Posts Tagged adaptation
Adaptations: What’s The Point?
That’s not a snarky internet question, a la “is it actually possible for you to be any more stupid than you are right now?” I mean it. Because about halfway through John Hillcoat’s faithful-as-possible version of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, I suddenly couldn’t stop wondering: what’s the point of a film adaptation of a book?
I don’t mean for the film studios, because for them the point is the Daffy Duck-style dollar signs appearing in their eyes. A quick calculation by SlashFilm found that only two of the top 30 grossing films of last decade were original stories: Finding Nemo and Kung Fu Panda. Adaptations are great business decisions. They come pre-hyped, risk-reduced, and with a built-in audience ranging from curious onlookers to rabid fans.
And if you haven’t read the book in question? You probably don’t care where it came from. You might feel some of the pitfalls of books-to-film adaptation – too many characters, bloated running times, plot points stuffed in until the screenplay is oddly shapeless – but you might not.
No, I’m talking about the specific sensation of watching a faithful adaptation of a book you’ve already read. For example: you couldn’t say Hillcoat’s The Road is a bad movie. In many ways, it’s great, and some of the problems I had with it were those I already had with the source material. (Yes, I’m someone who thinks that the ending is a cheat, and one that’s almost on par with “he woke up and it was all a dream…”)
I’m a book-rereader and a movie-rewatcher, so it’s not knowing what’s going to happen that bothers me. The movie of The Road was faithful enough that I knew how it would happen, too.
I’ve ranted before about how movies like Watchmen suffered from too much fidelity, and would’ve been better served by taking more chances. That would help make them more medium-specific, but it’d also give them more of a reason to exist in the first place. With comic book adaptations, it’s not enough to just get to see the pictures move. With adaptations of a novel like The Road, it’s not enough – for me, at least – to create a visual landscape that matches the one the prose planted in my head.
(Which the movie did, without doubt. It’s one of the most convincing apocalypses ever put on screen.)
So: what’s the point? Is it to have an excuse to enjoy the story again? To see how it matches against what flickered in your imagination as you were reading? To spot the small, inevitable changes to the narrative? To hear how the dialogue sounds, spoken out loud? Is it curiosity about whether or not the movie got it ‘right’? Or that the movie experience is an upgrade, flat-out superior to the one offered by a novel?
Or are the two mediums so different that you don’t feel redundancy in even the most faithful adaptation – and I should just shut up about it?
Enough Fidelity Already
My first piece as comic book columnist for the literary site Bookslut is now online. It’s about the successful adaptation of prose into sequential art, and you can read it over here. (It’s kind of long. I’ll wait. Pack sandwiches.)
I begin with a mention of Slate’s Sarah Boxer and her fury over an adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 – one she found to be an “extended, ironic, illustrated joke.” While I happily admit that many adaptations are god-awful, I say that:
“…her hilarious complaint that ‘…the text is almost always shortened to make way for pictures’ suggests that she either doesn’t understand the difference between an illustrated book and sequential art, or doesn’t understand the concept of ‘redundancy’.”
It turns out, however, that there’s a title being released that will make her day: a new adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? by Boom! Studios. The art is solid, the story well-deserved of its status as a sci-fi classic, and its first collected edition has already been listed as essential reading. Inside, it proudly announces that it is the “complete text” of the novel, just “presented in graphic form”.
What does that mean? It means, bizarrely, you’ll see panels like this one from issue #3:
We see Rachael examine her wristwatch, next to narration explaining that she examined her wristwatch. We see that it’s Eldon Rosen who says “Half an hour”, but the speech balloon with its little attributive tail is supplanted by more narration explaining that, yes, he’s the one who said it, all right.
I have no idea what’s gained in this strange hybrid, except for the right to boast that nothing’s been cut from the book. Why not just publish a version of the novel with handsome illustrations on every second page? If you really want to be redundant, why not print all the dialogue twice: once in a text box, and once in a word balloon?
Fidelity can go too far.
Ask Zack Snyder. The fact that he was so visually faithful to the source material when adapting Frank Miller’s 300 won him many fans – but his determination to keep the comics’ narration left the film with an often pointless voiceover, explaining things we could already see. Much of the pre-film hype around his next movie, Watchmen, was pitched to placate fans of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s comic with the fact that it ‘looked’ just the same as it did on the page.
If you find yourself eavesdropping online on a superhero-casting discussion – you know, which actor should play who – you’ll find that most fans seem to be basing their choices on who looks right, and acting ability be damned. (This is why these casting discussions always seem to have a lot of professional wrestlers in the mix.) Do we really want nothing more than to see movies that are comic books forced into motion?
Say what you will about the Watchmen film, but it delivered that in spades. Its blu-ray release features Snyder giving a guided tour of every last detail he embedded in each frame. Maybe Vanity Fair was right, and Snyder “love[d] Watchmen too much” to make a truly successful movie.
Any adaptation requires massive change. One medium is astonishingly different from the next. Too much fidelity to the source material can result in weird redundancy at worst, but even the best case tends to be a dreary, paint-plot-points-by-numbers slog. (I’m looking at you, Chris Columbus’ Harry Potter films!)
If you really crave an adaptation that’s exactly the same as the source material, you know what’s perfectly faithful to the book?
The book.