Why the Book Was Better

“Oh, books, what books they used to know,

Those children living long ago!

So please, oh please, we beg, we pray,

Go throw your TV set away,

And in its place you can install

A lovely bookshelf on the wall.”

Roald Dahl, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964)

 

Well-stocked libraries are the BEST. I accept no dissent.

The thing about film adaptations of books or series of books – a category which I think it’s fair to say constitutes a phenomenally high proportion of mainstream cinematic releases at the present time – is that they’re pretty much doomed before they’re even produced. When I say ‘doomed’ here, I don’t, of course, mean doomed to box office failure; in fact, quite the opposite would appear to be true, since adapting a beloved book series is a tried-and-tested way of pretty much guaranteeing an audience regardless of the film’s other ingredients. Nor do I mean doomed to cinematic mediocrity; adaptations of books can and regularly do make good films. What I mean is that they are pretty much doomed to be worse as films than the books upon which they are based are as books.

Maybe it’s just the circles I move in, but I hardly ever come across anyone singing the praises of a film adaptation while harbouring dislike for its book counterpart, and yet the opposite situation is rife. People are always telling me how much better the original book form of such-and-such a story is than its equivalent film version. I frequently say the same myself. Off the top of my head, some comparatively worse film adaptations of comparatively better books (I won’t waste your time by going into how good I would consider each book or film to be on a broader scale) include Coraline, Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant, The Lorax, I Am Number Four, A Series of Unfortunate Events,¹ both Percy Jackson films, all the Narnia series, all the Harry Potter series, and The Sword in the Stone (which I’m reading at the moment and would recommend). As for film adaptations which improve on their book equivalents, the only one I can think of that I’ve seen is The Hunger Games: Catching Fire.² There’s more behind this state of affairs, I think, than a lack of capability on the part of filmmakers compared to authors: a film adaptation is by its very nature almost insurmountably destined to be worse than the book whence it draws its story. I present five reasons why.

1)       The book came first.

Inherently, it was the book that actually broke the ground here. The book was the pioneer and is credited as such: it planted its flag in the previously unexplored zones of human imagination that it was the first to unlock, and that flag cannot be uprooted. There is no credit left to claim for conquering that ground. Then the film adaptation rocks up: bound to the book by its very nature, it nevertheless thereby clamps huge restrictions over its own capacity for originality. Either it must stick as closely as possible to the book in order to benefit vicariously from as large a proportion of the book’s credit as possible, meaning, inevitably, that it can be no better than the book even if it does what it does absolutely perfectly; or it must attempt to break new ground worthy of its own credit by making alterations to the substance of the book, which is a risky business (since it was the fact that the book was as good as it was that warranted a film adaptation in the first place, and similarity to the book is likely to be what the core, guaranteed audience of the film is looking for) and a very difficult balance to strike. Simply by virtue of having come first, the book version is immediately at an advantage.

And because it came first, the book was created in the most fitting medium for it, namely…

2)      The book was conceived of as a book.

The trouble with the first adaptation strategy outlined above – sticking as closely as possible to the book – is that film is a totally different medium to words on a page. A book can convey precisely the information the author wishes to convey: it can explicitly describe smells and textures and sensations that film can only indicate through character reactions; it can get right inside characters’ heads and explain nuances of their thought processes that can’t be communicated by even the cleverest actor; or likewise, it can be economical with detail for effect, whereas a film is generally obliged to have some level of completeness in what it conveys: the whole scene has to be set, even if we’re only really interested in a bit of it. Now, that’s not to say film as a medium doesn’t have its own advantages, but the point is that it has a different set of them. A film is certainly more than capable of telling a good story, but it cannot tell a story in the same way a book can. It has, if you’ll permit a metaphor, a different vocabulary and syntax; as with any translation, the translation of a story from one medium to another is bound to cause something to be lost.

As a bit of a side note, I think the best way to approach this issue is to flaunt the genre change, to make the very most of everything the medium of film offers. Catching Fire made a particularly good job of this. To be fair, it had some advantage in that the book was essentially about a televised event, so that that aspect of the story was in one way only coming home to its proper medium; but on top of that, the regular depictions of events Katniss, as the books’ present-tense, first-person narrator, couldn’t possibly have witnessed, really worked to build an atmosphere of brink-of-revolution tension that I didn’t feel came across nearly as well in the book. That said, the book versions of both Hunger Games sequels were rather disappointing: they felt somewhat unplanned and forced, their storylines pushing the edges of the sphere of plausibility laid out in the first of the trilogy. Presumably, Suzanne Collins hadn’t anticipated being asked to write sequels when she submitted her quite excellent debut novel for publication; the filmmakers, by contrast, were aware of the whole story from the start, and made the most of the fact.

 

The book was not, in this instance, better.

One of the commendable aspects of a book that is entirely inevitably missing from any film adaptation is that…

3)      The book was versatile in practical terms.

This point, admittedly, strays a little in the direction of a broader argument in favour of the superiority of books generally over films generally, which is not really what I’m trying to do in this post. I can’t say I agree with Roald Dahl’s rather Luddite opinions about entertainment as expressed in the poem from which my opening quotation is drawn; while I certainly adore books, I also enjoy TV as much as the next millennial with a knack for procrastination. Still, the point does, I feel, constitute a factor in why film adaptations are worse than the books on which they’re based, so I thought I’d make it in any case.

