Devil's Advocate: Does the Movie Ruin the Book?

NO: Truman Cunningham

Like wine and cheese, a good film adaptation can only complement the book on which it’s based. The book provides the substance and detail, and the movie provides a separate but related palate of flavours. Neither claims to be definitive. The two sides are not in competition. At most, one may overpower the other, but even the most poorly matched Amazon Prime series cannot entirely ruin the J. R. R. Tolkien novel. Instead, the good pairings strengthen the artistic merits of both media, like the Godfather books and movies, while the truly awful pairings are mercifully forgotten.

The very best film and folio pairings come about when accomplished filmmakers recognise the merit in good books, and use the text as a starting point for their own projects. Necessarily, this means the final movie may differ significantly from the book. It would be naive to expect absolute fidelity to the text, even when authors are involved in writing the screenplays for their books. Creative license means that Dune according to David Lynch or Denis Villeneuve is not Dune according to you or Frank Herbert. 

Instead, they should be evaluated as separate, though related, works of art. Take an old novel with a critically acclaimed film equivalent, like The Leopard or Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. It wouldn’t be right to say that the novel is bad because the movie is bad, and vice versa. Great movies, like Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr Fox, can be great because they share something of the spirit of the book. But they can also be great despite not sticking to the text. This is also true of historical films — unless you are a total nerd, the merits of Marie Antoinette or Gladiator are in the storytelling, not the meticulous attention to historical detail. 

With this in mind, it’s hard to imagine how movies can ruin books. Perhaps the exception is when a movie becomes much more deeply embedded in the popular consciousness than the book on which it’s based. In cases like this, it’s hard to read the book uncoloured by the actors and scenes that we’re already familiar with. When I read Dune, I had Lynch’s hilariously primitive CGI in mind during the fight scenes. The same is true of Alain Delon and Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley, or the desert scenery of No Country for Old Men in Cormac McCarthy’s masterpiece.

Even in these cases, it’s hard to say that the movie image of a book ruins it for us. Maybe a really bad film adaptation can hang unpleasantly over an otherwise readable novel. Most of the time, though, the movie only informs superficial details about how we imagine the story’s characters and setting. That’s not a bad thing. It would be impossible to hermetically seal ourselves off from outside influence in order to ‘properly’ enjoy a good book. Our lived experiences furnish the framework the author provides. 

From another angle, it would be ridiculous to say that a work like Hamlet ‘ruins’ an entirely separate though related piece like The Lion King. Or that Joseph Conrad’s book about the Congo unfairly flavours Kubrick’s Apocalypse Now. Movies based on books are separate artistic works than the books themselves, and it’s not fair to say that one poisons the other in either direction. They’re distinct works of art. If a bad movie ruined what you thought of a book, maybe consider it a bad movie instead of blaming the book.

YES: Sam Spendlove

As a disclaimer: I love adaptation. I find it thrilling. I love to see different spins on the same story — I’m sat for updates or reimaginings, retellings or pieces of inspiration. I’m happy to see Macbeth set in a Pets at Home, or watch a movie where The Odyssey is reperformed a set of semi-sentient crystals. I am not a purist, nor a hipster (or, I try not to be). But if I did have a concealed hipster gene, then Hollywood’s adaptation ethos would activate it: the film industry, through adapting novels, seems hungry to eat them whole. 

A good adaptation sets up a symbiotic relationship between the adaptation and its source material. The original and what it inspired are changed by each other, with neither disappearing completely. One can love Greta Gerwig’s Little Women, for example, while keeping the novel in mind; and, usually, one can have a different experience when consuming either. You can have a book Jo and a movie Jo, with only one being Saoirse Ronan. Both these experiences should be equally as valuable. What you imagine when you read Little Women is as official of a vision as anything someone could project on the silver screen. A good adaptation leaves you with that freedom to move between what you imagine and what a director imagined. 

The film industry seems to have no interest in allowing audiences this freedom. For about five years, the only copies of The Handmaid’s Tale available were ones covered with Elisabeth Moss’s face. During the marketing campaign for Wicked, the obscure source material was reprinted with the movie poster for a cover — uniting two vastly different pieces of media under one title, and traumatising little children in Ariana Grande costumes everywhere. Even Greta Gerwig (or her team) refitted copies of Little Women with a small sticker displaying her choice actresses for the March sisters. The subliminal message to readers, here, is that the book is supplementary reading — just one step toward consuming the film industry’s official vision of a story. 

I’m not saying books should be treated as holy texts. I loathe the tendency towards wrapping books in dark-academia-mystique, thereby denying them the chance at being creatively adapted. But I do think all iterations of a story should be equal, allowing for a clearer look at why the story stuck with us in the first place. You’d think this would be intuitive: if we like a story, we should like it in all its forms — be open to a diverse catalog even if it’s different from what we know. But, we aren’t: instead, we’re encouraged to purchase the official merchandise, to buy tickets to the official vision of what our stories are. And people buy those tickets! Even if they say they’ll go back and read the book, they do so with a vision of the movie. For this reason, it feels like a death sentence whenever a film adaptation comes drifting down from on high. For forever, the free imagery of the novel will feel dominated and restricted by the settled imagery of the movie.

Illustration from Wikimedia Commons