newcritics

Some random notes on Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys on the way to a review of the movie Nancy Drew which came out on DVD this week but which is not going to be the feature for Mannion Family Movie Night because the guys think it looks goofy—I’ve seen it.  They’re right.  It is goofy.  And that’s a shame because I never thought Nancy Drew was goofy, not even when I was twelve and thought girls and everything about them were goofy.

Nancy Drew and Frank and Joe Hardy represent a sort of cheerful existentialism.  Happiness and a contented sense of self come from doing.  Being like Nancy or the Hardys is a matter of getting out in the world, looking about you, seeing what’s there, thinking about it, using your brain, and acting upon what you’ve seen and thought.

More so than the Hardy Boys, who because they weren’t precluded from using their fists faced more dangerous and violent villains and had to solve some problems with a hard right to the jaw—Joe, the more athletic, more impulsive one, had the harder punch—Nancy solved problems by solving the problem.  She was the better detective.

In her books, the emphasis is almost always on the crime not the criminals because the point is to show Nancy thinking.

Action heroes, in movies and comic books, are good because they oppose evil, and evil is practically a force of nature not the result of some normal human beings’ moral failings.  Evil is the work of a monster of greed or anger or lust or vanity (not always) in human form and the battle of good versus evil is really only pure destructiveness versus its containment.  There really are no such things as good and evil, morality and immorality, in the action hero universe.  There are only Chaos and Order.

Nancy Drew and the Hardys do not live in a morally complicated world, but it is still a moral one.  Good people have to work at their goodness and that goodness is defined and achieved by their efforts apart from any contact with evil.  Good people don’t need bad people to stand next to in order to be seen as good.  Which is a way of saying being good is not simply a matter of not being one of the bad guys.  Bad people are dishonest and want something for nothing.  Good people are honest, polite, hard-working.  Occasionally they forget their manners but usually they are friendly and helpful.  The Hardys, Nancy, and their pals, Chet, Iola, Callie, George, Beth, and Ned demonstrate their superior virtues in their interactions with other good people.  They are more honest, more polite, harder-working.  That’s all.  They are smart but they make themselves smarter by studying hard.  They are good athletes because they practice and play hard.  If they didn’t practice, didn’t study, they would just be clever and brutal.

I used to read my sister’s Nancy Drews after I’d finished one of my own Hardy Boy books and was saving up to buy the next.  I don’t recall ever worrying, or even thinking, that I was reading "girl" books.  I also don’t remember ever even noticing that Nancy didn’t act like a typical girl.  I took her independence, her adventurousness, her self-reliance, her energy, her courage, and her brains for granted.  I knew she was smarter than Ned and that did bother me, but not because girls weren’t supposed to be smarter than boys.  It was because I thought Ned was a stiff and not worth Nancy’s time.  I’m sure I thought, if I thought about it at all, that if Nancy was going to have a steady boyfriend he should be a guy more like the Hardys.  But probably I didn’t think about Nancy’s love life, even though I was reading her books at the time I was discovering that real live girls were interesting.  I read her books because they were detective stories and she was a detective and detectives, as far as I was concerned, had better things to do than fall in love.

Possibly I didn’t want her to have a boyfriend because subconsciously I thought of her as already having one.  Me.  More likely I didn’t want her to have one because that would have confused me too much—I was identifying with Nancy the way I identified with the Hardys.  Like them, she was a surrogate me.

I’m not sure what that meant to me at the time, but I suspect it was the case that it was through Nancy Drew that I learned that girls, who as I said I was just discovering were interesting, were interesting as people in their own rights and not, like Callie and Iola in the Hardy Boy books, just as side-kicks and cheerleaders for they guys.

