The Book was Better

Posted on 2005/03/30 14:39:32 (March 2005) by john.

No it wasn't!

This was brought to mind by a conversation on the message board with Travis today about the American re-make of The Office. Now I haven't seen this, so am in no position to comment, but the point being every single critic talking about it apparently dived straight into the old cliche of saying "the original was better", almost automatically. It seems critics are really incapable of saying anything but this whenever a re-make of anything crops up. OK so this may not be a great example, as I struggle to believe any re-make of The Office could work as well with different actors, etc., but still, that is not the point. What irritates me is the utter predictability of this response from critics.

This reminded me of another pet hate of mine: "The book was better than the film". Indeed along with "The original was better", and even "I preferred them before they were famous" there are in fact a whole family of such comments which are frankly just very annoying.

You see they all translate to the same thing - what the person is really saying is not an attempt to deliver a balanced critique of the artform in question, they are instead guilty of shameless public ego stroking. All of these phrases really say "Due to my supposedly elevated status of cultural superiority I have prior knowledge of this particular artistic concept and given how great I am I understand it much better than everyone else and have therefore the authority to poo-pah any future interpretations of it.". This is, of course, amazingly arrogant and plainly quite irritating.

I recall particularly in school, aged about 12, reading the book The Machine Gunners and then watching the film (or maybe TV series) of it. Our English teacher then referred us to a particular scene where I think a body is discovered or something like that. After watching it, he asked us if we thought the book or the film portrayed this better. Like the mindless drones they were, the rest of my class mates all said "the book was better" (read out loud in a droney pathetic child's voice), because even by the age of 12 they knew that this was what was expected of them. I was the only person in the class to try and argue the case that the film was better, driven, at least in part, solely by the irritation of everybody else jumping on the bandwagon.

The base premise of the whole "the book was better" theory is that somehow people believe that their imagination and vision is better than that of even the most highly acclaimed directors. In that classroom back in the late eighties, approximately thirty 12 year old school children were all saying, indirectly, they thought they could do a better job. I would really love to see the arrogant little sods try. I wasn't part of a particularly accomplished class in school. On reading stories written by my fellow classmates I found them soul-destroyingly dry and banal. There was no-one with any noticeable artistic flare or talent... and yet these people still consider themselves to have better vision and imagination than people who are paid to do that sort of thing for a living.

One wonders why the medium of film was even invented, if, supposedly, anything done in film is going to be a poor subsitute to a book telling the same story. Why do we bother going to the cinema, when we could just go to a library and have a far better time, what with the wonderful imaginations we all have and everything. Why are millions of dollars wasted on these big hollywood epics, when some bloke could sit in front of his typewriter and knock out something infinitely better in a few weeks, at a fraction of the cost?

Books are, let's face it, a very poor form of media. You've got 26 characters at your disposal, a small assortment of punctuation, spaces, and the possibility of putting the odd word in italics if you feel really extravagant. That's it. It really is bugger all to play with. OK, from these very simple building blocks you can build up language and establish an intimate dialogue (well, monologue) between author and reader. That's all well and good but it is still extremely limiting.

Don't get me wrong, I don't hate books (although admittedly I don't read that often), but what irritates me is that people seem to always automatically say books are better than films, which is intrinsically rediculous because films are a vastly richer media to work with. Everything you can do in a book can be done in a film - at the very least you could have the words from the book being read out, or scrolling up the screen.

To say books are automically better than films is akin to denying the usefulness of all other art forms apart from literature. It is to deny the validity of real sensory experience, assuming that you can always imagine it better than it really is.

Would you look at the Mona Lisa and say it would be better described in a passage of text?

Would you listen to a piece of Mozart and say you preferred reading the description of it in a newspaper?

Films give you the magical gift of both sound and vision. A film can allow you to witness the beauty of the Mona Lisa whilst listening to the soothing sounds of Mozart. Can a book do that? No amount of poncy metaphors can allow you to authentically imagine what a great piece of music sounds like. Would you really prefer to read about "rolling, undulating hills sinking away into a hazy sunset" to actually being there looking at that view? If so then you shouldn't be allowed to have eyes and ears, and you should live your life in a box, with a little text scanning device stuck to the front of your face. Presumably routine users of "The book was better" wouldn't object to this treatment, because they could have a much more fulfilling life allowing different combinations of 26 letters to evoke marvellous word pictures in their limitless imaginations.

Yes, the transition from page to screen has, in some cases, been poorly executed. So there are specific instances where, under certain circumstances, I can imagine having read the book and enjoyed it, then seen a film version and not enjoyed that. Let us not, however, blindly assume this will always be the case.

I have tried to read some of the Star Wars novels in the past, and have found them to be very unrewarding. The films (I'm talking about the original three here) are very fast paced, and deal with multiple concurrent threads of the story rather well I think. This kind of chopping and changing becomes very cumbersome in literature, in my opinion.

