From: Ishan Tarunesh <ishantarunesh@gmail.com>
Isaac Asimov wrote a total of 90,000 letters and postcards in his lifetime. That’s roughly an average of 5 correspondences a day for 50 years. I wonder how much thought he gave to each of his letters. Anyway.
Let’s think more about the Movie vs Book debate that we had. I got some more time to think while I roamed on the streets of Prague, occasionally writing things on my phone. Pedestrians have the right-of-way in most countries of Europe, so I didn’t have to worry about being run down by a car (unlike in Mumbai). No wonder Europe has produced prolific artists, writers, painters, and whatnot.
I’ll (try to) summarise where we stood the last time in an unbiased way. The movie adaptations fall short of their book version because
Also, we are only discussing movies that were adapted from books later, and we are entirely ignoring books that were written after the movies were successful (Avatar for example)
Before you proceed, this letter doesn’t end on a decisive note and will probably converge towards a neutral stance – thus rendering the debate a Moo point, as Joey would call it.
Last time, I gave the example of Shawshank Redemption, The Perks Of Being a Wallflower, and Little Woman as movies that outperformed their books. Upon searching, I found more such examples (refer 1, 2) which the internet thinks are better as movies – Forrest Gump, Wolf of Wall Street, Jurassic Park, Jaws, 2001: A Space Odessey, How To Train Your Dragon, Fight Club, Sex And The City, etc. Let’s think of these one by one. I’ve skipped many on the lists because I hadn’t read or watched either of the forms.
Jurassic Park, Jaws, and How To Train Your Dragon are good examples of the first argument I would like to make. Movies can better convey fictional worlds which books might lack. You can read the whole of Jurassic Park without ever visualizing how big the Insidious Rex was compared to T Rex or what wooden structure Hiccup put on Toothless to help him fly.
Secondly, characters in books are non-existent beings. They do not exist outside of the book (or the series), whereas the actors portraying them exist in the real world. They have an image, persona, and context they carry around. So, when an actor chooses to portray a character in a movie, it can be the case that the movie version of the character becomes amplified due to the actor’s portrayal. In my opinion, This happens to many movies: Brad Pitt in Fight Club, Leonardo Di Caprio in Wolf of Wall Street, Saoirse Ronan in Little Woman, Emma Watson in Perk’s Of Being a Wallflower, and Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump. You take away more from the movie characters than from the book counterpart.
2001: A Space Odyssey is a unique example. The book and the movie were created together, but from a friend’s review, the movie is incredible. There’s not a single dialogue in the complete movie. The book probably doesn’t have dialogues either, but it’s a feat you would appreciate truly in the movie form.
I also found a discussion about this on Goodreads. Mind you, it’s Goodreads so I didn’t expect any movie to be better than books. (If you would like to feel heard and acknowledged, go read this because there are fanatic supporters of books in this discussion). There were a few other names that popped out – Notebook, The Princess Diaries, and Sex And The City (again)
A comment stood out -
If the Notebook Film is better than the book, then the book must be one of the worst books ever written.
This brings me to another point: the books we have been comparing are great books (and thus great movies). There are a plethora of terribly written books, and there’s a chance to redeem them while making the movie. Argument (i) assumed that in the process of going from a book to a movie adaptation, directors (or screenplay writers) cut down on details (such as details of the set, the back story of the characters, and most importantly the narrator/writer’s comments). Many times, details are added in too while the adaptation is created. This is probably what happened to The Notebook, The Princess Diaries, and The Sex And The City.
Another comment from above that I wanted to counter -
hahahahahahahahahhaahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahaha… HA!!! This is a great list for anyone with an IQ under 90. No film is better than the book, the best a movie can do is compliment and complement the book and that happens rarely. Even a horrible book is more mentally stimulating than any movie.
Mentally stimulating, yes, but is mentally stimulating the aim of art? Is mentally stimulating the metric that is being maximized? Then why not do Sudoku puzzles or crosswords? Why read a book?
We are coming to point (ii) of your argument. What’s the aim of an artist when they create their art (books, songs, paintings, movies). Do they want the audience to be mentally stimulated? Or do they want the audience moved by their art? To bring a change in a person? To make them feel certain emotions? To put them at the center of their art and make them forget their own life for a moment?
Mental stimulation doesn’t seem like a worthy goal to me; the other ones do. So it comes down to the question of whether there is a suitable art form for different things. I think yes! Maybe classics are better in books, but war stories are better in movies. Maybe the life of ordinary people can be best depicted through paintings and love through poetry. Maybe movies are suited for horror (strongly feel this and I am curious how jump scares in books work) and books for fantasy.
Can text as a source of information always convey more than video as a medium? I don’t think so. A simple argument for this would be audiobooks, which are somewhere between a book and a movie and probably make it a better experience (through added emotions, pauses, and sometimes the author’s voice).
We have left out an essential aspect in this text vs. video. That readers or viewers are not perfect consumers. They do not absorb 100% of what they read or see. If text conveys 50% more info than movies, but the comprehension is 50% less then the cumulative information reaching the reader is 1.5 X 0.5 = 0.75, i.e., 75% compared to movies. And wasn’t this the goal we discussed above – to evoke certain emotions in the viewer, to move them? So, in that way, books are sometimes disadvantaged against movies because an average person understands better visually than through reading. A lot of great authors write very simply because of this reason. (Paolo Coelho comes to my mind)
You would say, okay Ishan but let’s not talk about the average person; let’s talk about the 95th percentile person, to which I would reply, why should we only talk about the 95th percentile? Isn’t another aim of art to evoke emotions in the most number of people?
The debate of books vs movies (for the movies that were adapted from books) is more nuanced than it appears on the surface. To me people who support books firmly are saying “what came first is better and it’s impossible to live to it”. Now, the arguments are more straightforward to make
No, if the (i) first version was terrible or (ii) it was not suited for that form of art (book in this case). There’s a chance to make it better in the second attempt.
Bye!