There is a natural urge to create adaptations with film. Film, after all, is still a relatively new art and audiences have not yet lost their childlike wonder at its ability to convey alternate realities so realistically and convincingly. Who hasn’t read a thrilling scene from one of their favorite books and thought “man, it would be awesome to see a movie version of this!” Yet, as everyone says, “the book is always better”.
While I don’t think that this is always true, it quite often is, and not always through any deficiency on the part of the director. Is this a problem inherent to filmed adaptations of the other arts? Are all adaptations doomed to “suffer in comparison”?
I think the assumption most people start with when approaching the idea of an adaptation is that, first, the book that is being adapted is a masterpiece and, second, that the filmmaker possesses sufficient genius to create a masterpiece out of the work in their own right. In Bazin’s essay “In Defense of Mixed Cinema” (part of the inspiration for this post) he says “if all directors were men of genius, there would be no problem with adaptation”. But I think this oversimplifies matters greatly. John Huston is most certainly a man of genius, and his adaptation of The Maltese Falcon is nearly peerless when measured against the film output of the last 100 years. Yet even in this case, Dashielle Hammet’s original novel strikes me as the “better” version of this story.
Is this because film is simply a “lesser” art than literature? Will a thousand words always say more than 24 pictures a second? This seems to be a false conclusion no matter what my obviously biased thoughts on film as fine art are. Not that I believe in the fine art/low art distinction anyway, art is art, and I don’t care if we are talking about cave painters or mimes, I can’t with any conviction say that a master of one form of art is any less of an artist than a master of another form of art.
I think the problem here is two-fold. First, when you evaluate film with literary criteria you are setting it up for failure. Film and literature are very different art forms for all their similarities. Complaining that a film did not capture certain qualities that were in the novel can sometimes be like saying something like “the comic book version of that poem was better because it had prettier pictures”. This is really just comparing apples to oranges, neither will ever live up to the other.
The second problem is that the original work will always have a certain “je ne sais quoi” that no adaptation can ever quite match (assuming it was created by someone who was a master in their own right of course). When Dashiell Hammett wrote The Maltese Falcon, he imbued it with life from thin air and no adaptation will ever be able to capture the passion and vitality with which he wrote it.
But even this more pressing (though more abstract) issue doesn’t quite seem valid when you realize that the film version of The Maltese Falcon is not a lesser movie than Citizen Kane simply because it is an adaptation. They are both masterpieces and when evaluated together neither suffers in comparison.
So I think the key here is to remember to evaluate films on their own terms. Compared to a work of literature, cinema is a momentary, fleeting art due to its relative brevity. Its strengths are very different from those of literature, but they are of equal substance. The film version of The Maltese Falcon will always compare poorly if you are looking for the same kind of experience you had while reading the book. But that was not what John Huston wanted to do. He instead wanted to take the core of the book and translate those concepts into a hundred minute film that could stand as a tightly constructed visceral masterpiece of cynicism and honor in its own right. In this goal he succeeded admirably, while at the same time maintaining an astonishing fidelity to the source material.
But the question of how closely the creator of an adaptation should follow the source material is a blog post for another time!
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If anyone wants to see a real life film adaptation of the book pictured at the top of this post, you can find that very thing right here:
Re: that last paragraph: My favorite movies to bring up as far as adaptations go are American Psycho and The Rules of Attraction. These are two great books, one of them one of my all-time-favorites, by one of my favorite authors. They both do wacky things with narration or structure, and the plots are either subjective or, like, roughly nonexistent, or whatever. (One of them neither begins nor ends, and the other one traps you inside the book itself so that once you begin, you can’t ever leave! Oh god I love that book.) Anyway, they’re both ripe for being adaptations that I would hate because someone “ruined” MY BOOK – but I really really like both of them. I think the reason that I liked both of them is because neither one tried too hard to stick exactly to the book. So I came out of it not thinking that someone ruined my book, but thinking instead that someone took a story I liked and changed it and then filmed THAT. Like, poor old Mel Gibson screwed up Hamlet, because he tried to do Hamlet. But Leonardo DiCapprio did a fine Romeo because he wasn’t doing YOUR ROMEO. He was doing something different. Does that make sense? I think I’m rambling. This might not be insightful.
Also – where on earth did you get that photo!
