Artistic License

I recently saw the movie The Maze Runner, one of the many film adaptations to come out of the avalance of post-apocalyptic dystopian fiction novels aimed at Young Adult audiences that followed in the wake of the success of the Hunger Games franchise. I'd read The Maze Runner already, and while the book honestly didn't do it for me, I knew the movie would be much more entertaining. It wasn't a groundbreaking film, but it was enjoyable enough.

This was the funny thing, though: While watching the movie, I felt that it would be especially enjoyable for the young adult readers who made it popular in the first place. But then I realized that the reason I was enjoying the movie so much was because of the places it chose to deviate from the original story. And this made me think that if I was a teenage fan of the book, and watched the movie, I might be devastated at the things they changed.

This is something I've encountered quite a lot, particularly because of the Harry Potter films. Growing up with those books and watching them come to life on the big screen was a simultaneously delightful and horrifying experience. The first movie was an absolute joy--it felt like I was actually in Hogwarts. My little preteen brain could hardly handle the excitement. But as the series continued, and the books became more complex, the movies started to suffer. Badly. Very, very badly.

At first I attributed this to the fact that the bad movies just didn't follow the books. Everything wrong with the movies was wrong because that wasn't how it happened in the book. This was a simple idea, and it stubbornly lodged itself in my mind for years. And to an extent, it's still true; many of the things that suck about the movies are things that deviate from the source material.

But, to borrow a popular phrase from the vlogbrothers, the truth resists simplicity. Saying "the movies are bad because they deviate from the books" assumes that the books are perfect. And assuming that the source material is perfect is a dangerous way of thinking; it fosters a very troublesome art-consumer relationship, wherein the consumer places the art on a pedestal, as if on display at a museum, to be seen but never truly engaged. And that's troublesome.

And as I said earlier, one of the things I enjoyed most about Maze Runner was the way it didn't stick strictly to the book. Given that the movie is still new, I won't go into spoiler-y level of detail on this. But luckily, there are still tons of other examples of films where I found deviation to actually improve the story:

--In the movie HAIRSPRAY (released seven years ago, so I don't have qualms about spoiling this) the big buildup at the climax of the show is whether Tracy Turnblad or her rival Amber VonTussle will win the Miss Teenage Hairspray Pageant. As it turns out, it's neither: Little Inez, a young black girl, wins instead, and since the rules dictate that the winner will be the lead dancer on the TV show, this forces the show to integrate nonwhite dancers. But in the original Broadway show, Tracy wins, and just announces that the TV show will integrate, because apparently when you win a pageant you get to dictate that kind of thing. It's pure cheese. In fact, it makes you wonder why Inez is even a character, because in the Broadway show, she honestly doesn't do a whole lot. Even if both the movie and show are campy, having Inez win is a surprising, charming, and flat-out better ending.

--The Avengers was a huge hit. It was fun, exciting, and all the buildup Marvel had been doing with the individual hero movies (Iron Man, Captain America, etc.) really ended up paying off. Audiences loved it. I loved it! But it needs to be noted--the Avengers in this movie aren't the original Avengers from the comics. In the original Avengers you have Ant-Man and Wasp and stuff, and there's no Black Widow in sight. And that's the point. This movie wouldn't have benefited from having an Ant-Man. Sticking to the original would have been detrimental, in fact. The moviemakers made the right call here, using the source material as a launch pad to jump off to bigger and better things, rather than letting it drag them down for the sake of tradition.

--And even the Harry potter movies made good calls on shirking events from the books. In the first book, Harry follows Snape into the Forbidden Forest on his broomstick, hides out in a tree, and overhears Snape and Quirrel talking about Fluffy and the trapdoor. In the movie, the same conversation happens, but while Harry is fleeing the library under his Invisibility Cloak, forcing him to hide and making him discover the Mirror of Erised. In the book, it's not Ron, but Neville who joins Draco, Harry, and Hermione for detention in the forest, after they secretly give Norbert to Charlie in the astronomy tower. The movie doesn't waste its time here. It glides over these points so seamlessly that when you reread the first book, you forget that these weird things actually happened. It's much cleaner, and that's a definite improvement.

Even though it may have taken my brain a long time to admit it, deviation isn't always a bad thing. In fact, it can be fantastic. There are moments when artistic license is an overall improvement on the story, and it's amazing.

It's worth noting, too, that artistic license is inevitable. Books and movies and plays and comics are all vastly different mediums, and the stories have to change, at least a little bit, as they transfer from one medium to the other.

The problem is that a lot (and I do mean a lot) of the times a movie changes things from the original material are bad, bad, bad, bad choices. In the fourth Harry Potter movie, we don't get to see the Quidditch World Cup, which is certainly sad, but the World Cup doesn't advance the plot much, so I can make my peace with this decision. But what we do get is a horrible, overlong, absolutely soul-rending sequence where a dragon chases Harry around Hogwarts on his broomstick and the teachers do nothing about it. In Percy Jackson: The Lightning Thief nearly every single thing is different from the book, including the final bad guy. While it's nice they took out the weird 'twelve-year-old beats the God of War in a duel' thing, we also get stuck with an appalling plot thread where three kids try to find three magic pearls that can each transport one person out of the underworld, and then go into said underworld to rescue a fourth person and only then realize that they don't have enough freakin' pearls. And M. Night. Shyamalan's The Last Airbender is such a travesty that I can't even name all the problems with the things it changed.