I loved the Lord of the Rings, both in book and film form. I happened to think the adaptation to the screen was done very well. The book encompasses about a thousand pages if I recall correctly, it is a huge undertaking to sit down and read it, so it is unlikely that I will read it again. On the other hand I'd be quite happy to watch the films right through at least once more, if not several times. I think the essence of the story is preserved very well in the films, and I can experience it in a much more convenient format in that way. Had I not already read the book, then watching the film may well have prompted me to do so, in order to experience the story from a different perspective. If there was a musical I would probably go and see that too, out of curiosity. I wouldn't then feel any great need to compare them though - whether or not the operatic version was better than Lord of the Rings: The Ballet.

I agree with you wholeheartedly mate!

And you've given me an idea - fancy a LoTR marathon round at ours with surround sound and I'll borrow a projector?

Posted by tom at 2005/03/30 18:25:41.

Good points well made Sir! Quite agree!

Mind you... I don't like the way certain film companies pay for an "option" on a book, then make a film that bears no real resemblance to the original, except maybe the title and the main character's name!

I know an author who this happened too and she was livid! Mind you, I sneakily watched the film and though it was totally unfaithful to just about any part of the book, it was great fun! I loved it.

Just couldn't figure out why the film company bothered paying the fees for a name?!?

Posted by Nigel at 2005/03/30 21:48:21.

For the most part, I completely agree with you. whatever came first is often automatically seen as the definitive version, and hence better.

However, I have to disagree with "Books are, let's face it, a very poor form of media.". Its not the main drive of your argument, but that's not going to stop me :P

Saying books are naff media is just, in my opinion, wrong. Books and films (in the vast majority of cases) contain different types of detail. For instance, in a book, the plot can be more complex than one that can be conveyed to an average cinemagoer (or indeed anyone) in three hours. On the other hand, it would be unusual for a book to describe the story in as much visual and audio detail as a film.

I watch a lot of films, and I read a fair amount of books. Not books which are regarded as classics, but books nonetheless. I enjoy each of them enough to spend a fair amount of my time partaking in them. If films were generally superior, I wouldn't be reading books.

sorry to rant on about a paragraph in the middle of a well written article, but it looks to me like in that paragraph you are making one of the very comments the rest of the article is about :D



Byrn

Posted by Byrn at 2005/03/31 01:10:27.

Byrn, my point was more in terms of entropy. The amount of information, in pure scientific terms, contained in a book is very low - just 26 (plus a few) basic symbols, maybe a thousand pages in the more extreme cases, and say, a couple of thousand symbols on each page. So a book, as a text file, on your hard disk, is barely going to take any space at all - perhaps something in the region of a megabyte or two.

Films, however, contain loads of information, scientifically speaking. In MPEG-2 video, broadcast rates run typically at about 4MBit/s - about half a megabyte just for a second's worth. So it is likely even a very short trailer for a film is going to require significantly more storage space than the whole book in text form.

OK, it's a very crude measurement, and of course higher data rates do not necessarily correspond directly to increased meaningfulness. The "snow" you get on an untuned analogue TV set will actually be quite a strain for your average MPEG encoder, and it of course conveys no meaning at all to the average viewer.

However, there is the scope to include more meaning in richer media forms such as film. Whether or not this scope is generally used to it's full potential is of course a different argument.

Still though, I am pretty convinced that given a good film and a good book, more meaning can be conveyed in two hours of watching a film than in two hours of reading a book. If nothing else your ears are doing nothing at all whilst reading, and your eyes are not working particularly hard either - just recognising the same repeated patterns (i.e. letters) over and over again. Generally there's no use of colour in books, and your eyes are not having to change focus much, or track moving objects, or anything. Given the scope for information capture that your eyes provide you with, they are being heavily underused when reading, and therefore, I assume, you are consuming less information.

Also memory is affected differently. It may just be me, but I find the details of a story much harder to remember having only read it, as opposed to having seen it as a film. Dialogue as well is a lot less memorable having only read it. How often do you get two people in a pub fondly recalling quotes from a book?

Surely this makes sense - we evolved for the majority of our species' history without any kind of writing, and so our memory is naturally geared up to remembering real things that we have seen or heard, not abstract concepts described in a passage of text.

As me to outline the plot of a book I have read and I would struggle to do it in anything but the absolute broadest of terms. Ask the same question for a film, on the other hand, and I could almost regurgitate the script.

Posted by John at 2005/03/31 11:56:56.

Nigel, on the issue of optioning, is it sometimes more to do with the studio not wanting anyone else to make a film of the book rather than them particularly wanting to do it themselves.

I think there are many books for which the film rights have been bought years ago, but there's no sign of the film actually being made.

...but yes, I agree, when they do go and actually make the film and it is nothing like the book it does make you wonder why they bothered.

