LitPop’s Fall Writing Challenge: What’s the Most Interesting Book to TV or Movie Adaptation?
Here at LitPop, we’re always looking for intriguing literature-popular culture crossovers. This fall, we solicit articles that focus in particular on adaptations: books adapted into movies or TV or theater, movies or TV shows that spawn “novelizations,” and everything in between.
Those adaptations might be good, bad, so bad they’re good. Or they might just be interesting. After all, a literary critic can take just about anything and find something interesting: what the text reveals about the culture that made or consumed it, what ideological concerns speak through the text, why the text is exactly the way it is. And sometimes the mediation that takes place between source text and adaptation can bring to light exactly what’s interesting about a book, or a movie, or a TV show.
Take World War Z, for example. The book, by Max Brooks, was okay, certainly not a new classic but mildly entertaining. Then I suffered through the movie on an airplane. The movie was truly, truly terrible, but what saved the whole experience for me was the bizarre tension between the book and the movie. The book is a not-terribly-well-done experiment in collective narration, something that has since been done in a much more interesting way by Chang-Rae Lee in On Such a Full Sea. There are no main characters, and the through-line of the narrative is self-consciously global. The novel tries very hard not to reveal a hero, not to focus on one nuclear family. Instead, it moves constantly across the globe, juxtaposing stories from very different places, telling stories not just of individuals but of mass population groups.
The movie completely undid all of these narrative choices, focusing instead on the story of one heroic dude who has to save his family. And yes, that hero is literally Brad Pitt. Yes, he’s a United Nations employee — the movie tries to make him global and collective in that fashion. But no: he’s still one guy, and a textbook action hero at that.
In this tension between book and movie, we can see the ideological problems involved in telling stories that are not about individuals, that resist the hero-saves-the-day formula. To make a leap that these few paragraphs have totally not earned, I think that this example has something to tell us about why it’s so difficult for Americans to think and talk about climate change, which is not compatible with heroic, individualist narratives.
So, PNW community: write and think for us. We welcome your submissions on all literature-and-culture related topics, at all times, but this fall, we are particularly excited to see submissions about adaptations. Write about what you liked, what was terrible, what made you think about the book differently. Write about bad adaptations, good ones, ones that are so bad they’re good. Anything goes — just make an interesting point, keep us reading, and use multimedia content to engage your audience.
Submit your article to us before Halloween and promote your work on social media. The author of our most-read article will win and a copy of Ready Player One, generously donated by Green Door Books in Hobart, IN.
Having trouble focusing your piece? Start with an idea that fills in these blanks (but of course, you don’t have to use the template in your draft):
________ is an excellent (terrible, or otherwise noteworthy) adaptation because _______, _______, and _______