One of the high points of my Hardy Boy reading days (fifth and sixth grade) was when my father’s cousin gave me all his old Hardy Boy books, which were in fact old books.  He’d inherited most of them from an older cousin himself and these were all originals from the 1920s and 30s.  I had collected about a dozen of the newer, blue-spined books by then, my dad’s cousin’s collection included seven or eight brown-covered ones with actual grown-up book style paper dust jackets from the 1950s, so my suddenly increased collection included about a dozen more of the originals and I could tell the difference.  For one thing, they were better written.  Oh sure, they included their fair share of Tom Swiftys and Frank and Joe never just said anything.  They exclaimed, they enthused, they whispered, they called out, they ejaculated, a lot, and as soon as I learned that word’s other meaning I wondered if Franklin.W. Dixon employed it so often because he was trying to be funny or because he was a little bit strange.  (It wasn’t until I stopped reading the books that I learned that there was no one person writing the books named Franklin.W. Dixon.)  Still, the sentences were more complex, the descriptions more precise, the paragraphs less abrupt, and the prose generally more discursive.  The writing was mannered but it was meant to be read not skimmed.  The older books were written for kids who would soon be going on to read Jack London and Mark Twain.  The contemporary versions were written (or rather rewritten) to be read by kids who were already watching too much television.  But more interestingly, the older books were more modern.

This had a lot to do with the different attitudes towards the Hardys’ toys.

As the sons of a rich man, the Hardys owned a lot of things, a car, a speedboat, a pair of motorcycles.  (Of course, they were expected to pay for the upkeep on all these things themselves and had to earn the money to do so as well as save for college.  They were privileged but never spoiled.)  They also had access to all the latest technology.  By the 1960s, all these things were taken for granted.  I don’t mean everybody had them.  I meant that as things they weren’t anything special, not as things people owned, and especially not as things people made.  But in the 20s and early 30s a lot of this stuff was still new, at least new enough to not be ubiquitous, and somehow the older books made me feel the attraction of this newness.  Owning a good two-way radio in 1928 was almost as nifty as owning your own computer in 1968.  In the earlier books, the Hardys lived on the edge of a brave new world.  By the 1960s, they were living in a more complacent, less forward-looking time, in which even space travel was becoming old-hat.

Shortly after I realized this about the Hardy Boy books, it dawned on me that the older Nancy Drews were probably different from my sister’s yellow-bound rewrites and I went to the library to find out.  Sure enough.  And the difference was more than just that the 1920s Nancy wore hats and longer and trimmer skirts in her illustrations.

As the daughter of a rich man, Nancy owned a lot of toys too, but her pride and joy, and the thing that was most useful to her as a detective was her sporty little roadster.  The Hardy Boys’ devices and machines were useful to them, but Nancy’s car was absolutely indispensable to her.  Her car gave her the ability to be a detective because it gave her freedom.  Cars equaled freedom, in fact.  In her roadster, Nancy was free to go anywhere, any time, on her own volition, and on her own energy and strength of purpose and will.

And cars were new then.  Not new as inventions.  New as features of the average American household.  In her earlier books Nancy Drew lived in a time of newfound freedom of movement and with that movement came freedom from all the things that constrained you at home.  When they got in their cars, Americans were on their own.  They were free to be themselves.  In this, Nancy Drew was more a typical American than she was an atypical girl.

By the fifties, although cars still represented freedom to most teenagers, they had long devolved from something new and wonderful into just another material good and were hardly a luxury item.  They were necessary tools of the suburban life that had sprung up and begun to dominate and define America in the forty years that separated the old dust-jacketed Nancy Drews from the yellow-backed ones.

What’s more, instead of offering young women freedom, they were becoming symbols of their mothers’ entrapments.  Cars were what wives and mothers used to run errands.

By the time my sister and I were reading Nancy Drew, gender roles had become more traditionally sexist than they had been, or at least seemed in the old books to have been.  The newer books seemed to insist more on Nancy’s girlishness and to make more of Ned as being important to her future.  Nancy Drew, then, was living in a world that was less free for girls, and what gave Nancy her independence was her father’s position and wealth.  She was exceptional and that made her seem more old-fashioned—she was just another aristocrat with a neat hobby.

