Welcome back, class.

I’ve noticed that for the first three entries for this blog–Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the Harry Potter series, and The Lord of the Rings (pending…I’ll finish reading it eventually, I promise)–each novel in question has a major film franchise.  In fact, the fame for most (if not all) of the books on the list comes from the film adaptations.  I’m not saying that the movies are responsible for their success, but I am saying that their mainstream popularity can be easily linked to their movie versions.

Take, for example, the Harry Potter series.  I grew up with both the books and the movies, so like most fans my age, I have strong opinions about each novel and each film.  Based on entertainment value alone, I would say I enjoyed the movies more when I was younger, and now I enjoy the books more.  The movies did a good job bringing the magic of the series to life, and the books tend to be subtler and less stylistic in their approach.

Other opinions on the series, even in this class, will differ vastly from mine–and that’s the case with every adaptation.  Some prefer the books more, and some prefer the movies.

But every so often, these two media are dragged into the arena by screaming fans and are forced to battle senselessly. The books, as the source material, win much more often than not, and the movies are beaten to a pulp, built back up by hardcore fans, and sent back into the arena for more needless violence.  And what’s worse–our culture encourages this barbarism!

Let me lay this out plainly for you, students, so that you know exactly what’s happening here: books and movies are different.  They are as different as paintings and sculptures.  They are as different as science and history.  They are as different as Earth and Mars.  They shouldn’t be so severely ranked in comparison with each other, because it belittles the work put in by the creators of each product (and if your goal is to belittle those artists, we have a different issue to discuss).

You, as a human being with rights to your feelings, can most certainly enjoy the book more than the movie, and vice versa.  Feelings are much more permitted in society today than they were hundreds of years ago, you’ll be surprised to know.  But when you start shouting about the book being better than the movie, you better know that I FEEL enraged at your unceremoniously preposterous ranking system.  There’s no need for that kind of hierarchy.

So when I read a book and watch its movie version, I know (and, now, you know as well) that it is eye-opening to compare the two and senseless to rank the two.  The book, being the countless hours of work by both a hungering author and those responsible for editing and publishing a collection scattered thoughts into a cohesive story, cannot be better or worse than the movie, being the large-scale production of one or more directors that carefully guide actors, script writers, set designers, composers, special effects producers, and numerous other artists through a narrative set to film; it is impossible in the universe we live in.  Update your book reports and movie reviews accordingly.

Instead of ranking books vs. movies, it might be a better use of your time to analyze and discuss the ways a book and a movie tell the same story, or how one might fail to tell such a story in comparison with the other.  For instance, instead of saying “Prisoner of Azkaban was much better as a book than as a movie” or, even worse, “the movie version was STUPID,” you could say “The third movie did a good job of capturing the mood of the book and it was a good change from the first two, but it was much harder to follow the story for viewers who hadn’t read the books; I prefer the book because it tells a better story.”  See what I did there?

On a lighter note, I am enjoying reading The Lord of the Rings and I like comparing it to the movie versions.  I grew up watching the movies, so reading the original story now is akin to watching the extended editions of the movies, years after the original release.  I’m learning more about characters and more about Middle-Earth, which is going to give me a deeper understanding of the movies and of the source material.  I’ll get into all of this next week, though.

Thanks for listening to my rant.  I hope you learned something.

Prof. Jeffrey