Andrew Post 2

Daniella's blog post touches on my biggest English major pet peeve: the book is always better than the movie. No! Wrong! Reject! Film and literature tell their stories in different ways and each has their own strengths and shortcomings. While a film may challenge how we originally imagined something while reading it, it's a good practice to lean into the way filmmakers have visualized a story because it can encourage us to consider the source material from outside our own perspectives. I'm sure if I had read Bakery Attack I would never have pictured the story unfolding in such a strange way. The  idiosyncratic camera moves, the exaggerated acting of the woman choosing what pastries she wants, the serious narration over such oddities all served to tell the story in an exciting new way. It made me think of Murakami's forays into critiquing capitalism (I believe we read an excerpt from Dance, Dance,Dance that touched on this). The woman agonizes over pastries because she is convinced that choosing melon bread over something else is indicative of the quality of her person and what sort of life she leads. It is the absurd extreme of consumerism: the idea that the things we buy somehow define and shape us. Even the narrator and his dolt of a friend feel that they can't just be given food, they expect to either take it through violence or to obtain it through some sort of exchange. Robbing the bakery is also a temporary fix for them. They'll just get hungry again later. 

It's important not let our preconceptions of a story too heavily influence our viewing of another interpretation. Even a bad adaptation of a work could lead us to a new way of looking at the source material, encouraging us to take no interpretation for granted.