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Z: The Beginning of Everything

2016; Penn State University Press; Volume: 14; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/fscotfitzrevi.14.1.249

1755-6333

Rabon Pennington,

American Literature and Humor Studies

In adapting Therese Anne Fowler's fictional biography Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald (2013) into the pilot episode of a potential “bio-series” for Amazon.com's television streaming service, the veteran creative team of producer/writers Nicole Yorkin and Dawn Prestwich, along with director Tim Blake Nelson, faced enormous critical skepticism from literary scholars and Fitzgerald enthusiasts alike. In their choices of casting and filming locations for Z: The Beginning of Everything, as the series is titled, the team effectively wins over doubters concerned about thirty-five-year-old actress Christina Ricci's ability to inhabit the blonde and bold role of a teenage Zelda Sayre, as well as the capacity of Savannah, Georgia, to stand in for early-twentieth-century Montgomery, Alabama. This initial episode introduces audiences to the already infamous seventeen-year-old daughter of the South through many biographically accurate anecdotes. It also sets up promising plot conflicts in the tumultuous legacy of the Fitzgeralds that will be explored in the first complete season, which was ordered into production shortly after the pilot was released online on 27 November 2015. Those ten episodes will cover 1918–21 and are scheduled for release on Amazon.com in February 2017.In this episode's opening shot, a close-up of a bright pink, feathered shoe dominates the increasingly visible scene of rubble as the camera zooms out—undoubtedly a foreshadowing of Zelda's tragic death in Asheville, North Carolina, in 1948. By choosing to begin the series with a clue to Zelda Fitzgerald's passing, Yorkin and Prestwich effectively encompass the duality of the title quotation to which this prologue eventually dissolves as it ushers in the opening credits: “I love her and that's the beginning and end of everything,” a line drawn from F. Scott Fitzgerald's February 1920 letter to Isabelle Amorous (Bruccoli and Duggan 53). Nonetheless, the decision to precede this line with a voiceover of Zelda reciting a quotation from The Beautiful and Damned as the camera zooms out from the feathered shoe—“Things are sweeter when they're lost. I know—because once I wanted something and got it. It was the only thing I ever wanted badly…. And when I got it it turned to dust in my hands” (B&D 283)—initially seems problematic for a series that aims to emphasize Zelda as an “icon of modern feminism,” not as an extension of her husband's legacy. By presenting Zelda through the lens of her spouse, however, the show runners humbly attest to the way most audiences are initially introduced to her extraordinary persona—through studies of her husband's work and life. By quickly cutting to a close-up of Ricci as Zelda, and then zooming out to a lower camera angle that portrays her as towering and dominant, the prologue communicates the intention of the series to draw Zelda's legacy out from the shadow of her husband's, while still paying tribute to that shadow as an essential and irremovable part of Zelda's story. By appeasing the audience with this introduction, Z is then able to assure its acceptability through the following scenes of Zelda's defiance and independence.Ricci's ability to project the zest of Zelda's personality gains momentum throughout the episode. While the blonde hair certainly helps the audience abandon the veil of reality, Ricci's Southern drawl—with her consistent pronunciation of the diphthong [aI] as a shortened [a] in words like “why”—appeases Southern audiences familiar with the sounds of old Alabama. Furthermore, Yorkin and Prestwich's very loose adaptation of Fowler's novel, which itself is fragilely based on Nancy Milford's 1970 biography, gives ample opportunity for establishing the conflict between Zelda's character and those who interact with her. In one newly invented scene, Zelda steps into a Montgomery boutique to shop for dresses in a way that recalls Julia Roberts's memorable experiences on Rodeo Drive in the 1990 film Pretty Woman. Although Roberts's scene portrays her as a scantily clad escort shopping for conservative clothing, Z flips this trope, dramatizing Zelda's two-fold personality as both a Southern belle and a rebellious flapper by dressing her quite conservatively while emphasizing the cashier's doubt that it would be appropriate for her to wear a revealing dress. When the cashier asks, “Are you sure your Momma would let you wear a dress that short?” the audience—which sees a naked Zelda dive into a pond in the prologue—knows that Zelda will wear what she pleases, despite her mother's insistence