I’ve pointed out many times that I’m not much of a novel reader. “What!? But you’re like a writer ‘n’ shit!” my friends often respond with. I suppose I can call myself a writer, but I wouldn’t call myself a quality writer in many senses. Thus, I pollute my articles with colourful stick-figure people in a pitiful attempt to distract from this lack of quality.
Books are about as appealing to me as videogames are to my mother (though she’s a total monster at Solitaire). The purely written word is a medium that has generated a culture I could never connect with, which has isolated me in many a conversation. Thank merciful Neptune for movie adaptations though, for they provide me with an unlocked window into the book club world.
I’m often interested in hearing the opinions of my friends after we’ve seen a film adaptation of a book they loved and identified with. Sometimes they would be disappointed by a strange omission while accepting a fresh perspective of the material. It’s this insight that has increased my fascination with The Hunger Games, getting briefed on some of the richer details left out of the film (Katniss and Peeta’s relationship, the salute, white skin vs. olive skin, etc).
The back-knowledge book-readers have paints a perspective uniquely different to my own when going into a film adaptation. Seeing how a skilled filmmaker’s vision of a certain property matches/contrasts my own is an experience I’m rarely familiar with. So I relish the opportunity to get an insight from book-lovers about such films.
But opinions I cannot tolerate are those of Book-snob Barry.
He is a man too intellectual to use single syllable words like ‘smart’ to describe himself and would rather read The Horse Whisperer for an eighth time than watch “mindless dribble” like Die Hard* or 2001: A Space Odyssey. He also has a fireplace, a photocopied English Masters degree and a library of limited edition thesauruses.
*which is also an unfaithful adaptation of a novel
Barry tends to say things like:
Now I don’t hate Barry because he prefers books to films; I hate him because of his ignorance.
There seems to be this lingering idea that if a movie misses a beat of the book it adapts, it’s a flaw. To go in a different direction makes some uncomfortable, and I can understand why. If the source material is something many feel deeply attached to, seeing it manipulated can be unsettling at first. It’s natural to fear change, but accepting such change often leads to prosperous results. In reference to cinema, I call this the Stephen King argument.
If no film adaptations strayed from the source material, we would never have gotten Stanley Kubrick’s masterful The Shining, an adaptation King outright despised for not “faithfully” following his book. King would then go on to make a more faithful TV miniseries out of his novel which generated the reaction “well, that’s okay”. However, Kubrick had the vision to take the material into different cinematic terrain, one we are all thankful for to this day (except poor ol’ Stephen).
The best adaptations take the fundamentals that formed the original material as a blueprint to creating their own cinematic beast. Sometimes there are ways to shove everything that’s in a book onto the screen. But most of the time, things need to be cut, modified, merged and added.
There are unique qualities to the written story that simply cannot be imitated onscreen, but that proposition goes both ways. Movies are unique experiences in their own right, so to expect the exact same experience from a property traversing from one medium to another seems rather pointless to me. As you can expect with this sort of transference, things will get lost in translation. But we shouldn’t ignore what can be gained from this transference either.
Just for funzies, I had a go at making a short story (using not-quality words), later adapting that into a six panel comic (using not-quality images). The results speak largely for themselves, but I’m confident about one assertion: it’s flippin’ hard to perfectly imitate the written word in only a few images, moving pictures or otherwise.
Ten to five – a short story by Liam Maguren
“There I was, at the spry age of five, bumbling with my brother and the two neighbour kids, Tim and Monique. They were all twice my age which, according to my youthful logic, made me just as old as them whenever we loitered around the cul-de-sac during the days illuminated by the summer’s sun. On this particular day, my brother and I hopped the fence to make glorious use of Tim’s black velvet trampoline.
“I was always trying to show off my sweet trampoline moves to the pack – my naïve attempt to justify the age that I wasn’t. Forward flips, stomach drops, cannonballs, they were all in my skill set as we bounced around together, defying gravity (a concept I wasn’t yet familiar with). The fun would cease in tune with the setting sun, but Tim decided to exit the tramp in a more attention-grabbing fashion – he jumped.
“Gliding through the air, Tim nailed the landing with a gymnast’s grace. He turned to us and smirked, declaring a challenge.
“My brother was next. He soared with enthusiasm, crushing the green grass with his feet, followed by his knees and hands. He stood back up and looked at us, triumphant.
“Monique, hesitant, mustered the courage to send herself off the tramp. Eyes closed, she flailed about like an airborne squid, but grounded herself with the safety akin to an open umbrella.
“Now there was just me on the tramp. I was the last man on the sinking island left to board the lifeboat, the last man on the platform to catch the moving train, the last man on top of the exploding building with the rescue chopper’s rope ladder within jumping distance. But this wasn’t simply about showing them that I could land the jump; this was also my chance to show them that I was ten at the age of five. I couldn’t simply jump off the tramp. No, I was going to make that jump while doing a forward flip.
“With the decision made, I take a couple of practice bounces. I bound my way closer and closer to the edge until my confidence peaked. I launch into the air, starting my forward rotation. The safety of the tramp was no longer under me, replaced only with solid ground. My heightened ego combined with my recklessly-earned adrenaline to create a unique rush, one that had me envisioning my stupendous landing in front of my extremely impressed elders. But the fantasy came to a halt as my body failed to go beyond 180 degrees. Falling with my back parallel to the ground, I quickly familiarised myself with the concept of gravity.
“The pain was direct. My body hit the ground like a precisely dropped plank of wood, causing the pack hovered above my carcass like a group of confused vultures. As I lay there, almost having completed the most awesome-est stunt ever, I couldn’t tell if the looks of their faces were ones of admiration or sympathy, for my eyes began to well up. I began to cry like a five-year-old, spilling the tears of a ten-year-old.”
Ten to five – A short comic by Liam Maguren
