Why The Book Is Better (Or Is It?)

 It's a classic saying, one that you've no doubt heard before. A movie based on a book is released and without fail, someone will chime in and aver that "the book was better" with all the confidence in the world. The tendency to prefer the thing that comes chronologically first is ubiquitous among almost all forms of media, but nowhere is it expressed more fervently than when it comes to big screen adaptations of written works. Why is this? Is it merely a product of looking to the past with rose-colored glasses, in the same vein as every generation sneering at the amusements of those with the misfortune to be born after them? Is it a more cynical viewing of the forces at work behind the creation of licensed films? Or is there genuinely something to the notion that a novel will always outshine any attempt to adapt it to the visual medium? To answer this, or at least try to, I think it is pertinent to examine what the novel excels at, and why someone with an emotional connection to a particular story might balk at seeing it adapted.

The biggest advantage that literature has over its more technologically advanced narrative cousins is the element of flexibility. While the words on the page may be the same for any copy of a particular novel, the reader is given the opportunity to add their own mental voices and pictures to those words, personalizing the experience in a fashion that can never be achieved in a medium like film with clearly defined sound and visuals. Ten people might come up with wildly different versions of the same character whose lines are written, yet a hundred people who watch the same film are all going to hear the same voice and see the same images. No doubt it is a great thrill to see the characters you love brought to life, but once that visual is created there is no longer any room for interpretation. A nebulous character becomes static, and the thousands of different imagined voices and miens are pruned in favor of a singular, uncompromising interpretation. 

Movies, at their core, are often one person's vision of a particular story or setting, and it can be a wonderful experience to see a narrative and characters that you enjoy portrayed by a director whose visual language is distinctive or striking. But the inescapable weakness of an adaptation is that it must clearly define that which gains so much from being undefined. The best authors leave much up to the imagination of the reader, giving them just enough to paint their own pictures while leaving all but the broad strokes blank. For every person who wholeheartedly agrees with the creative choices in a particular adaptation, there will likely be ten who have nits to pick. Even the most critically acclaimed films based on books are not immune from criticism; a famous example is Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, which was so disliked by the original novel's author Stephen King that he commissioned his own adaptation so he might better see his work portrayed. There is obviously no pleasing everyone, and even hotly anticipated sequels in the literary world are often met with disappointment by fans who wish the author had gone in a different direction, or spared a character or given them a happier ending. But the reason that "the book is better" is not simply that humans are notoriously finicky creatures; it is that adapting a book to the screen neuters the written word's great advantage, the advantage of uncertainty. The book will always be better than the movie because the very nature of written works necessitates it. When the germ of a story is coming into being on the page, it is with the tacit understanding of the limitations of the written form. You cannot show your readers what you are picturing in your mind, so you must describe it in a way that allows for extrapolation. When such a work is tapped for the silver screen, it is like taking a creature out of its natural habitat. If a story was not written with the primarily visual medium of cinema in mind, it will lose something in the transition. "The book is better" not because books are inherently superior, but because a story will always shine brightest in its original form. 

The takeaway here, I think, is not that we should stop adapting books into movies altogether; even if such a thing were possible, there is artistic merit in the process. Rather, when looking critically at any art form one must take into account what that form does best. Cinema allows for nuanced expression through visual composition, and can elevate that expression through appropriate sound design in concert (if you'll excuse the pun) with said visuals. A novelization of a film such as The Matrix or Lawrence of Arabia would fall short in the same vein that so many filmed adaptations of books have, in that it would fail to recreate the advantages of the original medium. The key to a successful transition from one medium to another is respecting the former while focusing on what the latter is best at, and this is a difficult balance to strike. Too often when adapting a story to the screen the question of "how can we use the cinematic medium to enhance this story" is left unasked.  If there is no merit in the adaptation process, the end result will rightfully be viewed as a soulless cash grab, and our maxim of "the book was better" becomes unimpeachable. To truly adapt is to breathe new life into a familiar story, and too often what results from the transition is a sense of loss, not gain. The book will always be better than a movie masquerading as a book, but there is a definite case to be made for a movie in its own right being better than a book. If we only focus on what a movie cannot do, we miss out on the opportunity to see old ideas re-imagined. The movie may not be better than the book, but what it can be is different, and perhaps introduce the work to a whole new audience. Instead of lamenting that the book was better, appreciate that the original story was beloved enough to merit adaptation in the first place.