Adaptation

I recently turned in my paper final for my class in literary analysis. It was about adapting a scrapbook into an e-book format and how it would be difficult to preserve the original artistic function of said scrapbook in electronic form. It was approximately 30% fluff,  80% bovine  excrement (from a male, not castrated) and 100% boring so I won't afflict you with it, but it did get me thinking about adaptation.

We've been seeing a lot of adapting recently, mostly switching books into movies. Twilight wrapped its big screen series this year while The Hunger Games debuted, we got a one off appearance from Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, and I am personally eagerly awaiting Peter Jackson's The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, due out Thursday at midnight (I will not be going because I am an adult with responsibilities). Some of the old faces from Lord of the Rings are back along with some new ones, most notably Martin Freeman in the role of Bilbo Baggins. You might recognize him from his role as Dr. John Watson in the BBC's Sherlock, which adapts Sir Arthur Conan Doyles' famous characters from the written word into 90 minute TV episodes. Doyle has been getting the full media treatment recently as a much different interpretation of the same characters came up on the big screen in Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, not to be confused with the HBO TV series Game of Thrones which has been adapted from George R.R. Martin's excellent Song of Ice and Fire books. These are just a sampling. I could belabor the point that books are being adapted a lot, but I won't.

Every time these adaptations hit the market the age old debate flares anew; which is better, the book or the movie? Most of the argument boils down to personal preference, but I find that oftentimes movie people are dissatisfied with the characters, find multiple plot holes, and openly wonder what the big deal is. Even when they are impressed you can hear the book nerds commiserating on how much the director shortened, altered, or just plain left out, and how one of the minor characters just wasn't right. This is because you can put down a book and pick it up the next day; they have time to flesh out the details, but movies need to be consumed in a single sitting. The story has to be stripped down to the most important parts, but this has usually already been done in the books' editing process. Any stripping down for the movie leaves gaps, and it's up to the director to hide them as best as he can. That's one of the reasons that movies have started splitting single books into multiple films; they simply cannot cram all of the nuance and character development into three and a half hours. Of course we put up with it because we are either too lazy to read the book, we genuinely want to see the characters we love come to life on the big screen, or we genuinely want to give detailed complaints about how the movie was done wrong.

I do love a good movie, but when it comes down to it I think that books almost always tell the better story. They take a lot of time, it's true, but good stories are worth investing in. It's really more of a draw to me that books take longer to read because I can enjoy it longer. It is more about the journey than the destination, after all, otherwise all we'd have is "happily ever after," or if you're a Tarantino fan, "everybody's dead."

(The contents of this blog post are an adaptation of a Broadway musical based on a movie based on a book based on real life events)