Ramping up for my summer Lit and Film class I’ve been doing a case study of the adaptation of Wayward Pines from the novel to the small screen. Wayward Pines is an important novel in the way that Hugh Howey’s Dust is important. It is written by an independent author and published without the help of the big book companies. The book’s author, Blake Crouch, is presently #6 on Amazon’s top 100 where he remains one of the handful in the top 20 not writing about billionaire bad boys, vampires, or some combination of the two. Crouch approached the book with a vision and sold that vision to Fox. What did they do with it? Well, lets find out.
Authenticity is an important aspect of that translation (adaptation) from book to film. I am the type of person who believes the film ought to be authentic to the text. I define authenticity as carrying forward the literary position (deeper point) of the text and remaining loyal to the general plot. For example, if Game of Thrones the TV show decided that they were going to eliminate whole characters from the chorus–perhaps narrowing the Stark siblings to only two for the purpose of telling a narrative they have the time to tell or the most important (as they see it) aspects of the narrative.
Wayward Pines is literature in the sense of a piece of work tackling larger ideas through a character-driven narrative. My fear of the adaptation is that the sense of the larger ideas is lost in the visual pursuit of suspense-building and misdirection. On the one hand the larger meaning of the town of Wayward Pines is made obvious through quick visuals that give away far more than the novel does at that point in the story. In other words, the book deals with some real issues and the show trades in that conversation for suspense and moments of heightened drama.
The story isn’t over. I’ll continue following along and wondering if the effort is worth the time…
Some Thoughts:
- Whats crazy is that I thought today was friday and thought I’d somehow missed a night of posting… Not going into the office everyday makes me lose touch with reality quite fast.
- In 1841 the slaves who freed the Amistad were themselves freed, despite calls for their extradition to spanish authorities. It is an important step towards civil rights, especially considering that the slaves were defended by none other than John Quincy Adams.