Book vs. Movie: Paper Towns
By Ben Gruchow
August 10, 2015
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Paper Towns
Paper Towns is an adaptation of a young-adult novel written by John “The Fault in Our Stars” Green. It is a story about a high-school senior, Quentin “Q” Jacobsen, who finds himself finishing out his final year of school in two separate modes. In one, he searches for an old childhood friend of his, Margo Roth Spiegelman, who has up and left town. In the other, he develops and tries to bring closure and meaning to a social circle that consists mostly of his two friends, Ben and Radar. These two modes occasionally overlap with each other, and begin to fuse together as the search for Margo occupies more and more of Quentin’s time. The book is told in the first person, past tense.
The Book
Paper Towns starts up rather quickly, even given its overall short length. Our first exposure to the world of the narrator is as a kid, where he tells us about Margo and himself as nine-year-old neighbors in a suburb of Orlando, Florida. Having established this, it gives us our first introduction to what the thematic concept of the novel is going to be: Quentin and Margo happen upon a dead man in a neighborhood park, the victim of an obvious suicide. Their reactions to this discovery are very different, although they both leave the site equally quickly. Quentin has a fairly typical reaction; Margo, though, is more curious about the identity of the dead man than traumatized. She hypothesizes, coming to Quentin’s window later that night, that “all of his strings were cut”—a faint but unmistakable reference, in this context, to a breakdown.
After this point, the book flashes forward eight or so years to Quentin’s senior year in high school; in that time, we are told, he and Margo have drifted apart. They still live next door to each other, but rarely communicate and never socialize. She has become fairly popular, and is looked up to by a good amount of the student population. Quentin has his own friends, Ben and Radar, and as we catch up with the older versions of these characters, their senior year is coming to an end. Quentin’s life has become punctuated by predictability, which suits him fine.
That changes one night when Margo shows up at his window again, for the first time since they were kids, and this is what kicks the main plot of the book into action: Margo has a sort of all-nighter revenge bender she needs to go on, and she entices Quentin to join her as her getaway driver. She doesn’t have access to her car; Quentin has access to his, by way of a short narrative explanation that introduces us to two positively lovely characters we’ll come back to in a bit.
We also get our first look at the way quirkiness in personality becomes a defining characteristic of each individual in Paper Towns, in one way or another. In this example: Margo provides Quentin a shopping list to gather materials for the night’s events. The capitalization is screwy on this list, with the middle of some words capitalized while the initial letters are not. Margo’s rationale behind this? She feels that common grammatical rules are unfair to all the letters in the middle of each word.
Their night out consists of exposing Margo’s boyfriend to be cheating on her with one of her friends, and humiliating both of them (and the friends who knew about it but did not tell Margo) to varying degrees. The night concludes with the both of them sneaking into Sea World (why this particular theme park was utilized of all options is a mystery, but I’ve got to hand it to Green; his evocation here of the collision between theme-park bigness and tourist-trap tackiness in Orlando/Kissimmee is positively dead to rights). They break into Sea World, bond a bit, they drive back to their subdivision.
The next morning, Margo is gone. She’s disappeared without leaving much of a trace, which is nothing new to her parents nor to the narrator (and likely most of the student population). Contrary to worrying about their daughter’s disappearance, her parents are more or less tired of going through this and are ready to totally cut Margo loose.
At this point, Paper Towns shifts its gears, from a high-school social study to a more intimate personal study. Margo’s disappearance has caused a stir throughout the school, as you’d expect from someone who’s popular. The impact it has on Quentin, though, is significant - and all the more notable because he’s had a total of eight hours of time with Margo in the past eight years, yet his first reaction when he hears the news of her disappearance (lying and inferring that he’d had little contact with her as opposed to an entire night’s worth) is consistent with an idea that he is privy to some status that eludes everyone else.
The scene with Margo’s parents after her disappearance is actually significant on its own: we’re introduced to a detective character who provides the book’s most evocative piece of dialogue, while describing the impulse that leads a person like Margo to up and "disappear," and the impulse that leads people who admire them to cover for them. The syntax and use of slang here is a little cloying, but Green touches on something natural in the detective’s tone - a tone that feels weary and adult and perceptive, and instantly sells us on his legitimacy.
This is in sharp, sharp contrast to the other big players in this sustained passage: Quentin’s own parents. They are both psychologists, which is cause for them to have the most teeth-grindingly overwritten “analytical” conversations in the history of mankind. I exaggerate, but not by a whole lot. They really are just terrible characters - not an inkling of depth, not a drop of academic credibility. Thankfully, they’re comparatively minor.
The meat of the book after this is given over to a type of scavenger hunt crossed with an exploration of just how little we know the people that we have a tendency to idealize. Margo has not left totally undetected. From a poster hung in her bedroom window and facing Quentin’s, to an address written on a scrap of paper, hidden in a doorjamb, and referred to by the circling of a passage in a copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass that Quentin retrieves from Margo’s bedroom, the clues that Margo leaves behind seem to be aimed specifically at Quentin, and attempting to put all of these clues together into a substantive narrative of where she might have gone begins to consume a large part of his spring.
There’s a little concerned observation by the narrator that the things which used to matter to him - graduation, college, predictability, et al - matter less in the face of his search for a once-friend, but only a little; the novel avoids any serious sense of repercussion or consequences for Quentin’s impulsive actions. In doing so, it allows the middle of the book to focus squarely on what he’s thinking.
The mechanics of this thought, and the tendency of all characters involved to begin revisiting and second-guessing their own convictions, is what gives Paper Towns its thematic identity: conceptually, it’s about building up a person to be a certain way in one’s mind, constructing neuroses and thought-patterns and wants and needs by a combination of wishful thinking and imprinting one’s own personality onto another individual’s, and expecting them to act in accordance with that fabricated code. This is certainly done by Quentin with Margo, but it’s also enacted by Radar with his girlfriend Angela, and by Quentin toward Ben.
