Running with Scissors Represents What is Wrong with the Modern Film Industry

The film version of Running With Scissors, a popular memoir by Augusten Burroughs, is an excellent example of how books and films become "Hollywoodized". Hollywoodized films underestimate and manipulate their audiences. They resort to cliches and don't test mainstream limits or go beyond certain bounds of normalcy.

This is the wrong method to use when turning a book like Running With Scissors into a film. The book does nothing if not testing limits and breaking the bounds of normalcy. It's absurd, and bizarre, sometimes disturbingly so, but that's also kind of the beauty of it. Not only did the film create cliches out of a completely original work, it also neglected to preserve the entire tone of the book.

Augusten Burroughs may have had a difficult life--first in his unstable childhood, and then in his early adulthood, when he became an alcoholic and drug user. Almost anyone who reads Running With Scissors and Dry (his second memoir) will agree that life has not been easy on Augusten. But you don't hear him complaining. Part of what makes him such a great memoirist is his complete lack of self-pity. He never resorts to extorting pity from the reader; he never takes on a "woe-is-me" or bitter tone. His memoirs are surprisingly easy to read because of this--and it's comforting, even, to think that someone who has gone through everything that he has gone through still seems to have a fairly upbeat and optimistic take on life. Augusten knows how to find the humor within the mess--and bring it out. Maybe it was a survival technique he learned at a young age; who knows. Whatever is was born out of, it is one of his greatest strengths now and one of the main reasons he is a successful and popular author. The tone in Running With Scissors (the book) is rather matter-of-fact, and almost detached in its resignation to the absurdity of his life. True, he admits to unhappiness, but it is in that retrospective, "well, that's done" kind of way, not in a "life is awful and filled with misery" kind of way.

The film, which ideally would've been done more like an absurdist play, was filled with melodrama and over the top emotion. Where subtlety should have been utilized, the film opted for drama.The hilarious parts of the book that revealed aspects of various characters personalities' (arguably the most fascinating bits of the book) were glossed over or not shown at all, while parts of the book that seemed to take less precedence were focused on, exaggerated and added to. Sadly, these parts were the parts that one would expect to see in a Hollywood movie: parents fighting, kids being upset, touching, poignant moments. But this shouldn't have been a typical Hollywood movie, and besides, we've seen it all already. We're ready for something different. Aren't we?

I also found the casting to be lacking. Many of the characters were in fact well cast. Annette Benning, for instance, was great as the mom, and I liked Joseph Fiennes as Neil. Joseph Cross made a pretty good Augusten as well. But some were miscast. You get the feeling, when he gives physical descriptions in the book, that the Finches are not a family known for their beauty and sexiness. Yet the film industry seems to have a fear of normal looking people, and often places beautiful people in roles not meant for them; for example, Evan Rachel Wood in the role of Natalie.

Natalie, when Augusten first meets her, is about 12 or 13 years old. He mentions repeatedly in the book that she's overweight, and he generally portrays her as cynical but sweet; a young girl who, like many young girls, is unhappy with her appearance and frustrated with her family, but she's also quite strong and coolly apathetic about many of the things that go on around her. In the film, she's completely sexualized in a very typical Hollywood manner. That's mistake number one. She also looks about 5 years older than she's supposed to be, she's incredibly attractive, and she's very emotional. All of these missed the point of the character of Natalie, and turned her into an indie film quirky teenage girl stereotype.

Hope was another one I was dissatisfied with.Gwyneth Paltrow, for instance, is too pretty to portray Hope; just as Evan Rachel Wood is too pretty to play Natalie. Why not use normal looking people for a change? Would audiences run out of the theater in revulsion? Or would they be happy to finally see people they can relate to; people who look like them? I can't really say for sure, but I do think that in the case of Running With Scissors that kind of casting causes the film to lack authenticity.

The film industry took a unique, fascinating, wonderfully absurd book and forced it into a standard mold that would comfort audiences with its familiarity, and as a result, squeezed all the life out of it. The lively, quirky family filled with depth was turned into a group of stereotypes and one dimensional characters. The bizarre and sometimes disturbing plot line was manipulated until it resembled many other films much more than it resembled its actual beginnings, the book (and Augusten's life). I find this disheartening, firstly because Running With Scissors could have made such a great and original film, and secondly, because it's indicative of the the sorry state of the film industry today.