the darker side of the book-to-film boom

Whenever there’s news that a popular longform piece is getting turned into a movie, it’s kind of lame to be curmudgeonly about it, because hey, who’s ever going to complain about a good work of journalism getting a wider audience?

But as this Baffler piece, They Made a Movie Out of It: The Decline of Non-fiction in an IP Era, points out, there is a darker, or at least a less-considered side to this book-to-film boom and the resulting effect of what writer James Pogue calls “option bait.” 

The way Pogue sees it, as Hollywood / the streaming platforms continue to compete for IP in order to churn out dizzying amounts of original content, magazine-style storytelling has become an increasingly lucrative place to get it — think of all those good true crime stories and sagas around stolen phones and personal reckonings with modern-day slavery! — AKA, journalism that focuses on a straightforward narrative that translates easily to the big screen.

The first problem, then, is if/when the “Would this make for a good movie” standard is how we start judging whether something is good or even worth pursuing, which Pogue argues is already happening everywhere from The New Yorker to the fiction world: 

The desire is always for work that puts narrative ahead of all other considerations, and this is the kind of writing that now dominates our literature: it describes the world without having a worldview. Which is a workable definition of the kind of writing most easily converted into IP.

The second problem is the ickiness of giant, problematic corporations like Apple and Amazon co-opting this work that “placed story ahead of political or moral considerations” and “had the convenient feature of being unthreatening to power,” as indiscriminate content for their streaming services: i.e., “What you might have once thought of literary publishing is, when you get down to it, just high-status corporate content generation.”

It’s such an interesting critique, but I do have a few quibbles right off the bat. For one thing, I have a hard time believing there are just hordes of longform journalists out there who are in this biz strictly so they can publish something that’ll be a box office hit one day, which Pogue seems to insinuate. 

And despite some solid points, this article just ends up getting a little too dramatic about how anything narrative-driven = a total crime against humanity. Because, honestly? I think it’s a pretty snobby to look down on “shareable writing in forms that [are] easy for publishers to reproduce and that [are] easy to absorb,” like it’s some kind of travesty for ~nonfiction with a plot~ to go mainstream. Sorry, but…………….. humans need stories???? (see: Homer, cave paintings, history). Waxing nostalgic about wordy, complicated screeds from ye goode olde days is not ever going to be our jam.