Popular Culture Review Vol. 21, No. 2, Summer 2010 | Page 74

70 Popular Culture Review This calculus is not unique to Zombie, nor is it the only issue that problematizes any coherent understanding of Lewton’s adaptation of the Eyre story. That same year, producer David O. Selznick was hard at work trying to figure out how people would react to Charlotte Bronte’s heroine, and many of the choices in the final version of Stevenson’s Jane Eyre reflect this preoccupation (Sconce, 53-54). Selznick had instructed his writers to punch up everything that would draw audiences into the story, and to remove anything that would repel them; extensive tests were conducted even before filming began, and Selznick even investigated how often the novel was checked out of public libraries (54). The producer’s obsession points to an important aspect of adapting a work for the screen: Hollywood adaptations of canonical novels such as Jane Eyre, therefore, were not inferior imitations of individual, literary masterworks, but elite inflections on an audience’s shared more of contemporary cinematic narrativity. As with a Cary Grant or a Joan Crawford, the cultural stature of Jane Eyre provided an added incentive for an audience to once again engage themselves with Hollywood’s familiar narrative machinery, and as with any other star invested with a social identity, Jane Eyre was expected to follow an implicit set of conventions during the film’s unfolding. The primary work of adaptation, then, was not so much matching material to medium and medium to material, but involved adapting an audience to the material through the socially negotiated signifying conventions of the medium. (59-60) The desired end result of these machinations, Sconce points out, has little to do with fidelity to the movie’s source or with anything other than drawing an audience. And if Selznick was concerned, so was Lewton. One could afford a failure or two, the other could not. The same concern for audience reception, then, should be kept in mind when running through the complicated moral entanglements that I Walked With a Zombie's heroine is faced with. To acquire the object of her affection, it would at first seem as though Betsy would have to behave—and even be allowed to think—in ways that may antagonize her to an audience. Lewton introduces a number of ameliorating factors. Jessica never loved Paul. Besides, she had it coming: she was cold and i