I recently saw the new Rebecca (with Lily James and Kristin Scott Thomas) on Netflix, and, like several of my friends, I felt like rewatching Hitchcock’s film instead.
There are several problems with readapting Rebecca for the 21st century, and one of the problematic things is not only Maxim de Winter’s character (a husband, who, however you’d like to put it, actually killed his wife), but also the portrayal of Rebecca’s wild sexuality as dangerous and evil… Of course, Rebecca and the anonymous new wife being afraid of Rebecca’s ghost and wanting to be Rebecca at the same time are part of the subversive nature and ultimately wonderful ambivalence of the Gothic text… Yet, while Hitchcock’s direction knew how to capture this subtle yet stirring ambivalence and the deep feeling of menace and uncertainty, the new Netflix film does not succeed in recreating a compelling story.
Of course, du Maurier’s Rebecca is in way a rewriting of Jane Eyre… and the classic formula behind it is actually the Bluebeard fairy tale. In the Gothic romance text, the former horror in Bluebeard’s character is romantically morphed into that of the tortured hero (a Mr Rochester who has a bit of the Beast in him) that the heroine manages to redeem through her love…There are many romance novels that honour this scenario, and perhaps my favourite when I was a teen were Victoria Holt’s books – one of them, a battered copy of Mistress of Mellyn is still in my library.
I remember listening to Rebecca’s Tale by Sally Bauman as an audiobook, an interesting prequel which adds Rebecca’s point of view. And you might have read Jean Rhys’s wonderful Wide Sargasso Sea, which is the story of Mr Rochester’s mad wife, Bertha Mason, with postcolonial accents… Probably one of the most beautiful and subversive retellings of the Bluebeard tale is Jane Campion’s The Piano, where the Gothic plot takes an unexpected turn, with the Rebecca-like heroine rejecting the Bluebeard-like husband in order to be with her lover…
When I set out to write A Deep Dark Call, I had a simple, classic Gothic plot in mind. After I finished the book and I reread it, I actually realized with a smile that I had rewritten Rebecca (and, to a certain extent, Jane Eyre and Bluebeard with a bit of Beauty and the Beast blended in) in a way that attempted to capture the subversiveness of Gothic texts…Yes, there is a mysterious manor and my hero has secrets and he is rumored to have killed his wife, and my governess heroine is afraid of all these secrets…There is even a Mrs Danvers-like character in my book, loyal to her late mistress…Yet, as you’ll come to see, my tortured hero does not turn out to be a Maxim de Winter (And, believe me, he is way hotter than Max…), and my heroine actually discovers that the dark secrets she fears have just as much to do with herself as with the man she’s married…Just like Rebecca, my book is about desire and the darkness within. Unlike Rebecca though, it is a book about fully embracing that desire.
The Netflix Rebecca falls definitely flat, and even the superb Scott Thomas (as Mrs Danvers) can’t redeem it. One of the reasons this happens is probably because the film attempts to offer a realistic portrayal of a Golden Age British setting (with lavish costumes and pretty much everything looking gorgeous) and that it wants to make the characters more frail, human and credible. However, this attempt to be true to historical detail and to portray realistic characters undermines the eeriness of the original tale (which was fully preserved in Hitchcock’s film). By attempting to make de Winter less menacing and less assertive (In the 1940s, Olivier played him like a downright tyrant), in order to create a more likeable romantic hero for the 21st century public, the film fails to create sexual tension and appropriate conflict. Armie Hammer’s de Winter emerges as weak and pitiful, and, frankly, you begin to wonder how a woman of that day and age could really desire this man so much and attempt to save him against all odds.
But, nevertheless, there is one good, nearly redeeming scene in the film, which could have amounted to much more. It is when Maxim de Winter takes his new bride to Manderley and you hear Let No Man Steal Your Thyme (A song which carries both sad, eerie fairy tale echoes and a feminist note…)
