ruination

[calimac]

At a conversation yesterday the subject came up of people saying that a movie "ruined the book." The story was told of Raymond Chandler (or somebody) pointing triumphantly at his shelf of novels and saying, "They're still there!"

I've heard the story differently, that he looked sadly at them and said, "They're still there; that's what I have to keep telling myself."

But either way, people who say that the movie "ruined the book" are not referring to cases where the publisher removes the original novel from print and replaces it with a novelization of the movie, though that has happened a few times. They're talking about their reading experience of the book, and that makes sense: for I think most creative writers would agree that a book on the shelf might as well be dead unless someone takes it down and reads it and has it in their head.

If your re-reading or memory is tainted or mixed up with thoughts of a film version which you found unfaithful to the novel's spirit, then it's fair to say that, for you, the book has been ruined.

In response to that, someone said that's weak-minded, but I don't think so. A film is a powerful aesthetic experience involving visual art, drama, spectacle, music, and a lot of other things all at once. People are powerfully affected by films; they stick with us; that's why we see them.

I don't think it weak-minded not to be able to put that out of your head; and if it is, most people are. Deal with it. It took me about ten years to eradicate unwanted thoughts of the Bakshi film when re-reading The Lord of the Rings; if that makes me weak-minded, so be it. I was struck a few years ago reading an interview with Angelika Kirchschlager, an opera singer who prepared for the title role in an opera based on William Styron's novel Sophie's Choice by avoiding the film based on the same novel. She said, "I got the video and I started, but then gave up after 20 minutes because I realized Meryl Streep was so strong in that role I'd never get rid of the impression of how she did it." I like that word never - probably a rhetorical exaggeration; still, she said it.

Any odd cultural references can permanently change the way a work of art is viewed. When some 1930s radio producers chose the galop from Rossini's William Tell Overture to represent the Lone Ranger, they struck a cultural chord - and the overture has never been the same since.

The other way a movie can ruin a book is to get into the heads of those who haven't read the book and affect their first reading, in ways they might not even be aware of. My own experience going from a movie to a book I didn't already know is usually a disappointment akin to the one I get when a book I love is made into a movie. In either direction, the experience I first have sets up an expectation that's hard to overcome. As a child of 8 who'd seen Disney's Mary Poppins, I found Travers' books startlingly different to the point of mental whiplash. I might not have liked Travers even if I hadn't seen the film, but I don't know that, and have no way of ever finding out.

People who haven't read Tolkien, but who liked Jackson's Lord of the Rings films, usually especially praise its most Tolkienian aspects - which I think evidence that films more closely resembling the book would have been more successful - but whether they do or not, they tend to conflate the two stories into one. Which is not OK when the subject is explicitly Tolkien. Friends of mine who teach classes on Tolkien have to mark papers down for mentioning themes or scenes that occur only in Jackson, and I've seen it in some Tolkien scholarship too. (We're not talking compare-and-contrast here.)

I'm told that a lot of people going from the films to Tolkien are appreciating the book just fine. I'm delighted to hear it, but that doesn't say anything about the quality of the films. One of the top Tolkien scholars first came across Tolkien as a 12-year-old watching the Rankin-Bass Hobbit and fascinated by the map. A serendipitous encounter, but that doesn't make the Rankin-Bass Hobbit good. Frodo would never have gotten the Ring into the fire had Gollum not bitten his finger, but that doesn't make Gollum's attack praiseworthy. Just fortuitous.

Comments

[rozk.livejournal.com]

It gets even more complex than this, because sometimes there is a dialogue back and forth.

I can never remember whether or not Sam Spade's speech about the man who narrowly escaped death, walked out on his life and set up an almost identical life elsewhere is in the film or not, because I hear it in Bogart's voice when I read the book, and remember it as in the film though I suspect it isn't. And never remember the results of checking.

I would say that it isn't so much weak-mindedness as resistance to living in a culture where this kind of dialogue happens all the time, which is your right. Though I don't share that resistance.

Is there a reason why film changes the text on which it is based in a way that, say, opera does not? Or song?

I ask this in a general sense of enquiry, not polemically.

My view about Jackson's LOTR, which I like enough that I shall be writing on them at length this year, is Bentley's response to Pope's Illiad ''A very pretty poem, but you must not call it Homer'.

[redbird]

I'll answer for myself, not calimac, and based partly on a recent dinner conversation: I think it matters that film brings in more senses than song (and I don't know whether anything of this sort happened in the silent movie era).

What I told zorinth a few days ago was that, among other factors, I'll have a not-at-conscious-level idea of what some characters in a book that matters to me look/move/sound like, which is not going to match the casting of the film. It would be possible that a filmmaker's idea of a specific character in a novel would fit mine (and that the filmmaker would be able to hire that actor); I don't think it's possible to match all the major characters. (And if you did it for me, they'd still be wrong for lots of other people.) That does lead to a thought I didn't have at the time, which is that it would be easier, if only statitistically, for a film to feel right if it was based on a book that focused on one or two characters, rather than something with as many important characters as Lord of the Rings.

When I explained this, Zorinth pointed out that I'd liked the movie The Princess Bride. I did: I saw the movie first. (rysmiel added that Goldman had an appreciation of screenplays that most novelists don't.)

