Andrew Wheeler has a blog post up reviewing a number of graphic novels, including the Coraline adaptation. He has some interesting points to make about how different mediums work:
That’s the great gulf between a novel and a movie, of course: a movie can only show what’s happening on the outside, though it can hint and imply mental states, while a novel can dive right into a stream of consciousness and make the reader know exactly why a character did something. Graphic novels, at their best, hybridize the two forms — they can’t be quite as visually exciting as movies, since they don’t move, but they can come very close. And they can show the inner life of a character just as fully and in as much detail as a novel can.
This is good stuff, but it’s actually a bit more complex than that. During the post-gig party in Dublin Neil was talking about Coraline, and about his discussions with Neil Jordan over The Graveyard Book. He made the point that when he creates something scary in a novel he can often leave much of its nature up to the imagination of the reader. He just has to hint at something awful being there. In a movie, however, the monster has to appear, if only partially, at some point. That’s a problem that a skilled director has to worry about.
It is also a more general problem. I remember, for example, people saying how disappointed they were when the Cloverfield monster finally put in an appearance. I wonder how one could ever film that non-Euclidian geometry that drives men crazy, or how one might go about filming House of Leaves. Prose, comics and movies are all different mediums, and in translating between them you have to make changes.
I am sure this will be lost on many of the people who write about Watchmen over the next few weeks.
The silent Call of Cthulhu does a decent job with the non-Euclidian geometry, though they’re helped by the fact that in that story someone actually falls into it, instead of just looking at it and flipping out.
(Personally, I imagine most Lovecraft protagonists would have been driven mad by The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and would find James Galway’s interpretations of Japanese folk music every bit as insinuatingly unwholesome as the pipes of Leng.)
David: Oh, the horror!!!
“Prose, comics and movies are all different mediums, and in translating between them you have to make changes.”
Sure, but which changes were made for that reason (and did they have to be changed in that way), and which changes were made just because the adapters wanted to make changes and ascribed them to the difference in the media? Often enough the defense of the change would be just as valid (if valid at all, which in such cases it usually isn’t) to the original medium as well.
DBratman:
The fact that some bad changes may be made does not negate the fact that different media require different story telling techniques. You are welcome to debate specific individual changes as much as you like, but the argument that no changes must be made to the sacred text is foolish. Interestingly I see that much of the criticism of Watchmen I have seen so far is that the film has tried to be too faithful to the comic, and has suffered as a result.
Sure, faithfulness to the point of embalming the story is a problem too, as much as unnecessary change is. (The peculiar feature of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films is that he fell into both traps.) Please note that I am not arguing that the story must never be changed. Most stories adapted to films must be condensed, most obviously. But the rules for necessary changes have never been codified. The justification can be real, but it is very often sorely abused, and treated as an unanswerable trump when it is not, even when it is justified.