Perhaps it is a "just in case" measure - the book inspired the director or script writer or whoever to think of their own story which was vaguely along similar lines, but it is a safer and cheaper bet to buy the film rights anyway, so you don't get sued later on... or something.

Posted by John at 2005/03/31 24:38:14.

Tom, yes a LoTR marathon sounds great - do you have all the DVDs then?

Posted by John at 2005/03/31 24:39:28.

All good points John.

Books do indeed contain much less information than a film, however I'd venture to say that most of the information used in a film is actually redundant. For instance, in a given second (say) 24 frames are displayed. If that second is a close up of an actor, with a static or irrelevant background, the amount of actual information conveyed is virtually nil. Their expression and the movement of their mouth in time to the soundtrack are likely to be the only actual information involved, unless this is the first time that that actor has appeared on screen.

Even taking into account the small proportion of information conveyed, you're right, there is more information fed to you by a film than by a book. Yes, in two hours, you will probably take in more of a given story from a film than from a book.

But the above is missing the point... This is not a race. The advantage of books is that they can convey, albeit over a longer time, a far more complex and intricate story than a film can. There is a fairly low limit on the length of any one film... its about three to four hours. A book generally lasts many times that, and even with the lower rate of story, can contain far more story than a film. You can amke a series of films, but if you do there is a strong encouragement to make them self contained, approachable to those who haven't seen the previous one. Also, each one has to be perceived as "good" otherwise you might not bother to see the next.

Note that I say story, not information... To an extent, what the main character looks like (beyond a basic description) is often irrelevant to the story as a whole. As is (usually) the colour of his shoes, the way his hair is styled and what every person in the bar he's in is doing (think of all the extras in shot in a film).

The other advantage of books over film is unlimited special events budget. Only recently has CGI moed to the point where massive armies can be portrayed on screen, and moviemakers are now using it to its full with a large number of historical epics and fantasy books (lord of the rings for a start). Some settings, notably Sci-fi, have always benefitted from the power of the imagination... people were writing stories set in epic space settings long beofre star wars brought them to the screen.

It might be more fair to compare a book (or series of books) to a TV series (one with a plot arc, not the A-Team :D) than to a film.... comparing books to films is apples and oranges.

Oh, doubtless there are more people discussing quotes from a favourite film than a favourite book. I think this is partly, as you say, that films are naturally more memorable, but also due to there being a far higher chance that two people will see the same fiilm at around the same time (cinema release, dvd release, or TV release) than them reading the same book at the same time.

I think the plot outline thing varies... I find that stories stick in my mind, regardless of media. I could happily give a synopsis of the last two books I've read as easily as the two films I saw on monday... and the books would be more difficult, as I finished the last one weeks ago.

er, hmm. that's quite a lot of text. Better let you have a turn :D

Posted by Byrn at 2005/03/31 24:41:22.

That all makes sense Byrn. So perhaps we can at least agree that the two formats are different, with different expectations and limitations, and as a result some stories work better in one format than in the other.

Yes, I agree in particular one limitation of a film is time. I know I can start to get fed up with films after the hour and a half mark unless it is particularly engrossing (no problem with Lord of the Rings, for example). You often hear of directors having to cut important scenes because of pressure from the studio to keep the length down and so on. Although there may be some parallels in literature (Mills and Boon novels are not, in general, 20,000 pages) I would imagine usually authors are not so constrained in terms of length of their books.

Similarly before CGI there was a lot less you could do on screen - but incidentally I still think the original Star Wars looked great... but I am very wary of anyone who said they can imagine something better than that how it is created on screen. Yes, once in a while a director may have poor vision, or your personal interpretation may be better suited to your tastes.... but to universally always say your imagination is better than anything someone else can create is pretty arrogant, in my opinion.

So yes, film has it's limitations and I may concede that certain stories that may have been very enjoyable to read do not work as well in cinema.

On the flip side of this of course, there are films that would not work at all as books. Take Amelie for example - this is one of my favourite films of all time. I really don't think the magic would come across that well in a book version. It is a great story, but a lot of the joy of it is in the director's use of colour, and the general imagery of the film. Not to mention the soundtrack, and even the particular sounds of the actors voices (watch it dubbed into English and it is ruined). As in all good films, many parts of the story are presented with no words whatsoever. The scenes where Amelie's father receives photographs of his garden gnome in different locations around the world are generally carried out with no narration or dialogue or anything. You see the photograph and the expression on his face. To have to put this into words would butcher it somehow.

So my point is, yes, I accept for some specific situations it may happen that an individual has read a book, and then found a film interpretation of that book disappointing.

...but what I can't accept is people just universally saying "the book was better than the film", based on an arrogant assumption that film is an inferior artform to literature.

Posted by John at 2005/03/31 13:24:39.

Yes I do.

