I’ve written on here before about how film adaptations of books are usually (though not always) unsuccessful, because the stories told in books are usually optimized for book form, and so don’t work as well on screen. But what about books adapted from movies? Do they have the same problem?
Again; yes, usually. But sometimes they can complement the movie well. I think it’s actually easier for a novelization to enhance a movie than for a movie to enhance a book. You can probe the motivations and details of the characters more thoroughly on the page. But with movie adaptations, it’s more likely you’ll lose content rather than gain it.
An example of a bad novelization is the Star Wars: Attack of the Clonesbook by R.A. Salvatore. The whole thing feels off. It lacks much of the quick pacing of the movie, and when we get to “hear their thoughts”, as it were, the characters don’t really match up with how they seem to be acting in the film.
You don’t have to look far for a much better novelization, though: Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith by Matthew Stover is a great adaptation that does a very good job illuminating other aspects of the story and fleshing out the characters in a way not possible in the movie. One thing that’s not communicated in the movie, but which Stover includes, is the point that Anakin is very sleep-deprived during the events of the story. This helps make his decisions much more understandable.
I read a novelization of the movie The Mummy Returns, and it was about what you’d expect for a novelization of a popcorn action-adventure flick. It’s entertaining on the screen, but dire on the page. I think many novelizations really are nothing more than cash-ins.
One question that occurred to me as I was thinking about this issue: between books and movies, which medium do you think is more conducive to nuance and subtlety in storytelling? My first inclination was to say “books”, but then it is true that you have to spend a lot more time describing something in a book than in a film. “A picture is worth a thousand words”, as they say. What do you think?
“The fans are all upset. They’re always going to be upset. Why did he do it like this? And why didn’t he do it like this? They write their own movie, and then, if you don’t do their movie, they get upset about it.”–George Lucas
I was thinking a bit more about the Mass Effect 3ending. I may do a post later on with my thoughts on it specifically, but while I was thinking about it, the idea occurred to me that it was so disappointing because it was so anticipated. Fans had years to think about how the Mass Effect series would end; and so whatever happened would likely disappoint them. It is an intrinsically bad ending, don’t get me wrong, but its badness was amplified by how much everyone had been thinking about it.
The same thing happened, for me anyway, with the Harry Potterseries. A big plot point, discussed by fans and even used in the advance marketing of the last book was “is Snape good or evil”? Everybody had two years to think about this question, and we all knew what was going to happen. Even if you bet on the wrong outcome, chances were you’d heard alternate theories that turned out to be correct. It may have made it sell better to promote the debate, but it weakened the book’s dramatic power.
It’s hard to surprise your audience with twists when you are telling a story with long intervals between each installment. The only way out is to not leave clues to what’s coming, but then the endings or plot twists will feel unsatisfying; like they just came out of nowhere. The best plot resolutions have to have been logically set up beforehand.
Sometimes a writer can stumble on some good twist in the middle of a series. For instance, few people see the famous twist in The Empire Strikes Back coming, unless someone has spoiled them on it. I’ve heard that this is because George Lucas only decided to do it after A New Hope was released, so he hadn’t left enough clues to give it away before hand, but was able to satisfactorily retrofit his twist on to the second film with the vague setup given in the first. But he was very lucky.
Lucas also didn’t have the internet to contend with. If he had, some random fan probably would have accurately guessed the ending by pure chance while speculating on some forum. I see this as the inevitable fate of the Half-Lifevideo game series: if they ever do release Half-Life 3, there is no way someone won’t have already guessed what the deal is with the G-Man and posted a huge essay about their theories to be discussed on some forum.
There’s no question that internet fandom has intensified this problem; for it enables like-minded people to interact and ponder their favorite series. I don’t think this was as much of a problem before the internet, even though there were stories that appeared in installments in magazines and the like.
This problem is lessened a bit if you are not doing a sequel that directly continues a particular story. J.J. Abrams was very smart to come up with the alternate timeline business for his new Star Trekmovies, because it pretty much allowed him to do whatever he wanted. And although it still does not really live up to its title, I think a lot of criticism from Falloutfans of Fallout 3 was blunted because it was set far away from the other games. In other words, it’s easier to do a series that is a loosely-related group of stories in a certain setting or around a set of themes than it is to tell one coherent story over installments. And it’s easiest of all to just tell your story in one shot. To bring us back to Mass Effect 3, I’m convinced that had they condensed the story of the whole series into one game–with the same endings–they would have gotten way fewer complaints. On the other hand, they also would have made less money.
