Why Books Will Always Beat Movies

In a print-culture, we are apt to say of people who are not intelligent that we must “draw them pictures” so that they may understand. Intelligence implies that one can dwell comfortably without pictures, in a field of concepts and generalizations.
Neil Postman¹

Introduction

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It’s not lost on me that the people I mean to appeal to might never get to read this (as they’re probably out there watching something interesting), but I thought I’d write this anyway, on the off-chance that there’s a person reading this who, given the choice, would rather skip reading a book altogether if there was a movie made about it. It’s for this reason that I intend to write in such a way as to make the reasoning clear even to those who have never read any of The Lord of the Rings (LOTR) books or have never watched the movies. I’m reading the trilogy for the first time in my life, and as I write this, I’m currently within the first couple of chapters in the third book The Return of the King, and I have come to think that movies based on it shouldn’t have been made in the first place, even though they were great and even though the trilogy ended up as the most decorated in film history .

This is an intuition that I kept aside as one of those strange opinions to keep only to oneself, but which only grew as I read LOTR. Most fans of the LOTR movies know that, Christopher Tolkien, the author’s son, and the custodian of his father’s literary work felt the same . He said this of the movies:

The chasm between the beauty and seriousness of the work, and what it has become, has overwhelmed me. The commercialization has reduced the aesthetic and philosophical impact of the creation to nothing.

This is a statement I would not have understood – let alone agreed with – had I not read the books. However much I agreed with Christopher Tolkien, it is J.R.R. Tolkien, the author himself, who actually explained to me why LOTR should have been best left in its original form. His essay On Fairy Stories is the place where he comes closest to offer an opinion on this matter. In the essay, he says much about the genre itself – its origin, purpose and utility – and it all produced in me a greater appreciation for written words as a ‘medium’ superior to any other form.
First, a couple of quotes from the essay:

In human art Fantasy is best left to words, to true literature. ²

Drama is naturally hostile to Fantasy. Fantasy, even of the simplest kind, hardly ever succeed in Drama… Fantastic forms are not to be counterfeited. ³

To be dissolved, or to be degraded, is the likely fate of Fantasy when a dramatist tries to use it, even such a dramatist as Shakespeare. ⁴

What exactly is dissolved and degraded? Isn’t a picture, as they say, “worth a thousand words”? If that’s true, why then waste too much energy crafting and trying to understand words, when (moving) pictures could do a better job?

Priorities & Limitations

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In his book Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman said that it is “naive to suppose that something that has been expressed in one form can be expressed in another without significantly changing its meaning, texture or value.” Books and movies are very different mediums, each having its own priorities and toolset. An author might want to focus on the psychological or philosophical aspects of a situation by, for example, giving as much information about inner dialogues of characters as possible, but the movies might instead focus on compensating a weakness in this area by showcasing their powers of visual presentation.

To press the point a bit further, I’d say that, for instance (and I could come up with too many such instances), as far as the attempts made by the movies go, no scene will give me depth of insight into Frodo’s inner turmoil whenever he met the Nazgûl. And, setting aside what the movies changed, the profoundness of the scene in the book where we meet (the voice of) Saruman for the first time just can’t be reproduced any other way. If a movie cannot adequately intuit non-physical struggles and internal monologues when they’re key, won’t it deteriorate the quality of the original work? Such then (and many more) are the limitations that are inherent to the medium which, unfortunately, “degrades” the original work.

Furthermore, the task of translating a fantasy book into a movie comes with its own temptations. Fantasy as a literary genre creates objects and things that are of special interest to visual artists: supernatural and mythical creatures, heroic quests and enchanting places. The desire to depict complex, intricate and meticulously designed worlds such as found in the LOTR, is not bad in itself: the problem is that special attention will be paid to these elements – and, of course, as well as the “action” scenes – at the detriment of what we would consider “normal” or “mundane”. More on this in a bit.

Movies that interpret books that contain a lot of magic and “action” (such as LOTR) will eventually succumb to a big temptation; one that is hard to resist for those whose job it is to create spectacles to focus on the spectacular elements. The movies cannot focus on, say, the ‘walking’ described in much detail from the first book because there’s really nothing to see and therefore nothing ‘interesting’ to show. This might not be blamed on the movie producers per se because there’s a certain priority or urgency required by movies as a separate and distinct type of art which isn’t found in books. A medium with primary visual interests just cannot properly interpret a body of work with different priorities. The medium, the priorities, the limitations, the space, the tools, the canvas…too much is different, there can only be a ‘chasm’ between the end results.