Posted by tom at 2005/03/31 15:21:12.

John: Yes you are right about producers buying up options. They can trade them too in certain circumstances. Is this what they tell the authors though?

And you hit on another really good point in your reply to Byrn. Being more than a bit keen on archaeology myself etc I can readily agree that throughout history evolution has taught us to assimilate visual and aural information more readily than inscribed or written. The image of a snarling tiger bent over the body of a dead wilderbeast tells you more than an inscribed stone saying (in your favourite language) Beware of the Tiger!

I suppose historically, stories came first verbally, then as pictograms or similar, before becoming books. Film/TV is just an amalgam of a lot of historically usable ways to tell a story.

Some stories are just totally visual - a TV treat called The Plank by Tommy Cooper and Eric Sykes for example. A book could not cope!

Posted by Nigel at 2005/03/31 16:16:22.

Actually, John, I don't agree. I often find that a book is better than
a film. Not only do I think you're wrong, but you're also inconsistent,
and are in fact guilty of the very thing, of which you accuse others.
Basically, I think you've missed everyone else's point- so allow me
to demonstrate what I mean. You say "Would you look at the Mona Lisa and
say it would be better described in a passage of text?" I suspect the
answer from most people would be "No, the painting is better". You
also ask "Would you listen to a piece of Mozart and say you preferred
reading the description of it in a newspaper?" Again, I reckon most
people would rather hear the music. Seeing a pattern start to form here?
It's not to do with favourite media, but being true to an original.
*You* are actually doing the same thing as all the others who say they
prefer the book to the film ... you are in fact preferring the *original*.
So if the original is a book, it is harldy surprising when people say
"I preferred the book". If that is its original form, then it was
created for that medium, and (arguably) best represented in that
medium. Any translation to another medium is only going to cause a
distortion, either by adding, or subtracting parts. Whatever happens,
the distortion is very apparent to anybody who has read the book, and
so they will almost invariably prefer it. So when people say "I prefer
the book" it has nothing to do with claims of "Supposedly elevated status
of cultural superiority", or arrogance - it is merely that they have
experienced the original, presumably enjoyed it, and then gone to
the cinema and been annoyed that somebody has fucked around with it.
As for claiming that children are unimaginative, and that they should
defer to the output of film-makers ... I hardly know where to begin!
I have seen a whole load of films in my time which I consider to be
utter crap. Are you really telling me I should say "Oh! How arrogant
I am! That man makes films for a living, so my opinion is clearly
worthless." No way, John. Film makers can churn out some real rubbish,
and let's not try to deny it. Also, being able to imagine something
does not equate to being able to express that imagination on film,
so your argument is flawed there as well. Next: reducing written
language to "26 characters and a few punctuation marks". Are you not
an individual, living person? Or perhaps you'd like me to write you
off completely as "A bunch of chemicals which can be bought for under
a fiver"? How many chemical elements are used in the human body?
It's not gonna be much more than the number of letters and punctuation
marks in English, is it? As for other written forms ... how many
traditional Chinese ideograms are there? From such a Japanphile as
yourself, I am astonished to read such a narrow-minded argument.
As for your description of books and films as entropy ... blimey! What
utter drivel! If you believe that creative content should be
valued in proportion to its entropy and/or informational content, then
you truly have become disconnected form reality. As a source of
pure information, then obviously the one with the higer data rate
will win every time. But creative content? Come on! What about
your own example of the Mona Lisa? How small a JPEG do you think
you could squash that into? Do that make it worthless? I think not!
Have you ever been to the Tate Britain, and seen Turner's
paintings first-hand? They're incredible, and nothing on a computer
screen could every come close to seeing the originals (go and
look- you'll see what I mean). We all had experiences we did not
enjoy at school, and if your classmates during your reading of The
Macine Gunners pissed you off then you'll just have to live with
that ... but it doesn't give you the right to go around puting words
into other peoples mouths, or making assumptions about their arrogance.

Posted by Jimmy at 2005/04/01 14:02:23.

Blimey, that seemed to touch a raw nerve didn't it...

...and there's a great example of exactly what I'm talking about. I'm having to infer your actual mood from the text you've posted, which is an incomplete and potentially misleading abstraction of your opinion on this issue. Had you instead responded by way of a video clip, I'd have been able to observe your body language, and gauge from your tone exactly how irate you had become as a result of my apparently rather unpopular opinion. As it is I'm left floundering around, wondering if somehow my post has offended some book revering cult you secretly are a member of, or if, as usual, you are just getting stuck in because you love a good argument.

The point being that written language is a poorer (by which I mean specifically less rich, not necessarily worse) form of expression than a full blown audio-visual experience. Books do not (generally) have pictures or a sound track. Books are just words, Films, of course, can also have words in the form of dialogue, narration, subtitles, etc. So in terms of the raw media you could say that everything you can do in a book, you can do in a film, whereas the same is not necessarily true in reverse - a book can not play you a piece of music.

