"The Book Was Better"

While discussing the Titanic in English I could not help myself from noticing that almost everyone compared Thomas Hardy's(who's name reminds me of the actor, Tom Hardy every time I see it) poem "The Convergence of the Twain" with James  Cameron's film Titanic. While we did juxtapose the  two tones regarding the event; awesome (in the litter, "evoking awe" sense) and tragic, respectively, we never touched on our perceptions of the film at all. This, of course, did not need to happen, Hardy's poem certainly had enough literary merit to discuss for the entirety of class. In fact, I am glad we never discussed it, now I can hoard this knowledge onto my blog. Anyway, I felt that we all made subconscious connections to the poem and the movie, and eventually everyone made a decision whether the film or the book did a better job of expressing the events pertaining to the Titanic. Now, Cameron did not base his film off Hardy's poem, but it still allows me to delve into my topic of the "the book was better" phenomenon. I am a firm believer that anything can get adapted into a spectacular film, but to do that one would need to rip its guts apart until it hardly resembled it's original form, to put it simply: I could make a paper airplane out of the Mona Lisa, but why should I? Given this belief, I usually advocate looking to the source material for any kind of artistic work, so I am in great support of this thought process, or at least an equal examination of both of the works side by side.

One film/book I would like to focus on specifically is Mary Harron/ Brett Easton Ellis's "American Psycho". I want to focus on this film, not as an example of how the original worked better and so on, but how one should properly adapt a novel into cinematography without butchering the source material or seeming to confusing, or bloated (Zoolander, a film based on an Ellis book Glamorama, and Watchmen serve as good examples for these respective result). American Psycho does not fall into the horror genre, but the satire genre. While horrifying, the book mainly focuses on the rampant and vapid consumerism of the protagonist as well as his, quite literally, cut-throat business strategies. The work satirizes the capitalism and consumerism of the 1980s and both film and book capture it perfectly, but in different ways. For example, the famous business card scene barely happens in Ellis's book, but Harron does not show the protaganist, Patrick Bateman's, obsession with designer clothes (going to the point of narrating every single brand someone that he meets wears. One of the major complaints I also hear when adapting a novel is when parts get left behind on the cutting room floor. However, some cuts need to happen; nobody will print a film that involves the highly graphic murders Bateman commits (one can see this with other films too, A Clockwork Orange had to change the ages of almost all of the characters because two adults having sex appeals more than a 15 year old raping two girls 5 years his minor) and some things just tend to drag or does not make sense. For example, for the last hundred pages or so of the novel, Bateman believes he is being followed constantly...by a park bench(which could lead me into a discussion about unreliable narration, but I will abstain), and while I love these delusions he has, the human psyche is not easy to transition into film without seeming completely out of place. So, final word: just because the film left something out does not mean they forgot or did it on purpose, they needed to do it, and some books work better as books and adapting them just does not seem practical.

Now that I am done with this, will you please excuse me? I have to return some videotapes.