you ruined the book

[calimac]

Of all the arguments defending crappy movie adaptations of good books, the most tiresome is the line usually attributed to James M. Cain (or somebody) when asked why he didn't mind such adaptations of his novels: "The book isn't ruined. It's still sitting there on the shelf."

What any author ought to know, and most do, because they keep saying this in other contexts, is that a book sitting on the shelf is not doing anybody any good. The book only comes alive when somebody takes from the shelf and reads it. The true novel is not the ink frozen on the page; it's in the mental experience of a reader.

But if that mental experience is clashed with and distracted by the film adaptation, or anything else, the book has been ruined for that reader. Accidental clashes are nobody's fault, but a film which interferes with rather than enriches the reading or re-reading experience is the film-maker's fault.

Just in this morning's Internet browsing I came across two fine examples of this complaint, which show that the book still sitting on the shelf is not the point. One refers to the most classic example of films which did their damndest to ruin the book. "Asakiyume" on the tor.com website wrote:

Boy, the movie so poisoned me on Frodo--hard to go back to thinking of him as book!frodo, with a little more meat on his bones and personality to him.

And even a movie can ruin another movie! I like this bill of indictment against George Lucas:

It has come to our attention that your actions over the past decade in the production of the films Star Wars Episode 2: Attack of the Clones and Star Wars Episode 3: Return of the Sith (hereafter referred to as "Star Bores") as well as Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (hereafter referred to as "Grandpa Jones") infringes upon the rights of millions of moviegoers to preserve their childhood memories unscathed. This is a clear violation of your contract with the public to create films worthy of the legacy that you, yourself, began in 1977. Your recent actions have been grossly negligent, displaying a complete lack of regard for taste and artistic merit. Star Bores and Grandpa Jones represent a failure to satisfy the duty of care mandated for a filmmaker of your status.

Notice the implied contract with the viewer for the film-maker not to trash his own franchise, and the utter integrity of "the rights of millions of moviegoers to preserve their childhood memories unscathed."

Of course, I found Indiana Jones a monumental bore from film 1 (Lucas never figured out that even the fastest action is tedious unless there's something else to contrast it with) and felt that the Star Wars storyline nuked itself the moment that Vader said "I am your father" at the end of the second film. I never believed it for a minute and still don't. And the fourth film was the single most tedious movie-going experience of my life. It didn't ruin the earlier ones for me so much as make me resent wasting two hours on this one. I avoided the successors entirely. [I presume everyone reading this knows that episodes "2" and "3" of Star Wars are actually the fifth and sixth films. If you don't, it's not worth explaining further.]

But it's not my filmgoing experience that this writer is complaining about. It's his.

Comments

[mithriltabby]

The best Star Wars stories, in my opinion, are set thousands of years away from the films. The Knights of the Old Republic computer games are good (and the comic book series from Dark Horse of the same name, which have almost no overlap with the games), and the Darth Bane books by Drew Karpyshyn (who was lead writer on the first KotOR game, as well as the excellent games Jade Empire and Mass Effect). The stories set in the era of the films are usually burdened by dealing with the cast from the films and the families they’ve all acquired; writers like Walter Jon Williams and Karen Traviss and Matthew Stover who write in the universe usually find a way to focus on a few of the characters to get a good story in, but they’re usually embedded in a series that isn’t up to their individual quality.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

The most pungent of the free books in my bag from World Fantasy Con was an anthology based on the premise, "Not every story has to be set in a sharecropped universe! See what wonderful things these writers can come up with when they have to make up everything themselves!"