The trick to making a good film adaptation is to ignore all other considerations and make a good movie by any means necessary, even arson, and then sit back and watch the people who love your good movie squint really hard at the good movie that you’ve made and convince themselves that they can see a flawlessly-rendered solution to the question what is the proper way to translate from word to image with no information loss of any kind inherent in the goodness of your very good movie and that you the filmmaker were both clearly aware of and following this æther-kept secret throughout the entire hallowed filming process even though you were as stated above just doing whatever the fuck popped into your head and were therefore concerned only with the countless other and more practical concerns that present themselves during the making of a movie like my actors, why are all of my actors so dumb. Life is a con, and the accidental idols onto which we’ve desperately projected our desire for a logical and safely-yoked universe are just as confused as we are, except maybe taller, and with better hair. For we are naught but dust, cold space dust forever exiled from the origins of time and dreaming beyond ourselves a comforting lie called sentience, this winnowing window during which we spend most of our time thinking about food, and nutting. I am fine with all of this, for I am unable to conceive of an alternative, and I like both of those things anyway.
What’s the Best Way to Adapt a Book to the Screen?
I decided to preface this post with the disclaimer that none of this matters because 1) I should probably preface all of my posts with that disclaimer and 2) it frees me up from any narcissistic delusion that I can be “right” about any of this, that a deep enough dip into stodgy self-seriousness will make my completely arbitrary opinions sound scientific. They’re not. They’re brain worms! But it’s fun to parse these things, because thinking is like exercising, but with pictures.
Sure is a messy topic, though! The examples we can find of quality film adaptations are manifest, and happy to be here, but are also defined by their refusal to align conveniently, or even comfortably, into anything resembling a solid and usable map of the mostly impressionistic nega-zone that lies between words and images. Inherent Vice and American Psycho are both good film adaptations of books, but the former pays loving, dedicated tribute to its source material while the latter basically mocks the book it’s based off of. A Clockwork Orange changes the ending of its source material, and changes it fucking hard, and by doing so turns the entire thing from an arc to a commentary. The Mist may seem at a glance to follow this approach, because its ending differs from the book as well, but the changes made don’t undermine the tone or the ideas present in the original medium – quite the fucking contrary, actually, as the alterations made to the text if anything serve to make a louder, even Stephen King-ier version of the ending. So what’s a person to do?
Well, for starters, let’s look at some of the rules (ha!) that have at one point or another been written down for what makes a good film adaptation of a book, probably in a list that has the word OFFICIAL hovering paternally somewhere in its upper third, because everybody knows you make something official by writing in capital letters, and then after acknowledging these supposed rules we’ll immediately point to a movie that proves, no, that’s wrong, and probably also stupid.
Off to the dumb races!
“You have to replace the narrative prerogatives of words, which are a cold medium, with the narrative prerogatives of film, which is a hot medium.”
Inherent Vice, in all of its literary glory, says eat me!
“You simply have to do justice to the ideas of the source material.”
Nope! Paul Verhoeven made Starship Troopers out of spite because he hated the fucking book so much! American Psycho cheekily undermines – correctly, and justly, with the nodding and infallible assent of God himself – the dumb, edge-lordy book that it is based off of!
“You have to believe what the book believes, regardless of what story you tell, or how you tell it. Just see through the original author’s eyes, and embrace their faith.”
Ahaha, you rake, tell me another one! Stanley Kubrick adapted a ghost story to the screen, and he didn’t even believe in ghosts! He believed in alcoholism!
“You have to surprise the audience, because they’ve already read the book.”
Watchmen is basically a shot-for-shot remake of the comic that it’s based off of!
“This is all business and entertainment, so be practical: a film adaptation should try to reach the largest possible audience, ideally by being less challenging than the book.”
The Mist, motherfuckers. And Suspiria is a remake but it’s such a glorious middle finger to audience expectations that I’m calling it an adaptation anyway. Motherfuckers.
“Just don’t change the genre, I guess.”
V for Vendetta is an action movie that basically just licensed some character names from Alan Moore.
As you can see, everybody is wrong about everything, always. I now want to run through different types of adaptations, because I am earnestly curious about how many I can think of, and also because I love naming things. But first, another disclaimer, because this post is apparently more dangerous than driving an American-made car:
The key to this whole exercise isn’t to conclude what the best way to adapt a book to the screen is, because that’s like asking what the best month of the year to get a handjob is, but rather to draw a distinction between a good movie and a good adaptation. A good movie is easy to define. It’s a movie that isn’t bad. But what about a good adaptation? That’s a little trickier. The simplest definition of a good adaptation is one that presents its source material visually instead of through words. When viewed in this context an adaptation can better be called a translation. Like going from Japanese to French or Old English to Modern English, you’re attempting to keep intact as much direct, literal meaning as possible as you move from one language to another. You want to have the story, tone, themes, characterization, dialogue, even the specific descriptions be as close as possible on one end of the equation as the other, just with different squiggly lines on the page. It’s like a game of telephone; you want the person at each terminal point on the line to come away with the same sentence, same meaning, every time.