A film requires the viewer to engage with it on its terms; a book can be engaged with more on the reader’s. I mean this in quite mundane, practical ways. For instance, a book is extremely portable: it can be easily carried about and read almost anywhere, including in places where it’s impossible or inadvisable to use electricity, like the beach or the bath. If you hit a sentence that’s a tad difficult to grasp, it’s no trouble at all to reread it a couple of times until it makes sense, or similarly, if you encounter a particularly delectable chunk of prose, you can reread it for the sheer pleasure with equal ease; to do the same in a film requires some skill in the delicate art of fine rewinding (assuming the option is even available, which it isn’t in the cinema or with some Disney DVDs), and is frankly more trouble than it’s worth. Nobody mumbles in books, whereas I missed some pretty key plot points in The Dark Knight Rises just because I had no idea what Batman and Bane were saying to each other half the time.³ A book doesn’t buffer or freeze or run out of charge. It doesn’t require headphones if you want to enjoy it on a train or in a library. In short, the process of reading a book is altogether more straightforward, with less potential for things to go wrong, than the process of watching a film.

Furthermore, books are not only less problematic to read, but also less problematic to produce, because…

4)      The book had no budget.

When it comes to a book, the only limits are in the mind of the author: his or her imagination and ability to manipulate language. As regards a film, by contrast, the limits are everywhere: how far will the budget stretch in terms of actors, shooting locations, costume and makeup, special effects, and so on and so forth? Plus, even if money were unlimited, there is only so much that technology, or the human body, or the wonders of Smashbox Cosmetics, can actually achieve. Certainly the upper limits are remarkable, but a director will never have the total and utter free rein that belongs to an author quite automatically. An author might describe all sorts of things that simply cannot be adequately replicated on film.

And on top of that, she gets the reader to do a lot of the hard work for her, in that…

5)      The book let you imagine it how you liked.

I maintain that the reading of fiction holds a unique joy in that it recruits one’s imagination and calls it to work. The author gives you the raw information you need, but you’re the one who has to bring it to life. The scene is sketched out in your mind, shifted and shuffled in accordance with every additional item or action described, and as some particularly dramatic event unfolds, having to envision it for yourself is almost comparable to being the one who invented it in the first place. I won’t be so deplorably snobbish as to say that watching films does not stimulate the imagination; it does. At the same time, however, it doesn’t make the imagination work the way reading books does. There is no need to picture and re-picture the scene, because it is pictured for you: that’s the point. By contrast, nobody else saw quite the same things I did when I read about Hogwarts or Camp Half-Blood or Narnia; nobody else painted the duels and the magic and the daring escapes in quite the same shapes and colours. We understand what we read according to the mental and emotional resources we have available, which makes reading a book an incredibly personal thing. Then someone tootles along and makes a film of that book – and of course he makes it in accordance with the way he himself imagined it. One can expect nothing else. Still, his interpretation is likely to cross swords with other peoples’ in many, many ways, particularly if he follows the second adaptation strategy and makes lots of alterations to the substance of the book. If half the enjoyment I got out of reading the book came not from what was going on on the page, but what was going on in my head when I read it, then someone else’s way of picturing the same scenes just isn’t going to be as much fun. It won’t, it can’t, speak as deeply to my own ideas and experiences. And so watching a film of a book one enjoyed is almost guaranteed to be disappointing.

Or rather, watching a film of a book one enjoyed with the expectation that the film will be enjoyable in exactly the same ways and for exactly the same reasons the book was, is almost guaranteed to be disappointing. Perhaps that’s where we’re going wrong. We’re a selfish bunch, and when we say we wish that someone would make such-and-such a book into a film, what we really mean is that we wish someone would replicate in audiovisual format exactly what goes on inside our own heads when we read said book. We love the book and we want the film adaptation to perfectly replicate our experience of it, even though, as soon as we stop to think about it, we know that that’s an impossible order to fill.

So suppose we were to approach this differently. Suppose, next time a film adaptation of a beloved book hit cinemas, we were to see it not as the film version, but merely a film version. Suppose we were to recognise that a film cannot do the same things a book does and it’s unfair to expect it to, and so to assess the film as a film, according to the standards by which we assess films not based on beloved books, rather than unreasonable criteria clumsily extracted from our reasons for liking the book. Suppose we were to consider the film a piece of fiction in its own right rather than wishing it to be a reincarnation of the exact same essence as the book. I really think we might enjoy it rather more.

Or equally, we could just go and reread the book again…

Footnotes

¹ Hopefully Netflix will do a better job; it all kicks off in January and based on the latest trailer, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHyxlzHudoU, my hopes are tentatively high.

² One of my favourite Tobuscus literal trailers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ueJNO3-Ink. Actually, it occurs to me that there is the odd other film adaptation that I prefer to its book counterpart, but that differs so profoundly from the latter in almost every element that it hardly seems like a fair comparison: How to Train Your Dragon would seem the most obvious example.

³ And I know that’s not just me being incompetent, because Screen Junkies point out the same thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQJuGeqdbn4.