Story Killers - Characters Unwelcome (part 2)

(Read Part 1 of this article here first!)

I think that if we asked "what is the point of telling a story?", only someone with a really simplistic view would answer "to tell of a sequence of events". That is what a history book is about, perhaps, but isn't a story really about characters, and isn't the point of a story to either teach a principle of life or to portray a point of view so the listener/reader/viewer can understand it better? I would argue that that is the real point of storytelling. Hence, when a movie screenwriter or director messes with these aspects of a story, they are abusing the story for their own purposes. This is what really gets my goat. Let's talk about two ways that a movie maker can really screw up:

Changing the outcome or message of the story

Think of the old stories told to children by their parents and teachers. Think of fairy tales - think of Mother Goose or the Brothers Grimm. Many of the stories were gruesome or sad in their outcomes, mostly because they were morality tales - short parables to teach children some wisdom about life - don't trust strangers, don't wander off into the forest, don't obsess over something that you can't have, etc. Either they had negative examples, where foolish choices had bad consequences, or they were stories about human nobility, where the heroes made choices to do right and were held up as examples. In both of these areas the modern film industry hates to keep up this tradition. Just yesterday I heard an interview with a modern TV writer who expressed the thought that all good stories are about people being bad.

So in modern stories we find that the young, selfish person makes bad choices but gets what they want in the end, or we find that all of the characters are selfish and mean and everybody dies in the end, but for no really good reason. No nobility is expressed or implied. Look at Harry Potter, for example. He does develop some character as the story goes along, but in the beginning he is rebellious, sneaky, and never listens to anybody that gives him good advice, but it all works out in the end. (I wasn't bothered by the magic in the books but I was really annoyed that he was a hero even though he was so foolish - a bad example for kids reading the stories).

Now when a story has a noble character or a moral lesson, this is almost always the subject of screenwriting revisionism. As a set of good examples of this, take most Disney cartoons of the era starting with The Little Mermaid. In many of these, the original lesson is inverted. The original story for Mermaid, the silly, pining teen girl doesn't get the prince and hurls herself into the sea, becoming sea foam - which will cause all silly, lovesick girls to be reminded to stay unselfish and level-headed every time they look at the waves hitting the shore. Disney? Nah, too sad - let's have her get the guy even though she makes bad choices, ignoring her father, because it's "love at first sight". This happens in more than one movie but this is one of the more egregious examples. (For another, consider the happy nuclear family of Zeus and Hera in Disney's Hercules versus the actual story from Greek mythology with infidelity and Hera's persecution of Hercules).

In other movies, the director seems determined to take a happy story and make it a miserable one, evidently because his own life is empty and depressing and he wants to share it with everybody else. Another frequent example is a story that is patriotic in the book but made into some sort of liberal anti-war theme like The Hunt for Red October, where the original story was very anti-communist but the movie changed to an anti-first-strike-weapon movie (evidently at the prompting of Sean Connery, who thought that Clancy's motives for the captain's defection were not believable). This last example also deals with characters, so it's a good segue to the last movie sin that infuriates me...

Changing the character of the characters

Why do directors hate characters so much? It always amazes me that people who make books into movies (and claim that they liked the books) change the motivations and personalities of the major characters with such aplomb. I will illustrate with a few examples:

The book Patriot Games introduces the character of Jack Ryan to us for the first time. He is a hero because he does the right thing, for the right reasons. The terrorists in the book are not screaming, violent thugs but are instead scary figures whose very humanity seems to have been obscured by their evil ideology. One of the scariest scenes in the book is when Jack is in the British courtroom to testify gainst the terrorists, and he looks at the eyes of his nemesis, trying to see a common humanity there but fails to find any - just quiet coldness. In the movie, the terrorist screams death threats against Jack as he is dragged out of the courtroom. The end of the movie is worse. The high point in the book is when Jack gets the drop on this scary guy after he almost kills Jack's family. He wants to shoot this guy so badly, and knows that he will get away with it, but he decides not to take personal revenge by shooting this guy who is at his mercy and turns him over to the law. Jack is a strong believer in the rule of law. In the movie, Harrison Ford as Jack fights the bad guy in a flaming motorboat zooming out of control over the sea at night, finally impaling him on an anchor. Yeah, it makes a great action scene, but Jack Ryan as a character is lost.

An even more awful example (and why I hate Peter Jackson) is The Two Towers. That masterful book sets up for the final battle in the third book by telling of a series of important events that establish the moral qualities of the major characters. Big decisions rest on several rulers.

• In the book, Treebeard and the ents, who know very well the depredations of Saruman, decide (without much input from the hobbits) in the entmoot to take action. In the movie, the ents decide to be selfish isolationists and have to be tricked into fighting by Merry and Pippin. Huh?
  
• Theoden, who Gandalf heals from Wormtongue's lies by giving him the truth, shows his nobility by declaring (after Helm's deep) that he has every intention of honoring his age-old defense treaty with Gondor. In the movie, Gandalf heals Theoden by some sort of exorcism. Theoden basically says that Gondor can take their treaty and shove it until he is forced to change his mind later.
  