This is a fine intellectual undertaking, and certainly doesn’t result in bad movies – it has, in fact, resulted in many good ones! – but in its intense studiousness is kind of like Norman Bates wearing his mother’s clothes – technically impressive, but with a getup that hard going on someone is absolutely going to fucking die. This comparison is dope twice over, because Psycho is pretty much the exact type of adaptation we’re describing right now. So we’ll call this type of adaptation Mother, and have it be the stealth-start to our list. Next!
The Director’s Throbbing Ego. A personal favorite, and the house special. Assume the audience would rather see a film from the mind of you, the director, rather than the author, whose work you adapt mostly as a matrix onto which you can graft your own style. Examples of this include every Stanley Kubrick movie ever made, including his final one, where he essentially did this to himself. The Shining and A Clockwork Orange and Barry Lyndon were rejiggered to be, well, Stanley Kubrick movies, like he enjoyed their stories and appreciated their structure well enough but like a madman adjusting the contrast and blackness levels on his television was obsessed with making the colors more Kubrick. This is, of course, pure ego, because you’re looking at someone else’s work and believing there’s something better lurking unrealized in the words, either not knowing or not caring that the something so relentlessly teasing its nubile and beguiling presence from the darkness beyond expression is you, and your opinions, facedown and nude on a bearskin rug. You fucking weirdo. This entire approach brings to mind an anecdote from David Sedaris: one time he was listening to an audiobook of South African folk tales, and upon delving into the no-doubt rich emotions and complexly-accessible moralizing thought to himself, “I can do better than this.”
So the source material isn’t nothing in the Director’s Throbbing Ego approach – if nothing else it gives the filmmaker a unique structure onto which they can go about implanting their own ideas, which by definition makes the final product at least shaped differently than it would otherwise be if it had sprung, wholesale, from the parochial womb of their own mind – but, let’s face it, wanky wank wank all the same.
(Stanley Kubrick movies are awesome because watching all or most of them consecutively is probably the closest a sane person will ever come to seeing the panoply of life through the eyes of a serial killer who also has a tremendous understanding of lighting and narrative pacing.)
The Realist. Another approach would be to set the standard that some things simply aren’t visual, or that some ideas are too distasteful for general audiences, so you should only focus only on bringing to the screen those things that flow smoothly and don’t offend. Ever read the Hans Christian Andersen story on which Disney’s The Little Mermaid is based? It’s fucking depressing, and weird as shit! The mermaid in that story loses out on everything, and becomes like a purgatory ghost or something, forced to watch her man bone someone else for eternity? I don’t remember exactly what happens because every time I try to recall the original tale Under the Sea starts blasting in my brain to save me from the discomfort of brimstone sanctimony being hurled at my face from the vengeful recesses of the nineteenth century.
And as regards the visual part: how about all of those Ulysses and Gravity’s Rainbow adaptations that are just sitting right there atop the list of highest-grossing movies of all time? Oh, right, they’re not there, or anywhere, because a faithful adaptation to Ulysses would be a romantically-bland Irishman sitting in a room and thinking about kidney pie and his wife’s legs for twenty straight hours while his erection slowly comes and goes, the only task left to the viewer being to decide if twelve o’clock hard coincides with the lady or the pie.
The Facelift, or: Art is Challenging, You Putz. In this inspired but also unrelentingly artistic approach you maintain the themes, tone, ideas, impressions, lollygags, joie de vivre, bon vivant, cul-de-sac, and fromage of the original story but replace everything else that is literal. The main point you’re trying to convey through this flensing off of all things surface is that the only part of a story that matters is its je ne sais quoi, and that the details are just, well, details. Take I’m Not There or Michael Winterbottom’s version of Tristram Shandy – they both self-consciously avoid retelling the actual, literal story upon which they are based (I’m Not There isn’t based on one book in particular, but rather the life of Bob Dylan, but given his life’s length and similarity to the kind of book you’d get assigned in high-school and SparkNotes the hell out of, the judges are scoring it as a book) in order to better focus on the ideas behind those books. This approach is designed to appeal mostly to people so pretentious they plan to one day publish their diary as a novel, and who spell theater theatre even though they were born in Idaho. Needless to say, I adore it.
(All jokes aside, this approach is pretty dope. Showing how ideas are only tangentially related to their obvious containers and can instead inhabit any number of physical forms while still conveying the same thoughts and feelings across time and space is riveting. My novel-diary is going to be called The Clown Who Wept, and will not be available in paperback.)
