“Basic. Repetitive. Totally derivative.” These were the words of my high school music teacher — let’s call him Mr. M — a grumpy sexagenarian jazzhead. Every week we had New Music Friday, where a different student would share a song they liked with the class. Our initial excitement about what could have been an eye-opening communion of interests faded when we realized the purpose of the exercise was to reaffirm Mr. M’s narrow taste. Progressive house, ‘50s show tunes, alt R&B — all genres that fell victim to Mr. M’s keen observational superiority. No matter the production style or lyrical substance of a song, its quality in his kingdom boiled down to one factor: whether he could bang out the chord progression of the song on a piano with rudimentary accuracy. If so, it was relegated to that worst of fates as a “musically uninteresting composition”.
Mr. M had a genuine love for jazz standards, and an ability to express that passion to students. But when asked to deconstruct the thing he loved, the building blocks he ended up with were nowhere near the things he loved about it in the first place. Replicating all the notes in a song cannot reverse engineer its potential for ecstasy, sorrow, or freedom. This is a problem not limited to the beige, unadorned walls of Mr. M’s classroom. Our emotional experiences — listening to music, speaking to a friend, falling in love — are so often the effect of feelings that are hard to recognize and name. So, as a proxy, we identify the observable phenomena that occurred when we had the feelings as the cause. The truth is that we humans are bad at describing things that are important to us, and what we say something is about is almost never what it’s actually about. No one understood this better than Jane Austen.
Falling in love is perhaps the emotional experience people have tried to reverse engineer the most. “How did you meet?” is the first question that greets couples upon an introduction, and I suspect we ask it in part because on some level we hope that finding partnership, a task to which our society assigns so much worth, can be accomplished by knowing some list of romantic ingredients and following that recipe. But these ingredients, these procedures of love — the knowing glance, the first kiss, the grand gesture — are not satisfying as their own ends. They are but the means to facilitate feelings of passion, desire, and eventually, commitment. To try to create these feelings by replicating the procedures is as futile as Mr. M kerplunking away at his keyboard, as if any amount of that tactless hammering could create art.
Austen has been described as our premiere satirist of romance, but that description has always struck me as incomplete. Her novels contain genuine optimism about the possibility of love and of two people to complement each other. But what she questions is the insistence on procedures, and their stature in Regency era England. The quality of her novels that lends them such continued depth is their ability to hold this sincerity and doubt alongside each other. In fact, many of her protagonists are defined at first by their refusal to participate in the procedures of love, in literary worlds insistent on this participation. Elizabeth Bennett and Emma Woodhouse remain two of Austen’s most endearing characters because from the beginning, they know all the notes. They, Mr. M, and Austen share a cynicism about the procedures, and the joy in the novels comes from seeing their outlooks transform when confronted with the genuine artifact of romance, all while Austen continues to poke fun at the imitators.
Crucially, Austen’s narrators never wink. From beginning to end, they offer tongue-in-cheek descriptions of estate architecture, table settings, and social standings, all with the knowledge that these things are tangential to our protagonists’ goals of growth and union. “[Jazz is] the notes you don’t play,” said jazz great Miles Davis. Similarly, Austen’s continued appeal comes down to the feelings that aren’t voiced by her characters. She critiques the language of social protocol and excess without straying from it, and while we might describe the plot points and destinations of her novels similarly to any of the works she comments on, the end result couldn’t be any different. The chords are the same, but the song is not.
This, more than anything, is what makes Austen’s work so adaptable. Yes her art, like all art, is specific to its time. But to appreciate it, you only have to share her belief that the social practices we follow and statuses we desire are, while not without their value, a bit silly.
Cher Horowitz (Alicia Silverstone) is a bit silly. Or at least, that’s what her high-powered father (Dan Hedaya) and principled ex-step brother Josh (Paul Rudd) tell her. She and her best friend Dionne (Stacey Dash) are in a constant state of grooming, part of a visual palette that details the specifics of ‘90s California culture with precision. Clueless is a movie that understands this decade better than any other because writer/director Amy Heckerling perfectly applies the Austenian balance of sincerity and satire. Cher is fluent in the language of teenage flirtation and the constant negotiation of social status, but she sees herself as above it. She doesn’t date high school boys, and uses her own status to pull the strings on behalf of those she sees as less fortunate. When she eventually decides she wants to do good in the world, it comes in the form of ill-advised matchmaking for her teacher and her new classmate. The eventual realization that she’s in love with Josh is met with disgust, as it comes unaccompanied by the bells and whistles that are supposed to signify romance in high school. By learning to embrace her feelings, Cher, like her progenitor Emma, manages to stay true to herself while becoming open to authentic connection.
