Acast powers the world's best podcast. Here's a show that we recommend. Think of your favorite one-hit wonder. Or that over-priced toy your parents would never let you have. Or that TV show that no one else remembers because it was canceled way too soon. Now what if we could fix it? I'm Francesca Ramsey. And I'm DeLon Grant. And after 20 years of friendship, we are now hosting a new nostalgia podcast called Let Me Fix It. Each episode we'll dig into our favorite celebrities, shows, and brands
of yesteryear. And then imagine what it would take to repackage them for relevance today. Think of our show as an intervention. But with way less digs. So subscribe to Let Me Fix It wherever you get your favorite podcasts. Hi everyone, Marcel here. Before today's episode, I want to tell you about a new show that we are loving at which please productions. The Culture Study podcast with Anne Helen Peterson. If you don't already know it, I'm convinced that you're about to fall in love
with a new podcast. And this is coming from me, Marcel, someone who famously doesn't really listen to podcasts. Culture Study is a podcast about exploring the nooks and crannies of the culture that surrounds us. Each week, Anne and a super smart co-host will answer listeners questions about the stuff they find interesting and perplexing. Like, why to close suck now? And is Paw Patrol Copicanda or is it not that deep? And like, what's the
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Hello and welcome to Material Girls, a pop culture podcast that uses critical theory to understand the zeitgeist. I'm Hannah McGrigger. And I'm Marcel Cosman. This week we're talking about a hugely popular television adaptation of a hugely popular video game. So to get warmed up, Hannah, I want you to tell me about one or some of your favorite adaptations.
Oh, man, Marcel, so many of the things that I love are adaptations. You know what I was thinking about recently and always and constantly is the film, The Last Unicorn and how important it is to me, but also how few people have read the novel. Because it was a novel first by Peter S. Beagle, who was part of like a 1970s lefty writing community in New York. And The Last Unicorn is like very explicitly like a 1970s leftist novel about like sustainability
and capitalism and the ways in which we are, you know, destroying the earth. I got to read that novel. It's really good. But that is my hot take about adaptations, which I'm just going to obviously start with right at the top of the episode is that if there's like a book in a movie, I would rather see the movie first and then read the book that the movie is adapting. I totally agree. And I know people are really, really hard court.
Like the conventional wisdom is read the book first, then see the movie. I know, but the movie is always going to be disappointing for me if I read the book first. Whereas if I see the movie first, then the book is like reading fan fiction about the thing that I like. It's like, oh, I get to find out more about the back story. That makes a lot of sense
to me. It's time for why this why now? The segment that asks the materialist question, what are or were the historical ideological and material conditions for our objective study to become zeit case D? So we're talking about a zombie apocalypse television series adaptation of a zombie apocalypse video game. So we're going to talk about like the COVID-19
pandemic, right? I mean, not honestly not really, but I will acknowledge right off the top that like COVID has to be a big part of it because of the timing and because of the idea of an infectious pathogen. So absolutely. But we're going to focus on media instead. Okay. I mean, I like that more. Yeah. I mean, we've talked about COVID and we're going to talk about COVID. You know, so do we need to talk about COVID right now? Honestly,
probably we all need to be talking about it. But more importantly, I have to keep the section short because the next segment is going to be where we do most of the talking. So for the uninitiated, the HBO series, the last of us is a television adaptation of an extremely popular video game of the same name. The video game was created by the company Naughty Dog and released in 2013. At this point, I have to stress that I don't know enough
about gaming to talk about gaming. So I'm just here with some facts from Wikipedia. Okay. I'm ready. Okay. So Sony interactive entertainment. This is the part of Sony that makes playstations. Sony interactive entertainment bought Naughty Dog in 2001. So anytime I refer to Naughty Dog in this episode, know that this is a game development company that's owned by Sony. Okay. As noted, moments ago, Naughty Dog released its video game. The last of us in 2013. The game was a huge
success. One tons of awards made millions of dollars. Okay. So successful that as gaming companies do, Naughty Dog released a remastered version of the game in 2014. It then released a sequel called The Last of Us Part 2 in 2020. The second last of us. Yeah. And this sequel was released to critical claim. Again, one tons of awards. People love it. And the sequel was so successful that Naughty Dog then remade the original game and released it in 2022
as the last of us part one. I mean, I know you've preceded this by saying that you don't know a lot about gaming, but I'm really curious what it means that they remade it.
