{"id":48661,"date":"2019-11-10T18:16:23","date_gmt":"2019-11-10T14:46:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nasimword.ir\/?p=48661"},"modified":"2019-11-10T18:16:23","modified_gmt":"2019-11-10T14:46:23","slug":"looking-for-alaska-is-the-rare-adaptation-that-improves-on-the-original","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nasimword.ir\/?p=48661&lang=en","title":{"rendered":"Looking for Alaska Is the Rare Adaptation That Improves on the Original"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Of all the challenges that come with adapting a book for the screen, the question of what to do with a book\u2019s narrator is often the most intractable. Third-person narrators can sometimes be translated into a camera eye without requiring major story compensations, but first-person narrators present a specific variety of trickiness, and adapting them can be either a huge boon or an inescapable mire. Their particular voice and perspective is yoked to how the story feels, and in the case of a book like John Green\u2019s novel Looking for Alaska, the narration by teen boy protagonist Miles \u201cPudge\u201d Halter is the book\u2019s greatest tool and its most obfuscating feature; Miles, as the main storyteller, simultaneously enacts and short-circuits the book\u2019s central ideas. Because of that trickiness, though, and because of the problems and opportunities of Looking for Alaska\u2019s story, Hulu\u2019s new miniseries adaptation is a rare thing, a screen adaptation where the chance to ditch the first-person protagonist is a real gift.<\/p>\n

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As a book, Looking for Alaska is a beautiful, poignant, and unsolvable puzzle. It\u2019s about Miles, played in the series by Charlie Plummer, who transfers to a high-school boarding school in Alabama and quickly falls in love with a girl named Alaska Young (Kristine Froseth). He makes friends, too, and he studies and tries to learn about life. He has a wise, old religion teacher. He gets into trouble. Miles and his new friends are bonded together through all the usual, indelible kinds of teenage rule-breaking. But throughout the novel, Miles continues to be in love with Alaska, and she continues to live in his mind as a gorgeous, unknowable sphinx, someone whose obvious pain only makes her more appealing, more exotic and mature.<\/p>\n

The idea of the book, the deep crux of it, is the tragedy of Miles\u2019s inability to see outside himself, the frustration that he can\u2019t ever envision Alaska as a real, human person. It\u2019s sad that Miles is so limited, and that\u2019s precisely the point. It\u2019s infuriating and wrong that Alaska can\u2019t tell her own story. But because Looking for Alaska is stuck inside Miles\u2019s head, because he\u2019s always the one telling the story, it\u2019s too easy for the whole novel to end up reenacting the exact kind of erasure it\u2019s trying to dramatize. To explain it in a way Alaska might appreciate, it\u2019s like the book builds a fascinating and intricate labyrinth, a maze meant to demonstrate something powerful about how we\u2019re all stuck inside our own heads. But in the process of constructing the maze, the book also seals itself inside.<\/p>\n

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All of that is why it\u2019s so compelling to watch Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage, the producing partnership behind shows like Gossip Girl and The O.C., dismantle Pudge as the driving narrative voice and turn him into the figure that Looking for Alaska seems to have always intended him to be. He\u2019s young, he\u2019s well-intentioned, he\u2019s inexperienced, he\u2019s often an idiot, and he is just one of many, many people who have a significant voice in this story.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a relief to watch a version of Looking for Alaska where Miles\u2019s beloved teacher Professor Hyde (played by Ron Cephas Jones) is more than just a magical mentor figure with nothing to do except offer enigmatic koans at the right moment. It\u2019s a relief to see the Eagle, the hard-ass school administrator with possibly just a sliver of humanity, played with such humor and tenderness and sincerity by Timothy Simons, whose effectiveness in the role is the only thing that keeps his glorious mustache from running away with every scene in which the Eagle appears.<\/p>\n

