Neverending Stories?:
From Fairy Tales to Modern Classics
HUM 2085: Television and Film Adaptation
Summer 2014
Dr. Perdigao
July 1, 2014
Behind the Scenes
• Jane Espenson, writer and co-executive producer of Joss Whedon’s Buffy
the Vampire Slayer, is the consulting producer of Once Upon a Time and is a
writer for the series
• David Greenwalt, writer and executive producer of Buffy and Angel, and
Jim Kouf, a writer and consulting producer of Angel, are the co-creators and
executive producers of Grimm
• Once Upon a Time’s co-creators and executive producers Adam Horowitz
and Edward Kitsis were executive producers of Lost
Rewriting Source Material
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Twin Peaks: Twin Peaks
Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Sunnydale
Lost: That island
Grimm: Portland, Oregon
Once Upon a Time: Storybrooke, Maine
• Buried secrets, evil presence
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Twin Peaks: FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper
The X-Files: Special Agents Scully and Mulder
Grimm: Detective Nick Burkhart
Once Upon a Time: Emma, bail bond agent and bounty hunter turned sheriff
• Willingness to uncover the “truth”; role of the newly indoctrinated
Magical Realism and TV
• Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie, The Addams Family, The Munsters
• The supernatural turn of the 1960s
• Counter to heteronormative families, communities in 1950s culture
• 21st century questions about “reality” and governmental systems—law
enforcement, etc.
• Counternarratives
• The “other side of the story”
• Jon Scieszka’s The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs and Gregory Maguire’s
Wicked
Bifurcation
• Dual identities, worlds
• Viewers’ relationship to “reality”
• Our vantage point in relation to the narrative
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“You’re welcome. But before you go, I’d like to ask you something.”
“Yes?”
“The Tsimtsum sank on July 2nd, 1977.”
“Yes.”
“And I arrived on the coast of Mexico, the sole human survivor of the
Tsimtsum, on February 14th, 1978.”
• “That’s right.”
Bifurcation
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“I told you two stories that account for the 227 days in between.”
“Yes, you did.”
“Neither explains the sinking of the Tsimtsum.”
“That’s right.”
“Neither makes a factual difference to you.”
“That’s true.”
“You can’t prove which story is true and which is not. You must take my
word for it.”
“I guess so.”
“In both stories the ship sinks, my entire family dies, and I suffer.”
“Yes, that’s true.”
“So tell me, since it makes no factual difference to you and you can’t prove
the question either way, which story do you prefer? Which is the better
story, the story with animals or the story without animals?”
Mr. Okamoto: “That’s an interesting question . . .”
Mr. Chiba: “The story with the animals.”
Mr. Okamoto: “Yes. The story with the animals is the better story.”
Pi Patel: “Thank you. And so it goes with God.” (Martel 316-317)
Redefinitions
• Regina/Evil Queen
• Mr. Gold/Rumpelstiltskin
• David/Prince Charming
• Mary Margaret/Snow White
• Coming of age=learning “true” identity?
• “True”=the fairy tale
• In Once Upon a Time, pilot episode, Henry tells Emma, “‘They’re not fairy
tales. They’re true. Every story in this book actually happened.’”
• Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, Lancelot and King Arthur’s Court, Mulan,
Frankenstein, Robin Hood, The Wizard of Oz
The Uses of Disenchantment
• Bruno Bettelheim’s study The Uses of Enchantment (1976), the psychological
benefits of reading fairy tales
• Criticism of fairy tales in the 1970s and 1980s, literary retellings and
revisions
• Leaving Storybrooke=becoming disenchanted
• Vanessa Joosen describes the process of disenchantment in contemporary
retellings of fairy tales, writing, “We have seen that the disappearance of
magic helps to increase the contact with contemporary reality, and that the
intertextual references in the retellings bring with them a certain degree of
(intentional) indeterminacy, open-endedness, humor, and irony” (237).
• Uses of fairy tales in contemporary society
• Subversion
The Vampire Diaries: The Awakening
• “Dear Diary,
Something awful is going to happen today.
I don’t know why I wrote that. It’s crazy. There’s no reason for me to be
upset and every reason for me to be happy, but . . .” (Smith 3).
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• “Elena ignored all of it. She spun around, her burning gaze searching
between the headstones. Then she turned and shouted directly into the
fury of the wind. Just one word, but the one she knew would bring him.
“‘Damon!’” (Smith 253).
The Vampire Diaries, “Pilot”
• Opening, Stefan: “‘For over a century, I’ve lived in secret, hiding in the
shadows, alone in the world. Until now. I am a vampire and this is my
story.’”
• Stefan: “‘I shouldn’t have come home. I know the risk. But I had no choice.
I have to know her.’”