That's a great question. And we might be able to talk about it in greater detail. But just in case we can't, I'll just say that one of our major theorists that I'm using, Steve Spence talks about that remake as being itself a kind of adaptation, that the way in which they remade it, like took opportunities to expand and sort of play around with retelling these stories. So it's not that they redid it, told a whole different thing. It's that
they remade it with the intention of telling it in a new way. Cool. Yeah. Okay. Okay. And again, for the sake of time, I won't go into detail about the game specifically mainly because neither you nor I have played it. So I do like playing video games, but I can't deal with scary ones. So yeah. So Hannah, could I ask you to please read this very lengthy juicy paragraph from the polygon article, how the last of us became the greatest story
that has ever been told in video games. I thought that this would like sum up why people like the game quote the last of us the game introduces players to Joel, the survivor of a fungal plague that has decimated the world and created thin enclaves of humanity that try to defend themselves against the infected humans who have been corrupted by a mutated
cordiceps strain that turns them into attack ready monsters. The game opens with the death of Joel's daughter, then depicts him many years later as he is unwillingly tasked with taking care of Ellie, a young girl who is immune to the fungus. Oh no, it's a family story. I can't deal with this. They travel across the United States together in search
of the fireflies, an organization that claims to be working on a cure for the plague. Along the way, they encounter other survivors, murderers, and a huge number of infected that they have to stealth, chop, and shoot their way through. The arc of the game brings Joel, who has made his way in life simply as a survivor, back to an emotionally full human and sets
up Ellie to mature from a girl into a young adult. Eventually, they form a father-daughter relationship, which turns in the final hours of the game thanks to a strikingly ambivalent but endlessly debatable conclusion. What? So that last, the phrasing of that last sentence makes it sound like maybe it's their father-daughter relationship that turns in an ambivalent way and that I just need to be very clear that that's not the thing that's ambivalent.
Okay. The trust that they have in one another is because that lesson makes them know. So like they fuck it's really unnerving. I promise, I promise, that they do not. It is a legit father-daughter-found family, beautiful, wonderful relationship. Thank you so much for that reassurance. Yeah, I'm glad that you found that alarming as well because when I was reading
and I was like, is it me and I the problem? So this wildly popular video game, possibly the greatest story that has ever been told in video games, video game, according to Polygon. So it gets picked up by HBO, a production company that is famous for its prestige quality television programming. Now, this adaptation is what's known as a faithful adaptation
and we're going to talk about adaptation at length in the next segment. But for now, what this means is that the show aims to be consistent with the world and the characters that were built by the game developers. So it's not just copying one to the other. It's recreating the world with the intention of making the same world, but in a different experience. Can you give me like a few examples just to get a sense of like what that actually means
in terms of the adaptation? Yes, absolutely. I think that a great and straightforward example is that the television series uses the same composer Gustavo Centolasha for the series's musical score. Oh, okay. Yeah. So that means that just on a very like experiential level,
the show sounds like the game. And then a more complicated example. I'll quote here from Steve Spence, who I mentioned earlier and who I'll introduce him in his article properly in the next segment, spent says quote, the showrunners leaned into the different affordances of television to transcode naughty dogs calibration of in game violence, a core element of the
developers broader efforts to heighten the game's emotional power and quote. So in other words, the HBO series showrunners made specific decisions about how to represent the violence of the video game in a way that would maintain the emotional impact of the violence that is so fundamental to that game. Okay. And that makes sense because the violence in the video game is like interactive. Like it's part of the gameplay. You're making choices
in doing things. And you know, that's different than television, like television just fundamentally is not interactive in the same way. So it's like you can't just totally reproduce what is happening in the video game in television. So like, can you say what that means? Like, no, because I haven't played the game. Oh, yeah, fair enough. Sorry. So yeah, so I don't
I don't have a like a clear example. But I guess what I'll say is that again, having now played the game, what I can say as a viewer of the last of us is that I think the way that the last of us, the HBO show represents violence is intended to be emotional. It is intended to impact us as viewers. It's not simply sensational. Like when people kill people in cold blood, for example, I think we feel that in a way that is maybe more impactful
than say a show like the walking dead. Yeah. And I can imagine how that would be something that is structural to the gameplay, because you can make different decisions about how violence operates in gameplay, including making it more visceral, more deliberate. And so it's interesting to think about like a first person shooter game or a game where where you're sort of like
killing without thinking about the humanity of the people that you're killing. And then that gets adapted into that same kind of genre of action movie where it's like, oh, we don't need to think about who these people are. They're not humans. They're just targets and they can die. And we don't have to consider it. Yeah. And then the very different way that violence gets figured in narratives that want us to actually like think about the human cost of violence. Absolutely.
Yeah. So what I think is really interesting about the faithfulness of HBO's adaptation is also the way that it flashes out, no pun intended. I mean, maybe pun intended. If flashes out the like itty bitty details from the game, things that are just sort of maybe casual references. And it flashes those things out and turns them into at least for me and my viewing experience, life changing television content. Okay. You're talking about the the Franken bill episode. Aren't
you? Yes. And I am sorry that I didn't bully you into watching it. Yeah. I mean, we'll sit down together one day and Marcel and we'll watch that and then we'll watch the entirety of dirty dancing. Okay. That's a good plan. That's a good plan. I'm not going to talk in detail about the episode. But what I want you to know and what I want listeners to know is that this episode is remarkable in the way that it pulls us as viewers of Joel and Ellie's arc completely out of that main storyline
into what I think I would like to call the television equivalent of a side quest. It's a totally standalone episode. You could watch it and never watch the rest of the season have never played the game. But I can't stress this enough. I think that this standalone episode is probably one of the most magnificent pieces of television ever created. Wow. It's so emotionally rich and the characters
are so gorgeously played. It's Nick Offerman, right? Nick Offerman and Murray Bartlett and they have this like tender love story and it's wholly unnecessary to Joel and Ellie's plot completely. But it's presence in the series expands the universe of the last of us, the HBO show in a way
that makes that series meaningful and I might say important. Okay. So we've been talking about the way that the TV show specifically is adapting dimensions of the video game beyond just like content and narrative, like trying to actually like be in the same world and get at some of the emotional and experiential dimensions of the video game. And I noticed that when you were talking about what the show does, you didn't say adapting. You said transcoding. The TV show transcodes
the video game and I don't know what that means. So can we maybe like go to the theory segment and talk about what that means? We will absolutely talk about what it means to transcode in the next segment. I promise. But I first need you to read this next quotation about why adaptation is itself zeitgeist. Ooh. Because I think that the zeitgeistiness of adaptation is important context for the zeitgeistiness of this particular adaptation. Video game adaptations in particular.