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I\u2019d say it\u2019s also a relief to see Chip (a.k.a. the Colonel) onscreen, played by relative newcomer Denny Love, except it\u2019s not a relief so much as it is revelatory. The Colonel is Miles\u2019s roommate, and in the book version of\u00a0Looking for Alaska<\/em>, he\u2019s smart and funny and spiky and yet still, inevitably, caught inside Miles\u2019s vision of the world. Onscreen, Love\u2019s Colonel is so great that he almost unbalances the whole thing. The things that happen to the Colonel, his relationship with Alaska, his life story, the depth of his grief, the messy webs of honor and inequity he\u2019s trying to navigate \u2014 all of it is so much more compelling than most of Miles\u2019s story that you can\u2019t help but wonder why exactly he\u2019s not the main character. It\u2019s as if\u00a0Looking for Alaska\u00a0<\/em>was cut loose from the anchor of Miles\u2019s narratorial voice and then swung in the direction of the strongest prevailing wind, drifting toward all the new, rich material the miniseries finds for the Colonel, and the charisma with which Love pulls it off.<\/p>\n

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There are two defining features of the Looking for Alaska miniseries, and Miles\u2019s absent narrative voice is the biggest and most crucial of them. It feels like a chance for the story to move closer to what it perhaps should\u2019ve been in the first place. The other big defining thing is the unmistakable, nostalgic Stephanie Savage\u2013Josh Schwartz\u2013iness of this show. It\u2019s a series based on a book published in 2005, developed for over a decade, and then finally produced in 2018\u20132019. It\u2019s about teens in 2005, made by a producing team who, with a show like The O.C., basically defined what TV teen-ness was in 2005. Now, watching it in 2019, there is a wash of nostalgia to it that feels purposeful and painful, often in a way that makes Looking for Alaska feel like it\u2019s straddling two distinct TV eras. It exists on a platform that didn\u2019t exist in 2005, it\u2019s obviously influenced by prestige TV aesthetics that didn\u2019t have the same foothold then, and much of the best of this series \u2014 especially everything that\u2019s been added to the original novel \u2014 is stuff that likely wouldn\u2019t have been a priority for a show made over a decade ago.<\/p>\n

But there are parts of Looking for Alaska that feel like the show is trying to go back and insert itself into the 2005 TV schedule and just hoping we all assume it\u2019s always been there. Its cell-phone-free innocence feels so distant from the world we now live in. It frames teen drinking and smoking as almost wholesome and mostly innocuous, in a way that feels markedly different than the drugged excesses of Euphoria. (Looking for Alaska doesn\u2019t suggest they\u2019re good, but it\u2019s a vision of teen debauchery that feels matter-of-fact rather than either celebratory or alarmist.) Most intensely, if you watched The O.C. or were a teen at the same time as those teens, the music choices in Looking for Alaska will throw you for a nostalgic loop so blatant and unapologetic that you\u2019ll either be rolling your eyes or sobbing, or possibly both. When a cue from the Postal Service spun up in Looking for Alaska\u2019s first episode, I had to pause and do some deep breathing.<\/p>\n

It means Looking for Alaska feels like a period piece that hasn\u2019t fully reckoned with itself as a period piece, and some of its nostalgic impulses feel out of step with how brutally, gorgeously sad it is. It\u2019s not a happy story, and the final episode swerves a bit too far in the direction of trying to make things feel all better. But for the most part, it\u2019s the rare adaptation that dismantles the original in order to build something that works better.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Of all the challenges that come with adapting a book for the screen, the question of what to do with a book\u2019s narrator is often the most intractable. Third-person narrators can sometimes be translated into a camera eye without requiring major story compensations, but first-person narrators present a specific variety of trickiness, and adapting them …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31,"featured_media":48662,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[45090],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\nLooking for Alaska Is the Rare Adaptation That Improves on the Original - Nasim Word<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/nasimword.ir\/?p=48661&lang=en\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"fa_IR\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Looking for Alaska Is the Rare Adaptation That Improves on the Original - Nasim Word\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Of all the challenges that come with adapting a book for the screen, the question of what to do with a book\u2019s narrator is often the most intractable. 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