Of course I couldn’t articulate this when I was eleven and twelve, but I was aware of it.  And just as reading the old Hardy Boy books changed the way I read and thought about the newer versions, the older, as in olden times, Nancy Drew changed the way I read and thought about the contemporary Nancy.

There was no way to reconcile the two worlds, though, except to take them both out of time.  Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys lived in no particular era.  They weren’t creatures of the 1950s or artifacts of the 1920s.  In my imagination, they lived in their own time and place, and were therefore free of limitations of the time and place where I lived.  They lived, pretty much, in the future.

The result of this was that I never thought of them as old-fashioned.  I still don’t.  And that’s why I was initially baffled by the approach the makers of the new Nancy Drew movie took towards bringing their heroine to the big screen.   They apparently started from the assumption that Nancy Drew is old-fashioned and too old-fashioned for today’s movie-savvy pre-teen audience to identify with or care about.

You’d think that if they began with that assumption they’d have finished there too, concluding that there was no point in making a movie no one would go see.  You might also think that if they were determined to make the movie anyway they would have either decided to try to update Nancy or just ignore her supposed old-fashionedness the way the 1970s TV series did.  Another logical approach might have been to make the movie as a period piece and I think I’d have really liked to see a Nancy Drew movie that was set in the late 1920s.

But the idea they came up with was to co-opt the assumed precocious cynicism of their audience (which they don’t for a moment seem to have thought would include any actual present-day twelve-year old fans of the books) by making Nancy’s old-fashionedness a joke.

The movie Nancy Drew favors belted plaid skirts and knee socks.  Her faithful-to-the-books titian hair is parted on the side and worn with an elastic headband.  She looks as though she’s just stepped out of an ad for the Mystery Date game or a first-year episode of The Brady Bunch or a photo from Riverdale High’s Class of 1965 yearbook.  "I like old-fashioned things," she says to explain her unusual fashion sense to her friends at her new high school, but she’s not offering a real explanation, anymore than Clark Kent would be offering a real explanation for why he knows what’s going on in a room three floors away.  Just as surely as Clark knows he’s Kal-El of Krypton, this Nancy knows she’s an alien from another planet and she has powers and abilities these mere mortals couldn’t understand or deal with.

The movie has Nancy moving to Los Angeles from her hometown where it is always the early 1960s—that is, the 1960s that should have happened, the one where all the unsolved problems that had exploded the nation by 1968 had been taken care of by, oh, 1952.   It’s a 1960s in which there has been no Cold War, in which the Civil Rights movement was an overnight and unequivocal success, and in which everybody, including girls Nancy’s age—which appears to be about 14, but I’ll get to that—is free to be exactly who and what they want to be.  It’s an era of openness, honesty, tolerance, equality, universal politeness and good will—even the criminals are good-natured and helpful—and no rock and roll.   You don’t need a music of rebellion if there’s no need to rebel.

It’s the world of Leave It to Beaver and The Donna Reed Show but without the sexist stereotyping.  Women’s Lib has also come and gone, solving all problems and leaving nothing behind but good feelings.

So Nancy is the child of a Utopia and as such she is a complete innocent.  When the movie moves her to Los Angeles, which it does within 15 minutes of the opening credits, and that’s not fast enough as far as the movie’s makers are concerned, because, boy, do they rush her through everything that happens at home, including her solving a crime, she’s an innocent transported to a fallen world.  Her new high school isn’t a place of evil, but it is presented as a rather decadent place, mainly in that it is populated by shallow stereotypes who are content to be stereotypes.

Which means that very quickly the movie abandons any pretense of being a Nancy Drew mystery to become a typical, if charming (and goofy), fish out of water story, in which the fish teaches everybody else how to swim.

