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Popular Culture Review
This calculus is not unique to Zombie, nor is it the only issue that
problematizes any coherent understanding of Lewton’s adaptation of the Eyre
story. That same year, producer David O. Selznick was hard at work trying to
figure out how people would react to Charlotte Bronte’s heroine, and many of
the choices in the final version of Stevenson’s Jane Eyre reflect this
preoccupation (Sconce, 53-54). Selznick had instructed his writers to punch up
everything that would draw audiences into the story, and to remove anything
that would repel them; extensive tests were conducted even before filming
began, and Selznick even investigated how often the novel was checked out of
public libraries (54). The producer’s obsession points to an important aspect of
adapting a work for the screen:
Hollywood adaptations of canonical novels such as Jane Eyre,
therefore, were not inferior imitations of individual, literary
masterworks, but elite inflections on an audience’s shared
more of contemporary cinematic narrativity. As with a Cary
Grant or a Joan Crawford, the cultural stature of Jane Eyre
provided an added incentive for an audience to once again
engage themselves with Hollywood’s familiar narrative
machinery, and as with any other star invested with a social
identity, Jane Eyre was expected to follow an implicit set of
conventions during the film’s unfolding. The primary work of
adaptation, then, was not so much matching material to
medium and medium to material, but involved adapting an
audience to the material through the socially negotiated
signifying conventions of the medium. (59-60)
The desired end result of these machinations, Sconce points out, has little to
do with fidelity to the movie’s source or with anything other than drawing an
audience. And if Selznick was concerned, so was Lewton. One could afford a
failure or two, the other could not. The same concern for audience reception,
then, should be kept in mind when running through the complicated moral
entanglements that I Walked With a Zombie's heroine is faced with. To acquire
the object of her affection, it would at first seem as though Betsy would have to
behave—and even be allowed to think—in ways that may antagonize her to an
audience. Lewton introduces a number of ameliorating factors.
Jessica never loved Paul. Besides, she had it coming: she was cold and
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