“The Imaginative Space”: Books vs. Movies
One of my favorite bloggers, Ta-Nehisi Coates of The Atlantic, recently took up a discussion that’s been obsessing me lately–the relationship between books and the movies adapted from them:
“(T)he more comic book movies I see, the more I value the imaginative space created by books. . . . . More and more, I’m feeling like I’d like to keep my memories, and preserve my imagination.”
Some of the comments on Coates’s thread about Watchmen discuss how the technical sophistication of modern movies can basically fill in every detail, leaving nothing for the individual imagination to personalize.
I’m currently reading Dennis Lehane’s riveting “Kenzie and Gennaro” series of novels about the lives and cases of two young Boston private investigators. Since I’ve already seen the movie Gone Baby Gone, based on the series’ fourth novel, I’m really enjoying reading the first-person narration in the voice of actor Casey Affleck who did such a solid job in the role of Patrick Kenzie.
His beatiful partner, Angie Gennaro, was played in the film by the equally lovely Michelle Monaghan. Equally lovely, sure–but now that I’ve read the books, it’s driving me crazy how wrong she is for the role of Angie. There’s just no way the angelic Ms. Monaghan can possibly inhabit the emotionally scarred but tough as hell character that lives in the imaginative space in my head.
Sometimes the casting directors and my own imagination do pull off a coup of synchronicity, though. The whole time I was reading No Country for Old Men, before the movie was even made, I just automatically heard Tommy Lee Jones’s voice in my head as the weary Sheriff Ed Tom Bell.
It’s often way too distracting to play the role of casting director while reading a novel, but there are times when a character and actor just seem to fit together. I’m not going to fight anybody to the death over Viggo Mortenson playing the father in The Road (coming soon to a theater near you), but I’m really going to struggle to keep my mental image of Steve McQueen, circa 1968, in that role.
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Movies and books are separate beings. If I can suppress the images my mind created while reading a book (or if it’s been so long I really can’t remember everything that happened anyway), then I can enjoy the movie version. But the stories I love are off limits – I’ve never seen Cold Mountain or The Golden Compass, to name two. Partly because Nicole Kidman’s forehead is so creepily distracting (how did she end up in BOTH?), but mostly because I’ve internalized those characters and their lives too deeply. They live on in my imagination. Any other version is just a different story.