Now, I'll admit, at times the ambiguity and abstraction of prose can add a pleasing artistic quality to a narrative, much the same as in any artform. Were paintings merely facsimiles of their subjects we'd eventually get bored of them I suspect (or just revert to photographs).

However, I don't believe that the deliberately hazy, abstract take on reality presented by literature always makes for a better representation of a story. It does in some circumstances, but not always.

So perhaps my article didn't make it clear, but what irritates me is the way people automatically say the book was better than any given film, without even thinking about it. Yes, I agree there are plenty of poorly executed adaptations of books to the big screen, and in these instances I would happily agree that the experience of reading the book was a better one than that of watching the film.

However, it is the cliche of it that irritates me - that it is somehow expected of you to have this opinion. I'm sorry but 12 year old children are actually pretty vain - look at the clothes they wear, just because their friends do. Life in school is one long popularity contest for most children. So in the situation as described in my article they respond in the manner they believe is expected of them. I don't believe the majority of them sat and thought hard about the relative artistic merits of the two formats, I genuinely believe that, for the most part, they thought "I will sound clever if I say the book is better, because clever people read books". Equally you could argue that my stance was vain, that I deliberately said the opposite to everyone else just to stand out. Fine, I accept that, but I would maintain that vanity driving someone to be unique and original is better than causing everybody to behave homogenously.

Critics too are by their very nature vain. Their job relies on their opinions being sought after. If nobody wants to hear what a critic has to say about something, then he or she is unemployed. As such they have to be constantly mindful that their opinions are valid and fashionable. It is such a safe bet for a critic to say the book was better, because clever people read books, don't they? So, if clever people read books, and the critic prefers the book, then he must be clever, so his opinions must be valid, so lets go on paying him for his column.

Your point about things being best in their original state is a very good one, and I think my point about the film Amelie re-enforces that. Amelie in any other form would probably be awful - as an opera, or a sitcom, or a set of collectible magazines where you get a free binder with part one.

So yes, often a well loved book is a very poor candidate for adaptation to the screen, because people may have grown fond of it as is - they find particular literary constructs used in the book endearing somehow As such any attempt to change it, for example, onto another format, would somehow spoil its essence.

...but is it not also possible that an author touches on a great underlying theme in a novel but does not have the literary skill to express it as well as it could be... or indeed that the actual framework of a novel does not suit that story as well as another format might do...? A film maker might well pick this up and find a better way to express that story in film.

I'm sure there must be many instances of this sort of thing happening. If good films exist, and so do bad books, as well as books that are based on films, then surely there must be some good films based on bad books.

...and yet why do I never hear critics or ordinary members of the public saying a film is better than the book it was based on? Indeed, when a great film comes out of a mediocre book, the fact that the film even started as a book seems to get somewhat swept under the carpet.

..and why is that?

...because it is unfashionable to say that the film is better than the book.

Thus why I find people automatically saying "the book was better than the film" irritating - because, surely you have to agree, it is at least sometimes said purely because that is the fashionable thing to say.

Posted by John at 2005/04/01 16:17:54.

I believe you are being too presumptuous about people being arrogant. If I think the book is better, I'll say so. If I think the film is better, I'll say so. Of course, I can only speak for myself, but I don't believe that anyone else holds these opinions "Just to be trendy." Besides, not only have you had a go at peoples' opinions, but you seem to have really laid-into books themselves (oh yes you have. re-read you own text and you'll see). So I kind-of think you're on some sort of mad, anti-book rant, which is puzzling, and you're also on a rant about peoples' opinions, which you can't verify. In my case you'd certainly be wrong, and I don't know how you think you can speak for anyone else either ...

Posted by Jimmy at 2005/04/01 18:40:09.

Of course, I can't justify my justification ... indeed, everything seems to be stacked-up on the left of the page! Sorry about that ...

Posted by Jimmy at 2005/04/01 18:41:05.

Well I reckon I've got a thousand books or so in this house. You can't beat a bit of sliced tree with carbon-based ink on it to stir up the brain and bring things alive.

Visual and audio media are nothing new, just perhaps more developed these days. We do afterall still only have two eyes and two ears.

The truth is that a majority of films/TV are based on books. Films/TV compress a story and don't allow imagination to operate within the receiver. You get what you're given. Books though allow your mind to act as the set. Perhaps a book is seen as a million different minds-eye films. Whereas a film is a set piece. Big, glossy, faithful or othewise, but still a single view.

That's not to say some films aren't tremendous. Take 2001 - A Space Odessy. Copied for sure a hundred times since, but a stunning concept - and all from a short story. My brain on this occasion, did not imagine Kubrick's incredible vision!

However, let's all be "Original" and "Different".