Yeah. Okay. According to Spence, quote, adaptations increased visibility, variety, and status has more to do with recent transformations in the culture industry. Oh, shit, he's singing my song. Driven by digitization in general and network distribution in particular, these forces have dramatically altered the cultural ground on which new works are created, received, and appraised. Strategies that Jenkins, comma Henry, famously labeled transmedia, are now integral to the work
of fandoms as well as corporate conglomerates. Sony's acquisitions of Columbia Pictures in 1989 and Naughty Dog in 2001, for example, enabled the conglomerate to leverage the game studio's intellectual property through films like Uncharted. That's another adapted Naughty Dog game and HBO's The Last of Us. Naughty Dog itself has adapted the original game twice. The Last of Us remastered 2014 and The Last of Us Part 1 2022, each deliver a more fully realized and compelling
version of the game and each also helped to promote Sony's latest consoles. Oh, yeah. Yeah. The most recent game version also positioned Sony to profit twice from its collaboration with HBO. Just as gamers formed a ready audience for the television series, so-tod did the series' popularity boost sales of the game. End quote. Oh, Marcel, I am so excited to talk about adaptation in the way in which it has transformed via transmedia network distribution. Can we
can we do that? We're probably not going to do that, but I'm still fucking edging me. I know. I know. I know. I know. There is just one other really important thing that we have to say about the zeitgeistiness of The Last of Us, the HBO television adaptation, and it's Pedro Pascal. That's it. Just Pedro Pascal? We simply don't have time for more, but viewers of the series know
what I'm talking about. All right. Pedro Pascal. On we go. After spending an entire segment teasing the theory, it's time to actually learn the theory we need and make sense of our topic, which might actually just be the theory unclear. So, okay. So let me tell you what my initial plan was, okay, because in the dirty dancing episode that you led, you talked so helpfully about nostalgia. That I thought that this episode, we could talk about post-apocalyptic nostalgia, and that it
would be this like really elegant follow up to the dirty dancing episode. But when I got to doing the research part, all of the scholars who were talking about post-apocalyptic nostalgia, we're drawing on the exact same theorists that you had already introduced us to. And so it really short of talking about Wally would not have brought anything new to the conversation and would kind
of have been a little bit repetitive. So maybe we can talk about post-apocalyptic nostalgia in the next segment, which is what I really want to talk about, but you really want to talk about media and trans-media and trans-coding. But in any case, once we have a solid theoretical foundation in adaptation theory, we can talk about absolutely anything and everything after you interrupt my thesis. Marcel, does this mean we're resurrecting Professor Time with Marcel? In a way, I kind of am.
So listeners of the original run, the very OG, which please, might remember that we had a segment for our movie episodes called Professor Time with Marcel. And in those segments, I talked about the film adaptations of Harry Potter through the lens of Linda Hutchins' book, A Theory of Adaptation. But then when we rebooted our series, we just took that segment and made it like our whole identity, basically. We should have called this podcast Professor Time with Marcel and Hannah. I'm not sure
that it's as catchy, but I'm willing to work with her. So Hannah, I know that this was ages ago, but can you tell me what you remember about Linda Hutchins' theory of adaptation? I mean, the main thing that I remember is that she emphasizes for us that adaptations are not about attempting to reproduce a narrative identically in another medium, but rather need to be thought of in terms of the specific affordances of the new medium that the story is being adapted into.
And so simply critiquing an adaptation for its quote-unquote faithfulness fails to understand the actual like mechanism through which adaptation is working. Perfect. That's really, really helpful for the context that we're going to get into. Well, you're a good professor. Great memory, Hannah. Great teaching, Marcel. Thank you. Okay. So in the year of our Lord 2024, we are as consumers of media all familiar
with adaptations in a very material way. I thought maybe because of this, since we're talking about something that we all like engage with all of the time, it might be helpful to organize the segment around some questions that we might have had ourselves or that we might have asked or that people have asked us about the adaptations we consume. It's fun. Yeah, so we'll get into the how and the why and the what of adaptations.
Hannah, you will ask the questions. I will posit some answers and may have we shall discuss. Okay. First question, Marcel. We're going to start pretty straightforward. What is an adaptation exactly? Okay. This is a really, really good question. So we're going to think about adaptation as a process, verb, and as a product noun. Okay. Hutchin gives us quote three distinct but interrelated perspectives to refer to the process and the product and quote that we refer to as adaptation. Okay.
