If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t Adapt It

A Paper Towns movie? Have I heard these digital whispers correctly? It seems I have. Of course, not every movie deal that gets hand-shook ends up seeing the light of day, and we have yet to see how The Fault in Our Stars, another adaptation of a John Green novel produced by the same people reportedly putting together Paper Towns, goes when it hits cinemas in June. Still, my air of dubiousness has been, regret to say, riled up again on the subject of book-to-movie adaptations. Here we go again, friends.

My number one gripe about this industry is making movies of books not because they would make good movies, but because the book is popular. The fans are calling wistfully for a moving picture adaptation to bring their beloved vision to life. The Hollywood moguls see a potential project to cash in on. Everyone wants to see a book they enjoyed come to life, but the wall that train of thought runs into is that the movie that it becomes will never be the one you saw in your head while reading it, simply because sometimes the magic of a novel comes from the medium it’s in. A good book does not always make a good movie.

At one end of the spectrum (let’s look to YA, because that’s the big market at the moment it seems) we have The Hunger Games, which made awesome movies that are almost complementary to if not more enjoyable at times than the novels. They worked because of the action-packed nature of the plot (though people in the “why do we have to watch her sitting in a goddamn tree” school of thought will disagree with me there) and the quick, snappy style it’s written in, helped by the fact the novels were structured like a screenplay with a three-act framework Suzanne Collins picked up from being a scriptwriter. A quieter, more introspective novel like Paper Towns that revolves around everyday teenagers is immediately not blockbuster fuel. It’s a good book, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to make a good movie, in fact, in making a movie of that you might lose a good chunk of what exactly makes it good in the first place.

Dreamgirls Decoded

The Manic Pixie Dream Girl is a sweet member of the character archetype class, the girl that sits in the middle of the room blowing bubbles with her gum, drawing all over her notebooks and resting her colourful tight-clad legs on the desk. At least until the bell rings, then she flings herself from her seat and into the befuddled arms of her resident love interest. Bonus points if she does so while singing, or exits through the classroom window.

She means well but she’s a problem student, mostly because she’s more about freedom of expression than logic and wants to have class outside all the time. A factor also affecting her school performance is her unwavering devotion to her love interest… and the fact that she really can’t possibly exist.

Now, Manic Pixie Dream Girl is a name-of-shame too often slapped on the wrong people, but this is not a post that aims to point the finger and tack the accusation onto female characters who dare to act free-spirited and quirky. It’s also not a post that complains about the archetype, whatever it may be called, because I’ve done that already. It is, however, a post that rejoices over the general acknowledgement that the trope itself is deeply flawed and shallow.

What respect and logic is there, after all, in a character that exists purely to fulfil a fantasy (be it male or otherwise)? Continuing with my business of finally getting my butt around to watching recommended movies that came out ages ago, I viewed Ruby Sparks recently—a story about a man who literally conjures up his dream girl, and then has to work out what to do with her. Suffering from severe writer’s block, Calvin starts tapping out drabbles about the adventures of a wondrous, eccentric, bubbly, artistic character named Ruby and the man she’s falling in love with, who Calvin shyly admits ‘has a lot of me in him’.

Things get interesting when Ruby appears without explanation from anyone (including the cosmos and the movie writers) in Calvin’s kitchen, eating his cereal and wearing his shirt and acting as though they’re in a long-term relationship. Once he figures out that he isn’t losing his mind and other people can not only see but interact with Ruby, he’s left with a dilemma. What do you do when your dream girl becomes reality?

Why We Like Fiction That Makes Us Le Miserable

I dreamed a dream and then I diiiiiiiiiiied

When discussing the finalists of a local writing competition, my companion had to point out to me “All the ones that are getting the most points are the ones where horrible things happen.”

True enough, a lot of the finalist stories included themes of death, regret, depression, suicide, madness and other weighty topics, and none of them really seemed to propose that the characters therein or the reader would be having a great fun time. Why were they getting awards, then, she wondered? What drove the judges to stamp their acclaim on the fiction that had broken their heart?

I think this is The Newbery Medal Effect at work, a rule that simply states “If there’s some sort of award sticker on the cover, somebody in the book must die.” If something has gotten acclaim, critical or otherwise, one must assume that at some point it’s going to rip out the audiences’ hearts and grind them under its figurative heels.

I mean, look at my recent escapades into fiction, for crying out loud. I’m waiting patiently for the third season of Game of Thrones, a series notorious for hooking its audience and then pulling the rug of emotional stability out from underneath them. In the words of Mark Oshiro, who inspired this whole ‘consume media and then screech about it eloquently on the internet’ thing in the first place, I am not prepared. And I’ve read the third book, on which it is based, so I know what’s going to happen. This should make me doubly terrified for the trauma that is to come, but really I’m just doubly excited. I am voluntarily waltzing towards emotional pain of both myself and George R. R. Martin’s characters.

Alright Alex, you ask now, is that it? Are you a sadist? Do you like watching people suffer? The answer is that when it comes to fiction we are all sadists by default, because without a certain degree of Schadenfreude in the creators and the audience we wouldn’t have a fiction industry to begin with.

I’m Just a Teenage Hero, Baby

Sometimes books are a niche interest, but there are some that everyone has heard of: and at the moment those that have achieved this success of world-renown-ment are Harry Potter, The Hunger Games and Twilight… which funnily enough are all series aimed at the young adult market.

Some may ponder this most academically: why have these teen books become so hugely successful? Some others may fling the obvious answer back at them: they are engrossing stories that have captured the attention and imagination of an audience, an audience that extends well beyond the interest in struggles of teenagers stuck in fantasy or sci-fi settings.

There is in fact a large market for adolescent literature because, contrary to some belief, teenagers aren’t all spending their time popping shots and getting freaky and doing totally radical ollies in the skate park and they do read. And when they do read, they seek out stories that they can see themselves reflected in and relate to.

Those crazed youth. Just look at them!

Rollercoaster That Only Goes Up: Alex Reads John Green

The tempest may have passed now, but a few months ago you couldn’t move very far on the intertubes without catching some whiff of John Green. Aside from the YouTube show he shares with his brother, his name was very present about the place mostly due to the fact that he’d recently torn the hearts out of over 150 000 young people.

His most recent, most ambitious and in my opinion best novel is The Fault in Our Stars, and it’s responsible for the aforementioned 150 000 tear-stained faces. Now that may be enough to put you off — generally speaking, people don’t like to be sad. I was reluctant to open the book for this reason but I’m glad I did, and that’s lucky, because from the first page I was whisked into the little world he’s created with no escape in sight.