Ya think? It very easy to confuse the two, but I’m not sure I am.
I’m more than happy when a skilled screenwriter merges two characters into one, and makes up dialogue that neither of them ever said, just so long as the impression given is fairly close to what the two characters’ positions were. if that’s what I was railing against, then you’re right, i’d be upset about the figurativeness (figurality?) of the adaption process.
But my complaint (issue?) is when court testimony (something that is carefully recorded) comes out saying the opposite of what was actually said, or when a person’s symptoms are misportrayed because it’s cooler visually to show hallucinations than the subtler signs that actually existed. This doesn’t further anyone’s definition of truth, just makes for a neater story.
It might be good to compare movies to historical novels then, not to nonfiction. A mainstream, non-documentary is more like a historical novel in the treatment. A Beautiful Mind is a great example. Forget the math, which wasn’t that well explained in the book, and concentrate on the history and the dynamics. They made the life into a story, not a movie about the real life. (I know some of the people in the movie, and some people in the book and not in the movie, so this is a hot button item for me.)
I agree that movies are more simplistic. Think of all the plot elements removed in any noveliziation. I learned in a scriptwriting class I took that they film about a minute per page. That means a script is between 100 and 120 not very dense pages. Yes, scenery works better in a movie, but plot complexity disappears. So, I’m not sure about truth, but I do agree that movies are by nature simplistic.
It’s hard to address the question, since it undoubtedly contains a comparison between different media. Is ‘Apocalypse Now’ a simplistic version of the Joseph Conrad story. I think it is. But could ‘Lost in Transalation’ be made into a book with more layers and more complexity than the movie? I doubt it.
So, in short, the answer is no.
Some stories are better told in movies, others in other media. Thus, movies are not inherently simplistic.
Art is an abstraction, a description, a summary. Hence, inherently simpler.
Think of movies that are superficially simple or simplistic: The Graduate and La Strada. Just picking two off the top of my head. Not much for plot, per se. Not that much going on, really. But I’ll rank them up against a lot of literature, sculpture, etc.
If you criticize the limitations of cinema, you may as well damn theater while you’re at it. They’re the same idea, using two different mediums.
By the Op, if I understand it correctly, a movie by it’s inherent nature must be simpler than a book?
In the movie The Accused, which turned around a story about a Providence rape, the movie didn’t tell the actual truth, but told a “fictional” account. I can write about rape till I’m blue in the face, and still not convey the truth that that rape scene conveyed.
Truth is very subjective, and it is true that we are a narrative species, but I believe we can, and do, tell the truth with pictures.
Hell, Picasso’s Guernica tells us more about the Spanish Civil War in one frame, than most books on that subject.
Is it fair to call that “simplistic”, though? I don’t think fiction is less complicated than history. And I doubt you’d get anything much more complex than the average “based on a true story” screenplay from a fictionalized prose work on the same subject that’s the same length.
I’ve penned a “based on a true story” screenplay myself (don’t expect to see it in a theater near you anytime soon, though – I’m in Japan and I have no idea how I could even get an agent for it from here), and I’ll tell you something funny about the process. After I finished a solid draft I had a couple of friends read over it. Both picked out two particular scenes as seeming improbable and rather pointless. These were the two scenes in the script that were the most closely based on the available documentation with the least amount of embellishment by me!
I didn’t change much about those two scenes, but I did add in more fictionalized set-up and exposition. The thing about real life is, it doesn’t have to seem plausible or make sense. A story, even history, does. Any story is going to be a simplified and distorted version of real life. It’s impossibile to find solid evidence for every single relevant event. Just deciding what events are relevant is a big task. It’s also essential to put all those events in a coherent order so they can be understood by others.
Now, Hollywood films do suffer from one important restriction that non-fiction books do not – they have to make a lot more money just to break even. There are often changes made for purely commercial reasons. I’ve sometimes imagined the studio meeting for my own script – “Does the hero have to be gay? That’s not going to play in Middle America. Why don’t we make him in love with the female lead instead? And the whole thing is kind of depressing. Maybe we could put in a funny bit with a dog!” But such simplicity or distortion isn’t an inherent problem with filmmaking, although it may be an inherent problem with mainstream commercial art.
If you’re using “propaganda” to mean “what the artist thinks is true rather than the objective Truth” then we’d be fools to think we’re getting anything other than propaganda from anything other than real life itself. And even then, I’m not sure how much I trust real life!