Can we also smile!? :)

Posted by Nigel at 2005/04/01 19:52:12.

I can easily contrast the purely musical appreation of a symphony with that of listeners to whom it is the primarily or solely the starting point for things so inaudible as emotions and visual images. But there can never be, in the same sence, a purly literary appreciation of literature. Every piece of literature is a sequenence of words;and sounds are words precisely because they carry the mind beyond thenselves. That is what being a word means. To be carried. To be carried mentally through and beyond That is what being a word means. To be carried mentally through and beyond musical sounds into something inaudile and non-musical may be the wrong way of treating music, But to be similarly carried through and beyond words into something non-verbal and even non-literary is not the wrong the way of reading. It is mere reading.

Posted by Jeff at 2005/04/01 23:10:03.

OK well maybe fundamentally I just don't like reading books very much, and everyone else does.

Posted by John at 2005/04/03 24:50:21.

Well I must admit I read less now than I used to. I haven't got so much patience now that novels just have to be doorstops of a thousand pages. My favourites are all 300-page max.

Plus this also explains why my programming career never took off. The size of those, Microsoft, Sybex and McGraw-Hill reference books used to make me go weak at the knees!!

Your view is perfectly acceptable, John. Before computers, TV and flims there were only books. Things change. We all like what we like - and thank goodness for that!!

Posted by Nigel at 2005/04/03 13:38:36.

Nigel- total agreement here on 2001 A Space Odyssey. Personal favourite film, in fact. Have you ever seen it in a cinema? It's rare, but it does get shown from time to time ... the 15-minute trip-out sequence at the end is amazing!

Posted by Jimmy at 2005/04/04 08:46:24.

Reading-back my own comment, I see I've (unintentionally) provided yet another example of preferring something in its origianl form! There really is no getting away from it ... when things get moved from one medium to another (in this case big-screen to small-screen) something is always lost in the translation.

Posted by Jimmy at 2005/04/04 08:48:47.

I think that as an entity, any particular story should be told in as many forms as possible. If done properly, further insight into the story as an entity can give it new life or even save its existence. Thus, I believe that if you say something is better in one than the other, it's somewhat futile and very much down to personal preference. In reality, the story can give the audience new life if transferred into a new medium (2001, an excellent film, is a very good example).

Take the battle of Troy.

The story would have been told through an oral tradition, one spanning many centuries. It wasn't storytelling as we know it but an art form. The original was purely in the minds of men and passed down through the ages. The difficulties with people's memories meant the story changed and warped.

It was first compiled and written down in Homer's 'The Illiad', a mush of legendary stories pulled together to try and represent something coherent. The book is long and contains endless listing of items. It lies somewhere between historical fact and fantasy. It's still not very accessible to people and never was. A read story may not hold the same majesty as a told one but it would allow the story to survive. Is this a fitting medium? Maybe those at the time would have argued that it would have been better sung backed up by a popular beat combo, lyre and all.

Along with classical civilisation, the story remained pretty much untold (and unchanged) until the Rennaissance, where painters and poets latched onto it. Paintings were much more accessible to everyone but much of the story was lost in the politics of the day and the fact that the Illiad is very very long. Choice parts and heroes would be extracted to tell the story. The arrival of Christianity had meant that the representation of a pantheon of bickering Gods would be somewhat diluted. This modernisation gave new life to a quite stolid story that would not have appealed to a flambouyant culture.

As the ages past, the story continued to grow and new translations and studies of the text allowed it to be put into its proper context. The Victorians did a typically Victorian job of the story but at least returned to Homer as a source.

Then, in the 21st Century, a film was made. The film tried to take a more historical view of the book. Once again, the story was opened but this time, to a wider audience. Compared to the books and paintings, it lost a lot of its majesty (Patroclus is made out to be Achilles' gay lover in the book, not his cousin as in the film) but gained so much because of the knowledge of how things were done there. The Gods were gone but Achilles' magical nature was still in.

Stories as entities in themselves need this to survive. Anyone else here read The Illiad? It's a bit of a slog for modern times when our lives are fast. The film gives us a modern look at an old story.

So, what's next for Troy? An interactive experience like you might find in a Star Trek holodeck? Is complete immersion with absolute archaeological information going to be enough to make it better than the original? We may never know.

It makes me wonder how amazing the original oral story must have been 600 years before Christ was born.

I do agree that many critiques, both in school and in commerce jump on the 'book is better' bandwagon and I thoroughly agree with any attempted to blow it up.

From a entropy of information point of view, a film does have more information per se. However, a single moment in a book can be described with 200 pages of text - all of which is likely to be absorbed by the audience, whereas a single moment in a film is gone in a flash. You can slow things down and do Raptor cam stuff as with The Matrix but even with this technology, the information richness in a book is not neccessarily less. I also disagree that books are a very poor form of media. I think their benefits are much more personal than in film or paintings. I think you were indulging there, which is a pity because you main point is much more interesting.

