- Position‹2 of 3›
- Books should not be adapted into movies
Movies fix a visual anchor for the characters, props and setting. The imaginative process is lost and affects the reading experience.
The argument
The objection is about what reading does that watching cannot, and about what an adaptation takes away once it exists. It is not uncommon for a reader to picture the characters and the setting as they go, assigning a face to a name, furnishing a room from a half-sentence of description, hearing a voice the page only implies. That picturing is an imaginative process, and it is unique to every reader. Two people who finish the same book have not seen the same thing, and the version each of them built is part of what makes the story special to them. The creation of a movie, proponents argue, overwrites that work. A cast and a production design fix in a single set of images what the text had left open, and because the reader's own mental movie was assembled from their own associations rather than from a director's, there are bound to be discrepancies between the two. The discrepancy is not neutral. The screen version arrives with the authority of having been produced, widely seen and publicly agreed upon, and it tends to displace the private one rather than sit alongside it. What is lost, on this account, is not accuracy but the experience of building up an interpretation of the story from reading the book. Once a reader has seen the film, the imaginative labour of constructing the world is no longer available to them, and reading narrows to following a sequence of events whose appearance is already settled. This limits the imagination rather than exercising it. The sharpest form of the claim concerns the first encounter. Much of the pleasure of reading a book for the first time comes from not yet knowing what its world looks like or how it resolves. An adaptation spends that pleasure in advance, and for the reader who comes to the book afterwards, the fun in reading it for the first time simply disappears.
Premises
Counter-arguments
Some people may picture the story better, or even feel it would be more realistic in their minds, if they have seen a predetermined visualisation of the world through a movie. Taking advantage of the fact that movies may not faithfully recreate every element from the book, readers can now build a new mental "movie" that shows the original story, in its complete authenticity that the author wanted it to be.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P2] A movie does not necessarily ruin the imagination in reading a book.