• In Ithilien, Faramir, when he determines what Frodo is doing, makes it very clear that, though he understands the temptation that had ensnared his brother Boromir, he has no intention of falling to that temptation. "I would not take this thing, if it lay by the highway. Not were Minas Tirith falling in ruin and I alone could save her, so, using the weapon of the Dark Lord for her good and my glory. No, I do not wish for such triumphs, Frodo son of Drogo". In the movie, he goes "cool! I'm taking the ring so we can win the war!" and is forced to give it up mostly against his will.
• Aragorn in the book goes and helps with the defense of Helm's deep, cementing a deep friendship with Eomer which leads to a triumphant meeting in the battle outside Minas Tirith "though all the hosts of Mordor stand between us". In the movie, Aragorn never even goes to Helm's deep (Jackson instead has elves from Rivendell showing up there) so that he can have another soul-searching scene with Liv Tyler to convince him to be the king of Gondor after all.

All in all, this was a travesty of a movie. It is all the worse because there will probably not be another LOTR movie like that made in my lifetime. It makes absolutely no sense to me why Jackson did this, unless he was convinced that Tolkien wrote a nice story, but didn't do well on the characters. SORRY?? The hostility I feel about this is really hard for me to even express. Idiot.

Characters are (at least for me) the main part of a story. Change the motives and you change the story. The song in Gethsemane in Jesus Christ Superstar is another great example of a personality inversion. The real Jesus comes to lay down own His life to "seek and to save the lost". In JCS the Jesus character says "God you hold every card ... kill me, before I change my mind." Yeccch.

Somebody save us from film directors with an inflated view of their own storytelling skills. If you guys are so good, why don't you write your own stories and leave ours alone?

Story Killers - Characters Unwelcome (part 1)

It is almost always a great disappointment to watch a movie that is based on a book that you really like. I use the universal "you" rather than "I" because I have found a great deal of commonality with nearly everyone I have spoken to on the subject. It seems to be a pretty universal experience. Interestingly enough, though, I have found that my reasons for this disappointment differ from what others have told me of their own feelings a lot of the time. In what way can a movie be a bad adaptation? I think that there are at least three:

1. Changing the storyline or the characters in the story,
2. Changing the outcome or message of the story, or
3. Changing the character of the characters

Let's look at each of these in turn.

Changing the Storyline or the Characters

Obviously, the most frequent thing that happens is the first, and this is for a fairly simple reason. Books are usually either too short or two long for a two hour movie format. Many childrens' books are just too short (for instance Where The Wild Things Are or The Cat In The Hat) and are just a few short pages of rhymes with lots of pictures, and any screenplay must invent an entire storyline that will encapsulate or give the background story of the beloved book. The real question is - does the added part match the feeling of the original story? Is it a good story, or is it just a waste of time (for instance The Cat in the Hat - ugghhhh). In the case of more adult-length novels, the opposite is true. The screenwriter must chop out lots of detail and exposition from the book to make it 2-3 hours of action on a screen. Often this will call for carefully removing entire sub-plots and characters from the story. Sometimes the screenwriter will even combine a couple of minor characters into one character to streamline the story.

I think that this is what most people complain about. For instance, many people complained, saying "Where's Tom Bombadil?" after watching The Fellowship of the Ring. I did not mind that so much because I knew there was just no way to get even a 3 hour movie from that book if too much time was spent on the adventures that the hobbits had just getting out of the Shire (I had many other complaints against Peter Jackson, however, which I will give in later sections). While this is an understandable thing and just part of making a screenplay, some do it better than others, who seem to delight in ripping up the story in a quite shameless fashion, in ways that do not even make any sense. Some of the more annoying things that they do are

• take out entire sections of the story that explain why people are doing something,
• add extra scenes just so there will be some gore or sex in the story,
• take out sections because of time and then inexplicably add in entire other A-Plot items that weren't even in the book (the entire first invasion in "Prince Caspian", Aragorn getting lost on the way to Helm's Deep just to have his own battle scene, etc).

Sometimes I can forgive a director or screenwriter for altering a story. As an example, take "2001 A Space Odyssey" . Though Kubrick made the plot of a lot harder to understand (compared to the book), he made it his own art in a way that captured the 'feel' of the story (and it was very cool). The same goes for his "The Shining". In fact, this is an example of where this kind of thing may actually be good. In general, Stephen King novels don't transfer well to the screen, because the first part of the novel (where the suspense is) usually is easy to show, but the denouement is usually so overblown in the book it is hard to show it in the movie and maintain believability ("IT" is a good example of this). What Kubrick did to "The Shining" was to play with the viewer in a really creepy way up to the end. Who did not want to crawl out of their skin when the ball rolls up to the boy while playing alone in the hall. Eeek! (Actually I read that King did not like Kubrick's interpretation. I liked both the book and the movie. A later, more faithful tv version that King supervised, seemed a lot less scary to me than the Kubrick version, or the book).

There are certain genres, however, where the movie writer/director play with a story at their peril. This would include beloved young people's novels and historical or religious movies. Almost every Jesus movie leaves me yelling at the screen as they mangle a story that I believe is historical, and whose historical details are important. Note that the Harry Potter movies (especially the early ones) follow the books very closely indeed. I actually heard an interview with the first movie's director about how he knew that Harry Potter fans would kill him if he messed up the story, so he was being very careful to get that right.

For me, the worst plot changes are the ones that affect the message of the story or who the characters are as people, though. I will deal with these in the next part of this article.