- Position‹2 of 3›
- Books should not be adapted into movies
The greater attention placed on movies draws people away from reading the original source material.
The argument
Opponents of adaptation argue that the traffic runs in one direction. As more and more production companies come to view books as powerful source material, the book is progressively reframed as an input to something else. On this view the harm is not that any particular film is bad but that increasing commercialisation undervalues the book as a work of art. A book treated primarily as raw material for a grossing box office is being assessed by a measure external to it, and the impression carried by that treatment, that books are written just to be bought by moviemakers, devalues the book itself even when nobody states it outright. Supporters of the position hold that this reframing then hardens into a standard of judgement. Where adaptation is routine, the value of a book comes to be read off whether it has a movie or television adaptation, so that an unadapted book can look like one nobody wanted rather than simply one that was never taken up. Literary worth and screen suitability are different qualities, and proponents warn of an increasing trend in which the second quietly stands in for the first. The final cost falls on readers. Once an adaptation exists, people may feel there is no need to read the book, since they already know the story and how it ends. What they miss, on this argument, is precisely what the book had to offer: a fuller, more detailed experience of the story, including the interiority, texture and pacing that a film has neither the room nor the means to carry. The adaptation does not sit alongside the book so much as substitute for it, and the substitute is the thinner of the two. Because books can be so easily overlooked in comparison to the movie, proponents conclude, books should not be adapted into movies.
Premises
Counter-arguments
Not everyone watches the movie before reading the book. Plenty of people read the book first since the book is usually published before the movie is made.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P1] This is not always the case.