Books, unlike movies, allow readers to use imagination
November 20, 2014
Movies are wonderful things. They are visual masterpieces (when done correctly), and they can grip the viewer in several different ways.
They are just not more entertaining than books.
Emotionally speaking, books are left up to the reader’s interpretation. Everyone had a high school English teacher who talked about seemingly each word of the book and what it meant for the story’s plot and for life in general.
My English teacher of that elk was Mrs. Hunter. Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights was her favorite novel, and she ripped the mammoth to shreds. Every conversation was chewed up and spit out in four different ways.
At the time, I had not the slightest bit of idea or ounce of care to figure out her points about the character development and progression of Mr. Heathcliffe. The book was massive, and my attention span was not as such.
I later understood why she was so crazed over characters and facets of the book when we read The Great Gatsby.
The lessons she was trying to teach my classmates and me was that books have to lend to the reader’s imagination. It is up to the reader’s imagination.
The reader gets to think for him or her own self instead of observing a two-hour film with weakly-developed characters — by standards of authors — and the director’s thoughts strewn across the screen.
Authors of books know that, to accomplish their goals of capturing the interest and imagination of the reader, they must show explicit detail in scenes and of characters. The layers of implicit reasoning in books are written about in more detail in well-written stories.
And with the imagination and the connections between author and reader comes the many ways that a book can be interpreted.
In the film world, if the way a viewer interprets a movie’s themes and overlying message is different than what the director’s views are, either the director is considered to be shoddy or the viewer is considered to be an inadequate evaluator.
As written in a 2005 article in Time Magazine, “Readers of a novel have already made their own perfect movie version. They have visualized it, fleshed out the locations and set the pace.”
Books are made into movies. Not the other way around. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
It’s never “The book wasn’t really like the movie!”
It is “Goodness, the movie was not really like the book.”
