Adapting a book can be a tricky business. On rare occasions, an adapted movie can transcend its source, but more often than not, it loses some of the elements that readers loved. Book snobs, the lot of pretentious bastards that they are, often rightly criticize adaptations for failing to live up to original texts.
That’s the major difference between the Godfathers and the I, Robots of the world, they say. The former stays true to the original material, the latter substitutes quality for visual flair. And while I’m not about to defend Will Smith’s sad excuse for a Nike commercial, I think it’s difficult to judge an adaptation against its source. It’s not wrong to debate the merits of an original creation against its creative interpretation—hell, it’s awfully fun—but it is wrong to ignore the differences between them.
Consider how reading can inspire the imagination. In a book, settings, characters, and scenes don’t depend on projected images. The reader isn’t passive; he creates as he consumes, piggybacking off of the writer’s words.
A movie actively involves its audience, too, but in a different way. An adaptation is the director and screenwriters’ imagined version of a book, whether it delights its audience or earns its disdain. Their imagined worlds become public, and when audience members walk out of theaters and talk to one another, they discuss that world. Watching may be passive, but watching a movie doesn’t end with its credits.
Movie adaptations of books exaggerate the passive-active divide that a reader experiences. They inject personal opinion into another person’s work, twisting and changing it into something new. But that’s not a bad thing.
Look at two recently adapted books, The Accidental Billionaires and Never Let Me Go. The former, a fictionalized Facebook origin story, was optioned before its publication date; screenwriter Aaron Sorkin and author Ben Mezrich compared notes, but worked independently. The result? Two unrelated tales that each, in their own way, caution us that six billion dollars doesn’t buy friends.
Mark Romanek’s Never Let Me Go, however, merely tweaks Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel about organ-donating clones in 20th century England to make it a bizarre, unique horror story. It’s addition through subtraction, at the expense of Ishiguro’s subtle—and inimitable—plot progression. The movie is streamlined, thoughtful, and terribly sad without sabotaging its source. Never Let Me Go is far from perfect, but it gives the audience a chance to peek behind the scenes and learn how Romanek interpreted Ishiguro’s book.
Unless, of course, you haven’t read it. And that’s the true gripe in the “books versus movies” debate; reading is supposedly an intellectual act, while watching is not. At the bottom of almost every snide remark about how “the book was better” lies an elitist attitude against movies.
But an adaptation isn’t meant to better its source; it’s meant to reveal how the creator responded to reading the source. It’s why Fight Club didn’t end with the Narrator in a hospital bed. It’s why Samwise didn’t leave Middle Earth with Frodo in Lord of the Rings: Return of the King. And it’s why Charlie Kaufman’s struggle to adapt Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief led to Adaptation, a meta-commentary mind fuck about writing itself.
The truth is, it’s impossible to copy from paper to film without altering part of the meaning. So why not embrace the differences?
Get a glimpse of Chris’s “imagined world” at cheller@georgetownvoice.com