That’s actually part of the point I am going to make next week, I prefer for directors to break away from following the books so strictly for adaptations. Though I support the other side too…but yeah I think that all made sense (and is a good point about him “not doing YOUR Romeo” etc). (Though I haven’t read those books and I still haven’t seen American Psycho…Rules of Attraction was pretty good though).
As for the picture, I just googled “bad boys 2 novelization”…you don’t think I made that myself do you?? 😉
This is a HUGE issue for me, for many reasons.
I tend to not see movies if they are adaptations. I think short stories can make pretty good movies, but novels do not tend to translate well, either for time and/or complexity. When I see that a movie is an adaptation, I feel as though I must go and read the book/story, and I often do. It is, invariably, better than the adaptation.
It is hard for me to get over the fact that movies and books are entirely different forms of art. I mean, THE PEARL EARRING was an “adaptation” of Vermeer, but people don’t really call it that so much because how do you really adapt a still painting into a movie? Really, the same goes for novels. Sure, there is a story underlying both, but the same can be said for paintings/sculptures. Funny enough, as much as I am against adaptations, a movie I made for the KU film festival was an adaptation of one of my own poems. How is ‘narcissistic” spelled again? 🙂
Anyway, for all of my vast hatred of adaptations (if I hear what a good movie the Neverending Story was one more time, I will kill a puppy) some actually do stand out as “as good as” or “better” than the book, especially THE PRINCESS BRIDE. A few minor things were changed, such as the kiss, in the story itself, but all the inane blather about the divorce was happily removed. THE PRINCESS BRIDE is also a superior adaptation due to the casting.
The problem I have with most adaptations is not in the special effects or the general look and feel (though some of these aspects can also be spectacularly ruined), it is in the casting. Why? Because, invariably, concessions to the storytelling seem to be made either for egos or to “improve the role.” I don’t care for this. Okay, you’ve taken the part of some character that has almost no screen time in the novel. Live with it. Instead, you get a bunch of expanded crap so these peripheral characters can have more life at the expense of the REAL characters in the story.
The worst offenders as far as adaptations are those that take the title from a book and little more. Starship Troopers and Who “Framed”/Murdered Roger Rabbit are notable criminals. In fact, I so love “Who Murdered Roger Rabbit” that the Disney (yes, Disney is behind many of these rotten “adaptations” – don’t get me started on THE LITTLE MERMAID) version is almost unwatchable for me.
Which brings me to Lord of the Rings. As big of a fan as I am of Tolkien, I have not seen the movies. Why? Because I have a lovely, lively Middle Earth in my head that I feel will be adversely affected by seeing the films. I didn’t care for the previews that I saw – in fact, they nearly gave me a heart-attack. I’m not saying that Ian M. wasn’t brilliant or that the special effects were bad or anything. In truth, I don’t really care. I only know that the 3 minutes I saw on-screen was so NOT what was in my head, it was like finding out that god is a giant chicken (no, just Chicken – er, obscure joke, sorry). In fact, when I told my father that such an adaptation had been made, he said, “I’m not going to see it either. I don’t think you can make a movie out of those books. You can only use the medium of film to tell a similar story.” I know people who love the films. Whatever. They sold a lot of books for Tolkien’s estate.
Of course, I am no hater of movies. I love a good movie. I just wish that screenwriters would just WRITE MOVIES. Push the art, tell an interesting story that can be properly and best told in movie format. This is why we have different forms of storytelling, or we’d all be sitting around chanting in iambic pentameter. In fact, many movies were life-changing for me in both large and small ways. I think more screenwriters should have a chance to have their movies made, and I think it is a pity that the largest grossing movies in a year tend to be either novel (Harry Potter) or comic book (Batman) adaptations.
Of course, comic books DO translate better into movies simply because the art of a comic book is very close to that of a storyboard for a movie. THE DARK KNIGHT was a terrific film, though, in truth, that was mostly due to Heath Ledger’s superior performance. I thought GdT’s Hellboy movies were enjoyable. However, GtD’s original screenplays make for superior movies (I would watch Pan’s Labyrinth over Hellboy any day.)
My this is long, sorry. To sum up: More original movies, fewer screenplays. If a screenplay must be made, find actors to fit the roles rather than making a role fit the actor. Movies are their own forms of art… oh, who am I kidding – adaptations are a Hollywood cash cow. Hell, there’s even an adaptation of Death in Venice. I think, in the end, when someone make an adaptation of a beloved book, it doesn’t feel as though that book is my own thing anymore. It feels like a daughter who went out and became a stripper, writhing for the uncouth masses. Alas.
