Nancy Drew

Nancy Drew is not just a product of the past, but of all possible pasts since 1930. Conceived as a marketing gimmick and penned by a long chain of ghost writers, Nancy’s clothes, speech, and surroundings have, through rewrites and re-printings, morphed repeatedly into their modern equivalents, whatever "modern" happened to mean at the time. As a result, everyone who read Nancy Drew as a teenager remembers their own Nancy, and they remember her being a product of their own time, because, literally, she was.

Setting this movie in the present, and making Nancy a cool teenager who’s perfectly at home in 2007, would risk alienating the four previous generations of Nancy Drew fans, each of whom remembers a Nancy who understood exactly what it was to be a sixteen year-old girl in their own time. And if you’re going to alienate those people, why even call your movie Nancy Drew?

On the other hand, releasing a film about a teenager living in a bygone era is a risky proposition. Will teenage audiences, so consumed with being modern themselves, pay to see it? Perennial classics like Jane Eyre are constantly remade for the screen, but those adaptations are aimed at college-educated folks (or teenagers who have been assigned the book at school). As a teenager, there’s nothing more annoying than seeing a cinematic depiction of teenagers that’s antiquated. It’s insulting and condescending. Teenagers want to see movies about characters like themselves, and timeliness is an important part of their identity.

Enter a subgenre of the "fish out of water" story: the cool kid from another time. Nancy is old-fashioned, but that’s what makes her so cool. Sure, she takes even the smallest academic tasks very seriously. Sure, she dresses in the way that pleases her, and not her peers. And yet, as the trailer spells out for us, she pulls it off. She gets the cute boy, the approval of the snobby salesgirl at the boutique, and the chance to save her friends’ lives. In essence, she fulfills a nearly universal fantasy: being a teenager and an adult at the same time.

At a more basic level, adult Nancy Drew readers who see this trailer will be given to understand that Nancy is still Nancy (whoever that is), unfazed by all the things crazy kids are doing these days. And teenage girls will be given to understand that here is a story about a misfit whose confidence in herself
makes her cool.

Also, the fact that Nancy diagetically moves to Hollywood parallels (and eases) her move from book to screen in the mind of the would-be-viewer.

Nancy Drew Trailer