Hacker Cinema
Jane Eyre
2011 · Film · 120 min
Directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga
After a bleak childhood, Jane Eyre goes out into the world to become a governess. As she lives happily in her new position at Thornfield Hall, she meets the dark, cold, and abrupt master of the house, Edward Rochester. Jane and her employer grow close in friendship and she soon finds herself falling in love with him. Happiness seems to have found Jane at last, but could Rochester's terrible secret be about to destroy it forever?
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4 comments on Hacker News
>Eh, this is more complicated to me. If you were producing a modern play/movie of Jane Eyre, would you keep the psychotic creole woman locked in the attic, unchanged?
Sure. I'd want to retain art as an ark of its time. The idea is to present the work of the writer, not to use their mere basic plot as a starting point.
I'm not advocating book burning or anything. I'm just saying that we can look at Bronte and say "she had some good ideas about women's place in the word, but was totally blind to the racist / colonialist themes she adopted". It doesn't make her bad, but it does make her less of a forward thinking person than Gaskell.
> We should preserve Bronte's viewpoint though, not erase it or reject it, or keep the plot and change it's views and morals to our taste.
Eh, this is more complicated to me. If you were producing a modern play/movie of Jane Eyre, would you keep the psychotic creole woman locked in the attic, unchanged?
The absence of this, at least in the US, is that there's essentially no country side properly understood. A bucolic permeable area that a city person can integrate in their daily life.
The only way to enjoy the outdoors in America is as an activity. Drive there, park there. Do your thing. Come back. There's no osmosis or liminal space between urban and wilderness. It's either mechanized space for cars, or fenced off space for outdoor activity on the other (and even that you'll often end up sharing with off-road motorsports enthusiasts).
It shocked me for example, living in western europe, how easy it was to leave a bustling city center and enjoy rural serenity, and integrate this day2day. A bicycle commute through farmfields; a longer weekend hiking trip between cities; a trainride to a neighboring town; ... Whereas, I live in a state now that's by all measures a lot more rustic, access to the outdoors is completely packaged. It feels as if it is a product (even though access could be free).
I try to explain this difference here, and it is as if people genuinely cannot comprehend. There's this veil, a mist between us, I cannot articulate this difference. When my compatriots drive on the highways, they see mountains and vistas, and to them, that alone, is the experience (and definition) of rural life. But then, that nature is not integrated at all in daily experience. only as part of a movie playing through a windshield. I guess I need a better way of explaining this integration of town and rural life, I haven't found a way to characterize it. Muir for example was very much of the escape-to-wilderness variety. I guess I'm talking more about Jane Eyre walking country paths to deliver a letter in town. If anyone has good literature on the topic that gets at this difference, how it is possible that a much denser populated area in western-europe end up feeling more serene and bucolic than sparsely populated woodlands in the US, would love to hear it.
No. I guess I read more ebooks, just because I read a vast variety of books and papers. But (at age 49) I know who my favourite writers are, and never stop rereading them—e.g. Emerson, Stevenson, Chesterton, Collingwood, Putnam, Hazlitt, Fulghum, W James. Just recently I ordered online some of the Collingwood, Chesterton and Hazlitt books I'd never owned physically. I got a tablet which is great for reading ebooks in the park, but actual books are far better for bath, toilet..and anywhere. And writing in the margins and marking passages is essential! e.g. I have just about every book of Nietzsche's heavily marked and argued with on almost every page. Also am halfway through reading aloud Jane Eyre to the SO. We've watched a lot of movies together. She, a fan of 'period dramas', was shocked to realize how little any movie version of Jane Eyre (or any great novel) would or could give you of the book—virtually nothing.