age of innocence

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xoxo — Edith

March 16, 2009 in Books, Film, Television, Writing New York by Bryan

rachel-carr-photo.jpgI’m sure some of our students are wondering if I saw tonight’s Gossip Girl/Age of Innocence crossover, and the answer’s yes. (Of course it is! Didn’t I already make my obsessions clear enough early in the semester?) I hope none of our students missed the crucial moment when an audience-watching scene (see still at right) allowed Dan to realize that Rachel was the bad guy. Too bad we didn’t have a few of those clips earlier for lecture.

My quick response: Though it’s long been known that the original GG novels took some inspiration from Wharton, I think the writer of tonight’s episode must have been one of our students! Just kidding, but how many talking points re: Wharton, Scorsese, and Wyler seemed to be cribbed from Cyrus’s lecture notes? That said, I understand why they had to cast Serena as May, even though that was all wrong. Blair’s much more like May (and said as much in her opening lines in the episode) and Serena’s much more the Countess. Dan should have been Beaufort, of course, but needed to be Archer in order for the star-crossed lovers subplot to work itself out. (Student sex in the costume closet? They should have stuck with the kiss on the wrist.)

All that having been said, the most awesome parts of the episode, as usual, were Derrota’s moments — trying on Blair’s hairpiece, and then sizing up the catty “maids” dolled up for the play. I’m not sure Wharton would have known what to do with Derrota.

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New York Film: The Age of Innocence (1993)

February 28, 2008 in Film, Writing New York by Bryan

This is the second Scorsese film we’ve shown to our class this semester. The first was Gangs of New York, also starring recent Oscar-winner Daniel Day-Lewis, though in a very different role — or is it?

In a way, as different as these films seem, they share a fascination not only with old New York but with a sort of tribal violence bred by class stratification in American culture — as played out in the nineteenth-century city, itself a product and symptom of modern capitalism.

And as Cyrus pointed out in his last entry, about the connections between this film and William Wyler’s adaptation of James’s Washington Square, Scorsese also sets out, in this film, to examine “the emotional violence that lies at the heart of a tradition that readers tend to associate with genteel behavior: the novel of manners.”

In other words, watch for all the red at the end of the trailer, and pay attention to the relationship between color — especially the color red — and the codes of polite society in the rest of the film.

The simmering sexuality in Age if Innocence is ultimately repressed; all Scorsese’s unfolding flowers, then, may have more to do with (figurative) bloodstains.

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