The fulfillment of this theme is pretty easily guessable, and it’s to the novel’s credit that it doesn’t really try to hide its ultimate statement: that this type of personality construction is really no more than a slightly cushioned way of “other-ing” a person, and denying them the legitimacy of their own identity in the face of a preconceived one; consequently, the people who are put on this type of pedestal never end up reacting the way they’re expected to, and express confusion at the presumption and identity more or less assigned to them by the initiator.
The book contains trace explorations of other themes, and feints toward other genres (there is a passage set in a strip mall, one of the first places that Quentin’s scavenger hunt leads him, that edges on darker and creepier narrative territory before backing off) but most of its substance exists under this main storyline.
The Movie
First things first: The movie version of Paper Towns drastically cuts back the presence of Quentin’s parents, which can’t help but improve its standing there relative to the novel. Also, the store that Quentin and Margo visit in the middle of the night during their trip is an anonymous wholesale/Walmart hybrid, rather than the novel’s Publix (there is no Publix on Earth that I know of that is open past 10:00 p.m. - an incredibly spurious point, but it’s nagged at me since I read it).
Past those two improvements, what have we? The movie adaptation covers just about the exact same story beats as the novel, with one minor difference that gives the movie’s ending a slightly different flavor than the book’s (and it is ultimately very minor; sort of like the difference between Sprite and Sierra Mist).
Nat Wolff and Cara Delevingne step in for our two main characters; I’ve covered the details of Wolff’s performance elsewhere, but the application of the actor in the sense that he appears may be responsible for the movie version of Paper Towns locking us out of Quentin’s headspace, where the majority of the book’s middle part took place. Instead, the simple existence of the scavenger hunt for Margo occupies most of the movie’s substance, suppressing the story-long examination of what it’s like to de-humanize a person and put them on a pedestal. As a result, what we’ve got is a sort of light mystery with the sociological and school-related incident foregrounded.
Margo’s disappearance, appropriately, makes bigger waves here than it does in the book; far from accepting it as the latest instance in an ongoing series of events, the school is vocally and audibly spinning up theories about where she could have gone. Because we in the audience have only known Margo for a sum total of about 15 minutes so far (a solid 10 of which involved her enacting vengeance), the movie is more unsure than the novel as to what type of pull she exerts to elicit this kind of reaction.
The depth of Quentin’s obsession with piecing together clues and locating Margo is also lessened, although this is most likely due to time constraints; if Paper Towns the book is a slight 300-ish pages, Paper Towns the movie is an even slighter 109 minutes. The effect of this is that the middle chunk of the movie, which has to draw most of the connective tissue between the mystery of the opening half-hour (Margo is not even slightly sketched personality-wise until after she’s gone) and the resolution of the concluding half-hour, carries less psychological implication and makes the final reveal acquit itself in a much more genial way.
The detective character, source of the most evocative and grounding material in the book, is almost completely absent from the film save for his initial scene and serving his basic function as a character. Most of the movie is concerned with going to a real high-school party, going to prom, becoming comfortable with honesty and pragmatism. The central mystery is mentioned throughout, but only in the later going does it begin to reconnect with and pursue resolution to it.
The Verdict
Both the book and movie here ultimately play in a very low-stakes universe, and that makes both of them more trifling and forgettable than a story about a missing high schooler and questions of sanity and mental health set against the backdrop of senior-year social norms ideally would be. The movie provides lower stakes than the book does by virtue of its backgrounding of the central mystery and character intimacy. It proceeds much more as a shallow high-school comedy, with no real weight or significance except for what the viewer chooses to infer based on their knowledge of the source material. As an attempt to address this, the subtext and theme is jammed in diegetically, toward the end. It works, just barely, but it highlights a core problem with the movie’s narrative: it doesn’t really flow.
We are introduced to Quentin and Margo, given the beginnings of a storyline, and then another one takes over involving different characters and priorities; this is given just enough time to gather some steam before the original story wanders back in to be resolved. The other liability is that the movie, for most of its runtime, has us face-to-face with Nat Wolff’s Quentin - or, more specifically, Nat Wolff’s dead-eyed impersonation of a teenager named Quentin.
Juxtaposing these two rather major issues is the fact that the movie version of Paper Towns is ultimately quite a bit more agreeable in its implications than the book is; the story is not good in either form, but jettisoning most of the book’s middle means that we are spared much of the rather disagreeable portrait of, as my initial notes after reading the book put it, “one teenager’s descent into singleminded obsession, which he callously passes off as simple idealization." I remember feeling progressively uneasy as the book’s mystery plot unfolded - not because of its tension, but because of the type of mindset it would require for an 18-year-old to plan it, and for a 17-year-old to pursue it to the exclusion of all else in life.
And make no mistake, the middle of this book is dedicated to the search for Margo and the assemblage of seemingly random clues. You get the feeling that a nuke could have gone off in the book’s universe and the character wouldn’t have commented on it because it didn’t involve Margo. It’s a somewhat-accurate depiction of an infatuated teenager, but basic accuracy doesn’t automatically equate to a story well-told.
Another point in the movie’s favor is what happens to the speech: in the book, the characters talk like nightmares the characters from Juno have about themselves. The movie tamps down on this quite a bit, and the dialogue sounds generally more natural and believable. Some of this may be down to skilled work by the cast in selling difficult lines, instead of the lines themselves, but it’s there and it’s a factor. Ultimately, these cast members doing the work that they do leads to a significant bump in the movie’s enjoyment and entertainment, and you don’t get an equivalent bump from anything in the book.
Book vs. movie winner: Movie.