So number one, quote first seen as a formal entity or product, an adaptation is an announced and extensive transposition of a particular work or works. This transcoding can involve a shift of medium, a poem to a film, never happened, or genre, an epic to a novel, or change of frame and therefore context. Telling the same story from a different point of view for instance can create a manifestly different interpretation.
So like adaptations that are like we're retelling hamlet from the perspective of some issue. Okay. So in this case transcoding is just like the shifting from one format to another. Yeah. I think the phrasing is just borrowed from media studies. It's just like a VHS into a DVD. Yes, exactly. Okay. Okay. So shifting from one format to another, exactly. Yeah. Gotcha. And that was adaptation as product like the thing.
Yes. Great. Exactly. And so now we're going to talk about adaptation as process, the verb. Okay. Quote as a process of creation, the active adaptation always involves both reinterpretation and then recreation. Just shout out to Linda Hutchin like so kind of explaining things. Very straightforward, so clear. Okay. So this seems pretty straightforward. You can't adapt a story by accident. You have to be doing it on purpose. So it's a process that involves choices about
how to retell a particular story. That is exactly correct. And so then our third piece here is reception. Is that a noun or a verb, Marcel? That's a good question. I think it's a verb to receive, to receive. But we're talking about the reception of the product. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, quote, third, seen from the perspective of its process of reception, adaptation is a form of intertextuality. We experience adaptations as adaptations as palimpsests through our memory
of other works that resonate through repetition with variation. I want to ask you here just to clarify what Hutchin means by we experience adaptations, parentheses as adaptations as palimpsests because that phrasing is wild. Yes, exactly. So in a nutshell, an adaptation does need to be able to stand on its own as an aesthetic object. Okay. Okay. So the reader or the viewer or the player needs to be able to fully grasp the story that is presented to them in the adaptation without relying on
knowledge from source materials to make sense of it. Okay. And so when I watch the last of us the show, that television show needs to give me all the information I need to understand the show that it's giving to me. It cannot assume that I've played the game because I haven't. So when you are watching the last of us, you are not experiencing that adaptation as an adaptation because you are not familiar with the original text. Yes. So it's not palimpsestic to you in the same way that's its
need to stand on its own. The palimpsest, which for folks who don't know, is a term that comes from manuscript culture because writing surfaces used to be really rare and expensive. So people would scrape the text off a page and write something new on it. And sometimes you can still kind of see what was there before. So it's like a text that has two different texts on it at the same time. We've talked about palimpsest in one of our previous episodes, but none of us can remember which one
it was. So listeners, if this sounds interesting to you, you should go listen to our backlog. Yes. Surely there are several episodes in there where we talk about cool stuff that you'll find really interesting. So let's get back to palimpsest because she's not talking literally about manuscript culture. She's talking about that like extra layer of meaning that comes when you're viewing an
adaptation as an adaptation. That's right. So Hutchin is saying that in order to talk about how we experience texts like the last of us, the HBO television adaptation as adaptations, that's the part where we have to engage directly with its intertextuality, with its relationship to its sources or source. So like always adaptations have to stand on their own, but to talk about them as adaptations, to theorize them as adaptations. That's the part where we then have to talk about
their intertextual relationships. Amazing. Okay. So in that case, can you and I really talk about the last of us as an adaptation if an other versus played the video game? Frankly, of course, because as scholars, it's literally our job to talk about things that we don't know Jack shit about, right? Love it. You got to pH the all of a sudden you can walk around saying, I shit you want. That is the trend. So yes, we can talk about it in this context, but as you pointed
out, when we watched that show, we're not experiencing it intertextually. And so we are not experiencing it as adaptations. And so I'm willing to admit that there was some sloppy scholarship on my part by not playing the game first. Let's move on. Yeah, I mean, what an ask. Just play this multi dozens, if not hundreds of hours video game in order to make one hour long bug that's episode. Too much. Maybe a bit much. Intertextuality is such an interesting layering of possible levels
of reading for readers. And it doesn't mean that if you don't know the intertexts that you can't like one, look them up and rely on like external sources to help you understand them. Or two, you know, read the thing on its own, all of which is to say Marcel, using secondary sources to better understand the intertext is not sloppy scholarship. It's just scholarship. Two Shay Hannah. Two Shay. I appreciate that. Thank you. Okay. So does this like emphasis on the
need to have played the video game to talk about the last of us as an adaptation? Does that give credence to people who say like you can't properly appreciate an adaptation if you haven't seen or in this case played the original? Yeah, absolutely not. Absolutely not. So there are a few things going on with this statement that we should talk about. And first and most importantly, we should point out the absolutely unnecessary privileging of quote unquote originals.
