Red, White & Royal Blue: The Trick to Adapting Dual Storylines

In a life of devouring stories, I have always been drawn to character. Who am I? Who will I become?

To my mind, romance is undoubtedly the best genre for exploring character. The bare essentials of the genre is this: We are introduced to two people who are fundamentally different and fundamentally alike. They meet and change each other in undoable ways. By the end of the story, who the two lovers are now is so thoroughly intertwined that we can no longer imagine them apart. All the obstacles thrown their way are agony, not just because they threaten the relationship, but they threaten to destabilize the core identities of our protagonists.

Red, White & Royal Blue: The Novel, excels in its exploration of character and character growth. So much so that, even though bookstores stock it in the Romance Section, it is, structurally speaking, more accurately categorized as a bildungsroman, or a novel about growing up. It follows a year in the life of Alexander Claremont-Diaz, the First Son of the United States, and the events of that year that changed who he was.

Red, White, and Royal Blue follows dual plotlines: the romance, and the presidential reelection campaign. Both plot lines feel equally important because they have equal effect on Alex's character development.

Further, both plotlines also interact with each other in such a way that raises the stakes for each story thread and for Alex's personal journey. It's not enough that Alex is struggling with whether or not his feelings for Henry are romantic or not. It's also that, if his feelings are romantic, that means he's queer, and being queer will hurt his political career. It's not just that the boys are constantly hounded by reporters due to their international status. It's that they cannot spend time together without risking being outed. The romance and political campaign storylines wrap around Alex's character progression like the double helixes of DNA, intersecting at the most effective points.

When it comes to the letter of the two plotlines, Red, White & Royal Blue: The Movie is a very loyal adaptation. The romance has CakeGate, damage control British interviews, the cancer ward, turkeys, Get Low, the kiss at New Years, and a dozen other big events and little details. Some of the political machinations of the book are quietly discarded for the movie, but the arc is still there. And yet, as loyal as it is, something feels off about it. Why?

Simple. The character arc is missing. There's no process of Alex coming out to himself, no grappling with whether to go straight into politics or take the slower path through law school, no learning to allow his friends to see his faults and to live in the present rather than five years in the future. The plot beats are present, but the emotional tethers that tie them to character have been severed.

Not only are the dual plotlines of the movie not connected to Alex's character arc, but they are also largely unconnected to each other. In the book, when Alex tells his mom about Henry, Madame President freaks that Alex's personal life could affect her campaign and makes Alex sign papers stating that he hasn't used any campaign funds for personal reasons. It's clinical and uncomfortable, and further shows how Alex's relationship complicates the campaign and the campaign complicates Alex's relationship. In the movie, when Alex comes out to his mom, she smiles and orders pizza. Disconnecting the plot threads from each other doesn't just unmoor the journey. It also drastically lowers the stakes.

The big secret to storytelling is that effective stories are only really ever about one thing. Macbeth is about lust for political power. You could say it is also about a marriage falling apart, but the reason the marriage is falling apart is because of the lust for political power. Even if a lot is going on in a story, all the elements must point in the same direction, must support the same argument. Otherwise, the story will feel muddled and crowded, or some elements or storylines will feel much less engaging than others. Red, White & Royal Blue: The Movie adapted two separate storylines without considering what the unifying journey was that tied them together.

Red, White & Royal Blue isn't a bad movie, far from it. And I really appreciate all the plot details they adhered to. But when it comes to adaptations, it's not enough to transfer elements from the page to the screen. You also need to understand what purpose those elements served. If the elements are present, but their reason for being is not, the final product is going to feel hollow.