To conclude, a story as an entity needs as much different media devoted to it, through the ages. One is not better than the other so to completely appreciate it, one must sample both. To automatically disregard the film for the book purely out of fashion is lunacy.

As an aside, I'd like to thank John for starting this thread. I've enjoyed all the comments (if perhaps a little melodramatic at times) and I am glad someone has voiced something that I have certainly felt (but not articulated) for some time.

Posted by Rob Lang at 2005/04/04 15:07:20.

Great example there Rob. I particularly like the idea you highlighted of a story having a long evolutional journey throughout its history, within which "the book" and "the film" are just two landmarks on the journey.

I suppose Dracula is another good example - something that has come from vague historical fact, through popular folklore, into a book, and then into films etc. I read recently that Bram Stoker had been told about the legend over dinner at the Lyceum by one Arminius Vambery, who was apparently a spy. One wonders if the amount of wine drank that evening had any particular impact on the inevitable reproduction errors that occur whenever a story is retold in this way. It's interesting to me that you can, on occasion, tie down a "nodal point" in a story's development throughout history to such a specific event.

One wonders if a thousand years ago, when books (or scrolls or whatever) started to become popular, if there was a group of people arguing that the telling of the story by the village raconteur was far superior to the soulless distillation into text - "the Bard was Better".

Posted by John at 2005/04/04 15:50:24.

Rob, I did say that whether or not a story is best represented in its original medium is arguable. However, there's often a specific problem with films ... which might be termed "Hollywoodization". Often a simple story is expanded massively in an attempt to pull-in crowds. Often stories are re-set in America for no other reason than to amuse that audience. Sometimes, a fecking dreadful ending is bunged onto the end of an otherwise perfectly good film... again to please the yanks. Then, there's also the fact that a film often becomes dated very quickly (an example bieng Total Recall, which is futuristic, but now looks absurdly '80s). And what about re-makes? Get Carter with Stallone?! The Italian Job? Give me a break! To put it in a nutshell, it might be good to make a film of a book (and generally advance the story through new media), but this is not necessarily a good thing, and IMHO more often than not, is actually a bad thing.

Posted by Jimmy at 2005/04/05 08:58:56.

I agree that Hollywood do change things but they do this for their intended audience. Which is ten times larger than the UK.

I did smother a chuckle when you said that Films date horribly. Are you suggesting that Sci Fi novels from the 50s have not dated? How about Victorian novels, have they not dated in language style and content? Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment was hailed as a timeless classic (due to Raskolnikov's rhetoric on when a crime is not a crime) when it was first published but it is very much an indication of its time and place. Not only in the story and ideals but also in the style of language.

I am surprised that you chose the Italian Job as an example of Hollywood's bad practise because it did much better than it's original. From a British perspective, we are likely to prefer our version of the film but Hollywood does not see it that way. I've not seen the remake of Get Carter but that will probably be aimed at their target audience: not us. Also, I am a bit disappointed that you assume all films are made in Hollywood.

Furthermore, any creator of a story must be able to sell it. There is no point in writing / filming a story if no-one is going to want to see it. I have two examples. Charles Dickens did not want to write Great Expectations as a partwork. He had to. The publishers would not touch it as a complete novel. People of the time did not want to keep returning to a single book and they were expensive. A partwork was the best way to get his work out there. It worked. When Dino De Laurentis made Dune, he filmed many hours of film - accurately portraying the book. However, a tiny majority would want to see it. So it was cropped for the audience. These are both examples of creation for an audience. Books are not immune to it.

Jimmy, Perhaps you would prefer stories to die out than to be remade and refreshed for the new audience? I doubt people enjoying the story in the future would have the same sentiment.

This is all, unfortunately, off topic because John's original claim was the automatic condemning of a film "because the book was better". The irritation caused by this sentiment is certainly one I share.

Posted by Rob Lang at 2005/04/05 13:18:03.

True Rob. It's really just intellectual snobbery. I said earlier I have hundreds of books (and read them!) but that is because I like them. I also like TV/Film though too. However some people use the fact they have read a book as an intellectual hammer to clobber less "brainy" types. Which is wrong.

As you point out films are made for an audience. So are books, but maybe films offer more "instant" gratification, and that could be where the snobbery arises. Quick buzz or long intellectual journey? (I exaggerate I know!)

Sadly people will always migrate to one "snob" viewpoint or another, whether it's certain designer-label clothing or even football teams.

As I said before - let's all be individuals!

Posted by Nigel at 2005/04/05 14:23:25.

