Pygmalion2.0034_KazanDayton

Pygmalion2.0034_KazanDayton

imdb
OGCMA s.v. "Pygmalion"
Classical Sources:
Ovid Met. 10.243-98
Apollodorus Libr. 3.14.3

Zoe Kazan (screenplay) and Jonathon Dayton (director), Ruby Sparks (Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2012).

Summary: "A novelist struggling with writer's block finds romance in a most unusual way: by creating a female character he thinks will love him, then willing her into existence." (IMDB)

NYT review 24Jul2012. Ruby is one of those "characters who could have been created only by women." Is this story better than its forebears for being written by a woman?

Normally I would credit the director as auteur, but this adaptation of the Pygmalion myth is clearly so writerly, and the role of Zoe Kazan is clearly so prominent in reviews and in the credits, that here she gets the indexing privilege — i.e. "OGCMA...Kazan".

A man carrying a woman piggyback, with text reading "She's out of his mind" and falling letters around them

Is this an adaptation of Pygmalion or of My Fair Lady? Does the author know that this film belongs to the Pygmalion tradition? [The answer is YES: she mentions in reported interview.] Does it belong, if the author doesn't know... or admit knowing?

A good test-case for the smoking gun. Stephen Holden's NYT review mentions "Pygmalion Myth", but does Kazan know about it? Does it matter? Is Kazan's "Pygmalion" better for lacking overt allusion?

The Mythmatters blogpost may be too uptight. Maybe not.

Is this story better than its forebears for being written by a woman? Thanks to S. Collura for assistance on this slide.

OGCMA slides are designed by Roger T. Macfarlane for use in Classical Civilization 241 courses at Brigham Young University.
The present resource contains information assembled for The Oxford Guide to Classical Mythology in the Arts, 1400 – 1990’s, edited by J. Davidson Reid (Oxford 1994), and it is used with express permission from Oxford University Press.
Address concerns or inquiries to macfarlane@byu.edu.