Lupin (2021) in the shadow of Maurice Leblanc: the adaptation that wasn’t

Abstract

This essay analyzes the Netflix-produced French series Lupin dans l’ombre d’Arsène, showing the exhaustion of the fidelity question. In fact, the television show is not so much an updated transmediated retelling of one or more of the Leblanc stories, but rather tells the story of Assane Diop, interpreted by French actor Omar Sy. Inspired by Arsène Lupin’s methods, the character Assane Diop seeks revenge on a wealthy family who framed his father for the theft of an invaluable piece of jewelry. Examining the relationship between the series and the original Lupin novels, this essay shows the reinterpretation of a distant source corpus to align with a twenty-first-century French context. In many ways, Netflix’s Lupin is very different from the original text from the 1900s. Through a study of the reimaginings of Maurice Leblanc’s gentleman-cambrioleur, this essay thus highlights a type of adaptation that rests almost exclusively on form (how Lupin operates) rather than content (what his actions tell about contemporary society). This discussion of Netflix’s Lupin therefore challenges what adaptation means and the transmedial operations it supports. The anchoring strategy displayed in Lupin, which relies almost exclusively on canonical citations, in fact characterizes works that relate to an “original,” rather than retell a story in a new media form.