How Hollywood Ruins Novels

William Davidson has an interesting piece in Slate about how movies ruins great novels. He looks at Sam Mendes' version of the Richard Yates novel Revolutionary Road and Paul Schrader's imaging of the life and three works of Yukio Mishima:

This is what the movies do to literature, typically: There's so much plot to get in that there's no time to tell the story. Perhaps it's the insecurity of Hollywood: Inflated by the borrowed prestige of books, producers and directors won't stray too far from the guide-ropes of the story.Revolutionary Road, for instance, feels less directed than curated. But in this bargain, Hollywood makes an unnecessary concession, in effect admitting that movies are dumber than books. How could we think otherwise when smart books are continually turned into witless movies? It's the ultimate head-to-head competition, and movies are the Washington Generals. Are there reverse examples, where a mediocre movie is turned into a good book? I can't think of one, though I've heard that the novelization of The Harder They Come is remarkably successful. No, until recently, I'd just about decided that film deserves its reduced reputation as the flashy, gelled-hair cousin to literature.

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So much for theory. Mishima is an achingly pleasurable movie, a formal work of art that offers visceral pleasures: From the shots of the writer's ridiculously baroque house at the beginning of the film to the blazing red sun that ends it, Schrader works with a wide palette of colors and settings that string the viewer along from scene to scene. This is the luxury of film, that it can cohere a narrative through color or even through technical devices such as panning and focus.

Comments

[mike]

Yukio Mishima is definately a character, I read some of his works when I was in Japan... Probably something Edward lent me... Is the movie Mishima a bio film?

[Patrick McCoy]

Mike not exactly a biography, but it has elements of a biography in it. It's a difficult film to characterize, but definitely worthwhile to watch. I just started his Sea of Fertility tetralogy and finished the first volume Spring Snow recently.