One of my many half to three quarter written works is a Bluebeard re-write.
I was talking to someone this week and saying how hard it was to work on my current National novel writing month [nanowrimo] work when it was a romance and right now men are just… ugh. *shudders*
‘But that’s the thing with romance,’ she said. ‘There’s got to be a happy ever after.’
Well, yes… but then I remembered Bluebeard. My version of that story is probably technically a tragedy.
She loves him. He loves her. At a certain point she understands that he is going to kill her anyway. She survives. He does not. She goes on alone having killed the love of her life.
There is no happy ever after here.
‘So write that,’ she said.
Flash to today… I’m beetling around on Twitter and I see a post where a woman says her next movie is going to be a rewrite of Bluebeard.
I have a moment of full on panic. I’ve spiralled off into self hate before I’ve even read it. My inner critic is shouting: If only you’d finished that story, published it, you could have been ahead of the game, now it’ll look like you’re just copying someone else’s great idea blah blah blah.
I breathe.
Then I go read the article.
It seems there are any number of books and films that satisfy the ‘bluebeard’ story tag. And I didn’t know that. It was a favourite topic for pulp writers because it put a woman into a position of peril. Life Insurance scams with up to ten wives, right back to Gaslight and Hitchcock movies like Marnie, or Joan Crawford in Sudden Fear. The writer argued that Dracula fits this ‘woman in peril’ genre too, as does a whole heap of Gothic romance.
Huh. I love gothics. It all makes sense, now. It’s just the next level up from the ‘bad boy’ romance. He can be sexy and charming; which just makes him more dangerous, right? He’s not just ‘bad’, he’s life threatening. She has to work out if she’s just frightened of him, or if he really is a killer. And that’s the story.
Perhaps I’m in the wrong genre with tragedy. It should be a thriller, suspense melodrama, woman in peril. [Shawn Coyne would be so proud.]
A story where a hunted, threatened woman fights back and takes down the man who is threatening her. Right now, there’s plenty of room in the world for all the different versions of that story.
So good luck with your movie Anna Biller and I’ll finish my version as well.
Links:
Me on twitter: @mtr_amg
Anna Biller’s post