Media Bias

I grow tired of the assessment that "the book was better than the film." My fatigue comes in part from the fact that I usually agree with the sentiment; there is little surprise to me that a 90-minute visual adaptation of a five-hundred-page novel will be thinner and more shallow. But I also tire of the underlying assumption that works written may be usefully compared to works filmed.

Words on the page require a different kind of translation or imagination than images and voice in the theater. When our brains decode the complex array of characters on the page, and when our minds assign power and meaning to the decrypted results, we are in a different world than that of sight and sound.

A text is, by nature, more flexible and demands a certain work from the reader. When we have done this work, the results will vary by the individual and will likely be infused with a broader flavor and significance mined from the reader's experience. This happens, too, with film, but in my experience less so. When we read, we must climb full-body into another world.

I experienced this diversity of media pointedly when I first watched the film The Hunger Games, then read the book. The film (my full review is here) kept me on the edge of my seat. It depicted with expert precision a world of stark contrasts, grave injustice, and desperate tension. I watched Katniss Everdeen navigate the horrendous choices implicit in the challenge of teenage mortal combat.

This last bit is key: I watched Katniss Everdeen.

Collins' trilogy about Panem is narrated in the first person. The reader receives only Katniss' perspective. The fullness of her adolescence is thereby revealed; the horror of her situation is also thereby clearer than the film can make it. To read The Hunger Games is to do more than watch our heroine succeed and fail. To read it is to be Katniss Everdeen, to feel genuinely caught in a world which squeezes bitter from sweet.

When I watched the film, I felt the tension of being hunted. I felt the fear of being caught. I felt the shock of watching adolescents slain. But I did not feel hunger.

To read The Hunger Games is to feel hunger. The words printed on the page can conjure what goes on inside the soul when the stomach gnaws at itself. They can wither the spirit with the fatigue of which cinematography only hears rumors. They can draw the whole person into a world.

It is different than watching a film.

More could be said about the differences between flashbacks on the screen and single-sentence memories brought up in a written scene. Or about metaphors which cannot be literalized for the camera ("He looked like a dog that had been whipped").

I will not tell you that the books are better than the film (and, I'm confident soon in this case, films). To compare them is to compare apples and oranges—or perhaps better, apples and apple pie: something essentially the same in each, but ultimately a different experience. If we like apples, we eat apples. If we enjoy apple pie, we will eat apple pie. And if we like both—well, then we may have the best of both worlds.

~ emrys