The Book, but Harder. Call it the SportsCenter highlight reel while you’re at it. The formula is simple: take what people like about the book, cut out what you deem superfluous or simply distastefully unvisual, and then crank up the volume on what you have left. Frank Darabont’s The Mist is a great example of this. The Mist Stephen King-ses its material even harder than Stephen King did, which by definition means that someone gets eaten by a squid from another dimension.
(A weird wrinkle to this one is that, technically, you’re chopping up the book, same as the Facelift approach, but instead of replacing the literal events with wildly different ones to prove some artistic point about the ubiquity of life you’re simply condensing and distilling the story into more of what it literally already was – like if someone scheduled a facelift and told the surgeon that they wanted to look more like themselves, which is both terrifying and probably a subplot in a David Lynch movie.)
Licensed Genre Picture, or: There’s a Reason Alan Moore Hates Us. Let’s face it: ideas are boring. Know what’s not boring? Titties! And throwing knives! And dollar-store philosophies that only seem deep because you’re fourteen and the Guy Fawkes mask is the coolest thing you’ve ever seen in your entire life, and why would I bother actually reading about the real Guy Fawkes, I’m sure he was also a poetry-quoting vigilante who knew kung-fu! I’m being entertained and learning!
Basically, you just make a genre movie but license the use of character names from some compelling work of fiction so that when your actors make the rounds on the talk-show circuit they can pontificate (waaaaaanky wank wank) about politics and philosophy and all the challenging notions contained in this upcoming movie that for a work of art destined to overthrow the current political regime seems to stick suspiciously close to the beats of a standard action film, just with the word ideology thrown in from time to time in the same way you’d yell “sex!” to get someone’s attention.
Anyway, the actors get to feel smart, the audience gets to feel smart, the studio makes bank while also pretending they’re making art, and Alan Moore gets a check in the mail. Everybody wins.
The Ironic Adaptation, or: We Don’t Deserve Paul Verhoeven. Another favorite, because I drink irony like a Thomas Pynchon character chugging dandelion wine. Starship Troopers and American Psycho were made by people who (correctly) thought that the book they were tasked with bringing to the screen kind of sucked. They maybe liked some of the ideas, but (correctly) resented the way in which those ideas were expounded upon, which were, in order: fascism and fascism, but lazier. So these two heroes of cinema who were tasked with directing these movies (Paul Verhoeven and Mary Harron, respectively) bravely decided that the best course of action was to swindle a studio into footing the bill for what is essentially a million-dollar shit being taken on the book they were supposed to lovingly shepherd into the Hollywood canon. You could call this a subset of the Director’s Ego approach, but I think of the ego approach as being motivated by the director simply wanting to see themselves in the final product. In the ironic approach the director is greatly subverting the source material, yes, but doing so in service of pointing out how much the source material fucking blows, rather than indulging the whims of their own imagination, or their own image. Call it a social responsibility to remind people that Starship Troopers is a shitty fascist handbook (which it is) or that American Psycho was written by a bland sociopath with nothing interesting to say (also true). I like this one a lot because it involves being a huge dick, and somehow getting a major studio to finance said huge dickishness, and then just kind of waving that dick around, unconcerned about the proximity or well-being of children. Give Verhoeven and Harron Nobel Peace Prizes, because they are the best of us.
The Inherent Vice. Surprise, motherfuckers, this was a secret Inherent Vice review the entire time! Paul Thomas Anderson’s take on Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice gets its own entry because it is wonderful and underappreciated and it adapts a book to the screen in my favorite (and therefore, mathematically, best) way possible: it maintains an overtly literary structure (no real ticking clock, narrative detours galore, internalizing everything, more characters than is practical or kind to the audience’s memory) while threading visually, silent, and concurrently into that structure an entirely parallel tonal story that does all the shit movies are supposed to do, just quieter. It’s brilliant! There are sequences in Inherent Vice where the literary components are playing out in all of their glorious, meandering, Thomas Pynchon-y glory, while Paul Thomas Anderson’s Siamese twin of a narrative keeps rolling portentously along, sometimes if it must doing so entirely under the auspices of ambient-fucking-noise! This is magnificent! And people hate this movie, because they think it is boring! What a bunch of assholes! It’s two stories in one, which are actually the same story! It’s like light refracted through Icelandic feldspar and showing you two versions of a life, one as it actually is and the other how it could be! That was an Against the Day reference! I have gone completely insane!
The End
I’m supposed to end this post by concluding somberly, but with an ameliorating wisp of whimsy, that there is no “best” way to adapt a book to the screen, because the experiences and prerogatives and source material and zeitgeist and audience expectations are a living ambrosia of artistic potential and alchemical wonder whose precise formula will never be known, can never be known, and even if they could be known, would you want to know? But fuck that noise. Inherent Vice wins. It is the best, and has defeated all of the others. Watch Phantom Thread, too. Daniel Day-Lewis’ character is named Woodcock, which is like being named Bonerwang.