Back to your question: a song based on a novel isn't likely to try to cover as much of the story as a movie would. I've no opinion about opera here, nor even about stage plays as distinct from film; I can't think of examples relevant to my personal experience of the genres in question.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

The Princess Bride for me is one of the big exceptions. I knew and loved the book first, and liked the movie too. (With one major caveat: the film left out the explanation of why Buttercup agrees to marry Humperdinck.)

But then, The Princess Bride is my number one proof that it is possible for a film to adapt a book both imaginatively and faithfully. The frame story of the grandfather reading, and the boy's interruptions, are the perfect cinematic equivalent of the book's introduction and editorial notes: totally different in text, but having exactly the same spirit.

[ron-drummond.livejournal.com]

The Princess Bride is my number one proof that it is possible for a film to adapt a book both imaginatively and faithfully.

My proof is Slaughterhouse Five. I still recall how moved I was when I later read that Vonnegut wept with joy when he first saw the film; afterward he declared it a perfect adaptation of his novel.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

And I didn't like either of them, which probably still proves the point.

[barondave.livejournal.com]

Adapting a book faithfully can be done, but you have to realize it's a movie and not a book. My example of a good adaption: One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. Next examples are the Harry Potter movies. I thought the first one was too much like the book, and that hurt the movie. The second and third movies were better movies than the books were books... and the books are great.

[bibliofile.livejournal.com]

Is there a reason why film changes the text on which it is based in a way that, say, opera does not? Or song?

Sure. While reading, almost everyone develops mental images of the characters, the settings, etc. I'd guess that very, very few people* imagine tunes -- melodies for poems (e.g., Tom Bombadil), much less a full soundtrack -- at the same time.

Of course, the fact that film and television remain such common media for storytelling. Someone who is immersed in the world of opera might be more likely to develop a mental stage spectacle as they read, not just sketches of people and places.

*Composers (would-be or working) and only a fraction of musicians

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

'A very pretty poem, but you must not call it Homer'.

Exactly my take on Jackson also.

Is there a reason why film changes the text on which it is based in a way that, say, opera does not? Or song?

Doesn't it? To read lyrics for which you know well the melody, and not think of that melody, takes even more iron-mindedness than not to think of the film when reading the book.

For me the most thrilling moment in the film Topsy-Turvy comes when Jim Broadbent as WS Gilbert reads aloud the lyrics he has just written for "If you want to know who we are," and does so in an entirely different rhythm from that of the tune which Sullivan, at this point in the sequence of events, had not yet composed.

[asimovberlioz.livejournal.com]

For me it's the close-up on Broadbent's face, after the sword has fallen off of the wall -- it's the "AHA!" moment, a sort of intellectual orgasm of creation, that is bestowed upon the greatest minds only rarely.

The remainder of the movie is, in my opinion, Wonderful Beyond Belief. Watch it carefully; there are moments of high comedy, low comedy, family strife, mental sickness, drug addiction, confrontation (subtly different -- D'Oyly Carte confronting Sullivan over their contract, the tenor confronting the costume designer, and the cast confronting Gilbert on the steps), of joy, of pain, of love chaste and of love lewd. And there are even moments worthy of a science fiction film, as we see people using and being introduced to new technology. The scene where D'Oyly Carte demonstrates the reservoir pen to Sullivan is perfect in this regard.

I humbly suggest that "Topsy-Turvy" is one of the greatest films of our time, if not of all time.

[rozk.livejournal.com]

One or two points in clarification:

redbird I should have been clearer - I meant songs which set particular poems that have an existence away from the song. And while clearly the song is hard to get away from when you read the poem, there are poems that have been set so often that it is in fact an interesting test of the settings which of them you remember when you read the poem. Which is probably personal taste...I suspect that the Tchaikovsky setting is the one we think of when we read the poem 'Nur wenn die sehnsuch kennt' even though what he sets is a Russian translation - this is 'None but the lonely heart' for non-German readers. It might though be the Beethoven or Schubert, just as with 'Knowst thou the land where the oranges bloom' it could be Schubert or Liszt but is probably Hugo Wolf. People who don't listen to lieder don't have this problem at all.

Just as bibliofile suggests, people involved in the creation of opera as composer, librettist or designer read texts differently to what we may as well call civilians, as do film and television creators. Those of us who write fiction, on the other hand, read with an eye to what we can learn, or even in order to echo texts and pick fights with them, or slavishly emulate them. (I talked about this in my essay on the Tolkien imitators in the Bob Eaglestone collection.)

There is a long-standing argument about translation - there is the old Italian 'traduttore/traditore' pun - translator/traitor. Certainly some of the translations which matter most are quite free ones, are 'imitations' rather than 'translations'.

In its nature, I don't think this is something that can be settled, but I suspect that the argument is one which ends up illuminating all the works of art involved. Verdi and Boito's 'Otello' is a reaction to the Shakespeare as much as a transfer of it to another medium; it makes some very important and significant changes in the process of that transfer. It both is and is not an autonomous work of art - and Shakespeare's play was, in part, a reaction to the Bandello novella on which it is very loosely based.