Of Austen’s many gifts, my two favorites are her abilities to concoct suspense from secretive interpersonal relations and to simultaneously satirize and embrace the big personalities that form these relations. Both gifts are on display in my favorite Clueless scene, when Cher attempts to coordinate carpools back from a party so as to set up Tai (Brittany Murphy) with Elton (Jeremy Sisto), not realizing that Elton has a crush on her. The entire discussion plays out as a specific argument about the proximity of various LA interstate routes. Yet, it is classic Austen in that the highly detailed specifics of the conversation, near gibberish to anyone not a member of that society, are only meaningful in the context of what is not said, and in the implied universal romantic negotiations between Cher and Elton. In adapting Emma, Heckerling understood that what was important was not the exact plot points or the topics of discussion, but the underlying, unspoken feeling of seeing our heroine attempt, with a good-natured obliviousness, to exert control over the romantic ecosystem of those around her.
Negotiating one’s social status isn’t always so lighthearted. Systems of prestige also function as systems of exclusion, and therefore oppression, something that remains as true now as it was when Austen published Pride & Prejudice in 1813. Many of the discussions in the novel center on characters attempting to ascertain, through the author’s ever-tangential dialogue, the class standing of their romantic prospects. Social convention dictated that this evaluation remain unspoken, and instead, the characters “[communicate volumes] with glances and body movement and hidden meaning.” That was written by Joel Kim Booster in a feature for Penguin Random House, which would later lay the groundwork for his 2022 gay comedy Fire Island. It’s among the best Austen adaptations because it maps meaningful and specific social conventions onto the author’s framework. Ignoring the hetero gaze, Fire Island instead focuses on class division within the gay community, a hierarchy of desirability based on wealth, appearance, and race.
Best friends Noah (Booster) and Howie (Bowen Yang) are two gay Asian men without the generational wealth of the island’s seaside mansion residents; thus, they find themselves subject to perceived undesirability. Noah has responded to this by becoming a heartbreaker with the body of a Greek god, Howie by exercising extreme sexual caution. As their romances with Will (Conrad Ricamora) and Charlie (James Scully) unfold, Booster harnesses Austen’s structure of unspoken underlying conflict to highlight issues of race and class, even as the specificity of their ensemble of friends keeps the tone comedic.
The decision that separates Booster the most from Austen is also where his adaptation shines. While the appeal of Austen’s worlds comes from her narrators’ adherence to aesthetic commentary, Booster uses the friendship between Noah and Howie to offer explicit psychological analysis. The two friends understand each other, and their relationship comes to a head when they are in an argument and Howie offers an astute, if cruel, reading of how Noah uses his body and mindless sex as a coping mechanism to avoid confronting the issues they both face. Here, the normally scenic, underlying psychology of Austen is made explicit. It works because up until this point, the disdain and microaggressions Noah and Howie face are made so clear through the leads’ performances and the bombastic audacity of the rich, white antagonists. Austen lets the tension simmer throughout her works, but in Fire Island, the conflict comes to a boil; the realizations it provides the characters, and the subsequent unions that emerge from the communication, are all the more satisfying for it.
Various Jane Austen adaptations, more faithful to the source material in time period and dialogue, have succeeded to varying degrees in replicating the trappings of the author’s settings.Yet where Clueless and Fire Island resonate is their freedom in ignoring this replication. What Mr. M failed to realize — what these two films realize in the process of creating a conversation between the timeless and the modern — is that the notes on the page were never the art. The carriages and the dresses have never been the sole reason we keep coming back to Austen, generation after generation. The more essential quality was that which defies easy description: the perseverance of true love amidst an eternal sea of distractions and imitators. By allowing themselves to change the notes, to drop the familiar elements of the novels, Clueless and Fire Island succeed mightily in upholding the underlying spirit. Or, to quote Miles Davis again: “Don’t play what’s there. Play what’s not there.”
With all the respect, Fire island is not an Austen adaptation. At all.