A few days ago, a friend of mine was recommending to me that I read some John Steinbeck books. Then, a few days later, my blogger friend Thingy also mentioned him. So, I guess I better get to it. I’ll try Grapes of Wrath, even though I admit the setting doesn’t appeal to me.
Another famous book I’ve never read is The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, which I see they have just adapted into a movie. I’ll have to read it too at some point. It’s also considered a great book. It should make for an interesting contrast: Grapes is about poor Westerners in the 1930s, and Gatsby is about rich Easterners in the 1920s.
There are surprisingly many famous books that I have never read… Moby-Dick, The Scarlet Letter, everything by Charles Dickens that isn’t A Christmas Carol. (Actually, I’m not even 100% sure I read that–I may have just absorbed by seeing the many thousands of adaptations.)
I did recently read Dracula, by Bram Stoker. It wasn’t very good, to be honest. It was very slow-moving and except for Dracula himself, most of the characters were thin as paper. Add in that it was surprisingly violent for a Victorian novel, and I didn’t care for it at all.
UPDATE: Thank you for the award, Thingy. (I still can’t comment on your blog, BTW, but I’m glad some comments are back.) Gone With The Wind is another one I want to read, even though I fully expect to hate it from what I know about it. It’s what the critics like to call an “important” book, so I should probably see what all the fuss is about.
I recently read a book calledThe House on the Borderlandby William Hope Hodgson. It was a forerunner of what we would call “Lovecraftian” weird tales, in that instead of relying the stereotypical monsters, it instead used a weird atmosphere and strange alien creatures to be frightening.
That part of it is pretty cool. Unfortunately, it’s also a forerunner of Lovecraft in another respect: the story goes on way too long. I think it’s partly a dramatic device to have it drag on like it does, but it’s still too long. The feeling of weirdness and dread can’t really be sustained over a story of that length.
Even with that serious flaw, though, it’s a very good story, especially the first half of it. Some of the science of the science-fiction elements were surprisingly well done. The author does as good a job as one could expect of describing what seems to be the end of the universe as many astronomers predict it.
I guess that’s kind of a spoiler—but actually, it’s also a good way of conveying how long the book is: the universe ends—and then the book continues after that!
What I don’t know is what he means by “masculine writing”. Does he mean subject matter–wars and hunting? There are books about those things. Or choice of words–short, blunt sentences? Like Hemingway, who did both.
Tough to gut it out through lots of words. Have to fight your way through dense jungles of adjectives and adverbs, hunt down the meaning. Cut out useless bits. More manly to use short sentences, or fragments. But that has drawbacks, too. Can be hard to follow the logic.
Probably, fewer men read than women. So topics are chosen accordingly. It’s tough, but you have to man up, grit your teeth, and realize that probably, they’ve already won the war for dominance of the bookshelves.
I get uneasy when I read academic literary analysis that focuses heavily on what elements of a story are supposed to symbolize. Symbolism is definitely a device that artists use, and to some extent all art is trying to say something about “life, the universe, and everything” by using its own elements as representative of some larger idea.
So, we know symbolism is used. What we don’t always know is what the author was symbolizing or why, and unless they explicitly say so somewhere, the only way to figure it out is through educated guesswork. And sometimes, we don’t even know if s/he was trying to symbolize anything.
This being so, it’s awfully easy to make up almost any symbolism you like and call it an analysis. Let me give you an example of what I mean, with a faux-analysis I just made up of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Grand Duke:
The Grand Duke is an allegory about the failure of democracy. It shows the rightful ruler of the state of Pfennig-Halbpfennig deposed by the rabble (actors–commonly considered a “low” occupation then.) The actors, on taking over the government promptly seek to “revive the classic memories of Athens at its best”. The ancient Greek theme is chosen to represent Democracy because it was in ancient Greece that Democracy was created.
The ultimate theme of the story is how Democracy–a.k.a. mob rule–ruins the Aristocracy. The fake aristocrats hired by the Prince of Monte Carlo are the most obvious example of this. In the end, order can only be restored when the rightful ruler is placed back in charge.
This interpretation does rely on actual evidence from the play–the actors who take over really do dress as ancient Greeks, the commoners who attempt to impersonate aristocrats are portrayed as buffoons, and the opera ends on a happy note only when the original Duke resumes his reign. So, I think this is a theoretically possible interpretation.
