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What makes a story compelling? Is it the characters, setting, or events? Overall it’s a combination. How the story is delivered is an essential part of the equation.
Books leave readers to imagine how characters and settings look, while movies use many senses to immerse the audience in the world.
Making a film adaptation is challenging because filmmakers and authors use different tools to captivate their audience.
What is a film adaptation?
Making a film adaptation means changing a written story to a screenplay and then a film. Notable examples of film adaptations are To Kill a Mockingbird, Little Woman, and Romeo and Juliet.
Making film adaptations involve filmmakers interpreting what the author envisioned the characters and settings to be.
The descriptions of characters or settings help readers imagine their individual versions of characters. The film, however, needs to translate the essence of the characters and the story to appeal to a mass audience.
The first phase of making a film adaptation
Writing is an essential part of making a film adaptation. Before a director is hired and actors are cast, writers create a screenplay. When translating a book to film, a foundation is laid by describing the settings and characters.
The film’s authenticity can only be achieved by writers who understand the original story’s nuances. The screenplay for Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012) was written by the book’s author. It featured Charlie’s mental health issues as the main focus, particularly dramatizing what his “bad place” really feels like visually.
There was a choice not to include the deeper subplots of domestic violence and rape. Subplots in films often lack the time for development afforded by novels.
Perks of Being a Wallflower sets an example.
The importance of authenticity in film adaptations
Perks of Being a Wallflower’s authenticity avoids reinforcing the stigma that labels people with mental health issues as crazy. They’re just misunderstood.
According to Henderson, “Stigma is thus a product of social interaction between the normal and the stigmatized.
During the process of stigmatization, people with mental illness are distinguished and labeled.
Individuals who display certain characteristics which are culturally defined as deviant thus become linked to undesirable features (labeled) and open to discrimination.”
On the one hand, a diagnosis can validate your life experience and help you find your people.
On the other hand, it can also ostracize you from people who don’t understand that part of you. Self-acceptance involves embracing yourself as a whole, not just one particular label.
Making a successful film adaptation consists in understanding the meaning behind the text. Perks of Being a Wallflower has the advantage of being written by the novel’s author. But making a film adaptation involves many actors and directors interpreting the story.
There has recently been an increase in onset of mental illness among young people due partly to the increasing use of social media and increased awareness. Perks of Being a Wallflower facilitated an open dialogue about so many important topics when they weren’t as visible in the media.
Henderson notes an overuse of the medical model in stories about mental health, presenting medication as the only solution for everyone.
Many people find help and can live happy lives with therapy and lifestyle changes. A complete mental health breakdown is unnecessary to get the help you need.
Book Vs. Movie audiences
The media we consume is a primary channel of education. The interviews Henderson collected from mental health consultants recognized that some characters do an excellent job of not sensationalizing mental health issues.
They are presented as part of a person, not sensationalized as hot, juicy gossip material.
It often needs to be made clear what struggles people face. Refrain from judging a book by its cover.
Treatment is never one size fits all. The media tends to pick a solution that is the most compelling in some way.
In the book Perks of Being a Wallflower, Charlie sees a psychiatrist and has been “brought to the doctors” since his Aunt Helen died.
Charlie’s breakdown from thinking he killed his Aunt Helen since she died in a car crash on the way to picking up his birthday present is visceral.
After that breakdown in the novel, Charlie is implied to end up in the psych hospital. There is an epilogue for describing how much he enjoyed his friends visiting him, which is the right message to leave with the reader.
There is strength in friendship/community. Making a film adaptation as true to the novel as Perks of Being a Wallflower is rare. Its success comes down to whether the story is compelling.
The film uses different tools in embellishing the writing by engage more senses. Making a film adaptation successful also involves appealing to a wider audience, where film adaptations risk losing the nuance and deeper meaning of the text in favor of creating spectacles.
Source
Lesley Henderson (2018) Popular television and public mental health: creating media entertainment from mental distress, Critical Public Health, 28:1, 106-117, DOI: 10.1080/09581596.2017.1309007