I have not read Pride and Prejudice.
I have not read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.
I will not play a video game for the iPhone based on Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.
Or won’t I?
This, of course, raises several interesting questions, such as: Why haven’t I read Jane Austen’s novel? Well, why haven’t you read Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino?
ANYWAY
The question I’d really like to address is this one: Why, initially, when I read about the video game based on Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, did I react negatively? And why, after that initial negative reaction, did I quickly talk myself out of it?
How would I feel if someone asked if they could make a video game based on one of my books? Probably awesome, right?
Why didn’t I have that initial negative reaction when I found out someone had created a video game based on Italo Calvino’s story “The Distance of the Moon” from his book Cosmicomics?
I love video games with a narrative, even if that narrative is forced and trite and silly (Zelda, I’m looking at you), but is there something wrong with making a video game based on a narrative which is based on a narrative?
In many ways, I suppose this will boil down to questions of copyright and cultural appropriation, but it also has to do with a kind of cultural elitism from which I suffer: A video game based on Calvino is cool because Calvino is relatively obscure, and the game might get people to read his work; A video game based on a book about zombies (hugely popular in the culture right now) which itself is based on a book by Jane Austen (also hugely popular right now) is not cool because it’s capitalizing on (what I see as tired) cultural trends and will not, in all likelihood, get anyone to read either Pride and Prejudice and Zombies or even Pride and Prejudice.
blah blah blah
None of this really answers why I immediately talked myself out of my initial negative reaction, does it?
I suppose this post could just as easily have been about the Broadway musical version of Young Frankenstein.
Saying the Words ‘Jane Austen’ and opening David Robbins’ ‘The Velvet Grind’ at random: “Artists’ sense of superiority over the raw populism of entertainment has remained inviolate.”
Ditto, but saying ‘Italo Calvino’ (who is far, far from obscure & unknown–you’d be surprised): “the pleasures associated with two different symbols by two different people, are not to be compared or arranged in a hierarchy.”
ditto ditto-’Zombies’: “we are right to do this, for our lives as well as our art”