Is it actually likely that this is what W.S. Gilbert had in mind when he wrote it, though? Highly doubtful. It seems much more likely that he had the characters remake the government in the image of ancient Athens because he had worked up a clever song about it, and he made the Prince of Monte Carlo’s entourage an uncouth band because he thought it was funny. Anyone familiar with the piece will have a hard time believing it was trying to make any major statement about forms of government.
People say authorial intent doesn’t matter, and to an extent they’re right–I can believe that people would insert certain ideas in stories without being conscious of it. But when you have symbolism that, however “logical” it seems, takes you so far away from the obvious character of the work in question that it gives you pause.
I remember reading about the theory that L. Frank Baum’s novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was an allegory about the Populist movement. There is a lot of detail in this theory, and it is pretty thorough, but there’s no evidence that Baum intended it. According to Wikipedia “it is not taken seriously by literary historians”. I wonder why. They take flimsier theories seriously.
As you know from this post, I enjoy alternate interpretations that run contrary to the creator’s ideas. but still, no matter how plausible you make the case, at a certain point you have to acknowledge it when your interpretation takes you far from what the author originally meant.
Paper Lion by George Plimpton. Plimpton was a journalist and essayist who decided to write about what it was like to play football. He went through training camp as a quarterback for the Detroit Lions, and got five plays in a scrimmage at the end of camp. It didn’t go well, but the point of the book is mostly about the fascinating personalities in football at the time. It’s very well-written, and for someone like me, who was abysmal at sports in their youth, Plimpton’s experience is easy to relate to.
The Education of a Coach by David Halberstam. It’s about Bill Belichick’s career and his knowledge of football. Sort of a biography, but it also contains some important points about strategy and tactics. I would recommend supplementing it with…
Patriot Reign by Michael Holley. This book is not terribly well-written, but it does contain some very interesting information about football coaching. If you’re into the strategy of the game, I recommend it for chapter on how they stifled “The Greatest Show On Turf” alone.
Where Else Would You Rather Be? by Marv Levy. The memoir of the great Buffalo coach. Levy might have been the greatest pro coach never to win it all, but his tone is light and not at all bitter. He recounts many amusing stories from his long career. I don’t think you even need to be a football fan to enjoy this book, although it helps.
Football Physics by Timothy Gay. This book is fun; it’s an introduction to basic physics using examples drawn from football. I suppose it’s more a “physics” book than a “football” book, but it still makes the subject matter easier to read about.
My blogger friend Thingy mentioned reading and enjoying Stephen King’s novel 11/22/63 awhile back. I’d never read any books by him, so I decided to give it a try. I’ll try not to spoil it here, but it’s about time-travel and the unintended side-effects thereof.
It’s quite good, all in all. You can tell he made an effort to research the styles and vernacular of the 1960s, and he also does a pretty good job of presenting both the good and the bad aspects of that era. There was also a lot of the hint-don’t-tell kind of cosmic horror in certain parts that I really liked.
The ending was a bit weaker though still good. Again, without giving away too much, there was a part of it that reminded of the book A Clockwork Orange, and that felt kind of cliched. The ending was… I guess, “bittersweet” is probably the best word for it.
I might analyze it more in-depth later, but for now, I just want to recommend reading it.
I know I’m in the minority on this, but me and a friend happened to be talking about our disappointment with the Harry Potter series. I think talking about J.K. Rowling’s new book was what started it. We agree that 6/7 of the series is quite good. But the last 1/7 is a different story.
The series starts out magnificently, the first 60% or so being among some of the finest adventure epics I’ve ever read. In the second half, it gets weaker, but still very, very good. But it culminates in an inexplicable and unforeseeable disaster that tarnishes the whole thing. It is the 2007 New England Patriots of Y.A. fiction.
The first four books combine adventure, humor, horror and mystery into an excellent package. The climactic scene in the fourth book where Voldemort rises again gives me chills every time I read it. The next two books are not as good—they have more pointless teenage angst, and seem less tightly-plotted and well-edited than the previous ones. But they’re still quite good.
And then, alas, we come to book seven. The best thing about it is the cover. (In fact, the quality of Harry Potter books is inversely proportional to the quality of their cover art.)
This book is a mess. There is no gentler way of putting it. Early on we have the inexplicable alteration in Remus Lupin’s personality. Why he would suddenly become so reckless makes really no sense for the character, except, I guess, to set up a tearjerker fate for him and Tonks. It doesn’t work for me; it feels like the character just wildly altered his personality for no reason.
