As a general rule, I don’t like films (or shows) that are based on books, and it’s not because of the pretentious reason that you think it is!
With American Psycho’s adaptation being the only exception coming to mind, visual mediums rarely capture the exact emotions and themes of the novel they’re pulling from, making them seem flat or hollow by comparison. Moreover, just like the adaption of Ellis’ insanely violent novel, parts are cut and censored to make it more appealing to general audiences — removing characters and scenes in order to make it shorter or more acceptable in terms of content.
But the loss of scenes and changes in content are fine, for the most part. Only pretentious people act like a film can’t be enjoyed just because they’re not as mentally involved as books, or that cinema can’t be as captivating and evocative as written words. So rest assured that I am well aware that a full-length book would require an extremely long film or series to replicate in full. Concessions can therefore be made, and weakest aspects can be cut out or merged into other scenes. These are sensible and understandable alterations, and often encourage people to check out the source material as a sort of extended or director’s cut of the film they just watched.
What I don’t like is the simple fact that films alter how you look at a book, often permanently making some impression upon you, even if retroactively (i.e. you read the book before you watched the film).
Going back to American Psycho and its 2000 adaptation — it ruined the book to some extent. I saw clips of the film before I read the book, and that basically led to me implanting Christian Bale’s rendition of Patrick Bateman (as well as the actors of other characters) into the novel. Sure, this helped with imagining scenes and voices, but it also took away from being able to use Ellis’ descriptions to imagine the characters uniquely. It was also annoying to learn that multiple characters had their names changed in the film, such as Paul Owen becoming Paul Allen, even if it was for legal reasons.
Appearance is an issue, but not for political and social reasons. Character casting has become quite the hot topic in the last while, with race and gender swaps stirring up some controversy — often remarked as the ‘Netflix’ and ‘Disney’ effects, and seen more as a means of capitalising on diversity for profit. The same is true for tampering with the sexuality and relationships of characters.
Personally speaking, I don’t care all that much when there are superficial changes. However, I will stand by the fact that the gender/race/background of a character does matter to a lot of stories and impacts how we look at those characters. Disney fairytales? I think it’s pretty harmless to change aspects in those, for the most part. Serious novels that rely on contextual character building? Yeah, tampering with the established facets of a character is a bad idea.
If you read a book, and imagine a character however you imagine them, then see a casting that wildly deviates from the image you had in your head, that spoils it. Likewise, for re-writing them to be different, such as fiddling around with a character’s sexual orientation and bringing it to the forefront when it was never relevant to the original work in the first place. It’s not that I am a racist or a homophobe. I simply look at it and think ‘that character wasn’t that race in the novel’ or ‘that character wasn’t gay in the novel,’ and you have to wonder what the justification for the change. Pandering? Profit? Politics?
For me, it’s not even a matter of race/gender/sexual orientation, but a matter of nailing that character as they were in the original work. A character that you came to adore because of how they were in the novel is now suddenly different, and now you can’t find that same enjoyment or relation to them that you once had.
Even if the fundamentals traits of the actor match the character (race and gender), a lot of exceptions are still made. These come across as lazy or picking actors because of their fame, rather than how much they can replicate the character they are supposed to portray.
Some examples of these small, but still jarring issues, are: a change in hair colour and style, a character possessing an accent that is never addressed in the book, the actor’s build and height don’t align with the book, wearing or lacking glasses when compared to the source material, or there being a clear attempt to make a character more attractive and cooler than they are ever portrayed as within the novel.
I don’t hate creative changes, but I do dislike it when books and films vary so harshly from the source material. When you create an image of someone, it’s hard to enjoy or relate to that character when they now look and act differently from how you and the book envisioned them. Let’s look at an example using Ellis’ novel again…
American Psycho (the novel) indicates how out of it Bateman is, how depressed and empty he truly feels inside, and how he has been trapped in this psychopathic and disconnected state for almost all his life. It indicates how he finds his only solace in vanity and self-obsession, rather than through his relationships with others.
In the film, he’s a violent psychopath that is just very self-absorbed, but is portrayed in such a way that losers online have attached the ‘literally me’ mind set to Bale’s portrayal. The Bateman in the novel, whilst monstrous and clearly insane, is at least humanised in some ways. The film version of Bateman barely relates, showing little introspection and often lacking the necessary seriousness to make him a truly horrifying character — Bale’s rendition is just the silly, buff, and mostly one-note yuppie psychopath that only shows occasional flashes of more depressive, human elements. It’s a flat portrayal when compared to the book, even if the performance itself is entertaining.
If you’ve ever met up with an old friend after many years, you’ll get that same sentiment as I’m trying to pin down here. The basis of that person is the same, but their appearance, how they carry themselves, and the context of their life has all changed so much that you barely correlate them with your memories. You observe them differently and feel differently about them, even though you shouldn’t feel too differently about them. Changing around a character and making them hard to recognise, whether through appearance or personality, creates a similar chasm that leads us to view them differently from how they were in the original work.
Ultimately, films are films, and books are books. I won’t be going on a crusade to end adaptations, and I don’t think they are the root of all evil. No Country for Old Men was a really tense and enjoyable film, and I would’ve cited that had I read the book yet. But, even I’m unfamiliar with the exact contents of its source material, the film was still effective and captivating. As for screenplays, those do work for film. Seems a little obvious since they were designed for performances, but the directing and overall design of it has to capture the intent of the original work. I particularly enjoyed the 2015 rendition of An Inspector Calls, I felt it captured exactly what the play was after.
The important thing to keep in mind is this: most authors are more than thrilled to have their work turned into a cinematic rendition, and films generally outperform books in the majority of scenarios. Plenty of readers, ones less picky and with less lofty expectations than myself, thoroughly enjoy seeing how directors and actors recreate a novel.
I’ll just do myself a favour and stick to mostly steering clear of live-action adaptations, unless I have no intention to ever read the book in the first place.
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