The film of the book

One of the things I most often hear over the counter at work is that “the book is always better than the film.” Well, the customer is not always right. I beg to differ. While in the public consciousness books and films enjoy a long history of antagonism, their actual relationship is one of mutual support.

Angela Meyer, in her awesome booky blog last month, pointed out that our “generation learns everything backwards –
from reference or homage to the original”. This is true. While I’m unlikely to pick up a book by Arthur Conan Doyle, the image of Sherlock Holmes has become a familiar one via Disney’s Basil the Great Mouse Detective. And this week I went to see the film, partly because (despite never reading the books) I know that Sherlock Holmes is an awesome character. The rest of my reasoning may or may not have had something to do with Jude Law’s aesthetic appeal.

If you read the arts section of your local newspaper, you may have noticed comments recently about Hollywood’s increasing reliance on books for plots. The concept of a ‘bankable star’ is a familiar one (people will go and see a film if George Clooney is in it), but the ‘bankable character’ (that book hero everyone loves and will go to see) is also becoming a factor.

Jane Austen alone has been 'banked on' for a rash of series and movies in recent years: Pride and Prejudice, Lost in Austen, Miss Austen Regrets, The Jane Austen Book Club, Becoming Jane. Don’t even get me started on the child/teen fantasy/paranormal market for films-based-on-books. A quick glance at my inbox says that films currently showing locally which are based on books (or the writers of them) include: Bright Star, Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Lovely Bones, Sherlock Holmes, New Moon, and Where the Wild Things Are.

But the benefit of the film-book relationship goes two ways. Jodi Picoult’s bestselling My Sister’s Keeper enjoyed a resurgence in sales with the release of the film (which one might imagine was inspired by the book despite an incredibly different storyline), the Twilight saga went from a popular series to an international phenomenon with the release of the first film, Mastering the Art of French Cooking was brought back into print after it featured in Julie & Julia, and Keats’s poems are back in bookshops with the release of Bright Star.

So even if films do tend to remove some of the ‘good bits’ from our favourite books, they bring wonderful stories to wider audiences. I read The Lord of the Rings, About a Boy and The Princess Bride because I’d seen the films. (All of these films, by the way, are excellent and not at all 'worse than' their corresponding books.) And I’m familiar with other stories I’ve never read- North and South, Treasure Island, The Jungle Book, A Christmas Carol, Spiderman (to name a few)- because I’ve seen films or series based on them.

So who am I to complain that Paramount butchered the ending of Stardust? I owe a lot of my literary experience to films.