What’s next? The Secret of Mr. Y?
That Bazin essay made an interesting point that the first 30 years or so of “cinema as art” film was constantly pushing the boundries and by 1940 or so it had reached its technical peak, and with the tools in place turned to adaptations more and more, not because they were easier but because it was a new challenge to try to not just create cinema, but to also create cinema that “captured the book”. Adaptations have always had an element of “cashing in on the popularity” of the new hot book (or old hot book), but just because studios rush out a Twilight movie or whatever doesn’t mean adaptations are always bad.
I really can’t say that original movies are better than adaptations, probably half of my favorite movies are adaptations whether I know it or not (the original version of this post I compared Maltese Falcon to Stagecoach before remembering seeing that Stagecoach was based on a book too).
I really think you have to look at the movie as its own product. Like Orson Welles’ A Touch of Evil an adaptation he made without even reading the book…the Time Out Film Guide sums it up brilliantly:
“A wonderfully offhand genesis (Welles adopting and adapting a shelved Paul Monash script for B-king Albert Zugsmith without ever reading the novel by Whit Masterson it was based on) marked this brief and unexpected return to Hollywood film-making for Welles. And the result more than justified the arrogance of the gesture.”
He shat all over the original book, but goddamn that’s a great movie. I don’t care if he did it to Lord of the Rings, it’s the quality of the movie that really counts.
Sure, the new Lord of the Rings movies way pump up Arwen’s part and put a few more actions scenes in…but they are just hollywood blockbusters. I bet had Boorman made his version of Lord of the Rings back in the 80s he would have changed all kinds of stuff and I would have liked it a lot better than the new movies (which were pretty good…for hollywood blockbusters that is). Instead he adapted the King Arthur legend and it ended up being one of my favorite movies (despite being a bit of a mess).
Of course I’ll touch of most of this in the follow up post to this one at the end of the week… 🙂
Okay, I can agree, in part, to your answer, but I still believe any sort of adaptation between media can have a profound affect on how the original is afterward interpreted.
For example, everyone knows about the Three Wise Men that come to see Baby Jesus at Christmastime. However, despite everything that is wrong with this statement, the Bible reports that only “wise men” visited. Why three? Because three was the popular number of Magi depicted in the early Middle Ages. So, essentially, the picture adaptations of the story were so powerful that people attribute things to the original text that just aren’t there. Examples from the Bible are almost infinite.
The same can happen with movies, and, frankly, the “close” adaptations are worse than those that are just blatantly different. Historical movies can also have a negative affect on the “real” story (as real as history is anyway), as historical adaptations, from Homer’s Iliad to Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar to Gladiator, really can alter how we imagine the past. It is true, there is an art to adaptation and I will not argue that the inaccuracies in Julius Caesar render it a terrible play. It is a very good play. The problem is that audiences substitute the fiction of an adaptation for the fact of the original.
Why is this particularly bad for movies adapted from books? I am so glad you asked. It has to do with the power of the image. Movies, unlike books, are phenomenological. They allow the audience, whether one or many, to EXPERIENCE a story. This is very powerful. Once you as an organism experience something, it takes priority in the memory. Therefore, if you see Ian McKellan’s mug on the screen lecturing a Hobbit about proper jewelery disposal, then it is very likely that unless you are of a stout intellectual spirit, when you read the books, you will, in your mind, see Ian’s mug once more when imagining the action in the books.
Sure, some people have no issue with this or even enjoy that sort of affect. I, however, do not like it when an adaptation clashes with my imagination. I have to work very hard while reading The Neverending Story not to see a dog-like dragon whenever Falkor’s name appears in print. I am only partially successful in this. Therefore, my choice not to see an adaptation has to do greatly with protecting my imagination. Still art (such as an illustration) is not quite as powerful, but still, who doesn’t picture Tenniel’s engravings when reading Alice in Wonderland (speaking of another adaptation!)?
All that said, yes, some adaptations can be really fun and can even improve on or add to a story. But adaptations are a form of Fan Fiction in the end.
Interesting debate though, and I do have more respect for the adaptation now. I still like a good original screenplay though.