Although Klein’s Ernessa bears some similari- ties to Carmilla, she is not the charming con-artist of the novella, but rather, with her stiff formality and her precise, antiquated speech, an alien pres- ence whose inhumanity simultaneously renders her at once more distant and yet more sympathetic. Although she glides through the narrative as a ci- pher, the one thing that almost all of the charac- ters can agree upon is that Ernessa is thoroughly unlikable. But the muted revulsion they feel toward her stems not from her callous indifference nor from any perception of malevolence—as even the narrator, who asserts that she is the cause of the deaths at the school, questions whether human notions of good and evil can be applied to a crea- ture that is alone in the world. Rather, it is Ernessa’s intangible “otherness” that makes her an intoler- able presence, as it prevents the girls from em- ploying her as a reflection of themselves. Ironically, the only fully mutual interpersonal connection de- picted in the novel is the one between Ernessa (who is also revealed to be Jewish and a fellow victim of anti-Semitic persecution at the school) and the narrator, suggesting that it is she, not Lucy, whom the vampire desires as her future companion—a suggestion made explicit in the climax of Mary Harron’s misguided cinematic adaptation. Harron, as the director of I SHOT ANDY WAR-
HOL and AMERICAN PSYCHO, had already proven herself remarkably skilled both at depicting patho- logical obsession and adapting an “unfilmable” novel which, like DIARIES, is also told from the first- person perspective of an unreliable narrator. Thus, she would appear to have been the ideal candidate to bring Klein’s novel to the screen. Unfortunately, her adaptation is a ruinous mishandling of the material that dilutes a complex novel for adults into a flashy “after-school special” on the dangers of bad influences. In Harron’s film, the narrator (Sa- rah Bolger) is given the name Rebecca (the sole indication of her Judaism), the setting is modern- ized, the characters are glammed up to resemble fashion models, and Ernessa (Lily Cole)—who now sports a British accent—is here reduced to the sta- tus of a malevolent Wednesday Adams who goads the other students into drug abuse, vandalism, anorexia, and suicide. Although some token con- cessions are made to the Klein’s depiction of the narrator as unreliable and potentially mentally ill, Harron unfortunately deviates from Rebecca’s point of view on a number of occasions, thus privileging the camera with an omniscient perspective that leaves no room for doubt once the supernatural events are depicted. The presence of a multicultural cast eliminates any depiction of Rebecca and
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Ernessa’s shared burden as cultural outcasts in an anti-Semitic subculture—one of the cornerstones of the novel—suggesting instead that Ernessa is drawn to Rebecca simply because they share a similar family tragedy and both “look alike.” Fur- thermore, Mr. Davies’ (Scott Speedman) romantic overtures toward Rebecca—initially portrayed as predatory in the novel and thus serving as an alter- nate explanation for the deaths on campus—are here depicted as simply an awkward crush that serves only as a testament to Rebecca’s beauty and intelligence.
The film’s most profound failure, however, is found in the numerous changes made to Klein’s ending, which not only eliminate all possible doubt about Ernessa’s vampirism, but also justify the adolescent narcissism that the novel decries. The film offers as its climactic “shock reveal” Rebecca’s sudden realization that it is she, not Lucy, whom Ernessa has targeted to become her companion, thus transforming her assaults on the other stu- dents from the acts of self-preservation depicted in the novel to a ploy to isolate Rebecca and there- fore foment the suicide that will transform her into one of the undead. It is this realization—not her anger over Lucy’s victimization—that here spurs Rebecca to burn Ernessa to ashes in her hidden lair, culminating in a conclusion that finds Rebecca glowing in triumph as she watches Ernessa’s spirit released to the verdant pastures of the afterlife, while she herself assuredly throws her razor blade out of an open car window, having freed herself from her suicidal impulses. What is particularly galling about this ending is not simply its saccha- rine perversion of the source material, but rather its celebratory reassurance that Rebecca, all along, had really been the girl that everyone wanted. As every adolescent girl so desperately wants to believe, it really is all about her.
Before concluding the discussion of THE MOTH DIARIES, it is important to note that the ending of Klein’s novel reveals a subplot that Harron (as well as many readers and reviewers) misses entirely—one that casts a new light not only on the narrative that precedes it, but also on Le Fanu’s source material. While Le Fanu’s CARMILLA offers numerous subtle clues that Carmilla and Laura share the same sexual ori- entation, Klein goes one better by subtly reveal- ing in the very last line of the adult narrator’s epilogue that the adolescent narrator was her- self a vampire in a larval state. In fact, this rev- elation is so easily missed that Klein earlier has the narrator offer a clue that the novel must be reread from the beginning to fully grasp its
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