on corsets and stockings. Though brief, this interaction reveals the many assumptions Zelda faced as an aspiring flapper in the South.The most stirring scenes of conflict, however, involve Zelda's relationship with her father, played by David Strathairn. In the two most significant scenes between Zelda and Judge Sayre, his stern condemnation of her behavior resonates as heavy but futile as Zelda ascends the stairs in both shots—a physical representation of her desire to transgress the strict parental boundaries she battled in her coming-of-age experiences. After Judge Sayre instigates Zelda's removal from the dinner table, director Nelson cuts to the first shot of F. Scott Fitzgerald, portrayed by Gavin Stenhouse,1 a close-up that features a voiceover from a typical, slow-speaking Southern belle sharing the notion that her “Daddy doesn't appreciate you Yankees swarming downtown like a bunch of locusts.” If David Mamet's film theory insists on telling the story through cuts (2), then Nelson certainly uses this transition effectively to set up the later tension between Judge Sayre and his future son-in-law. Tellingly, on the climactic night Fitzgerald meets Zelda at the Montgomery Country Club dance, his carefully staged position behind and between the shoulders of Zelda's parents represents the many parental and social obstacles he will have to overcome to marry their daughter.In setting up the couple's first meeting, the show's creators make fruitful use of Theodore Dreiser's novel Sister Carrie (1900) as a symbol of their compatibility. In Fitzgerald's first scene, his portrayal as a cigarette-smoking, gin-drinking, Dreiser-reading Princeton man dramatizes his early influences. When he boldly tells the two Southern belles sitting across from him that the novel is about a girl who “flees the country life for Chicago and falls into a wayward life of sin in the corrupt city,” his smirk communicates both his and the audience's knowledge that neither of the women present would ever be that girl. (Their response when asked their favorite book: “The Bible.”) The audience soon recognizes that Zelda might be able to fulfill this role when she tells Private Lloyd Harper that she wants to leave Montgomery for “Baltimore, Philadelphia, [or] someplace that's not the South … someplace that's shiny and new and not obsessed with the past.” This conversation with Lloyd, a sentimental nod to a conversation between Sally Carrol Happer and Clark Darrow in “The Ice Palace” (F&P 36–60), serves to connect Zelda's desires to Scott's description of Dreiser's characterization of Carrie. Beyond this hint of the pair's eventual romance, both the mid-episode shot of Zelda reading Sister Carrie and her disregard for “the Montgomery set of boys” for not having read any books confirm the compatibility of her interests and Scott's. When the two catch each other's glances at the dance, Zelda appeals to Scott by blatantly kissing her dance partner as an evocation of jealousy—a typical Zelda move for all familiar with her reputation. By ending the episode with Scott's interception of Zelda at the dance, Yorkin, Prestwich, and Nelson prove that there is much romance and drama to be expected in the coming installments of this series.Ultimately, the establishment of significant plot points and the rising action in this short episode leave audiences eager to follow the development of both Zelda's character and the early chapters of the Fitzgeralds' love story. While Savannah serves as a convincing Southern backdrop, future episodes would undoubtedly benefit from the avoidance of recognizable sites—such as the Wesley Monumental Methodist church and the Massie School—if continuity is to be more fully achieved. Still, Fitzgerald enthusiasts should find satisfaction in the inclusion of an overwhelming number of biographical anecdotes in this first episode: Lloyd Harper's character (a representation of Lloyd Hopper) joins Mrs. Sayre's mention of Leon Ruth, Dan Cody, John Sellers, and Peyton Mathis as men who courted Zelda during her Montgomery days; Zelda's inscription in her journal that reads, “Momma says conflict develops the character,” clearly makes use of a famous line from Save Me the Waltz (Collected Writings 174); and even Zelda's ballet costume in the episode's closing scenes functions as a representation of the outfit she wore in the frequently reproduced photographs of her in front of her mother's rosebushes on Pleasant Avenue. This careful attention to detail and biographical accuracy establish the series as a reputable portrayal of one of literature's most intriguing couples; as the series continues, the development of the conflict and stories established here will certainly amplify the voice and prominence of Zelda Sayre's role in creating the Fitzgerald legacy, as Fowler's novel has already so effectively done.