More Pride Less Prejudice: How Jane Austen’s novel went through Bollywood, zombies, and now a gay adaptation
India Today
Fire Island, a gay rom-com inspired by Pride and Prejudice represents the latest stage of the classic novel’s cinematic evolution.
“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. You know who said that? Jane Austen, the queen. Pretty dope way to start a story, right? Well, no offense to my girl Jane, but that sounds like some hetero nonsense.”
That’s how the 2022 rom-com Fire Island opens with screenwriter and lead actor Joel Kim Booster setting the tone of the film. Recently released in India on Disney+ Hotstar, Booster’s script presents a “gay adaptation” of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. This is just one of the few modern adaptations that the classic has gone through.
Fire Island: Austen goes gay
In Fire Island, Booster’s protagonist Noah (our version of Elizabeth Bennett) throws sarcastic jabs at Austen’s heternormative, monogamous brand of romance but the movie is a surprisingly accurate adaptation for the ones who have read the 1813 original.
On the surface, the film deals with a group of friends who assemble every year at Fire Island, a venue that hosts an annual carnival of partying and lovemaking for gay youths. With his friends doubling as the novel’s Bennett family, Noah explores love and life with his very own Mr Darcy who is as uptight and stonecold as viewers would expect him to be.
Not to give away many spoilers, Fire Island offers hope on how dated novels can change with the times. At a time when there weren’t many women novelists around (and the ones who wrote used to write under pseudonyms), Austen was arguably a visionary. It might be too late to “cancel” her for not being diverse and accommodative enough in her writing but she can definitely be reinterpreted for the new age.
And this is how Booster’s script perfectly balances the original period drama with a good dose of gay romance. As Margaret Cho’s character remarks towards the final minutes, “Some things need to change”.
