Good Books and Bad Movies, Bad Books and Good Movies (Part I)

“Oh, did you like that movie? Then you should read the book.”

I have heard this plenty of times, and in my experience, it seems that most folks who have seen a movie based on a book that they have read prefer the book to the movie. But why do people feel this way? Is there more information included in the book that can’t fit into two hours (or more… Hollywood is digging the epics these days…) of screen time? Shouldn’t the movie, as a mostly visual medium, suck the viewer into the story world with more efficiency? Are words on a page more powerful or compelling than the combination of images on a screen and audio out of speakers?

To understand these questions, let’s take a look at two different movies adapted from books. Here in Part 1 of this two-part blog, we will take arms with the bookworms and look at Breakfast of Champions, a great book, but a teeeeerible movie.

Breakfast of Champions is a book written by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. in 1973, and adapted into a movie by Alan Rudolph (director/screenplay) bearing the same name in 1999. The book and the movie share the same plot (don’t laugh, some adaptations do not share the same plot): Dwayne Hoover (played terribly by Bruce Willis) is a successful used car salesman in Mid-West America who is on the brink of insanity when the writings of a visiting science fiction writer, Kilgore Trout (played by Albert Finney), push him to violent madness.




The movie does a decent job of handling the ensuing craziness of one of the main characters, Dwayne Hoover. The shots of this character “going insane” include overlays of some kind of lava lamp effect, unconventional camera angles, and audio of voices that appear to be in his head. However, Bruce Willis was a terrible choice for the role because of his history of being typecast in the role of an action hero. I kept waiting for him to blow something up or look sternly off camera… But let’s take a look at how the movie compares to the book.

The first thing a viewer will notice about Breakfast of Champions that differs from the book is that the movie is missing the crude illustrations that Vonnegut includes in his book. In the preface for his book, Vonnegut plainly spells out his motivation: “This book is my fiftieth-birthday present to myself… I am programmed at fifty to perform childishly – to insult the ‘Star-Spangled Banner,’ to scrawl pictures of a flag and a asshole and a lot of other things with a felt tipped pen” (Vonnegut, 4-5).





Vonnegut’s crude and simple drawings add to the satire and humor of his book and Rudolph neglected to somehow incorporate this into his film (granted, this would be tough… overlays of felt-tip pen drawings on different shots? nah…). However, the biggest gap between the book and the movie is the lack of narrative voice. In this book, Vonnegut claims to be trying to “clear [his] head of all the junk in there… trying to make [his] head as empty as it was when [he] was born onto this damaged planet fifty years ago” (Vonnegut, 5). So, in the book (like all of his books), Vonnegut has the undeniable narrative authority; the reader is always clear that this is Vonnegut’s story, and that he is telling it. In Rudolph’s movie adaptation, there is no narration. Granted, this is easier when the narrator of a story happens to be a main character in the story (read/see these successful book/movies: No Country for Old Men, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas).

So books with a strong author-based narrative voice may not make good movies because this narration has no place in film except as a voice-over narration, which could be hard to explain to viewers when that voice does not belong to a character in the story. However, this does not mean that all books tell better stories than all films. In the next blog, we will take a look at how a movie can outdo a book in storytelling.


print credits: Vonnegut, Kurt. Breakfast of Champions. New York: Random House, 1973.

photo credits:
1)https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUa2l9bCXC0t6LhmQ8Cihx01IsNrxEtfObKCd8JcfrhSzdDy3xnXMtJIUUGjPCJIcXxmLtPaAi7EqTo-Bfvv8__fDlG2X72Kg0ZpCBicorJcfjoMNUzxU_-QBatEF1_M3xMtGu7HwdFdE/s400/Breakfast+of+Champions+%233.jpg

2) https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUg1W-t6LtLVF1Fc6eyuW5YmnAQrgc3d9kyWZ0cuBof14wAOyMpgvRaSTP6afh65cvsTFmaxe8DfjaTCyztMObaSCyhMfjF6PGUVJIWvOIWCu5t8DvOHcZEgXaY6nvpiE6WwA-MIJg/s400/vonnegutchart.jpg)

Intensity and Apathy in Jarmusch's Down by Law

I am torn: We could call it intensity and apathy. Or we could call it intense apathy… Or apathetic intensity… Take your pick, this movie has got plenty of it.

Jim Jarmusch’s film Down by Law centers on two different New Orleans low-lifes (Zack and Jack) who are both duped (by different folks and in different ways) into taking the fall for a crime they did not commit. Zack and Jack end up in the same cell together, and the rest of the film focuses on their time in prison (with an Italian named Roberto for comic relief) and their unlikely escape.

Although there is little action in the film, the movie maintains an intense feeling (all black and white, grimy sets, long quiet shots, and sparse background music) while Zack and Jack respond to everything that happens to them with an overwhelming sense of apathy.

After the opening title sequence (which briefly introduces our two leading men), there is a scene in which Zack’s girlfriend is outrageously throwing his personal belongings around. She smashes his records, claiming that she “is completely finished with (Zack).” She asks him why he “can’t stay at one (radio) station a while,” which informs the viewer that he is more than likely an out of work DJ. However, throughout Zack’s girlfriend’s rant, Zack remains docile in a sitting position, seemingly just casually waiting for this rant to be over. He certainly shows no signs of wanting to save his current relationship. In fact, the only point at which Zack rises from his position is to stop his girlfriend from throwing his shoes out the door: “Not the shoes. Not the shoes,” he says. So Zack does care about something, and it turns out to be his shoes: a practical man, perhaps. His girlfriend struggles with him for possession of the shoes, yelling, “Come on hit me motherfucker!” She seems to just want Zack to show some kind of passion, and since he has no passion to work and no passion for her, maybe she can get him angry enough to show some sign of emotion. However, she fails, and Zack calmly tells her: “I guess it’s over between us, alright?” So his girlfriend’s intensity is met by Zack’s total apathy.

This same apathetic response shows up in the next scene, but this time it is Jack who seems to have no worries or cares. This scene shows Jack, the pimp, counting a small stack of cash while a nude prostitute, Bobbie, maintains a one-way conversation with him. Like Zack, Jack is apathetic and detached from the dirty world around him. Bobbie tells him that he “doesn’t understand any kind of people,” and that he “sure doesn’t understand women at all, and a pimp is supposed to at least understand women.” She tells Jack that “if [he] was a good pimp he would’ve hit her by now, or done something.” So like Zack’s girlfriend, Bobbie is unable to elicit any emotional response from him. In fact, it is clear that Jack has not paid any attention to Bobbie’s speech, but only responds by stating, “You sure can talk, can’t you baby?” At one point in the scene when Jack is prepping himself in the mirror, Bobbie even holds up a loaded gun at Jack’s back (which the viewer can assume he sees based on the position of the mirror in the background), which also results in no response from Jack. Bobbie just flops her arm back on the bed, still holding the gun, but gives up on getting any rise out of Jack.

So the film’s introduction to the two main characters shows them much in same light: unresponsive, detached, and apathetic to the serious and dirty world around them.