Stolen Normalcy

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As J.R.R Tolkien says in his essay, one of the purposes of Fantasy is to inject a sort of fresh perspective unto the things we call “normal”. These are the things that no longer excite us in our day to day lives because, so the thinking goes, these things are simple, known, and there’s nothing new about them. And as we’ve just seen, movies are less interested in these and are sometimes incapable of reproducing them: therein lies one of its biggest weaknesses. Just what is new or exciting, you’d ask, about the sunshine, or the rain or trees?

Tolkien argues that this is precisely one of the things that Fantasy helps recover – “regain a clear view”. According to him, Fantasy shows that nothing should be boring under the sun, nothing should become trite, nothing and no one should be domesticated and considered ‘familiar’ as nothing and no one is fully known. If fantasy is well done and is successful, things that were in “your hoard” and had become as “caged birds” are seen from a different angle and thus let loose and “set free”.

The gems all turn into flowers or flames, and you will be warned that all you had (or knew) was dangerous or potent, not really effectively chained, free and wild; no more yours than they were you.⁵

He adds:

It was in fairy story that I first divined the true potency of the words, and the wonder of the things, such as stone, and wood and iron; tree and grass; house and fire; bread and wine.⁶

There’s a way daily routine numbs us and clouds our perception; things and people become static and dull, frozen in a corner of the mind where we consign all things we’ve already “mastered” or things we no longer find interesting. These are the things we then stop looking at. Fiction however – and not only fantasy – has the power to turn things around, and, as it were, break this spell. It recovers the world’s vitality, revealing its liveliness, potency, and hidden spark of things, their ceaseless capacity for change and renewal which restores of our sense of wonder.

This, as in the previous point, can’t be blamed on a particular person; it’s the fault of the medium: there’s nothing interesting to ‘show’ for normal things. Skipping the mundane altogether, if you think about it, is the least logical and beneficial thing to do: these are the things we can relate to the most, yet they’re taken away from us. What was meant to refresh our perspective is completely cut out. Whereas the movie could only “show” us the sun, unadorned, and without commentary, the book, through its prose, will instead gently nudge us to take another look, and “denote the queerness of things that have become trite”. Whereas the movies could only “show” us ’the company’ passing through some forest, the author, through every turn that he narrates, means to prove that trees are not all the same, and that we’re never really attentive to landscapes we come across.

This is, if you will, the kind of awakening we ultimately miss. With fantasy, one will realize they’ve been blind or asleep, not able to truly know the ‘magic’ of things to which we’re so accustomed. There’s a deeper reason for recovering the normal as we’ll see in the next point, but suffice to say at this juncture that when movies show us people swallowing a morsel of bread, the author intends to tells us more about this “waybread”; that there’s more to it than regularly meets the eye. And these just aren’t the places where movies (usually) linger.

Stunted Growth

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In my opinion, this is the biggest offense and the biggest failure: movies are where one’s imagination goes to die. An exaggeration perhaps, but I believe this is yet another (deeper) reason to recover the “normal.” In the most basic sense, the imagination can be defined as the mental capacity to create images. One would then wonder what’s the use of imagination if the brain doesn’t need to do this work, because this functionality is instead delegated to movies. Why struggle making mental images when they’re already served for us by the most skilled artists on the silver screen? One can answer these simply with another question: “How long will it take for muscles to atrophy for not being exercised?” Like an unused tool left to rust, our imagination will loose its sharpness and good condition when neglected.

We know, however, that the role of the imagination goes beyond merely creating mental images. When Georges Orwell in Animal Farm creates a fictional farm where pigs take charge, the reader’s imagination is not meant to only envision said farm; it must envision the horror that nations become under communism. If the imagination fails to grasp the latter, the reader would have missed the entire point of the novel. In other words, the fictional world must, through the imagination, “come out of the book and rest”⁷ into this primary or real world. This implies that perhaps goblins, elves, balrogs, Nazgûl, dragons all symbolize something real in our world if only the imagination was doing its work.