This is a very capital R romantic way to value texts and it sucks. Listeners, you can assume that if we call something capital R romantic, we mean it sucks. Yeah. This is a kind of cultural gatekeeping that comes in a cornucopia of flavors that we see all the time and every day that includes, but is certainly not limited to racism, sexism. And when this happens, it is most often
classicism. So whether we're talking about a video game being made into prestige television or a say great work of literature that's being turned into a film for a teenage audience, the assumption that the adaptation is somehow of lower quality or less important, that comes from the same gatekeeping impulse. Yeah, that was a reference to Clueless, right? Yeah, it was. Now it was a reference to Bosnian Romeo and Juliet, but
like this also. Yeah. Also appropriate. So when we're talking about gatekeeping and in those examples that you gave Marcel, like literature is the serious genre or medium and film is like the day class A medium that is for like people who don't read books. Is that do you think still the status of film? So not anymore. I definitely think that when Linda Hutchin first published a theory of adaptation in 2006, film was still very much the like exactly how you were describing it,
the like thing people who don't read books consume, but it's very much no longer the case. And the reason why will provide us with this opportunity to finally introduce Steve Spence, who is a professor of media studies. And I'm going to actually name the article that we've
been quoting from. This is adaptation, violence, and storytelling in the last of us. And in this article, Spence not only draws on Hutchin quite a bit to really helpfully explain how the last of us, the HBO series adapts in these really cool and interesting ways, the video game that you and I have not played. But more poignantly for our purposes right here, Spence declares that quote, both television and video games seem to be speedrunning cinema's journey from vulgar diversion
to artistic medium. End quote. Ah, speedrunning Marcel, you might not know this because you're not a gamer like me, but that's a gaming term. Cool. What does it mean? It means trying to play a game probably that you've already played as quickly as possible. Nice. Okay. All right. So this is interesting because it suggests like television and video games are like following the same route
that cinema did, but they're doing it a lot faster. If we recognize that lots of different media now like can be and are taken seriously as like, you know, significant artistic mediums, then we got to put gatekeeping aside and not be like, oh, the book was good in the movies bad because movies are bad or the book was good, but the video game was bad because video games are bad. So if we put that kind of gatekeeping aside, then how do we talk about adaptations that suck?
Yeah. Honestly, sometimes adaptations just do suck. Cough cough, goblet of fire, cough. Yeah, like when we talked about the goblet of fire, we talked about how it's just like the filmmakers just took all of the hits from the book and made them into scenes in the movie and it's one of Harry Potter fans favorite film adaptations because it just gives them all the serotonin that they need seeing their book come to life, but it actually makes zero sense, strung together for viewers
aren't familiar with the book that preceded it. So sometimes adaptations are just shitty. That is in fact just the case. However, going back to the claim that you can't fully appreciate an adaptation if you haven't seen the original, what's actually happening when people say that is that they're confusing the adaptation as a whole with the intertext or with the intertext as a
speech act or they're confusing the adaptation as a whole with the intertextual references. And so this is where things for me being interested in adaptation theory, this is where things get really messy and also really fun. Oh, messy is the fun. Yeah. So Hannah, I'm wondering, just a curiosity. I'm wondering if you have a handy definition of intertextuality on hand. Yeah, I mean, of course, Marcel, you know, I always bring a copy of the penguin dictionary of literary terms and literary
theory to our recordings. I know that about you and I love it. Quote coined by Julia Cristava in 1966. Intertextuality refers to the interdependence of any one literary text with all those that have come before it. A literary text is not an isolated phenomenon, but is made up of a mosaic of quotations. It recognizes that discourses are transposed into one another so that meanings in one kind of discourse are overlaid with meanings from other kinds of discourses and quote. Pretty
self-explanatory, I'd say. Wouldn't you agree? Yeah. Yeah. Oh, for sure. I like how many times it used the word discourse. Do you want to transpose that into regular person speech? Yeah, I mean, so one of the major points, and this is, you know, Cristava came up with the term, but it was a point that a lot of post-structuralists were making around the same time, is that you can't sort of pull a single text out of its entire context and think about it without understanding that it is
always going to be in conversation with the other things that have come before it. And that what's really vital there is that it helps us understand that art is always profoundly elusive, ALL, not elusive. Because artists are always drawing on like their discursive context, right? So like the way words don't just mean things. They mean things in context and what we think words
mean has to do with our context. And so it's like the text that we might want to sort of just hold up and be like, oh, here's a thing that can just fully stand on its own is actually always sort of enmeshed with all of these other surrounding contexts. That's right. And intertext. And intertext, right? So like I think when I studied literature in my undergrad, biblical illusions was always like
the first thing that we were learning about, right? One of our recommended texts was always a copy of the Bible so that we could look up all of the illusions that people were making because so much literature is in intertextual conversation with the goddamn Bible. KJV. In part because Western writers could assume that that was a text that almost all or all of their readers would be familiar with. So that does bring us to that problem, right? It brings us back to
that problem of like, well, but what if you can't assume familiarity? So if that's the definition of intertextuality, what would you say an intertext is? So an intertext is like another text that is being alluded to within the text that you're reading? Yeah, exactly. Okay, great. So like any literary reference, an intertext relies on your knowledge of the referent in order to get the joke. I like thinking of it as a get the joke kind of thing because they're inside jokes and when you're not
inside the joke, you don't know what the joke is and it's not that funny. Okay, so here we're going to get messy. So we're going to get fun. Okay, so it is possible to adapt. Again, this is I'm talking about the process, the verb. It is possible to adapt a text, but create an intertext instead of an adaptation. Oh, yeah. Okay. And of course, adaptations and intertexts are not mutually exclusive. So you can make an adaptation that's full of cheeky little intertextual references.