The movie is a social satire, a very gentle one, offering the usual lessons of fish out of water stories—be yourself, try new things, don’t worry about what other people think—but with a bit of a twist.  Nancy Drew is not a rebel.  The reason she is able to be herself is that she doesn’t care what the other kids think of her and that’s because all the adults she knows admire and respect her.  The movie is trying to teach kids that it is more important that adults recognize your talents than that other kids respond to your coolness.

In Los Angeles, Nancy stumbles on a mystery to solve, but it’s a dumb one and not really important in its details.  It’s there so that the other kids can see her in action and learn to admire her for her activity.  In the beginning, Nancy’s detective work—she insists on calling it her "sleuthing"—is another sign of her dorkiness to the other kids, like her weird clothes.  None of the characters ever really articulate why they think it’s dorky, but it’s clear that they can’t understand why she’s so concerned with things that are as far as they’re concerned none of her business, and by that they mean things that take place in the world outside of high school, the world of their parents, the world of grown-ups.

The movie’s Nancy is a model for other kids for how to grow up.  The way to adulthood is not simply by taking the path out the door of your parents’ house.  You grow up by leaving behind childish concerns, like what your peers think of you and what they own and how they dress.  And you grow up by taking on a job and working hard at it.

In this, then, the movie has something important in common with the books, that cheerful existentialism that posits that happiness and a sense of self and self-worth come from doing.  Being like Nancy, the book or the movie version, is a matter of getting out in the world, looking around you, seeing, thinking about what you see and acting upon it.  It’s a matter of using your head, not your credit card.

The movie Nancy Drew is free, as free as the Nancy of the early books, but free from different things.  She is free from fads.  She is free from peer pressure.  She is free from dependence on her father’s money—although she certainly takes advantage of it, it’s clear she could and would find away to do without it if she needed to, unlike the kids at her new school who can only rebel by spending their parents’ money.

She is free from sexual pressure too.  Boys don’t matter to her, because she has more important things on her mind, for one thing, but also because they’re, well, boys.

Another big difference between the books, of every era, and this
movie is that the movie Nancy is a girl and the Nancy of the books is a
young woman.  I’m not sure if that’s supposed to be part of the lesson or if it’s an accidental result of the casting.  Emma Roberts—daughter of Eric, niece to Julia, and you can see it—is a talented and charming, if a tad over-eager, actress.  But she was around 16 when the movie was made and she looked younger.  She could have been cast as a seventh or eighth grader and been believable.  In fact, the movie doesn’t really make clear how old she is.  As far as I could tell, she’s meant to be at least old enough to drive, but that might just be another one of the jokes and we’re supposed to find it funny that adults think Nancy’s so confident and responsible that they don’t care that she too young to have a license.  She probably asked for the keys when she was eight and Carson Drew, because he’s not an over-indulgent dad, told her she had to wait until she was nine.  At any rate, not only does she look young, but she is surrounded by boys who look and act younger.  Ned, who in the books is a college man, looks to be about the age when a guy buys his first razor, not to actually shave with, but just in case.  And the other guy in her life, her smart-alecky sidekick Corky, looks even younger.  I don’t know if the producers decided to cast Roberts in the expectation that they were beginning a series and they wanted a Nancy Drew who would make a plausible high school student for at least six more years of sequels or if they were deliberately eliminating from their movie any hint of real sexual tension.

Which makes me wonder again who this movie was made for?  If sex has to be taken out of the question, then the audience must be assumed to be children too young to be thought able to deal with it, and if the audience is that young, third and fourth graders, then it probably doesn’t include a lot of readers of the Nancy Drew mysteries.

If the audience is older, the right age for Nancy Drew, fifth and sixth and, maybe, seventh graders, then it still may not include a lot of fans of Nancy Drew, but it probably includes a lot of fans of Harry Potter, and one thing J.K. Rowling has never shied away from was her characters’, and so her readers’, developing sexuality.

In other words, I think the movie sells its intended audience short all around and at the same time deflects any of Nancy’s non-fans who go see it from rushing out and discovering the joys of reading the books.

Cross-posted at my place.