I really like lit-to-film adaptations, so when a movie comes out that I’m interested in and it’s based on a book, I’ll usually read the book as well as see the movie. I don’t think that’s weird. What’s maybe a little weird is how I then look at them in conversation with each other as if they’re simply two cameras showing us the same story with their own perspectives and filters and, from that, how I then think we can view the different interpretations of a common story as statement pieces of their respective storytellers.
I once built and taught a literature class around that idea and got to teach it for a couple years. It was fun. I’m a huge nerd.
So anyway the film adaptation of The Dog Stars came out, and it so happened some friends had recommended recently I read the book because they thought it was up my alley, and boy howdy is it. It was something of a surreal experience for me reading this story about a couple of guys and a dog trying to survive after an apocalypse and seeing how thematically and emotionally similar it is to this novel I worked on for five years and nobody seems interested in publishing (#NotBitter).
It’s a very different book, of course, but if I could have a beer or a coffee with Peter Heller (the novel’s author), I imagine we’d have some things to talk about.
As it is, I really enjoyed The Dog Stars (both the book and film), and they taught me some things. Such as…
Theme can be a red herring.
The Dog Stars presents as a story about survival and isolationism, but in one of the book’s most touching moments (IMHO), it reveals itself to be a story about grief, carrying that grief, and finding love, joy, and happiness again, even though losing it the first time almost destroyed you. The effect this achieved, for me, was not only a deepening of the book’s meaning but also a kind of realignment or revision of the story I’d consumed to that point. I imagine The Dog Stars is an amazingly moving second read as you pick up on all of the breadcrumbs Peter left you to chew on when you know what’s coming, but on first read, for the reflective reader, it has this kind of, “oh, everything I thought I knew about this book is wrong and this is how it actually is, and wow, that reveals something to me about my own disposition and perspective,” effect. I love that kind of thing.
The film is less effective than the book at hitting that particular note, unfortunately, but Ridley Scott took it and laid it in the foundations so that it hums throughout the story instead of slapping you at a pivotal moment. For me, seeing it done in two different ways with a common story is interesting because it demonstrates that kind of epiphany can be a wave that crashes into you or a creeping tide that slowly submerges you. Pretty cool.
The narrative can make sense of character decisions that don’t seem to make any sense at first (versus setting them up and justifying them beforehand), and this can be remarkably moving and meaningful.
This is essentially a continuation of the above, but man, there’s a significant part of the story in which you’re reading and thinking, “Hig, what are you doing, you absolute dumbass?” And maybe you think you see the writer’s hand as if he’s trying to force some of the themes he’s worked with until that point and you think it’s heavy-handed and contrived, but then he writes a single line that changes everything about that character’s decision-making and makes sense of it in a way that is deeply human or, in other words, a way that generative AI will never understand or be able to replicate, and you know you love this story and just want to thank Peter for it.
The film is less effective here because it just doesn’t do this (or rather, it pushes the protagonist to make a decision with plot). But that leads me to…
Character-driven storytelling is generally more moving and meaningful than plot-driven development that characters have to react to.
I think this tends to get misunderstood as stories should give us character and no plot, but really, I think good stories should do both. However, when it comes to extracting meaning from a story, characters affecting the outcome with their decision-making is almost always more impactful than things just happening that the character has to respond to.
The Dog Stars is an excellent example of that because we get to see a pivotal plot beat play out in each way. The book moves the story through this plot point by handing the power of what happens to the characters to decide. The film, however, forces the characters down a particular path because the plot demands it.
It’s difficult to discuss this without spoilers, but Hig meets two very important characters who have to make a critical decision about their futures. The book lets the characters make that decision, and it is incredibly moving, demonstrating truths about how love, parenthood, and guardianship require us to take risks, which reinforces one of the story’s main themes about why Hig takes his journey to begin with. The film forces their hand, and from that, we can derive nothing of meaning beyond, “haha, that was a cool action sequence.”
And don’t get me wrong. I love cool action sequences. The Dog Stars just isn’t that kind of story, and it doesn’t necessarily have to sacrifice meaning to give us cool action sequences, which it proves elsewhere in the film (Josh Brolin is fantastic as Bangley).
What isn’t on the page and what a character doesn’t say can be as powerful as what is there.
This isn’t a new concept to me, but it was influential to again see it in practice. The Dog Stars is ostensibly about two men and a dog surviving in a post-plague world, and what’s notable about the setup is how little the two men (Hig and Bangley) have in common with each other. They’re so different they literally live apart from each other and only really interact insofar as it matters to their shared survival. Hig even remarks on several occasions he doesn’t trust Bangley alone with his dog or that Bangley won’t just kill them both at some point. But here they are, sharing the end of the world, and the question begs itself: why? What is the point of surviving like that?
What is beautiful to me about the story as it develops and concludes is it answers that question in a satisfying way, which is to say it insists you were reading it wrong. You weren’t seeing what was off the page, and by the time you’re finished with the story, you see it. You hear the things Hig and Bangley don’t say to each other. You understand the thoughts and feelings Hig had even if he didn’t understand them at the beginning of the story either.
Readers, sometimes you have to do a little work to fully appreciate a story, and some stories are challenging and unenjoyable because they ask you to do a little work. The Dog Stars isn’t like that. It’s an easy read, and it’s thoroughly enjoyable as a passive storytelling experience. But if you dig just a little bit at it, you’ll find a much deeper and more moving story under the surface.
For what it’s worth, Ridley Scott’s film does a remarkably good job with this. Jacob elordi and Josh Brolin are magnificent in the performances of the subtext between these two guys, and it might be the best part of the film, in terms of how Scott adapted it from the novel. Hig and Bangley have a touching relationship even if there is almost no intimacy written for them.
I still very much feel like we have punctuation for a reason, and books that attempt to write dialogue without quotation marks and other essential punctuation just reinforce that belief over and over.
Just put your dialogue in quotation marks, or denote them in some way that is clear to the reader (but isn’t annoying or burdensome at length). In The Dog Stars, Peter actually felt compelled several times to follow unmarked character dialogue with “He/She said that,” and it should have suggested to him that what he was doing was confusing, impractical, and an unnecessary barrier to the storytelling that served no function. I’ve never seen a good use of this tactic, and that includes The Dog Stars. I wrote that.
Finally, the world ended a handful of years ago. People going feral that quickly is a bad trope of post-apocalyptic stories. It’s never believable, and if a storyteller wants to go there, it needs to be justified, or it just won’t work.
Yeah, this is something in the film that is a big change from the book, and every time I think about it, I dislike it more, so I’m just going to leave it at this: If your story is about people holding onto their humanity in inhumane times, there are many numbers on that dial before you get to full-blown feral. You don’t need to go there unless you need to go there, and The Dog Stars didn’t need to go there.
I learned a lot more from this one, but I’ll leave it at that. If you pick up the book or watch the film, go in with an open mind. Don’t expect typical post-apocalyptic fare, because it’s very much not that. Maybe what I appreciate the most about The Dog Stars is that essential fact: it demonstrates post-apocalyptic stories can go well beyond themes you might expect and give us stories that are meaningful and moving and couldn’t be told in any other genre. That, maybe more than anything, is The Dog Stars’ biggest success.
Leave a Reply