Adaptations

Some thoughts on adapting novels to film

If you spend any time frequenting literary or writers circles, online or in real space, you will eventually come across a conversation about film adaptations. The inevitable talk about authors getting their work made into a Hollywood film, to get the real money and the real exposure. This isn’t a new or modern phenomenon, back in the 19th century the goal of many authors, and where they made their big money just like today, was to have their work adapted for the stage. The stage then and the screen, or better yet the stream, is where you get mass exposure. Mass exposure leads to money and fame, and most authors harbor that GRRM or Rowling fantasy deep down somewhere. Even the great writers of the past like Fitzgerald weren’t immune from the lure of the silver screen.

Sadly this whole compulsion has led to a complete enshitification of the novel. Every two-bit hack writer wants to save the cat and write cinematic fantasy or whatever the fuck praying to Mammon that the pedophiles in Hollywood send some silver their way. This of course has led to shit writing, that is based on shit movies, that were originally based on shit writing, creating a shit cyclone of regurgitated garbage.

I’ve said this before, but if your novel is easily adapted to film it probably sucks. It means that you are not taking advantage of the power of language, the power of the novel as an art form. Writing is not a visual medium, it’s an emotional one, where the artist can transcend time and place, and create an emotional and textual work of art that goes beyond anything film, for all its merits, can ever approach. So, in my opinion, writers should get rid of the idea of film adaptations. Just don’t, instead write to be unfilmable.

But the above is not why I hate film adaptations of novels. I hate them because they rob me of my intimate imagination. Take the Lord of the Rings movies, I enjoyed them very much, but a part of me also loathes them. I read Tolkien’s novels the summer before I began High School, a year or two ahead of the first film adaptation. Tolkien’s work blew my mind, and my imagination was wild with vivid pictures of Rivendell, Moria, Gondor, and the Shire. Frodo and the crew had a look, and of course, I imagined Aragorn, a tall king, mustached, rough but kind. I had mind-eye images of all of these places and all of these characters that lived in my imagination through the writings of Tolkien. Then the movies came along and Frodo became Elijah Wood, Aragorn no longer looked like my father and uncle, instead he became Viggo Mortensen, and Rivendell and the Shire now looked a certain way. Those visual images displaced and overwrote the ones I created and over the years I can’t even remember what the Middle Earth I first visited looked like, all I have left is Jackson’s creation. Something a lot more mundane and real than I imagined.

This is the same story for many other adaptations. Doc Sportello will always be Joaquin Phoenix, and Winona Ryder my Mina. I’m stuck with Anthony Hopkins as Dr. Lecter and Christian Bale as Bateman. Is this a bad thing, maybe, I don’t know, somewhat, but what I do know is that there is a not-insignificant part of me that feels a bit of a loss that I don’t get to meet these characters on my terms.