#svthsa

Simon’s family

The one change that jumped out to me while listening to the audiobook that I felt was absolutely necessary if adapting it to screen was cutting the character of Alice. It’s the lowest-hanging fruit, and you could absolutely do something interesting with Nora to keep some of Alice’s aspects in the character.

Which… they sort of did? I mean, ultimately, Nora in the film is a VERY different character than in the book. But this makes sense because:

They also drastically changed Simon’s parents. Or… they’re not actually that DIFFERENT, it’s just that the film cut the entire plot thread about them being overbearing and embarrassing. They’re still pretty much as overbearing and easygoing as they are in the book, but them learning from this isn’t really part of the film.

Oh, also, they did give some of Alice’s character traits to the mom, specifically the outspoken feminism stuff. It did feel a little shoe-horned in though.

That said, I actually do like the efficiency with which they addressed the ‘Jack makes jokes about gay people’ stuff. They brought forward the tension between Simon and Jack to ‘earlier’ in the story, and they did actually show him doing it a couple of times, without having it be a major throughline that would require more time from him.

So Simon’s family is different, but I think that makes sense. The throughline of the story is really about Simon, Blue, and their friends. Simon’s family is a secondary emotional and plot centre.

Leah and Abby

This is a small thing, but Abby lives on the way to school rather than far away in another direction. This is purely a cinematographic affordance, but it does make sense because they cut time from the later parts of the book’s story and so cut the need for Abby to be so far away…

But the main thing I want to talk about is [Leah/Abby]’s parents’ divorce.

In the book, it’s Leah’s parents who are divorced because her dad cheated on her mom.

In the film, they instead combined this character trait from Leah into Abby’s backstory of moving from DC. (In the book, Abby’s dad and brother are still in DC but her dad is looking for a job in Georgia still).

And… I have mixed feelings about this. I’m not thrilled about the way that this makes Leah, who was already the most opaque character to me in the book, into an even less-fleshed-out character…

But I do admit that moving that moment onto Abby (and effectively moving Simon’s ‘I don’t really know people’ revelation from the book WAY earlier in the film) gives a little more weight to Simon choosing to come out to Abby before anyone else. There’s a moment of very obvious connection there, and I think that works in a medium where we don’t have moment-to-moment narration of Simon’s headspace.

While talking about Leah… I think her having a crush on Simon makes sense, but I’m also not sure I like the adaptational change because it DOES make the falling out feel like it’s based on Leah being upset Simon rebuffed her… Which isn’t REALLY supposed to be the text there, but that is how it came across to me. Though it does at least give Leah more concrete motives and characterisation. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Leah is the book character who needed a second book to flesh out.

Teachers

This is quick, but the vice-principal is, bar none, my LEAST favourite adaptational change. He feels like he exists to serve the sole purpose of separating Simon from his phone once, but they kept him around to just be a bit creepy and weird… I think the film would ONLY be enhanced by removing this character, even if that left Ms Albright as the ONLY staff member with any significant screentime.

Speaking of Ms. Albright… “She doesn’t like men.” … Okay, first of all, I think the book did a much better job with this, because I KNEW Ms. Albright was a lesbian from the book, despite the book never outright stating it. And I even think the dressing-down she gives the homophobes later in the film does a good job of that too. It doesn’t HAVE to be explicitly stated, it can be implied and that can be fine.

Ethan and Cal

I’m lumping these together (though I will mention Cal again later) because I think there’s an interesting juxtaposition.

First of all: I’m not 100% sure how I feel about Ethan… I think the lack of out gay (male) students at the school was an important facet of the book… But I don’t think adding a single gay student actually breaks the larger point being made with that. And I will admit that it does allow some more pointed conversations later in the film between them. I actually quite like the Simon-and-Ethan scenes after the homophobe stuff.

But on the flipside from Ethan, a character who wasn’t in the book… We have Cal, a character who was BARELY in the film. And this one is more confusing to me.

I think partially they just didn’t have the bandwidth to flesh Cal out as much as he was in the book (which, admittedly, wasn’t a HUGE amount even then…) They made him the pianist for the play, which got him out of the spotlight of being stage manager, and then only really had him interact with Simon once, after the outing.

But the reason I’m putting him alongside Ethan is because… the film outright cuts Cal being bi. Which is… weird to me. There are no canonically bi or lesbian characters in the film, which feels like a let down because the book does discuss the different social ‘acceptance’ of gay men, gay women, and bisexual people within the emails (both actual acceptance as well as the ‘lesbians are hot’ trope).

Martin and the blackmail

Martin feels a lot slimier of a character in the film… I think some of that is probably just SEEING him doing the things he does, because he actually really isn’t written THAT differently at all.

But the more interesting thing to me is that in the film, Simon is MUCH more willing in helping Martin than in the book.

Not to say he doesn’t help Martin in the book at all, but the book goes to great lengths to show Simon trying to avoid committing to helping him get Abby, and also has Martin feeling like he’s not helping ENOUGH…

In the film, Simon EXPLICITLY agrees early on to help Martin, and is generally a LOT more interventionist in his friend group. He’s more forceful about pushing Nick away from Abby.

Oh, also, Martin tagging along WITH Simon and his friends to the party, instead of just showing up at the address… Does actually plug a plothole from the book that didn’t need plugging. How did Martin know where Garrett’s house was in the book? It’s explicitly stated that SIMON doesn’t know it.