And now we're going to talk about Bridget Jones' diary, because it's my favorite example, because Bridget Jones' diary, the film, cast Colin Firth as Mark Darcy. Now Colin Firth famously played Mr. Darcy in the BBC Pride and Prejudice mini series. He jumps in a lake and he wins a wet t-shirt contest. The fans love it. In the Bridget Jones diary novel, Bridget is super thirsty for the BBC Pride and Prejudice Mr. Darcy. And so the Bridget Jones filmmakers cleverly cast that same
actor to play Bridget's main love interest, Mark Darcy. Any actor could have played Mark Darcy and it still would have been an adaptation. But casting Colin Firth is a cheeky intertextual nod to fans of the mini series and fans of the Bridget Jones novel. All right. Let me make sure I've got this straight. So Bridget Jones' diary, the novel, is an adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, the novel. And this adaptation, Bridget Jones' diary, the novel, includes intertextual references
to the BBC television adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, the TV series. That's right. Okay. And then the film adaptation of Bridget Jones' diary casts the actor who played Mr. Darcy in the television adaptation of Pride and Prejudice as Mark Darcy from the novel. That's right. So Bridget Jones' diary, the movie, is an adaptation of Bridget Jones' diary, the novel, which is in turn an adaptation
of Pride and Prejudice, the novel. And then both the novel and the movie, Bridget Jones' diary, have intertextual references to the BBC television mini series adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. That's right. You nailed it. Good job, you know. Okay. So if Colin Firth plays both Mr. Darcy and Mark Darcy, then the Bridget Jones' movie can't show Bridget watching him in the BBC Pride and Prejudice mini series because that would break the fourth wall for us, wouldn't it?
But they can cast him as Mark Darcy because he's playing completely different people. So the fourth wall remains intact, but it's still got that sort of like his face as an intertext and viewers can feel like they're in on the joke. Yeah. And that's like fun, but like you actually don't need to know
it to enjoy Bridget Jones' diary as a film. Yes, that's so true. I guess we could say that casting Colin Firth in the Bridget Jones' movie is a way for the movie to adapt the novel's intertextual references in a way that is like a kind of intertextuality that's more appropriate to the medium of film. I absolutely agree, Hannah. So transcoding intertextuality from novel to film. That's right. Solid example. So clearly there are tremendous pleasures in catching these
intertextual references, right? And these intertextual references and the pleasures of catching them are not essential to the process of adaptation or the appreciation of an adaptation as a stand-alone work of art. These things exist. So when people say you need to have read or seen or played the original to appreciate the adaptation, the right in so far as you can't appreciate the adaptation as adaptation and the various kinds of like intertextual references and inside jokes that come with
the process of adaptation if you haven't seen or read or played the original. So you can't fully appreciate an adaptation as an adaptation unless you've seen what it's adapting from, but that doesn't mean you can't appreciate and enjoy the adaptation as its own self-contained. An aesthetic object. An aesthetic object. Okay, great. So now that we've got a solid understanding of how adaptations work and how they exist both as intertexts and also as aesthetic works of art on their
own, we can talk about new media. So do you want to know? No, no, no time, no time for new media. I'm sorry Marcel, you're actually going to have to come up with a thesis using parchment and quill. No, no media here. Oh no. Hey marketers, want a matchmaker to set you up with your perfect audience? We'll look no further. Get intimate right away with host-read sponsorships with Acast. Use Acast's self-serve ad platform to search and partner up with a podcast or two from our
network of more than 100,000 shows. Have them sing your praises in their own words. And get their listeners ready to be wooed into loyal customers. It's the ultimate loving endorsement. Book host-read sponsorships with Acast head to go.acast.com slash closer to get started. Okay, Marcel, it's our final segment in this essay I will. And it's your job to formulate us a thesis of apocalyptic proportions. Holy. The transmission of COVID-19 should have been
done by all accounts totally manageable. We learned fairly quickly that masking and proper ventilation worked to radically reduce transmission rates. And a vaccine was developed quickly and it was effective. What we lacked, at least in Canada, was the political will to enforce these measures effectively and for the long term. This is especially appalling given the incredible loss of life that we experienced and witnessed during the first year of the pandemic.