And that's the thing: it's not just that things changed... it's that things changed and got replaced with crap.

(As a quick aside, it's fascinating to me that the director of the Percy Jackson movie and the director of the first two Harry Potter movies are the same guy. The first two Harry Potters are easily the most faithful book-to-film adaptations in the series, but it hardly feels like the people who made the Percy Jackson movie even read the original book.)

When it comes right down to it, changes are done because movies are made for a broader audience. They're not made for the fans of the books, they're made for everyone. Moviemakers are aware that they can't make the movie too complicated because the viewers who have never read the book would get confused. The problem is just when they dumb it down too much and eliminate the things that made fans become fans in the first place. Then the audience thinks the movie is dumb, and that the books are probably dumb too, and the original fans are stuck begging everyone else to please please please read the books because the story is actually really good, we promise, just give it a shot, but of course the non-fans already saw the movie, so why bother with the book, and everyone goes home unhappy.

If I was a teen now, and I had fallen in love with the Maze Runner books, I'm honestly not sure how I'd feel about the things they changed. Maybe I'd cling to the books and cry foul, or maybe I'd be able to see things more objectively and notice how things were improved. The movie adaptation of my favorite musical, Into the Woods, is coming out soon, and I'll be the first to admit that I've probably put that show on a pedestal. It's tough to be objective about things you love, and I have to remind myself that there's no value in blindly accepting originals as untouchable, unchangeable perfection. Moviemakers need to be careful about the things they change. They need to take the time to truly scrutinize the source material, and if they need to alter it, those choices have to be deliberate, artistic, and justifiable. But fans need to be careful too. Writers are frequently told to 'murder their darlings.' No matter how much they love something, sometimes it has to be cut for the sake of the story. The story is what matters. Which means that fans have to truly engage with the things they love so much, just as much as moviemakers. Sometimes we have to be okay with watching our darlings get murdered.

Tricking Your Body

Your body doesn't know anything.

This concept took me a little while to learn, but it's perfectly true. Your brain is fully aware that you're sitting at a computer reading a blog, but your body has no idea. All it knows is that you're sitting down and that it's comfortable and that you're wearing clothes. Hopefully.

This concept, that your body has no idea what's going on around it, has probably been the most important lesson for me in terms of fitness. Because it teaches you how your body thinks. And it lets you trick it.

Let's take the example of excess body fat. This is by far the most frequent fitness complaint. People like trim waistlines, so extra fat, especially around the stomach, can really distress people. But here's something to keep in mind, that can help ease that distress: when your body has excess fat, it's being nice to you. 

Even though you know where your next meal is coming from, your body doesn't have a clue. It doesn't know you have food stored somewhere. It thinks the last time you ate could actually be the last time you eat. So it has its own storage system. If you eat a lot of food, and your body doesn't need to use all the energy from that food right away, it's gonna hold onto that extra energy for you. Just in case. If the zombie apocalypse happens and food becomes scarce, it's got some energy stored up you can use.

That's really the key to all this: your body isn't trying to be a supermodel, it's trying to stay alive. Any meal could be your last. It only wants to use energy if it absolutely has to, because holding onto those extra calories might help you if you start to starve. It's not gonna burn away that extra energy unless you make it.

That's how you can trick your body when you work out. You have to realize that your body doesn't know you're in a gym. If you start lifting weights, it has no idea what you're lifting. All it knows is "OH S*** THIS IS REALLY HEAVY GOTTA LIFT GOTTA LIFT GOTTA LIFT!" If you go running, it doesn't know the difference between running on a treadmill and running away from a saber-toothed tiger. It just knows it's running, and lets your brain handle all that complicated "why" stuff.

Your body also doesn't know that all of this Working Out stuff is otional. It thinks its lifting a heavy weight because it has to to stay alive. If it doesn't lift the Heavy Thing, the Heavy Thing will fall on you, and that will be incredibly, incredibly painful. And your body really doesn't want that. Because your body likes being a body. It likes being alive. It likes Not Being In Pain. 

So you keep lifting the Heavy Thing. You go higher and higher weights. But eventually your muscles get tired. They can't lift the Heavy Thing anymore. Which signals DANGER DANGER DANGER in your body. Your body's like "WTF MUSCLES, YOU HAVE ONE JOB." But they clearly can't go on lifting the Heavy Thing. Which is a big problem for your body. It doesn't like that. Because it's worried now. What if you had had to lift a Heavier Thing? Or an Even Heavier Thing? It would have failed. The Even Heavier Thing would have fallen on you. It could have injured you. And that goes against the Not Being In Pain rule, which is just absolutely unacceptable. So your body tells your muscles to grow. To get bigger. Because it got lucky this time with the Heavy Thing. But next time it could be a Heavier thing, and your body wants to be ready. 

(This is also true for running. Your body thinks its running away from a Fast Thing, but what if next time it's an Even faster Thing? It's gotta get stronger to stay alive!)

This is how your body thinks. It hasn't got a clue what's really going on, so take advantage of it. Trick your body into thinking that it has to get stronger and faster, because if it doesn't, the Heavy Thing might fall on you. If it doesn't, the saber-toothed tiger will catch up to you and eat you. it's not easy, but damn, it's a lot of fun.