“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.
reading The Reader
Reggie Jet made some really interesting comments here about the weird interactions between novels and the movies adapted from them. It’s made me re-think my usual knee-jerk insistence on trying to finish a book that’s been made into a movie I’m wanting to see.
When is it best to try to read a book first before seeing the movie? If you’ve seen the movie first, how likely is it that reading the book will enrich the whole experience? What if a truly crappy film adaptation ruins your memories of a great book?
Before I’d considered Reggie’s conundrum, I powered my way through Revolutionary Road and the Benjamin Button short story just assuming it would ultimately improve the movie-going experiences. I also picked up The Reader on a mad quest to finish off all the Oscar-nominated novels (and, let’s be honest, to bring into the theater some unspoken sense of superiority at having hacked my way through the underbrush of text). Now I’m finally conscious of the real hazards involved here.
For one thing, even though I’ve mostly avoided reading reviews of the movie, I already knew Kate Winslet and Ralph Fiennes played the two main roles. It was immensely distracting, then, to read the book and try to imagine what sort of old-age or youthful makeup would have to be applied in each scene to make these two actors look appropriate, or in which scenes younger or older actors might be playing their roles. I know Ralph Fiennes is a hell of an actor, but I’m also pretty sure it would take some Benjamin Button-style special effects to put his head on the body of a 15-year-old German lad.
Another obstacle is the almost clinically Germanic tone of the novel’s translation, which I can only assume is true to its original language. By some horrible coincidence I had recently been in a car with a friend who had been listening to an Eckhart Tolle book-on-CD, so I had the German guru’s Sigmund Freud-sounding tones in my head as the voice of The Reader’s narrator–as if visualizing a CGI-ed, pubescent Ralph Fiennes wasn’t distracting enough.
It’s a perplexing novel in any case, full of philosophical and moral paradoxes and powerfully evoking the ruined civilization of post-World War II Germany. Beyond the immediate concerns of the plot, the question asked by a war crimes defendant to her judge in the courtroom, “What would you have done?” resonates powerfully even after the book is finished.
One reviewer noted a later-20th century phrase commonly heard in Germany, “the lucky late-born,” referring to those too young to be held accountable for their behavior during the Nazi regime. The Reader illustrates the paralyzing difficulty of coming to terms with not only personal guilt and shame but the culpability of a whole society, and I’m extremely curious if the movie is able to express those themes as memorably as the novel does.
