I’ve just encountered two bildungsromans, or coming-of-age stories, one a film, the other a memoir. The film is Canadian director Matt Johnson’s Tony, about Anthony Bourdain’s initial experience in a kitchen, based on the beginning of his memoir Kitchen Confidential. The memoir is Theo Baker’s recent book about his freshman and sophomore years at Stanford, provocatively titled How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University.

I came to Johnson’s film, knowing virtually nothing about Bourdain, because of my interest in Johnson. I have used Johnson’s 2023 film Blackberry in my leadership and narrative course and will do so again this fall. Given the tendency of young people, especially men, to be the founders of technology startups, films about startups will have some genre crossover into bildungsromans because the business begins with the dreams and activities of a few young founders. Thus, it is a logical progression from tech startup movie to bildungsroman.

Learning to Cook

In Tony, Bourdain, who wants to be a writer, fails to win a summer writing award from his college. At loose ends, he follows a crush to Provincetown, where she has a summer job. A drunken fight leaves him penniless and at even looser ends. A chef gives Bourdain a hammock to sleep on in exchange for work as a dishwasher. As the summer unfolds, after some painful errors, Bourdain begins to learn about cooking, and he begins a relationship with his crush. Spoiler alert. Bourdain ends the summer with a recommendation from the chef to support his application to the Culinary Institute of America. There is much to like about this film: what I liked most are the intense relationships between Bourdain (Dominic Sessa) and the chef (Antonio Banderas) and his would-be girlfriend (Emilia Jones).

Taking Down a President

How to Rule the World is an expansive story about a talented young man who happens to be in the right place at the right time. Theo Baker, the son of two New York journalists, one at the Times and the other at The New Yorker, is admitted to Stanford primarily on his strength as a coder. Baker takes an enormously challenging computer science course in his first semester. In his extracurriculars, he is part of the team running a hackathon and part of another group, The Stanford Highly Incompetent Team, car aficionados who build a race car. His third extracurricular, writing for The Stanford Daily, turns out to be the most impactful. There he becomes an investigative journalist examining the research integrity of some papers co-authored by the neuroscientist Marc Tessier-Lavigne (MTL in local parlance), then President of Stanford.

The challenge to MTL’s research integrity is introduced a quarter of the way into the book, which then bifurcates. It is a bildungsroman, with numerous coming-of-age experiences, including the computer science course, the hackathon and race car extracurriculars, girlfriends, the death of two grandparents, and a drug overdose.

It is also an investigative journalism narrative, involving the cultivation of sources and conflict with the object of the investigation. Seven years ago, Beth Herst and I published an article on films dealing with investigative journalism, in which we set out an investigative journalism fable, with 14 recurring structural elements. (Here is a link to a blog showing how to find the article.) I had this template in mind when reading about Baker’s investigative journalism and his narrative fits it very nicely.

There is a community of people who monitor research integrity and they provide evidence that some of MTL’s co-authors had falsified results, essentially by doctoring images appearing in co-authored articles. MTL and the Stanford administration are litigious, but The Stanford Daily, to its credit, also lawyers up. Eventually, the Stanford Board of Trustees investigates MTL’s research. As a result, MTL retracts or corrects five papers and resigns as President of Stanford. But MTL seamlessly moves out of the President’s mansion to one he has just purchased and launches an AI drug-discovery startup, with $1 billion in venture capital funding.

There is enormous scope for a film in Baker’s book. The screenwriter would have to decide how to balance the bilgungsroman genre with the investigative journalism genre. Baker has provided lots of visually compelling episodes for the bildungsroman to use. The investigative journalism component connects to the bildungsroman because Baker decides on a career in journalism rather than in technology.

Dramatizing Baker’s investigative journalism narrative poses two challenges. The film must explain to a lay audience the nature and significance of the violations of the research ethics canon committed by people in MTL’s lab. That is much more complicated that the political skullduggery of All the President’s Men or the sexual harassment of Spotlight. While MTL was negligent in creating a hypercompetitive culture within his lab that undermined research integrity, he is not comparable to President Nixon or Cardinal Law. The second challenge is that MTL would likely use the threat of a lawsuit to influence how he is depicted.

Though How to Rule the World can be read as the source text of a future screenplay, it can also be read as an indictment of Stanford University, which Baker believes has sold itself out to become the academic handmaiden of the Silicon Valley elite. Occasionally Baker the protagonist does sophomoric things and Baker the author writes like a sophomore, but the book also displays a keen critical eye for the failings of both a major university and of its leadership. I strongly recommend it.