Animated Reply: Why Books and Movies Are Irreconcilably Different

This is in response to my friend Steve’s post over at his blog, to which he has kindly allowed me to reply in the interests of opening friendly discussion (and also in the interests of giving both of us fodder for future blog entries. Win-win!). I actually meant to write this over six months ago, as you can no doubt tell by comparing the dates on our respective entries, but I admit I got a little distracted by other ideas. And also The Good Wife and OMG YOU GUYS SEASON 3 IS UP FOR PRE-ORDER I AM SO EXCITED!!!

*ahem*

Anyway, what finally jogged my memory was Mal Peet’s Guardian review of Michael Grant’s Gone. What interested me was how Peet places Gone in a genre he labels “game novels”; he suggested that Gone was written to appeal to an audience of teen boys raised on Call of Duty and Skyrim. The reasons he gives to support this include nonstop action and violence, mutations and weapons that read as power-ups, and shallow thematic development.

I agree that video games and novels are different media with different conventions and requirements, and I agree that although Gone is not what I normally consider to be a well written book, I wouldn’t think twice about its narrative shortcomings if it were a game for my Wii. However, I think Peet is mistaken to suggest that Gone is a video game in literary form, mainly because I disagree with his understanding of video games and what appeals to people about them.

From my perspective, Gone simply doesn’t come close to replicating the experience of playing XBox. Video games are immersive; they’re often (but not always) short on story because what they offer is experience — a relationship with the main character (or characters) different from the relationship readers have with a novel’s protagonist.

I like Sophie Hatter and Karl Lionheart because I identify with them; I like Mario, Link, and Samus Aran because in many important senses, I am them. I choose what they do, and when the game developers force them to make choices I don’t think they’d make, I feel even more betrayed than I did when Cuddy turned into a conventional sitcom girlfriend on House or Harry Potter never faced Snape in J. K. Rowling’s series of novels.

That’s because I perceive Cuddy and Harry as causally independent from me, but there’s a sense in which my video game character’s choice is my choice — in which I know her because I get to inhabit her. I see the world from her perspective because it’s my perspective, the same way playing a particular character in a play forces a performer to blind himself to the journeys of the other characters.

In this respect, gaming offers an experience completely unlike any traditional narrative media can put forward. The best video games, invisible walls notwithstanding, create an immersive experience of true agency, while books and movie can offer at best only vicarious agency through emotional and intellectual sympathy. While a weaker version of Peet’s argument is probably supportable — that video games have begun to contribute structural and semantic  conventions to other forms of media — I think his broader point is unfortunately flawed because it misinterprets their fundamental appeal.

(Steve, you might think this is me agreeing with you, positioning books and movies as the same type of media in contrast to games, but I’m just getting warmed up.)

Okay, so neither books nor movies allow the reader or viewer agency to control the protagonist’s actions. But there’s another kind of choice on the table: the choice of how and when to obtain and process information. And I would argue that despite the fact that both filmmakers and writers intend their work to be processed visually, books and movies offer very different kinds of choices and hence difference kinds of experiences.

In some ways, the written word offers the least agency of all to its consumers. What’s on the page is literally all there is to know about the world of the story; you can choose to skim over a paragraph that’s boring, skip back and forth to find out new information ahead of time, or read faster or slower. But if the author writes “It was a dark and stormy night,” there is nothing you can do to those words on a page that can tell you precisely how dark, how stormy, what temperature it was, whether it was raining or snowing, whether there was lightning, what the air tasted like, whether you could still see the stars through the cloud cover, etc.

A good prose writer directs your ideas; there is nothing outside of what he or she chooses that you notice, and, what’s more, you can gain “pure”* knowledge straight-up mainlined. “Elizabeth loves Mr. Darcy.” “Harry Potter is a  thirteen-year-old wizard who goes to Hogwarts, and now he’s in his third year there.” “Peter Pan will be a little boy forever.” Many of these things are difficult to express without words; when movies do try to convey these messages, they usually rely on narration, either voiceover or from a character in the scene.

Meanwhile, it’s not the audience’s ideas that’s restricted in film; it’s their attention. A good filmmaker tries to direct viewers to focus only on those points he or she wants them to notice. If you really wanted, you could spend all of The Dark Knight ignoring Batman and obsessing over how Bruce Wayne decorates Wayne Manor or the demographics and facial expressions of the citizens of Gotham. That you don’t — and especially that you don’t want to — is testament to the skill of the performers, writers, and crew in shunting your attention where they want it to go.

A filmmaker is also better able to obey the old storytelling maxim, “Show, don’t tell” — no one needs to tell you that Eddie Valiant is short and balding when you can see Bob Hoskins on screen, whereas that information has to be brought out in words if you’re reading a novel. The direct visual and auditory stimuli of film make it easier for a storyteller to convey knowledge in an experiential (even if just by proxy) rather than propositional manner.

There is, however, one type of agency that books have over film: that of timing. For instance, on the recommendation of friends, I’ve recently been watching the anime series Death Note. I like it; the plot’s interesting, and the ideas are original. But no matter how much I get into the story, the pacing drives me nuts.

Once you know that the series was based on a manga, it’s easy to see how the sequence of static images and words was translated in a medium-preserving way to the screen. For me, it’s like having someone else read me a graphic novel at a way slower speed than I would choose to adopt myself, and although I appreciate the dramatic presentation, I just want to rip the book out of their hands and take control.

In a way, my frustration stems from the distinction I made above: because the format of the show focusses so heavily on verbal information, I feel like it’s my thoughts, not my attention, that’s being directed. But my thoughts are faster than my attention — they have different needs!

Anyway, Steve, this has been kind of fragmented and incoherent and throwing random ideas out there to see if they stick. But that’s part of the fun of posting a blog entry in reply to someone else — I can trust that you will respond and take care of all the shoddy parts (ha!). So this has been my somewhat careless attempt to suggest one way in which books and movies ought to be considered fundamentally different media. Until next time…

* Don’t argue with me about the distinction between a proposition and the language in which it’s phrased. I’m too lazy.