After reading Megan Giese’s post, Yes, I Still Read For Fun, I was interested in why people always say the book was better in comparison to film adaptations of novels.
Are the people who side with the book just being pretentious? Is it because our society still values literacy as a sign of high-brow culture or upper class status?
I think this perspective on the book versus movie debate stems from Sylvia Scribner’s Literacy in Three Metaphors where she describes the metaphor of literacy as a state of grace. In other words, people who are literate elevated their social status and are now ‘cultured’. So, there is a deep underlying belief in our society that books (or reading/writing in general) is better than film or video games. Though the two mediums are vastly different, society has developed an obsession with tradition and often fears the effects of new technologies which may add the reasons why people often choose books over movies.
But is it more than just societal standards?
When you read a book, as Megan mentioned, you create your own characters and setting in your mind. Each detail is visualized dependent on how you connect with the book. For example, if two people who read the same book were told to sketch the main character, the two sketches may be completely different from one another. Therefore, reading novels creates a strong bond between content and the personal experience.
So. as we read we visualize the story in our mind creating our own personal film to go along with the book; therefore, if the movie adaptation does not meet our expectations we my find the movie to be disappointing in comparison.
Would we still choose a book over a film if it is adapted from an original movie?
Photo by Min An from Pexels https://www.pexels.com/photo/novel-books-775998/.
I had never really considered why exactly I’ve always held the position that the books are better, but I think you’re right about both points you make. I strongly identify with your latter, that the movie we see on screen just can’t compete with the one we’ve made in our heads when we read a good book. In my own experience, its difficult to watch a movie based on a book I’ve read first because I don’t want their interpretation of the story or its characters to contaminate mine. For example, when I last reread The Great Gatsby, I could only envision Nick Caraway as Toby Maguire, and I didn’t even think that his performance was that good. Oddly enough, I have the opposite experience too. There are some movies based on books that I never want to read because I love the movie so much that I don’t want to know of their analogues, like Misery.