Cogito, Ergo Sum (The film of the book)

Name: Ophelia

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Product:	The film of the book
Date:	03/12/01 (104 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Entertainment

Disadvantages: Fails to live up to expectations

Descartes was right. I think, therefore I am. When we read are book, we are forced to think, to use our imaginations to bring the characters and the setting to life. When we watch a film, all this hard work is done for us; the appearance of the hero, the rolling countryside, the frightening monster, all of these are presented to us. We do not need to strive to contribute to the creative process and it would seem that the experience could, therefore, never be as satisfying.

The ultimate result of this is inevitably going to be that if you have read a book, watching the film can never be as fulfilling.

Another drawback is that we enter the cinema with pre-conceived ideas. When we leave the cinema we are filled with criticisms; the hero was too tall, the stepmother too kind, the castle too gothic. We have used our imaginations to create the author’s world in our minds and we were pleased with our creations. When we see the director’s visions of the same world we can only be disappointed. They can never be identical to ours and will inevitably, in our view, be inferior.

The other frequently heard criticism is ‘it was nothing like the book’. How many times have we uttered that remark on leaving the cinema after watching the adaptation of one of our favourite novels?

For example, Stephen King wrote a short story of ‘The Running Man’, which was made into a film with Arnold Schwarzenegger. In the book our hero dies at the end in the process of wreaking revenge on his tormentors. There are no prizes for guessing that in the film the ending is entirely different; the guy gets the girl and they all live happily ever after. Good lord – it wouldn’t do for a Hollywood film to have an unhappy ending. There is a similar change in the ending of the film of Stephen King’s book ‘Cujo’. Here we really can’t be surprised, as in the book the young boy, who is our hero
, dies and that is another big Hollywood no-no. One dooyooer (you know who you are – Iain) told me that when this film was previewed to selected audiences with an original ending with the boy dying, the reaction was extremely negative. If that sad ending had been in the film, box office figures would have fallen and yet the book is a best-seller. This also shows that we are expecting different things from reading a book and watching a film.

It seems that watching a film is more of a short-term investment in entertainment. It is a ‘quick fix’. We want to be pleasured by the film. Scared if it is a horror, amused if a comedy but what we don’t want is our expectations to be challenged. We want to leave the cinema satisfied by the experience but it is only short-term and the next week we will go to the cinema again. With a book, it obviously takes longer to read and so we are involved in its world and the author’s creations for a longer period of time. We are using our minds and imaginations and it is stimulating us intellectually as well as emotionally. With books we are making a mental investment and, therefore, it is more acceptable for the death of a hero, as it is all part of the process of giving us a ‘long term fix’; it gives us food for thought, it provokes a deep set reaction within our mind, which we are pleased to rise to the challenge of facing.

The film of the book is often inevitably more shallow than the book. A book can give us an insight into the thoughts and motivations of the characters, enriching their personalities. This is extremely hard to present through a film in an acceptable manner. For example, returning to ‘Cujo’, in the book we ‘hear’ what the boy’s pet dog is thinking as he is running through the fields, when he encounters a rabid bat that bites his nose, we ‘hear’ his pain and confusion, which can never be put across in a fi
lm.

Some directors do attempt this. Another example, again a Stephen King adaptation ‘Misery’; in the book after the hero’s traumatic experience he is physically safe but he is haunted emotionally and keeps having awful heart-wrenching moments when he feels that his tormentor is everywhere he goes and there is no escape from her. In the film the hero ‘sees’ his tormentor everywhere, his waitress at a restaurant suddenly changes into her and we know that he is plagued by memories. However, this instance shows that even if the director tries to give us the impression of an inner struggle it is really only possible to do this with simple a more simple premise. Another inner struggle the hero in ‘Misery’ has is when he is suffering from drug withdrawal, pain and fear simultaneously. This is represented by the author in his mind as a horse race, each emotion being represented by a horse; as the pain grows, that horse runs into the lead but is soon overtaken by the drug withdrawal horse as the cold turkey symptoms envelop him. Such complex imagery could never be replicated in a film.

The final, rather obvious, way in which a film can never live up to its book is caused by the time restraint. A book takes a long time to read and the amount of action and thought which occurs can never be recreated in two or three hours of screen viewing. A prime example of this is ‘Bridget Jones’ Diary’; in most respects the film was extremely true to the book, however, there just was not the time to explore all the side plots that occurred in the book and most of her friends remained minor characters in the film and their own trials and tribulations were not even touched upon. I am, however, delighted to see that the upcoming ‘Lord of the Rings’ adaptation is not to be tackled in one film, so they are giving themselves a fighting chance; the proof of the pudding shall be in the eating.


If you have read a book and go to see the film you are, for the reasons detailed above, bound to be disappointed. The only way in which you can counteract this outcome is to enter the cinema with the thought in mind that you are expecting (and indeed, seeking) a different experience from that which you derived from the book. You want to be entertained, purely and simply, no more, no less. If you remember this, then your quest for short-term amusement will be satisfied.

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