For as long as there have been movies, there have most likely been people who insist, with absolute certainty, that the movie is never as good as the book. It’s often an earnest position, one based on the things only a book can give us: the level of detail, the careful character development, the lush or spare or elegant prose.
It would be simpler, and more accurate, to just say that the movie (or the series) is not the book. Not ever. And I would like to propose that we stop asking them to be. Stop wishing for the same thing to happen on page and on screen.
It can’t be the same. Because an adaptation is a retelling.
Last week, in the wake of some appalling adaptation news from the newly renamed Max (they’ve excised the more recognizable “HBO” part), Vulture’s Kathryn VanArendonk wrote a piece that I immediately bookmarked: “There Is No Such Thing As a Faithful Adaptation.” There are a lot of very quotable bits in this piece, but let’s go with this one: “What if, in fact, faithfulness is a meaningless goal, a quixotic and doomed exercise that’s both creatively bankrupt and almost inevitably dull? What if, actually, faithfulness is bad because it is—stay with me here—impossible and boring?!”
I have, I admit, been a person who once wanted more faithfulness in adaptations. I remember being outraged at the rumors that Arwen would somehow appear at Helm’s Deep in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films. I have wanted to see the world that once appeared in my head somehow, magically, transferred to the big screen. But that world isn’t the book, either. It’s just what’s in my head—with all the choices that I made, consciously or not, while imagining it.
A story is a series of choices. Transpose that story into a new medium and it’s a whole new series of choices. How to tell the story, yes, but also who stars in it, and where it’s shot, and which scenes get cut and which extended, and how to present an internal monologue on the screen, and how to light and frame and edit all of these things once they’re filmed, and what the music sounds like, and so much more. These choices are no longer being made by one person—the author—but by a whole team of them.
Every one of them has a part in retelling the story.
Does this seem like a semantic argument? I don’t think it is. We expect different things from retellings. We don’t expect the characters to behave exactly the same way, or the villain to get their same comeuppance—maybe they were just misunderstood!—or the perspectives to match up exactly. The stories of Angela Carter and Kelly Link are not the fairy tales they’re working with. Circe is not The Odyssey. Wicked, though it’s a bit of a prequel, is not The Wizard of Oz.
Just like a movie or series is not a book.
More than that, an adaptation that takes a freer approach to the material is often the better for it. We all have our lists of movies that were better than books; for me, Children of Men is the classic. I read the novel after seeing the movie and was astonished at what the filmmaking team had drawn out of a pinched and dated-feeling book. They made it something new, something fierce and bright and relevant and astonishing.
But what I love best is when the two are their own things. The first season of American Gods is not Neil Gaiman’s novel; it’s Bryan Fuller and Michael Green’s interpretation of that novel, complete with an outstanding episode for the underwritten Laura Moon; Mr. Nancy’s incredible speech; and a whole host of other changes and additions that make it into something quite different. As the series went on, it became more tied to the book, less vibrant and inventive, and I mostly kept watching because I love the book and the cast. But it wasn’t enchanting or fascinating in the same way. It didn’t have that thrill of something new, of a brilliant translation across media. Of a retelling.
The Magicians, the series, is not The Magicians, the book(s). It is kind of the reverse of American Gods: The first season hews fairly closely to the plot of the first book, but also plants the seeds for things to hare off in their own directions. The characters become alternate-universe versions of the ones we met in Lev Grossman’s books. The story widens, grows, does things the books never thought of. I love Janet riding her hippogriff in The Magician’s Land and I love Margo pushing a very important button at the end of the series finale. They both need to exist. They don’t need to be the same.
This is not to say, though, that every adaptation ought to run off with the work it’s adapting, or that we have to like strange or wacky choices. We do not have to like the end of Game of Thrones just because it did … whatever that was. Chaos Walking was full of incomprehensible choices—a terrible fate for an excellent book. Amazon’s adaptation of William Gibson’s The Peripheral is certainly doing its own thing—but it’s a thing too interested in violence and cruelty at the expense of Gibson’s fascinating characters, his uncomfortably believable blend of art and capitalism, his take on how the future might shape the past. I find the adaptation hard to watch, and yet I’ll keep watching it, curious what other choices it will make.
Even a show like The Expanse, which at times is very true to the books, makes choices, retells things—for one, in the unforgettable character of Camina Drummer, who does not exist in the books as she does in the series. The two versions of the story feel enmeshed, to me, which is maybe ideal: You can see and feel all the strands that connect them, all the visible and invisible lines drawn from one version to the next, but they exist as their own things. One story doesn’t—can’t—overwrite the other. The unexpected narrative changes in the first season of Shadow and Bone, the series, are a delight in part because I know that things don’t happen quite the same way in the books. It lets me wonder what might happen next, rather than being sure. The uncertainty makes it all feel more fresh.
Buy the Book
The Saint of Bright Doors
(You can maybe tell I’ve been watching a lot more series than films, lately.)
Thinking about adaptations as retellings doesn’t necessarily change anything about them (though I would be curious to know if showrunners or film writers and directors ever approach their material this way). But it can change how we think about them—what we accept or struggle with, what we expect, maybe even what we want out of these new versions of stories we love. If we go into an adaptation expecting familiarity, yes, but not the elusive, impossible faithfulness, what will we notice and love instead? What unexpected combined characters or more detailed plots or invented settings might bring something new to these fictional worlds?
To go back to The Magicians: When the primary cast for the series was announced, I was skeptical. Hale Appleman did not look like Eliot. Why was Janet named Margo? Quentin, okay, he fit the bill, sort of. I had nits to pick in the first season, when the show seemed, mostly, to be doing the book. But somewhere along the way, Appleman’s Eliot became my Eliot. Penny became a thousand times more important than he was in the books. Alice was nothing like I expected. And Quentin was somehow even more Q than his book self.
All of this was possible because Sera Gamble, John McNamara, and their team weren’t afraid to retell the story. To imagine Fillory a little differently; to follow the stories to outlandish, magical, infuriating places; to use the books to set themselves on a trail but then free themselves to see where else it might lead.
A good adaptation, when it retells a story, gives us something new. It’s not a replica, but a whole new work of art. It’s a surprise and, when we’re really lucky, a gift.
Molly Templeton lives and writes in Oregon, and spends as much time as possible in the woods. Sometimes she talks about books on Twitter.
