The Book is Always Better Than the Movie
I'm playing a game with my friends--who are reading this and hopefully not annoyed with me for spilling this--where we are dream-casting Terry Pratchett's Discworld. There are no rules. Basically, we just have to put what particular era each actor is actually coming from. Thus, we have accidentally set up a love match between Matt Damon and Katherine Hepburn. Then there's the comedy duo made up by the actor--Mark Sheppard--at his current age, and Mark Sheppard from a dozen years ago. Time, in this case, is most definitely relative.
This makes a fun game. But it also drives home how impossible it is to concoct a movie out of a book. There's all the obvious problems: time, length, setting. The infinite range of a reader's imagination is much more complex issue. Maybe an author starts off with a pretty clear image of their character and that character is set down on the page. But when that page is read, that same person can be read as such disparate people as Simon Pegg, Spencer Tracy, or Clive Owen. There isn't a single character on our list that has only one choice; there isn't one casting choice that all of us agree on.
From what we know of Ancient Greek tragedy, most of the violence occurred offstage. (Spoiler: that's why Oedipus stabs out his eyes backstage.) It's not simply because the Greeks knew the limitations of drama without CG; scholars have considered a religious motivation--not wanting to stain the stage with blood. It could also be that they knew that whatever the audience imagined occurring was always going to be better, even if a dedicated Athenian method actor grabbed a spear and blinded himself on stage.
Consider, then, that one's eyes are the stage. We view a movie or tv and we see what it tells us to see. If I talk about BBC's "Sherlock," you know I'm talking about the wonderful duo of Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman. But when we read, we build the cast ourselves, taking bits and pieces of people we know and people we've seen, until we have a character that is uniquely ours. If I bring up Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, your memory is of a very different person than the one that I'm talking about. A character has as many doppelgangers as it has readers.
There are some movies based on books that are great in and of themselves. I personally like the Lord of the Rings better on screen. I've never bothered to read The Godfather, since Marlon Brando has "branded" himself so well into the story it'd be a waste of time. But there's also those movies that made a complete hash of it. "Ella Enchanted" came out in 2004 and I'm still peeved at the gross misinterpretation of one of my beloved childhood novels. "The Borrowers" was completely unacceptable.
It isn't necessarily the book that is better than the movie. There are movies that are just as creative and wonderful and thought-provoking as books. There are books that translate nicely into movies--"Shawshank Redemption", "Pelican Brief". It's the brain, it's the imagination, it's the individual experience of the story that occurs most often when reading. The story we read, the one that we create behind the scenes, is always better than something plopped down in front of us like overcooked spaghetti. As readers, we feast upon the food of our own gleaning: as readers, we are never alone.
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