• Elena: “‘Dear Diary, Today will be different. It has to be. I will smile, and
it will be believable. The smile will say, ‘I’m fine. Thank you. Yes, I feel
much better.’ I will no longer be the sad little girl who lost her parents. I
will start fresh, be someone new. It’s the only way I’ll make it through.’”
The Vampire Diaries, “Pilot”
• Closing, Elena: “‘Dear Diary, I couldn’t have been more wrong. I thought
that I could smile and nod my way through it, pretend it would all be
okay.’”
• Stefan: “‘I had a plan. I wanted to change who I was, create a life with
someone new, someone without the past.’”
• Elena: “‘Without the pain.’”
• Both: “‘Someone alive.’”
• Elena: “‘But it’s not that easy. The bad things stay with you.’”
• Stefan: “‘They follow you.’”
• Stefan: “‘You can’t escape them, as much as you want to.’”
• Elena: “‘All you can do is be ready for the good, so when it comes, you
invite it in. Because you need it. I need it.’”
Roswell, “Pilot”
• Opening, Liz: “‘September 23rd, journal entry 1. I’m Liz Parker and five
days ago I died. After that, things got really weird.’”
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• Closing, Liz: “‘It’s September 24th. I’m Liz Parker and five days ago I died.
But then the really amazing thing happened. I came to life.’”
The Tomorrow People, “Pilot”
• Opening, Stephen: “‘My name is Stephen Jameson. This is me. This is my
breakfast. These are my friends. At least they used to be. This is where I
live. This is my mom. And this is the worst part of my day. You see lately
strange things have been happening to me. And they’re only about to get
stranger.’”
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• Closing, Stephen: “‘My name is Stephen Jameson. This is where I go to
school. These are my friends. This is where I work. And this is my new
boss.’”
• Stephen: “‘I’m in.’”
• Jedikiah: “‘Welcome aboard, Stephen.’”
• Cara: “‘I hope you know what you’re doing.’”
• Stephen: “‘Yeah, me too.’”
Catching Fire
• “I should get up, move around, and work the stiffness from my limbs. But
instead I sit, as motionless as the rock beneath me, while the dawn begins
to lighten the woods. I can’t fight the sun. I can only watch helplessly as it
drags me into a day that I’ve been dreading for months” (Collins 3).
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• “I recognize the voice. It’s the same one he uses to approach wounded
animals before he delivers a deathblow. I instinctively raise my hand to
block his words but he catches it and holds on tightly.
‘Don’t,’ I whisper.
But Gale is not one to keep secrets from me. ‘Katniss, there is no District
Twelve’” (Collins 391).
The Perks of Being a Wallflower
“Dear friend,
I am writing to you because she said you listen and understand and
didn’t try to sleep with that person at that party even though you could have.
Please don’t try to figure out who she is because then you might figure out
who I am, and I really don’t want you to do that. I will call people by different
names or generic names because I don’t want you to find me. I didn’t enclose a
return address for the same reason. I mean nothing bad by this. Honest.
I just need to know that someone out there listens and understands
and doesn’t try to sleep with people even if they could have. I need to know
that these people exist.” (Chbosky 2)
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“Tomorrow, I start my sophomore year of high school. And believe it
or not, I’m really not that afraid of going. I’m not sure if I will have the time
to write any more letters because I might be too busy trying to ‘participate.’
So, if this does end up being my last letter, please believe that things
are good with me, and even when they’re not, they will be soon enough.
And I will believe the same about you.
Love always,
Charlie” (Chbosky 213)
The Book Thief
• “First the colors.
Then the humans.
That’s usually how I see things.
Or at least, how I try.
* * * HERE IS A SMALL FACT * * *
You are going to die.”
(Zusak 3)
The Book Thief
• “I wanted to tell the book thief many things, about beauty and brutality.
But what could I tell her about those things that she didn’t already know? I
wanted to explain that I am constantly overestimating and
underestimating the human race—that rarely do I ever simply estimate it. I
wanted to ask her how the same thing could be so ugly and so glorious, and
its words and stories so damning and brilliant.
None of those things, however, came out of my mouth.
All I was able to do was turn to Liesel Meminger and tell her the only truth
I truly know. I said it to the book thief and I say it now to you.
* * * A LAST NOTE FROM YOUR NARRATOR * * *
I am haunted by humans.”
(Zusak 550)
Life of Pi
• “This book was born as I was hungry. Let me explain” (Martel vii).
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• “My suffering left me sad and gloomy” (Martel 3).
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• “As an aside, story of sole survivor, Mr. Piscine Molitor Patel, Indian
citizen, is an astounding story of courage and endurance in the face of
extraordinarily difficult and tragic circumstances. In the experience of this
investigator, his story is unparalleled in the history of shipwrecks. Very
few castaways can claim to have survived so long at sea as Mr. Patel, and
none in the company of an adult Bengal tiger” (Martel 319).