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

So from the previous blog, we understand that some books with a strong narrative voice make bad movies when this voice is not somehow included in the film adaptation. However, many movies are able to capture the narrative voice. This, combined with other visual and narrative elements, could result in an overall better story than the book. To examine how this works, we’ll take a look at the movie Fight Club and the book that it was adapted from, which shares the same name.

Fight Club is a book written by Chuck Palahniuk in 1996 and adapted into a movie (director: David Fincher, screenplay: Jim Uhls) in 1999. For brevity I will absolutely skip any plot summary (just stop now and go watch it before I ruin it for you). While I can’t honestly claim that the book is BAD (much of the dialogue is extracted directly from the book), the movie does a far better job of telling the story. Let’s take a look at why:

Like Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions, Fight Club’s story is driven by the narrator’s voice. But unlike BoC’s film adaptation, Fincher decided to use this in his film as voice over narration. This is much easier to do with Fight Club since the narrative voice belongs to a character in the story, in this case, the protagonist of the tale. This narration makes extra sense for the story of Fight Club, which is literally the story of an internal battle within the Narrator.

But what makes Fight Club more compelling as a film are the visual elements that are unattainable within the text. For instance, there are several moments in the film where a frame or two of Tyler Durden’s image appears in the background of a scene. This accomplishes two things that are not available in the book: First, it mimics the actual splicing that Durden uses in the story while he is working as a projectionist (splicing pornographic images into children's films). Second, it foreshadows the onset of Durden as a split personality of the Narrator, which is not revealed until later in the film/book. Limited to text only, the book is unable to include this explicitly visual component.



Similar to this, the visual difference between actors Edward Norton and Brad Pitt cannot be adequately accounted for in the text. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then the text of Fight Club falls short on describing these two characters. The film, therefore, tells the story better simply because the experience of actually seeing these two physically different actors would lead a viewer, much more than a reader, to believe that they are in fact separate people, which is necessary for the story to have its element of surprise.

So a successful film adaptation depends on many factors (choice of director, actors, screenplay writers), but most importantly depends on the type of story being told. A good adaptation first requires a good source. A successful book becomes so from creating a compelling narrative, just a good story. This narrative vision must somehow be captured by those that wish to transfer it to film.