing - I’m from New Jersey. I remember (somewhat) was New York City was in the 1980s… so from the beginning I’m rooting for the guy who wants to gentrify the area.

And the holding up of bums? Really?!

Heh. So was I, actually. If the building was really as crappy as they make it out to be (no heat in the dead of winter, just for starters) then even a public housing project would be an improvement for these people.

[Voyager]

@astorian

I can think of two literary works that are regularly and wrongly depicted as anti-war.

1. Dr. Richard Hornberger, who wrote*** MASH** under the pseudonym Richard Hooker, was a hawkish, militaristic patriot. He certainly didn’t shy away from showing the horrors of war and the black humor that helped soldiers and doctors alike survive, but he LOATHED Alan Alda and the pacifistic TV show.

Altman’s movie was seen as anti-war also, though it was mostly true to the book in terms of plot.
In the last real MASH novel (as opposed to the TV spinoffs) Hawkeye tells an amusing story of how, when the atomic bomb failed, he convinced a sea serpent to incinerate Hiroshima instead. I think Hooker was trying to make a point.

[TreacherousCretin]

@Diceman

Having seen Deliverance in the not-too-distant past, I’m inclined to agree with you. It’s actually a pretty boring movie for the most part, and the “Squeal Like a Pig” scene really is the most memorable part of it by far.

Although the film is quite faithful to it, the book is incomparably better. Dickey’s mastery of words was phenomenal.

[Lamia]

@Hermione

I’ve had a bit of Dracula on the brain since Halloween has just been here. It’s occurred to me that so many Dracula spin-offs of the last few years or so have had Dracula and Mina Harker having a consensual sexual relationship. For example, there have been no less than three sequel novels (Dracula The Un-Dead by a descendant of Bram Stoker’s,* Dracula In Love *and Dracula, My Love) that have taken this and run with it. It seems, from what I’ve heard, that the new NBC series has the whole Mina-as-reincarnation-of-Dracula’s-lost-love that the Francis Ford Coppola movie had. And the Frank Langella version (which, as some versions do, played musical names with Mina and Lucy–Lucy was the hero’s love interest, and Mina was the one who died, came back, and was staked–and was Van Helsing’s daughter to boot) had Lucy willingly giving into Dracula.

But that is NOT the case in Stoker’s novel. Mina and her fiancé-turned-husband Jonathan are very much in love, and she shows no interest in anyone else. Her encounter with Dracula was portrayed as a metaphorical RAPE–brutal, horrifying, and very much against Mina’s will. The implications of turning this into a consensual encounter are a little squicky.

In fairness to the adaptations, the original text does involve Mina being “tainted” and her very soul imperiled by a metaphorical rape. The implications of that are going to be uncomfortable for modern audiences too. But I agree that having a Mina who’s in love with Dracula does a disservice to the character, who’s depicted by Stoker as being genuinely in love with Jonathan, honorable, brave, and determined to do her best to resist Dracula’s influence and help Jonathan and the others to track him down and kill him. While she remains on the sidelines during the final showdown with Dracula, IIRC she is actually armed with a gun and willing to use it if necessary.

The NBC series differs enough from the novel that a Dracula/Mina romance seems a bit less awful. She doesn’t know he’s a vampire yet, and so far at least he hasn’t kidnapped her fiance or essentially raped and murdered her best friend. And while I haven’t been impressed with the series I do give them credit for making it clear that while Dracula is interested in Mina he’s not so much of a romantic that he’s given up on seeing other women…both for sex and for snacks.