I did *not* say that all films were made in Hollywood. I did *not* say that all films were bad. I don't care how much money the new version of The Italian Job made ... there's no way you can realistically call it anywhere near as good as the original. IT WASN'T EVEN IN ITALY! Of course books show their age, but nowhere nearly as badly as films. Going back to Total Recall, it dates badly *because* it is a film. The short story is futuristic, and so doesn't really date in the same way. No, I don't want stories to die out, but (as I said earlier) films generally tend to be a poor reflection of the original story. That is a generalisation and of course you can find plenty of exceptions ... it's merely a heuristic I've developed over time ...

Posted by Jimmy at 2005/04/05 17:34:22.

There was a great Alexei Sayle sketch where he's going past the houses of parliament on a Thames river cruise, talking about location filming rights... he says it's so expensive to film in London that in fact the backdrop you were looking at was all made of balsa wood on a set in Thailand, or something like that. Errr, I guess it's more of a visual joke.

Posted by John at 2005/04/06 09:45:50.

But when a film gets old - they remake it. It continues to be new. A book is rarely remade and so the language and style of the book does date. There are new translations but these don't tend to add anything to a story.

Jimmy, I still get the feeling that you think a story should be this unchanging static entity. A story should not be considered as just a book or film but all the different media that represents it. Is this the way you see stories, as owned by a single writer and media?

Posted by Rob Lang at 2005/04/08 14:09:34.

Oooh. This is a good debate. I wish you all could have witnessed Robin Lane Fox's speach at the Classics Association Conference last weekend. He was one of the consultants for the Alexander film - you know, the one that had all the hype, was in the cinemas for about three weeks and was then mercilessly slated from all sides by the critics.

Now, of course there is no single original source for the 'story' of Alexander but one can gain an overall picture through reading the various sources.

The point I wish to make is that this gentleman (Fox), along with all the other scholars involved, tried his hardest to ensure a level of accuracy. Oliver Stone chose to ignore certain things to make a more satisfactory narrative. The result was that the film critics claimed it was purely for classicists and the classicists reviled it for its inaccuracies. Everyone hated it.

I happen to belive that a work of art in any medium should be regarded in terms of its own merits. I wholeheartedly agree with Rob in that stories can come from many different sources and each part can potentially widen our appreciation of the whole (if I didn't think this then the underlying premise of my dissertation would be in slight trouble!).

I have read books that made better films, seen films that made better books and experienced the two mediums complimenting each other (perfect example is Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas). However, one principle I shall ever stand by is the belief that one can loose a great deal of subtlety in transforming a book into a film.

Posted by Kate at 2005/04/08 14:49:59.

It has been mentioned before in all the above posts that it "could" (wimped out from "does" there) all depend on which you experienced first. For example Fight Club was a brilliant book and then film. I have heard separate people comment "the book is unfilmable" and "that film wouldn't work as a book" However thanks to the brilliance of both Chuck Palahniuk and David Fincher in their respected mediums they are both excellent.

My favourite along these line came from a friend's rap loving teenage daughter. After listening to "Every Breath You Take" by the Police she declared "Yeah its good but I preferred the Puff Daddy original."

Posted by Mike at 2005/04/12 11:15:40.

I didn't know Fight Club was a book originally. You're absolustely right about people jumping to conclusions like that - to me that is a prime example of the sort of film I would think "that wouldn't work as a book"...

Posted by John at 2005/04/12 11:36:45.

Another cross medium example could be "Goodbye Mr Chips" though I haven't read the book or seen the film he always cracks me up with his little antics on Catchphrase.

Posted by Mike at 2005/04/12 15:25:58.

Mmmmm chips...

Posted by John at 2005/04/12 15:42:24.

Fight Club was a book? Incredible! However, echoing what was said about Puff Daddy, the film would seem like the "Original" to me ... so I doubt if I'd enjoy the book as much(*). It's the same with Dr. Who- eveybody loves the Doctor they saw first.

(*) But I'm more than happy to give it a go.

Posted by Jimmy at 2005/04/13 11:39:22.

Yeah, I know I said that it was intended as a book, but I also said whether or not it was best represented in that form is *arguable* ... so don't jump down my thoat, anyone!

Posted by Jimmy at 2005/04/13 11:40:58.

I spawned an article and didn't even realize it until nearly 3 weeks later. I just wanted to say that this article was better when I thought it up the day before you wrote it.

Posted by Travis at 2005/04/19 01:22:51.

Films are always better, books are boring, they take hours to get through, films cut out the flab and get to the point (plus a bit of totty and fighting), and there's time for the pub afterwards.

LOTR was bloody hard work as a film, bollux to the books.

Posted by Karl at 2005/05/24 01:31:50.

...now where did I put this months Vis?

Posted by Karl at 2005/05/24 01:32:40.

Karl, excellent comment - why couldn't I have just written something to-the-point like that rather than all that waffley bollocks...?

Posted by John at 2005/05/24 14:55:28.

Because you don't wear enough burberry.

Posted by Rob Lang at 2005/06/06 14:43:52.

Post a comment