On Adaptation

My top three favourite films, Jaws, Psycho and The Silence of the Lambs, are all based on novels. Given I have seen these movies hundreds of times and can quote them back-to-back, you’d be forgiven for assuming that I have a similar relationship to the books they came from, but that’s not quite the case. Of the three respective source novels the only one I really like is The Silence of the Lambs, and even then despite my avowed Thomas Harris fandom I tend to prefer the book’s predecessor, Red Dragon.
 
Jaws (by Peter Benchley) and Psycho (Robert Bloch) offer slightly uncomfortable propositions in book form because, even though they provided the template for the films I love, to me they lack the heart and soul and tone of their adaptations. Is that sacrilege? I don’t think so. There’s a reason the movies have eclipsed the books, a reason many, many film fans aren’t even aware the source material exists.  
 
So why don’t I like the novels? The reasons vary. In the case of Psycho it’s easy to boil down to one choice. In most respects the book and film are beat for beat the same story bar one main shift – Norman Bates, famous as the appealingly vulnerable and awkward boy-next-door played so perfectly by Anthony Perkins, in the book is an overweight and unsettling forty something voyeur who so clearly is bad news. The film’s twist works because we like and feel for Norman. In the book, he’s so slimy that the final reveal is borderline obvious.  
 
Jaws is also a matter of character, but the changes are more evenly spread. Spielberg famously said that upon reading the novel he disliked the characters so much that he wanted the shark to win, necessitating a major rethink. Reading the book it’s not hard to see his logic. Where the film sees decent but flawed characters come together to deal with the matter of a bloodthirsty shark, in the book the shark often takes a back seat to self-pity and middle aged malaise and a fairly skin-crawling affair between Chief Brody’s wife Ellen and Matt Hooper – on the page more preppy playboy than nebbishy nerd. In the film, the shark’s explosive death is a moment of punch-the-air catharsis. In the book it just kind of dies of exhaustion mid showdown. Having reached the end of the novel you can sort of relate.
 
I’m being somewhat glib here. The films I love would not exist without the books; in particular the famous shock ingenuity of Psycho is all there on the page. I doubt I’d be so hard on either book if I didn’t know the films so well. But I would argue that the filmmakers refined what was on the page to deliver versions of the authors’ stories that have managed to endure for decades.
 
The question of changes to source material is always contentious. George R.R. Martin famously despises alterations and on more than one occasion has accused screenwriters of thinking they know better than him. Anyone who sat through the second season of House of the Dragon or the last four seasons of Game of Thrones will likely see his point. But this does invite a question without an answer – if changing an author’s work is inherently an act of arrogance, then why is it okay sometimes and not okay other times? More to the point, why does it work sometimes and not in others?
 
The obvious answer would be that sometimes a book, as I would argue is the case with Jaws and Psycho, is more of a flawed blueprint for what would become a great film with some massaging. But you could hardly blame Peter Benchley or Robert Bloch for taking umbrage with that interpretation. I often wonder how I might feel if The Hunted film ends up making brazen changes to my signature novel only for the world at large to agree that they had been for the best, implicitly designating my original version of the story the lesser one despite my having created it. From the perspective of an author, it might almost be better if a heavily altered adaptation is a flop, or at least more vindicating. 
 
I often think about the miserable 2020 Disney adaptation of Artemis Fowl, a book series I liked a lot as a kid. The entire hook of Artemis Fowl was that he was a twelve year old criminal genius with very little in the way of a moral compass. The first book has him kidnap a fairy for ransom, leading to a siege of his family estate. It was one of those early 2000s kids’ books that felt spiky and irreverent and like it wasn’t talking down to its readers. Anyone familiar with the series would tell you that was the appeal.
 
Disney disagreed. In their interpretation Artemis is just a nice kid trying to save his missing Dad. Within minutes of him kidnapping his fairy target (here done for much more noble reasons than the financial incentive of the book), he asks his captive ‘are we friends?’ to which she replies ‘forever friends!’ and then he lets her go and now they’re forever friends. I fucking hated that movie.
 
It begs a question – why adapt a book if you’re not going to adapt the book? Especially if the book in question is a multi-million copy bestseller with a string of sequels and a large fanbase. My assumption can only be that in the case of Artemis Fowl, Disney thought they needed to soften the sharper edges of the novels, despite those sharper edges being the whole reason anyone liked them to begin with. It’s still one of the most incomprehensible adaptations I’ve ever seen.
 
One particularly fascinating case study I only fully delved into recently is Jurassic Park. Despite my longstanding love of the films, I’d never read the book until very recently. I think I’d always had the notion, probably from some article I read as a kid, that it was another Jaws/Psycho situation – a classic film that came from a mediocre novel.
 
So I was pretty blown away to find that the novel is not mediocre at all. But nor is it playing the same game as the film. At a glance, the plot, structure and characters are mostly the same. But where Spielberg’s film is all about awe and wonder at the resurrected dinosaurs that turns into nail biting terror when they get loose, the book is far more of a chilly, cautionary science thriller that right from the start sets a tone of bleak horror. The opening chapters detail the scavenging little compies sneaking into the bedrooms of sleeping babies to eat their faces – a concept that disturbed me so much as a kid that it’s a big part of why I didn’t read the book until now. The novel shifts between dense scientific description, pages of philosophical musings, and terrifying set pieces that more often than not feature the kind of gore more at home in a Friday the 13th film than anything Spielberg’s film franchise attempted. Periodically the book allows itself beats of wonder and melancholy, but it’s a darker, harder, tougher story that, adapted faithfully, would not be nearly as beloved by so many generations of children.
 
So which is better? The film here is not a faithful adaptation like The Silence of the Lambs, or one that makes some notable changes but stays true to the spirit of the source material, like The Lord of the Rings. It’s not a clear improvement like Jaws or Psycho and its not an act of rampant destruction like the latter seasons of Game of Thrones or Artemis Fowl. It's more like two alternate versions of the same story that offer their own distinct but equally valid delights.
 
It would be tempting to say this is how we should see all book-to-film adaptations. But the common (yet wrong) refrain of ‘the book is always better’ tends to come from a valid place; if you’re going to see a story you love on the big screen then you want to see the story you love. Likewise, if a favourite film is based on a book you later discover to be very different, that can be its own sort of jarring. Often our opinion depends on which version we consumed first. But not always.
 
Like Jurassic Park’s hybrid dinosaurs, adaptation is an imperfect scienced influenced by so many factors. Budget, studio interference, the power of the director, the popularity of the novel, the size of the fanbase, the influence of the author, whether the adaptation is getting the space and time afforded by a TV series, or the more constrained and distilled interpretation of a movie. It’s a subjective, case-by-case practice with no formula for success. But to me, the adaptations I remember and talk about the most are the ones that took at least a few risky swings all their own. For better or worse.

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