Then there is there is the posthumous destruction of Albus Dumbledore’s character. Now, I like the idea of a seemingly generic, stock character (kind, wise teacher) turning out to be more unique and interesting. Theoretically, it sounds like a good idea. But it doesn’t work with Dumbledore, because it comes too late in the story, and moreover it takes too much time away from developing other characters. Which leads me to my next point…
The marginalization of Severus Snape is another weird error, compounded by the fact that he got all the advance hype, and yet was barely in the book save for one flashback chapter. Snape is by far the most interesting and complicated character in the series, but he gets largely ignored and instead we get “The Dirty Life and Times of Albus Dumbledore”, or whatever it was.
This is all pretty bad so far, but I might have liked the book despite it all. What ruins it for me are the following catastrophic things.
First and foremost: The pointless introduction of the Deathly Hallows, which just confuse everything and add even more MacGuffins on top of the already hard-to-keep-track-of Horcruxes. The first six books were spent setting up the Horcrux plot thread; the Deathly Hallows just show up out of left field. They are a magical device too far.
This is closely related to the problem that the Deathly Hallows, particularly the Elder Wand, are governed by a set of byzantine laws that seem designed arbitrarily for dramatic effect. And even for dramatic effect, they fall short. The entire book hinges on Dumbledore’s “final plan” going awry, Voldemort not studying his Wizarding law, and Potter just happeningto disarm Malfoy at the right moment. Not on Potter learning something, or having courage; it’s just sheer luck. Realistic, I guess, but it doesn’t fit with the rest of the series. (Jenny Sawyer wrote a review when the book came out that addresses this in a bit more detail.)
Finally, in the atrocious epilogue, I don’t understand how it is that no one seems to have learned that Slytherin house creates vastly more problems than it solves, and that it really should be abolished. Here they are, with the old rivalries still maintained, despite the fact that Slytherin’s Founder buried a giant monster under the school, his “heir” tried to conquer the world, and all but two of the people who are known to have attended Slytherin have been evil. (Even Snape and Slughorn aren’t exactly model citizens, but they keep it from being uniformly bad.)
But no, nobody cares, and they are still admitting people into Slytherin, effectively sorting all the little maniacs into one isolated group, cut off from the rest of the school. I would have tweaked the Sorting Hat’s algorithm to distribute the evildoers into the other houses, where they might be reformed, or at least restrained.
There are other flaws as well–the extremely dull camping trip (and the attendant return of pointless teenage angst), the comical ineptitude of Voldemort and his minions, the unbelievable ease and speed with which the entire Ministry of Magic converts from being a liberal democracy into an authoritarian regime. (Did all Ministry of Magic employees get a memo “You’re all going to be Nazis now”?) but these could be overlooked, if not for all the major flaws mentioned above.
All this adds up to a disaster. The characters are inconsistent, which makes them hard to care about. The MacGuffins and plot devices pop up everywhere, and are not really connected to each other in a meaningful way. The climactic battle between Potter and Voldemort is resolved by a quirk of wizard law, an ending which would be very well in a Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera, but not so good in an epic high-fantasy novel.
Star Wars fans moan endlessly about how “the prequels ruined Star Wars“. Putting aside that I like the prequels, I never understood how the creation of a new movie could somehow retroactively ruin previous ones. But I can sort of feel that way with Harry Potter thanks to Book Seven. It sort of dulls the appeal of the whole series for me. It probably shouldn’t, because I can still go back and read the brilliant Chamber of Secrets and it is every bit the tightly-plotted magical thriller that it was before Deathly Hallows was even written. But, the fact remains, I have not bothered to revisit any of the other Potter books since Hallows, and I suspect my lack of motivation to do so is because of the awful finale.
When you criticize something popular, people usually respond with: “could you do better?” Fortunately, I don’t have to. The good people at “How It Should Have Ended” have already supplied an answer to that question:
Oh, wow, I had never heard this before. Studio executives had wanted the Harry Potter movies to be set in America. I didn’t like the Potter flicks much–certainly, all except the last two installments were but pale shades of the books–but if they’d messed around with them even more they could have been an outright disaster. That article kind of makes me more forgiving towards the filmmakers’ general disregard for the stuff in the books. The fact that they couldn’t be bothered to make Tonks’s hair look like the book describes seems minor in comparison to the prospect of seeing Hogwarts relocated to the outskirts of Los Angeles.
As an American, I am vaguely insulted by the idea that people suspected Americans wouldn’t be interested in a movie that wasn’t about them. Do they think we’re that ignorant and narcissistic? Man, that would have been an awful series of movies. I mean, in my eyes, the major draw of the movies was the chance to see skilled British actors plying their trade. Take that away and they would be nothing.