Marple, Poirot (BBC)
Sep. 10th, 2011 08:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
marinessNow and again, my brother and I pick up DVDs of the BBC's Marple and Poirot shows. We just finished up a couple this week. Bear with me while I meander.
Marple lurches between relatively faithful to the plot of the original book, with some sex and/or lesbians thrown in, and the occasional POC character or bit of incest, both treated with considerably more -- how do I put this - calm acceptance than I recall from the Christie novels. (This is not to say that Agatha Christie was a major racist, exactly, although some of her pre-war statements about Jews can be discomforting, but rather that multicultural casting and discussions of the impact of incest in society were not high on her list of priorities, and her one major attempt to write a more multicultural cast -- Hickory Dickory Dock - was just not a very good mystery. Anyway.) The other major shift in quality, and one you can't always predict from the DVD cover, is who is playing Miss Marple: the first Marple, Geraldine McEwan, is very good, sharp as a button, acidic, and yet easily leaping off into the digressions of "I remember so-and-so in St. Mary Mead....", managing to show that she is genuinely thinking through these otherwise completely off topic digressions.
I find myself oddly more fascinated by the shows that go wildly off the point and plot of the original novel, partly because with those shows, I don't know who did it. (And in the hands down worst Marple episode, bar none, the adaptation of Why Didn't They Ask Evans/The Boomerang Clue I still don't know who did it in the show. I know who did it in the book, which had the typical tight, crisp plotting of vintage Christie that makes no sense when you step back and think about it but works within the context of the book, but the filmed version not only added Miss Marple (who wasn't in that book) but a lot of very confusing and poorly edited stuff about China and poorly edited flashback scenes with left both of us going, huh?)
Sometimes, as in By the Pricking of my Thumbs, the going off the plot works -- that was a fairly effective episode if seriously hampered by a couple of inexplicable edits and some terrible acting by the American in the cast, who was just awful, and if you, like me, were willing to repress all memories of Tommy and Tuppence from the books, and willing to accept that solving a murder mystery will also solve your alcoholism problem. (It's a two for one deal!) Others....distinctly do not, providing an model lesson on what can happen when you go off your planned plot: quagmire.
Going off the planned plot is not always a bad thing. I'm currently writing a story where the original plot that I thought up for the original concept just wasn't working, and a side element that I just started typing out has sort of overcome the main story, meaning that I'm going back and transforming the former side element into the main story - and this is working out much better. Then again, I rarely have a plot in mind when I start writing a short story -- the plot sorta evolves as I go along. Sometimes, some of those evolutions have to be tossed out.
Marple doesn't toss out all of the non-working evolutions. That's its problem. Along with the solid question of why bother to change the plots of the one writer pretty much known and celebrated only for plot*, but that's a separate question, I suppose. Do the producers genuinely think that anyone is picking up an Agatha Christie novel for its nuanced characters and insightful depictions of British society? And while I'm at it, throwing a romance into each show is nice enough, I suppose, but I don't think anyone is reading an Agatha Christie novel for a romantic happy ending, either.
Poirot retains considerably more faithfulness to the original books, and tends to be a better show -- but less, for me, absorbing. I guess because at this point, I'm as interested in seeing failures as successes: a large part of figuring out what works in writing includes figuring out what doesn't.
ETA: Meant to add, the main thing we end up thinking, after every episode, is why on earth do people continue to welcome Poirot and Marple anywhere since so many dead bodies follow in their wake? Angela Lansbury had the same problem in Murder, She Wrote, of course.
* To be fair, Christie also mastered a deceptively simple and effective prose style that allowed her readers to focus only on the plot, one reason for her success. But again, that just goes back to why we read Christie - it's the plot.
Marple lurches between relatively faithful to the plot of the original book, with some sex and/or lesbians thrown in, and the occasional POC character or bit of incest, both treated with considerably more -- how do I put this - calm acceptance than I recall from the Christie novels. (This is not to say that Agatha Christie was a major racist, exactly, although some of her pre-war statements about Jews can be discomforting, but rather that multicultural casting and discussions of the impact of incest in society were not high on her list of priorities, and her one major attempt to write a more multicultural cast -- Hickory Dickory Dock - was just not a very good mystery. Anyway.) The other major shift in quality, and one you can't always predict from the DVD cover, is who is playing Miss Marple: the first Marple, Geraldine McEwan, is very good, sharp as a button, acidic, and yet easily leaping off into the digressions of "I remember so-and-so in St. Mary Mead....", managing to show that she is genuinely thinking through these otherwise completely off topic digressions.
I find myself oddly more fascinated by the shows that go wildly off the point and plot of the original novel, partly because with those shows, I don't know who did it. (And in the hands down worst Marple episode, bar none, the adaptation of Why Didn't They Ask Evans/The Boomerang Clue I still don't know who did it in the show. I know who did it in the book, which had the typical tight, crisp plotting of vintage Christie that makes no sense when you step back and think about it but works within the context of the book, but the filmed version not only added Miss Marple (who wasn't in that book) but a lot of very confusing and poorly edited stuff about China and poorly edited flashback scenes with left both of us going, huh?)
Sometimes, as in By the Pricking of my Thumbs, the going off the plot works -- that was a fairly effective episode if seriously hampered by a couple of inexplicable edits and some terrible acting by the American in the cast, who was just awful, and if you, like me, were willing to repress all memories of Tommy and Tuppence from the books, and willing to accept that solving a murder mystery will also solve your alcoholism problem. (It's a two for one deal!) Others....distinctly do not, providing an model lesson on what can happen when you go off your planned plot: quagmire.
Going off the planned plot is not always a bad thing. I'm currently writing a story where the original plot that I thought up for the original concept just wasn't working, and a side element that I just started typing out has sort of overcome the main story, meaning that I'm going back and transforming the former side element into the main story - and this is working out much better. Then again, I rarely have a plot in mind when I start writing a short story -- the plot sorta evolves as I go along. Sometimes, some of those evolutions have to be tossed out.
Marple doesn't toss out all of the non-working evolutions. That's its problem. Along with the solid question of why bother to change the plots of the one writer pretty much known and celebrated only for plot*, but that's a separate question, I suppose. Do the producers genuinely think that anyone is picking up an Agatha Christie novel for its nuanced characters and insightful depictions of British society? And while I'm at it, throwing a romance into each show is nice enough, I suppose, but I don't think anyone is reading an Agatha Christie novel for a romantic happy ending, either.
Poirot retains considerably more faithfulness to the original books, and tends to be a better show -- but less, for me, absorbing. I guess because at this point, I'm as interested in seeing failures as successes: a large part of figuring out what works in writing includes figuring out what doesn't.
ETA: Meant to add, the main thing we end up thinking, after every episode, is why on earth do people continue to welcome Poirot and Marple anywhere since so many dead bodies follow in their wake? Angela Lansbury had the same problem in Murder, She Wrote, of course.
* To be fair, Christie also mastered a deceptively simple and effective prose style that allowed her readers to focus only on the plot, one reason for her success. But again, that just goes back to why we read Christie - it's the plot.