Page-to-Screen: ‘Spiderhead’ the movie squanders George Saunders’ classic short story

George Saunders’ “Escape From Spiderhead” is the stuff of nightmares, or at least of mine: torture, mind control, lifelong regret. Published in the New Yorker in 2010 and collected in Saunders’ “Tenth of December” in 2013, the short story puts me in mind of art-house films by miserabilists like Gaspar Noé and Lars von Trier. But in greenlighting the adaptation, Hollywood had other ideas.

Which is reasonable enough: Many of Saunders’ stories have unexploited potential for Hollywood studio films. Bard of conflicted white guys and dispenser of folksy wisdom, Saunders has made a career of old-fashioned morality tales green-screened with photogenically fantastical inventions.

His stories are full of Everymen-turned-moral heroes — or moral failures, no less instructive. They’re lessons on how to do what’s right, of the kind John Gardner famously demanded from fiction. “Escape From Spiderhead” fits that mold, with a redemption arc that could map neatly onto a star-studded dramedy.

Yet in “Spiderhead,” the adaptation by Joseph Kosinski (“Top Gun: Maverick”) that opens this week, Saunders’ work is little more than a prop. The film’s writers, Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese (“Deadpool”), fundamentally misconstrue Saunders’ story.

Where “Escape From Spiderhead” posed penetrating questions about complicity and sacrifice, “Spiderhead” ignores them in favor of flashy fisticuffs between black hats and white. Escape no longer happens through self-transcendence; instead, it’s by seaplanes and speedboats.

In Saunders’ story, narrator Jeff is serving time at a New York state prison nicknamed “Spiderhead.” Spiderhead lets incarcerated people participate in pharmaceutical trials in exchange for a separate and ostensibly easier confinement. The drugs’ intended psychoactive effects range from trivial to life-changing. 

Researcher Abnesti and his assistant administer them through an insulin pump-type device, observing in a control room, and submit data to the manufacturer, as do colleagues elsewhere. 

Despite a charade of consent, subjects are aware that if they refuse to cooperate, the experimenters can fax Albany for permission to use an obedience drug. Jeff would also risk his cherished calls with his mom. His only other activity is attending therapy.

Researcher Abnesti and his assistant administer them through an insulin pump-type device, observing in a control room, and submit data to the manufacturer, as do colleagues elsewhere.

 Despite a charade of consent, subjects are aware that if they refuse to cooperate, the experimenters can fax Albany for permission to use an obedience drug.

 Jeff would also risk his cherished calls with his mom. His only other activity is attending therapy.