Books v Movies: The Reckoning

You’ve heard this one-million-and-one times in your life: “The movie was OK, but the book was way better.”

In all but seven of these instances, the person saying this was correct. These are official statistics provided to me by the National Security Agency’s little-known subsidiary, the Banal Conversations About Forgettable Things Division. Big Brother is watching.

It’s not like movies based on books are inherently bad, or even mediocre. In some cases, they’re flippin’ fantastic. “The Godfather,” “The Shawshank Redemption” and “Apollo 13” were all based on books (the last being a nonfiction account, of course), and all three are recommended viewing -- fun romps that go well with a bowl of popcorn and those well-worn slippers you keep repairing with duct tape. If you haven’t seen one of those movies, find a streaming service and watch it immediately. Also, buy new slippers.

Despite the quality of those movies, though, the book is a better experience in 99.9 percent of all cases. Part of this is due to the nature of the medium itself. When a story is presented using only words, your brain is engaged in the complex task of converting those words into images, and lemme tell you, those images are higher-def than the highest-def televisions in existence. How can they not be? The picture is being formed in your mind. It’s like experiencing a waking dream, only this time nobody’s wetting themselves in front of a sold-out crowd at Madison Square Garden. Or, you know, whatever your particular dream happens to be. Sometimes I think I share too much.

Books are also more immersive. They linger on details, explore characters’ thoughts. Movies can do this to a certain extent -- the best ones can, anyway -- but there are limitations to the format. You’ve got two, three hours tops to make your case. You can’t leave a whole lot to the imagination. And you can’t spend an inordinate amount of time examining a character’s thought process as they choose between the decaf cappuccino or the double-shot of espresso with cinnamon. “Caroline Picks Her Morning Beverage” doesn’t exactly make for a compelling day at the cinema. Unless it culminates in a magical cappuccino monster leaping out of Caroline’s cup and biting off her left ear. That has potential.

But hey, this is just a personal preference, surely influenced by my predilection for daydream and whimsy. Movies come with their own built-in advantages -- tightly choreographed action sequences, swelling orchestral scores -- and in some rare instances the film tops the novel.

Look at “Forrest Gump,” for example. Kind of a divisive movie; some people love it, some people hate it. No matter your opinion on the film, though, it’s an undeniable fact that it’s a massive improvement over Winston Groom’s book, which is a fetid, fly-ridden, steaming pile of hippopotamus crap. Like really, really awful.

Cinema buffs will recall that, in the movie, Forrest unwittingly finds himself at the center of some of America’s most seminal moments of the mid-to-late 20th Century: desegregation of schools in the South, the war in Vietnam, etc. Groom’s novel takes this concept to its utmost extreme. There is actually a sequence in the book -- I wish I were kidding, but I’m not -- in which Forrest flies into outer space with a chimp, then re-enters Earth’s atmosphere and crash-lands on an island populated by cannibals, who try to cook him in a giant stew. I suppose you can make this stuff up, because Groom obviously did, but why would you? The only way the whole space-chimp-cannibal section would seem like a good idea to an author is if he suffered severe head trauma at the hands of a 400-lb. hammer-wielding gorilla. A scenario, by the way, which is more realistic than anything found in this terrible novel.

Clearly, a Hollywood screenwriter picked up this literary disaster and said, “You know what? Ninety percent of this is pure trash. But the other 10 percent could be a decent film, as long as we lock down a virtuoso director and an Academy Award-winning actor for the lead role.” The result is that rare exception, a movie that trounces its source material in every way imaginable.

You could call it “the exception that proves the rule,” a phrase that’s apt if grammatically mystifying. Yet that still doesn’t answer the question of why reading a story, is most instances, is better than watching it.

As it turns out, neuroscience may have some insight here. Not to get all nerdy on you, but neurologists studying the brain have done a boatload of research on this, and what they’ve found is that reading descriptive words and phrases activates parts of the brain aside from just the language centers; words like “soap” and “coffee” triggered the smell centers, for instance, while words like “kick” and “throw” lit up the motor cortex, which coordinates the body’s movements.

What this means is that reading a novel is like using your brain to run a simulation of real life, much like a computer can run, say, a flight simulation. Imagining something is the next best thing to actually experiencing it, at least from a neurological perspective. Which is great. Because now, instead of forking over airfare for that long-coveted trip to Europe, I can just read “A Tale of Two Cities” with a glass of chianti -- and not have to worry about how putrid the movie would have been.

Each medium has its strengths and weaknesses, but if you’re watching movie trailers and see something that piques your interest, do a little internet searching to see if it’s based on a novel. In all likelihood the source material will give you a much better experience. Put your feet up and crack the book open. Just do me a favor and get a new pair of slippers, would you? The whole duct tape thing is really getting out of hand.