John Green and the Difficulty of Capturing the Teenage Mindset on Screen

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There’s a certain tone that characterizes a John Green novel: wry, sarcastic, a bit humorous, but ultimately landing on sincere. Of his five solo novels, four have been adapted for the screen. But these adaptations too often lack the punch of their source material.

Take Paper Towns, John Green’s second novel, and in many ways, an echo of his first, Looking for Alaska. Both feature a nerdy teenage boy pining after a knowing, slightly wild, and unpredictable teenage girl who turns out to be more complicated than she initially lets on. Both alternate between fun, lighthearted coming-of-age hijinks and something much more somber. In Looking for Alaska, the turning point is Alaska’s death in a car crash—perhaps an accident, perhaps not. In Paper Towns, the turning point comes much later, when main character Quentin, after hundreds of pages of searching, finally finds Margo, the manic pixie dream girl of his imagination. She’s living alone out of a decaying barn, more sad than mysterious. The novel then delivers its most essential line: “What a treacherous thing it is to believe that a person is more than a person.”

In the film version of Paper Towns, which is nearing its 10 year anniversary in June, Quentin doesn’t find Margo in the barn. Instead, he sees her glide past the window of a convenience store before chasing her down. Their exchange is sparse and full of longing glances. It shares some similarities to the book equivalent, but barely, stripped of thematic richness and complexity. In the book, Margo and Quentin have things to say to each other. In the movie, they mostly just stare at each other awkwardly. The flatness of its supposed climactic moment embodies many of the shortcomings of the film as a whole: Most of the characters are shadows of who they were on the page, the dialogue is clunky and awkward, and the story lacks confidence.

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One explanation is that the movie is just bad. But the gap between the book and the movie suggests a more fundamental problem with translating the novel to the screen. Without the internal monologue of the book, there’s no way for Quentin to make that integral realization—that Margo, for all her confidence, is lost, that she’s both more and less than the magnetic and charismatic person who lives in his imagination, that they’ve chosen different paths in life and can likely never be together in the way he wants. In the book, we understand this moment of realization not only because John Green spells it out for us but because we’ve lived in Quentin’s head for 200-plus pages. We know how deep his infatuation with Margo goes, and we know how the dream of finding her has crowded out other aspects of his life.

John Green’s wry, half-cynical and half-sincere style has been hugely influential on many YA contemporary novels, which often favor teenagers who speak in a blend of inane banter and dubiously philosophical musings. The movies occupy a similar niche, aiming for light coming-of-age comedy drama with a romantic bent. But unlike the books, they often lack sincerity and emotional honesty. They can’t get into their characters’ heads or replicate John Green’s particular method of capturing the teenage mindset, which understands that teenagers are often melodramatic and self-deprecating and angsty and sad and sometimes deeply annoying.

In Turtles All the Way Down, Aza, a teenage girl with OCD, falls in love with the son of a billionaire and investigates said billionaire’s disappearance with her best friend Daisy, all while struggling with her mental health. The novel blends its various elements by staying centered around Aza herself. Aza’s OCD is often debilitating, and the exciting and sometimes ludicrous, bordering on magical events of her first romantic endeavor contrast nicely with the crushing and repetitive mundanity of her illness. But when the movie, which came out last year, attempts to toggle between being a light mystery, a sweet teenage romance, and a highly realistic and often devastating look at mental illness, it just seems confused, lacking a clear tone or identity. It’s missing the quality of Aza’s narration, which in the book is what brings everything together.

Some of the best coming-of-age films understand that there are other ways of getting into a character’s head. Kelly Fremon Craig’s The Edge of Seventeen, Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird, or Emma Seligman’s Shiva Baby, for example, are able to bring the viewer in close without overly relying on voiceover or awkward expositional dialogue. But many coming-of-age films struggle to find genuine empathy for their protagonists beyond what can be made obvious through various common and recognizable tropes. Perhaps this is why the film version of Paper Towns succumbs to the same manic pixie dream girl trope that the novel critiques. That Quentin is infatuated with Margo is obvious. We’ve seen the nerdy, awkward loner fall for the beautiful, mysterious, and unattainable girl many times before. What’s more complex, and what requires a deeper understanding of these specific characters, is all the ways that his infatuation is problematic and how it interferes with the genuine connection that might form between two real, human people.

This isn’t to say that John Green’s novels never fall prey to grating YA tropes themselves, or even that they’re perfectly consistent in their critiques of gendered archetypes. Looking for Alaska especially relies on building a dark mystique around its main female character that’s narratively impactful but also irksome in how it reduces her to a mystery for the male protagonist to navigate. But John Green’s style, his way of creating a narrative voice that’s capable of being self-effacing, funny, sincere, and sometimes even annoyingly self-serious, speaks to a profound empathy for his main characters. That empathy is something that’s all too rare in the YA genre, in novels but especially in film.