The Blues

I think that having Simon imagine each of the Blue candidates in the situations they described makes a lot of sense as an adaptational change. Because the film doesn’t take place in Simon’s first-person perspective, and the long descriptions of Bram’s fingers and legs, or Cal’s hair and eyes… just would not adapt well. So I do get it.

I also don’t entirely disagree with the decision to cut Simon lusting after his classmates physically from the film. It ends up a point of contention with Blue in the book (actually one that feels like it fizzles out rather than resolving) that Simon is attracted to Cal, and the way the plot was chopped and changed in the film wouldn’t have really left bandwidth for that plot point…

Also, given the cutting back of Cal’s character, I was surprised to see that he was still a Blue candidate.

And upgrading Lyle from a character who is LITERALLY mentioned twice in the book in passing to being a Blue candidate, someone who clearly knows who Simon is, and a romantic false-lead for Abby… I think that worked. I’m actually surprised how I like that adaptation…

Also Simon and Lyle are the most awkward people in the world.

OH! And I’m glad that the film cut the part where Simon spirals over whether Blue really is Martin or not. That was excruciating in the book, and I think that adapting that into the film wouldn’t have worked.

Bram, in particular.

Bram’s characterisation is different…

He’s less reserved in person in the film, and some of the things that were part of entire email exchanges in the book (Oreos, for instance)… are just part of his character in the film.

This is an adaptational change that makes sense, because as we said above, the film is working with a more limited time to characterise Blue and we need to actually have seen Bram and Simon interact earlier in the film because we lose the post-reveal interactions between them.

(Simon and Bram get together about 80% of the way through the book. In audiobook terms, they are together as a couple for about 90 minutes, almost the entire runtime of the film. So it makes sense that Bram would need characterising earlier in the film.)

That said, I think Bram being a bit more outgoing and talkative loses something… Because with the adapting out of Cal’s personality too… this kind of removes the underlying ‘type’ that Simon has. In every Blue candidate in the book, Simon likes their reservedness that’s hiding hidden depths. Even with Martin, Simon finds his awkwardness endearing more than his outspoken aspects…

Changes to The Reveal and Fallout.

So, this is the main thing that had to be changed. There is just too much plot in the back half of the book that just couldn’t ALL stay intact or in the order it happened in.

First of all: Martin outright publishing the screenshots instead of just a bizarre homophobic text post… makes sense, but it also drastically changes the PLOT of the second half in a way that I think is ultimately worse.

Secondly: Simon’s friends falling out with him AT the same time as the reveal is… not my favourite choice. I completely agree that in adapting the book they needed to condense the ebb and flow of people falling out… But I don’t overall like the fact that Simon is outed AND loses his friends in the span of a week.

That one comes back to Nick… I think that if Abby found out about Martin’s blackmail FROM Martin as in the book, Simon could have been spared Nick a little.

But the main adaptational changes I don’t really like in this regard… are about Blue.

By having Blue delete his email address after the outing, we lose a really interesting power dynamic between Simon and Blue that is the throughline for the second half of the book.

In the book, Simon gets outed without Blue being directly involved… And over the course of the middle of the book, it becomes clearer and clearer to Blue who Jacques is. So for much of the middle of the second half, Blue KNOWS who Simon is, but still can’t tell Simon who he is, and that leads to a lot of tension both ways.

We lose that in the film.

And moreso than that, we lose the privacy of Simon and Blue’s relationship.

Book!Blue would NOT have taken well to Simon declaring his love for Blue publicly on CreekSecrets and arranging very publicly a meetup that EVERYONE would attend.

And yes, obviously, their relationship is public pretty soon after they get together in the book too, but I feel like the hope and intimacy of the moment works so much better when the ‘I know you’ email is a private thing between them, and not a public declaration. Again: Book!Blue is much more reserved.

We also lose the final 20% of the book almost entirely. We don’t get to see Bram and Simon on dates, or just existing together as a couple or fooling around in the auditorium… And this is a sacrifice that is made in the film for runtime reasons and because the way film narratives climax doesn’t lend itself to a long dénouement… But it feels like a real loss, because ultimately SEEING Simon and Bram being together is the payoff for the several hours of seeing them making their way there.

Was this the right medium?

I don’t think that a film was the right way to adapt this story, ultimately.

The book is semi-epistolary. 13 of the first 26 chapters are JUST email exchanges between Jacques and Blue, and there are more emails later in the book too. The narrative of the book has multiple conflicts and resolutions throughout, underneath the overarching plot…

I think the best adaptation of this book was not as a 2-hour film. It would have been as a 3- or 4-hour series. The emails work as a framing device, a series would have allowed more room for narration and imagination spots, we could have seen more of EACH of the Blue candidates.

Obviously, a series would still have required significant rewrites and adaptation… You couldn’t have had the final episode be JUST Simon and Bram happy together, for instance, and I think you’d still have cut out Alice from the plot…

But I think that there are ways to rearrange the book into a series format that keeps the soul of the story a lot more coherently than the film did.

And I think this is a REALLY interesting case study in adaptation.

Because, overall, I at least UNDERSTAND almost every adaptational change made… And if I were adapting the book into a film, I think I’d have made most of them too… Some of them actually came to mind while listening to the audiobook as things that would probably be changed for the film…

But the result is… I think the film is a weaker work overall?

And part of it is definitely that we only get to see the emails that are NARRATIVELY important, instead of the ones that are EMOTIONALLY important… but I think it’s also that rearranging some of the events of the book for narrative expediency just breaks the flow in a weird way.