Living in a region that had the so-called luxury to be complacent in its response to COVID meant that our collective post-apocalyptic zombie megatext needed to up its ante. We had already lived through a failure of government to prevent mass casualties, so this no longer made for compelling TV. The novum of the last of us, however, raises the stakes for an apocalyptic narrative. It is
a pathogen that is literally unstoppable. An infectious cordicept fungus that turns its host into a walking moldsbore connected to a hive mind that doesn't even need its host to survive. The futility of fighting an unstoppable pathogen, then I think, effectively recasts or adapts our experience with our shitty leaders. No longer failures, we can think of them as simply just a couple of fun guys. In this essay, I will... Okay, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, I need you to tell me
what a novum is. Shoot, of course. So in science fiction, scholarship and fandom, a novum is generally understood to be the thing that brings the world of that text into existence. It's like the thing that precipitates it, the thing that causes it. So it could be anything from like in Wabgisia graces to books, Moon of the Crested Snow Moon of the Turning Leaves. It's a blackout that just occurs so the blackout could be a novum. And also in the last of us, the novum is this
pathogen, this infectious fungus that then infects the whole world. Everything was different after the war. Exactly. Yes. So the war in that sentence is the novum. Okay, second word that I want to pick up from your thesis, Marcel. Yes. Because you said that this like zombie mega-text is like
adapting our experience of the pandemic. So that immediately makes me think that, you know, similarly to your point about Richard Jones's diary, the movie casting Colin Firth that like this adaptation from video game to HBO TV series is also almost intertextually responding to the COVID-19 pandemic as well as as a kind of story in which leaders could never have done anything. Exactly. They couldn't have done any better. They couldn't. And because we survived.
If you're watching it, you survived. Yeah. And so if you are watching, if you are in the audience for the HBO television adaptation of the last of us, that means that you were fortunate enough to survive the COVID-19 pandemic. And so the failings of your own government are then maybe what I'm suggesting is recast or adapted. You might reconsider their failings on the one hand is being actually not that bad, those failures, not that bad. Because you're there,
you're here, you're watching the show, how bad could it have been. And also look at how much worse the pandemic could have been if it had in fact been unstoppable. What could they have done? You know? So that's the sort of, I think in terms of reception, without getting too much into reader response theory because we didn't talk about that at all. We talked about reception a little bit. A little
bit, a little bit. But as the viewer, this is maybe I think possibly what the show provides for us is an alternative reality in which things could have been so much worse that our present reality is therefore not so bad. But I think the way in which the show uses the COVID-19 pandemic as an intertext itself is really, is really subtle. And again, again, I'm going to sing the song again. I didn't play the video game. And so I don't know if this comes straight out of the video game
or not. So what I'm saying is that as a viewer of the show, the sequence that HBO uses to start the entire series is a very clear, intertextual reference to the COVID-19 pandemic. And it is a 1970s interview show where two scientists are talking about pandemics and talking about things that people should be afraid of. And the one scientist is saying, you know, a virus would be so dangerous and so damaging and would spread and we would need to mitigate it, blah, blah, blah.
And then the other 1970s scientist, they're both smoking, says, uh, viruses, they don't concern me. And they're like, what? Why does this not concern you? How could this not concern you? And then the scientist says, because I'm afraid of fungi. And then starts talking about how much worse a pandemic that is rooted in mold or in fungus or in these kinds of pathogens would be in how much more unstoppable. That is really interesting as a like, up in the anti-unmultiple levels.
Which does make me then want to ask like, what role these kind of post-apocalyptic stories play in relation to the politics of the present? So like, what's the sort of political or cultural function of in a moment where things are very, very bad, telling stories about how things could be much, much worse? Do you remember people got really into playing the board game pandemic during lockdown? Bunkers to me. I mean, I did it. It's a great game. I understand like a lot of people
really liked it. And I was just like, I don't want to think about pandemics right now. Yeah, yeah. So what I think, both of these two things, playing pandemic, I'm guessing. I don't know. I didn't look this up. I'm guessing that video game play increased as well during lockdown. I'm guessing. I feel like that's a safe guess to me. Like just in general? Just in general, yeah. Oh yeah, no, that is that is undeniably true. Yeah. Switch sales went through the roof of the switch was sold
out. You couldn't get one for ages. Like, it was, yeah, it was a huge issue. But last of us is available on the switch. So I know just as a PlayStation. Just as a example of the fact that way more people started playing video games. Yeah. And so I don't think it's radical to suggest that the way that people cope with living in the midst of trauma is going to depend on what they in particular need to distract and survive. Right. And so I think whether that is
playing video games like the last of us or whether it is reading more apocalyptic fiction. Because I think I remember that there were also increases in like book sales streaming of apocalyptic movies and television series. Oh yeah. Yeah. Everybody was watching um, contagion. Yeah. It was a contagion. There was some movie that everybody was like, yeah, we're all going to get really into
this. Yeah. I think that the way that sometimes we need to see a version of events in which things would have been radically worse is what we need in order to be present, be like physically present. Not necessarily. It doesn't necessarily make us feel better about the moment, but it makes us, it makes us more able to be in the moment. Because we can see that like, okay, I'm in my home and there are not mushroom monsters hanging down my door. There are not people trying to break
through the windows in my kitchen. I might be rationing toilet paper, but I'm not yet rationing beans. Do you know what I mean? So I think that there's like, what do the mushroom monsters do when they catch you? They bite you and infect you with their sports. It is very much a zombie. It is like full zombie. Post-apocalyptic survivalist narratives always remind me of the fact that my survival instinct is not oriented towards staying alive. Like you said that and I was like,
oh, that sounds fine. I would get bit right away. Yeah. That sounds way less stressful than trying to survive, which you know, was not the case with the pandemic, but the thing with the pandemic is that you didn't just turn into a cool monster. Yeah. Yeah. So what I'm thinking about the way that we engage with these stories in moments when things are bad, it's making me think of this Stephen Pinker book called The Better Angels of Our Nature, which I have never read. But I am thinking about
it because the podcast of books could kill has been talking about it. And it's a book about the fact that we currently live in the least violent time in human history. Whoa. That's bleak. Sorry. Yeah. Going. So the book is like, you know, if adjusted for population, every a previous time in history has been more violent, more dangerous. There's been more deaths. Pinker basically says that classic liberalism is responsible for a drop in violence. Well, it is hard to shop when you
are under threat of violence. Thanks capitalism. So, you know, one of the arguments that they're making on if books could kill is that this kind of narrative of don't complain about what is happening in the present because it could be worse is an inherently conservative narrative. And
one that discourages activism and organizing the present. And so that, you know, that makes me think of what you're articulating in the thesis, which is like, what is the role that this kind of narrative plays for us in a moment when we could be focusing on the rampant political failures of our own government. And instead, it's like, no, let's let's let's check out. Let's check out. Let's escape from that reality in which we have like some level of agency, but like a frustratingly
limited agency. And instead, like, check into a reality that's like, well, how much worse it could be. Totally. Yeah. Yeah. I think that for all of the things that I love about this series, and for all of the ways that I think that it is socially more responsible than a series like The Walking Dead, it is still a culture, it is part of the culture industry and it is intended to profit. We had this conversation when we did our bonus episode about the Barbie movie, right?
