Statement
I chose to adapt the book called Rebecca from the author Daphne du Maurier. I chose this material primarily because I saw the musical adaptation of this book and I really enjoyed it and I wanted to see how different is the book from the musical. I also chose this book because it wasn’t really scary and horrifying.
This material focuses on the inner fear that someone was or will be better than you and how much we care about other people’s opinions towards us. Also, it focuses on the different sides of our personality that we show to different people. The book is written in first perspective so we can only see the main character, “Me”, and her view about different people and their behavior towards her and Rebecca’s “perfect” personality. At the end of the book the main character finds out that these interpretations were wrong which suggest how misleading it could be to try to figure out someone trough other people.
I really enjoyed the storyline and all the twists that was in the book. The characters were well developed, the settings were detailed so it was really easy to imagine. Also I really liked all the psychological and sociological issues that were brought up through out the story. What I didn’t like about the book is the main character’s personality. She didn’t have self esteem, she did everything as others would like her to do and she never thought about herself. She pitied herself and didn’t believe in herself. The only two things she cared about was what others think about her and Rebecca. Through my adaptation I won’t change the character’s personality because the low self esteem plays a big role in the story. My plan for the adaptation is to bring the story to the XXI. century and make both characters to their twenties. As showing Rebecca, instead of other people’s opinions, I want her to be seen through her Instagram account. It would show how divergent is our real life versus our internet life. These changes wouldn’t change the message it would only be translated for the modern society.
The main theme that I want to focus in my adaptation is that how we show different behavior between different groups. It is really common to misunderstand a person only by looking at the surface. I think this is still really true in our society that we try to show our best to other people, mostly in the internet, and don’t want other people see our suffering. So we put up an “ideal life” to social sites so other people would think that we are happy. That is not healthy. What I would like other people to understand that what we see in Instagram, Facebook or any other sites are most likely not real, it is photoshopped or enlarged. It is necessary to have self-esteem, courage and the power to not care about other’s life and make our life as good as possible because we never know what happened behind the picture.