With Ender’s Game finally coming out of movie development hell, and The Hunger Games: Catching Fire and The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug on the horizon, the annual discussion about film adaptations of books is resurfacing. People are already bemoaning the inaccuracies of Ender’s Game as they have bemoaned the inaccuracy of so many books-turned-movies in the past (although Ender’s Game at least makes a conscious and visible effort to remain true to the book).
Anyone who knows me knows that I have rather a lot of strange minority opinions. I’m here today to tell you about why you should stop complaining if your favorite book didn’t get a good movie made.
Essentially, my argument rests on two premises: 1) The medium of art is tremendously important, maybe as important as the content; 2) an original story and its adaptation are two separate and distinct pieces of art.
The former displays itself pretty clearly any time a well-written book is turned into a movie. One of the main benefits that a book has over any other form of narrative art is its ability to enter the head of its characters. Books often do this literally in first-person stories, but even when they are in third-person a book can still tell you what a character is thinking or feeling at any given moment. In a movie, it is the actor’s responsibility to convey this inner monologue through his facial expressions and body language, but it’s simply not possible to make this as specific as a written account. For example, both The Hunger Games and Ender’s Game suffer significantly from this—in The Hunger Games, the real meat of the book is Katniss’ inner monologue, as she struggles with new emotions and thoughts as she battles through incredible hardships. In Ender’s Game, one of the most significant parts of the book is the psychological and emotional trauma that Ender and the other recruits endure in Battle School and Command School; at any given point in the book, the main characters are ready to collapse from sheer exhaustion and many of them (despite being the best and the brightest Earth has to offer) are incapable of free thought because of the constant psychological bullying. In the movies, Katniss is a much flatter character than in the books (despite Jennifer Lawrence’s excellent portrayal) simply because we don’t hear her trying to work through everything, and Ender states his exhaustion a couple of times but we don’t feel his body and mind crumbling under the strain of what’s happening to him. (If you’re looking for example of movies that do a superb job of displaying inner monologues via facial expressions and cinematography, see the 2006 Russian film Ostrov and Days of Heaven. Or anything Tarkovsky directed.)
This, however, is rarely the complaint that readers raise against movies. The complaint normally involves them (at least inwardly) standing up and screaming “BUT THAT’S NOT HOW IT HAPPENED IN THE BOOK!!!” Plot and character changes are the fundamental problem most readers have with film adaptations. I believe that this problem arises because people expect for movies to essentially be audio-books with pictures—although of course that’s tremendously unsatisfying, as well. But they demand that the movie actually be the book, only with moving pictures instead of stationary words.
Aside from the fact that this is, from a technical standpoint, simply impossible, the fact is that when a movie attempts to do this it really doesn’t make a very good movie. The Hunger Games, for instance, was co-written by the author of the book, and the result is that the movie rigidly and uncompromisingly sticks to the plot of the book but saps all of the meaning and depth. If you have read the book, The Hunger Games is a decent movie because you can automatically fill in all of the gaps, but if I had seen the movie without having read the book I would’ve left the theater confused, disappointed and without any interest to see the second movie. (The Hunger Games also has a few other problems, such as the fact that no one in the movie ever actually looks hungry. But that’s another discussion.)
On the other hand, Mary Poppins barely even resembles the book, beyond the basic characters and plot structure (although even the plot itself is fairly different). The result of this is that the movie is one of the most beloved Disney classics, and pretty much everyone except P.L. Travers herself thinks the movie is better than the book. The movie took the premise, characters and themes of the book and developed them, fleshed them out and transposed them into a film-ready state—resulting in tremendously fun dream-like sequences of animation and special effects that the book could never have produced. For an example of a movie that improved on a book that was actually good, I present The Princess Bride, which takes the comedy and insights of the narrator and brilliantly weaves them into the dialogue of the movie, in the process making the characters more complex and fleshed-out and allowing for a more powerful emotional climax. The writers of these two movies understood that you cannot write a movie the same way that you write a book, and made no attempt to do so. The result was two pretty fantastic movies that purist fans of the books would hate. (And along these lines, Saving Mr. Banks looks absolutely phenomenal.)
Movies simply function differently than books do. You must communicate through dialogue and cinematography rather than through omniscient words. They are wonderful ways for books to come alive, but you cannot expect that this process will leave the result identical to the starting point. If you can transmute lead into gold, it’s unreasonable to expect that it will still protect you from radiation.
Personally, I believe that the soul of a story is frequently somewhat divorced from the actual events, and that changing some of the events may in fact allow that soul more room to grow (C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien agreed with me, for what that’s worth). This happens in The Princess Bride, and I believe in Prince Caspian as well (although most people disagree with me on that one). If you are adapting a story, the important thing is to maintain the soul of the story, the souls of the characters, and not much else matters. Of course, if the changes you make to the story simply make a worse story, then you should not make them (Mazer Rackham is less brilliant in the Ender’s Game movie because it was a bit easier to create the special effects shot that way). However, if you can make the story better, bring out truths and themes that are only touched on in the book, then by all means, change away (Prince Caspian needed an actual villain and some character arcs for Peter and Caspian, and the movie provided them).
It is a disservice to both the movie and the book to expect a film adaptation to be exactly the same as a book. Let the book be the book, and the movie be the movie, and accept each for what it is. If you love the characters enough to want to see the movie, then enjoy the presence of the characters in a slightly different world. If you don’t, then enjoy the different world that creates a different setting for the story. Or don’t see the movie. But please, don’t go see the movie and then complain it isn’t exactly the same as the book—art doesn’t work that way.
gopherwood
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