That like, there are limits to how transformative media can be when that media is a for-profit industry. And I think that that's true for the video game and I think that that's true for the television series. Yeah. And you know, that ties us back into this context of these big media corporations that are buying up like lots of different kinds of property so that they can incorporate the entirety of a series of adaptations all sort of fall under the same umbrella,
like Sony's making money off. I actually don't know what Sony's relationship to HBO is, but it's a partnership. There's no ownership. Yeah. Yeah. But still, you know, lots of profit going on. I was at an undergraduate conference on Monday and one of the students gave a media history paper about the rise of VHS and how like VHS technology directly led to a falling off in how many people were going to the movie theaters. Oh, interesting. I mean, you know what? No, that
makes sense. It makes sense, right? Like, prior to that, like, you could only see a movie at the theaters and then all of a sudden you can see movies at home. And as these technology companies, like Sony and Panasonic, started making more and more money, they eventually were in the position to buy the studios. And so we get this reversal where it's like it used to be that the studios ran supreme and they got to decide what got made. And then it shifts to like actually the technologies
that have the most sway in terms of what kind of media is getting produced. And that's very much the landscape we see today, right? That it is starting with like Sony has the PlayStation. They want people buying PlayStation's, the artistic adaptation and re adaptation of this game is in part a project on the part of this technology company to get people to buy their platform.
That's right. I know that earlier on I said that I don't know shit about gaming. And so I can't talk about gaming, but what I can tell you is that the first the last of us came out on the PlayStation 3. And oh, now I can't remember if it was the sequel or if it was when they when they remade the original into part one, but it was it was specifically to be released on PlayStation 5. Mm hmm. Gotcha. So yeah, they're making new consoles. They're improving the technology of
their consoles. But then they also are taking this opportunity to entice the gamer, the player, to repurchase games that they've literally already played. Yeah. And then in turn, to go watch a TV show that is based on for a lot of people, a game you've literally already played. You know, which which then brings us to this whole conversation about adaptation and repetition and self-southening and the role that self-southening played in our media consumption during the pandemic because the
idea of like watching a TV show that is based on a game that you have played, where you had some agency and control over how things went is also in turn really interesting, right, to think of that as as a kind of comfort viewing where you feel like this is a thing that I can actually control even though you can't in a TV show. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is making me desperately want to talk about my recent experience failing to play the game Baldur's Gate, but I think I might
be taking us too far off the rails. So I'm just going to end this segment Marceline and bring us to the close of this segment by saying, you like zombie media? Sometimes, guys, honestly, yeah, kind of. Yeah. I'm scared of them. Yeah. I'm scared of zombies. Yeah. I'm too scared to watch zombies stuff. Material Girls is a Witch Please production and is distributed by A Cast. Why don't you hover your cursor over the link to owichplease.ca so you can check out the rest of our episodes and
fill your inventory with transcripts, reading lists and merch. Oh, it's game references. Yeah. Yeah. Our website can also help you on your side quest to discover our two other shows, gender playground, a podcast about gender affirming care for kids and making worlds a video podcast about sci-fi fantasy and the radical power of imagining otherwise. You can find everything you need to play all of our shows at owichplease.ca. Maybe you're mostly here for the fandom and that's okay too.
We have an excellent newsletter at owichplease.substac.com and an even better patreon at patreon.com slash owichplease. We're also on Instagram, X and Threads at owichplease and on TikTok at owichpleasepod. Thanks to Auto Syndicate for the use of our theme song, Shopping Mall. And of course, thanks to the whole Witch Please production's team. Our digital content coordinator Gabi Aiori. Our social media manager and marketing designer Zoe Mix. Our transcriber Ruth Ormiston.
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