This is not to say that movies totally fail in this aspect. After all, doesn’t everyone keep wondering what the ‘one ring’ really symbolizes while watching LOTR movies? Additionally, these strange creatures mentioned are also depicted in the movies, and so there shouldn’t be any obstruction for the imagination to do its work. This is all true. However, the problem is that, as Neil Postman puts it eloquently:

Pictures have little difficulty in overwhelming words, and short-circuiting introspection.⁸

In other words, the screen is not where the best reflection happens – if it ever happens. I do not know any person who, after watching the scene of The Passage of the Marshes or the one of Shelob’s Lair , had a moment of deep reflection and contemplation. The average person would say that they found the scenes disturbing and horrifying: these are the kind of things that cause nightmares – especially at the sight of dead marshes. In many such instances, the sensory overload prevented any form of ‘introspection’. On the other hand, when the books tell us something about these creatures – even in their hideous and ghastly frames – there’s always a hidden invitation and there’s room reserved for the reader to think about their nature, to pay attention to a certain quality and quietly engage the imagination into what these creatures actually represent. This isn’t what movies do; the visual and musical stimulation that package the whole spectacle impedes the message rather than channeling it.

The LOTR, as any good story, aims at the highest emotional impact in specific cases, and, lest I’m misunderstood, let me note promptly that I’m not advancing the idea that movies should apply less emotional force but I’m rather saying that its medium, in many cases, lacks the capacity to do it as effectively as books. For instance, in the first book/movie, the fellowship journeys through Lothlórien, the fairest realm of Elves. I won’t deny that the movies painted the place so beautifully, however, their work does not even come close to the magic and enchantment found in the book. Personally, I had forgotten the name of the place, let alone what it looked like, long before starting to watch the third movie.
This is not the case for the books. Each sentence was measured and carefully calculated to evoke the highest emotional response and, at the same time, elicit serious reflection (rather than ‘short-circuiting introspection’) and it all served the purpose of creating a deep longing for the place. From the moment they approach Lothlórien, the reader notices a drastic change in Legolas, the elf of ’the company’, as he was clearly moved to sing songs about Nimrodel, the river at its western borders.

For over an hour as one reads about Lothlórien, beautiful prose and songs and poems all work together to intensify what C.S.Lewis would call a “piercing longing” in the reader – at least that’s how it felt for me. Even Gimli, the battle-hardened dwarf of the Company, whose people had long held little affection for elves, was visibly awestruck and was openly weeping as they left Lothlórien. Samwise Gamgee felt like he was “inside a song”⁹. Page after page, one keeps wondering what sort of place Lothlórien is, and why one feels a longing for an imaginary realm as such. These questions are not silly, and I have no doubt that Tolkien intended to stir such emotions!

Movies, alas, do not have the space nor the capacity to do that, as the imagination cannot be engaged as well without all those tools available in the literary arsenal. In this case, a picture is far less ‘worth than a thousand words’ because it is, in some sense, trying to bypass the imagination to get to the visual result, yet Tolkien intended us to go beyond what the eye can see or what the ear can hear. The picture keeps trying, as a helicopter, to fly us to a destination by dodging a sacred journey. And I believe this is one of those instances where the journey, or the pilgrimage, is the actual destination, and, trying to circumvent it certainly ends up leading to the wrong place. Even if it was the correct destination, trying to lift us there to avoid the work would be like always insisting to carry a child rather than letting them walk on their own. Wouldn’t that stunt our growth? Would that really serve us in the long run?

Conclusion

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Neil Postman said:

…I believe the epistemology created by television not only is inferior to a print-based epistemology but is dangerous and absurdist. ¹⁰

I agree. Even if Postman was talking about show business in general, this is certainly applicable to the subject under consideration. I believe that not only do the LOTR movies fail to relay the depth of insight found in the books, but they also actively work against us. If their entire purpose is to “show” something, very little is certainly left to the imagination. And instead of being sharpened or deepened, the imagination is suspended.

The length and the space that the books create is what we desperately need, and the resistance faced page after page as one reads is very important for us to truly know and truly understand what the book is about. The books create plenty of room for desires that one is not even aware of to be kindled and to grow; the same can’t be said for movies that are rushing to show you the next fireworks. As Legolas said, one better not “spoil the wonder with haste!”¹¹

I’d say that watching the movies instead of reading the book is like viewing the highlights of a sports event; even though not a bad thing in itself, no one would substitute one for the other and still pretend they know intimately what happened. In fact those who watch highlights still consider themselves as having missed the entire thing. In a culture that is seeing a concerning decline in reading, the better and useful thing to do would be for the movies to be marketed as made for those for whom, according to Postman’s opening quote, we must “draw pictures” so that they may understand.