I’m certainly not the voracious reader that some folks on here are, but I’ve always found that reading novelizations of a film (or contrarily, a novel that was later made into a feature film) is a lot easier for me once I’ve already seen it onscreen. The reading goes a lot faster for me, and is more enjoyable. I can further examine the nuances that a novel offers over a film while still having an established look in my mind to draw from while reading. It’s considerably easier to visualize characters, environments, and scenes in my mind when I have a visual association to specific actors and locations. Expanding on those scenes in my imagination is a fun exercise when I have that connection, but without it, I will actually struggle to construct and/or maintain a mental image of a character or a location in my mind’s eye and it actually slows my reading down. The characters don’t have a humanity to them for me unless I can connect them to a face. It admittedly makes me feel like a dolt with no imagination, which hurts because I’m an awfully visual person. I can still read a book without having seen a film, of course, but I never feel as drawn in and involved with the characters …
I have to assume there are probably others who feel the same. Is there some psychological principle for this need to have a visual reference point when reading, or am I just literarily challenged in an age of visual storytelling?
I loved the movie Forrest Gump so I got the book after I watched the movie. It was exactly like the movie except Forrest was an abusive retard that had a pet orangutan. In the book, Forrest gets shot into space to be the backup for the ship’s computers. After that, he lands in New Guinea to be held hostage by cannibals for a few years. Awkward sex with Raquel Welch is made funny because he thinks she is just some random whore. Forrest also becomes a big stoner for a while. Jenny is still there but the sex scene with her illustrates her extreme skills on many levels.
It depends I read A Tree Grows In Brooklyn and To Kill A Mockingbird after I saw the movie. The movie of A Tree Grows in Brookly was horrible compared to the book. While I thought Mockingbird’s adaptation was OK.
The only film I saw which was better than the book was The Wizard of Oz.
As a followup to my OP … I wasn’t trying to weigh merits of a book vs. its screen adaptation, or the differences between a book and a movie, or whether one is inherently better than the other, or whether a film bolsters an inspiration to read its original source material … I’m trying to find out how easy readers find it to imagine characters without a frame of reference or an association with an actor when they are reading the book. I find this tendency most often occurs with fantasy and sci-fi films because they can be very abstract and hard to imagine when in literary form, but are easily digested once rendered onscreen, and thus, much easier to read and analyze once you’ve seen the film.
As an example, were I to read any of the classic stories which have served as the basis for any number of animated films from Disney over the years, then I would probably imagine the Disney portrayals of those characters in the story. If there had never been such a successful Disney version of ‘Alice in Wonderland’, then I would have a hard time making heads or tails of the literary absurdity in “Through the Looking Glass And What Alice Found There” because it would be difficult to visualize Lewis Carroll’s utter nonsense, if that makes more sense. Perhaps that’s an extreme example of what I’m talking about, as his stuff is so off-the-wall that I could never have pictured what’s in the book for myself without Disney having already pre-established the look of the story for me, so as a result I feel like my imagination is pretty dull.
One of the reasons why I like to read the book first is that I like to keep my own mental image of what the author is trying to display, instead of somebody else’s. I am, for example, glad that I have my own image of Frodo and not Elijah Wood.
If I read the book first, I often get angry, frustrated and disappointed with the movie for changing thinks and leaving stuff out. If I see the movie first, reading the book just adds to the pleasure by filling in background and fleshing out the characters (and I don’t resent the changes, because how can you resent the original?).
It depends. Most often, I see the movie first, simply because it just works out that way. I saw 2001 : A Space Odyssey a long time before reading the book. I liked the movie, but until I read the story, I didn’t “get” it. Maybe a flaw in Kubrick’s storytelling, I dunno, but the book and film really complement each other.
As a kid, I often bought the book after seeing the movie; sometimes the book was an adaption, sometimes it was the source material. From Hollywood crap like “Back to the Future” and “Stargate” to real movies based on literature, I often was inspired by a film to read the book…
I don’t think I ever preferred to see the movie first. I know the way Hollywood messes up the written word; the way that, even with an incredibly faithful rendition, an awful lot must be left out and something is invariably lost. If the work iss science fiction or spy-based, there’s a pretty good chance that the finished film will bear no resemblance whatever to its source material.
I had completely bogged down reading Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain. It was dense, confusing and I just couldn’t get into it. Then I saw the movie and it completely opened the book up for me - it flowed so much better for me after that, dunno know why.
Tom Clancy’s Patriot Games is the only book I’ve ever read that was significantly better when adapted as a movie. Worlds apart, I tell you.
Generally speaking, though, I prefer to read the book before I see the movie.
It’s arguable whether Clarke’s novel “explains” the film 2001 – Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick were two very different people with different media, storytelling styles, and agendas. It’s not that Kubrick wasn’t as good a storyteller – you can bet that he didn’t want to tell a straightforward, easy-to-interpret story. Whether or not you think that’s a good idea or a laudable goal is something else. Clarke’s book is something of a compromise. If you want to see what HE was trying to say, read his short story “The Sentinel”. Then get hold of “The Lost Worlds of 2001” and watch how is asymptotocally approached the final film version. But never got there – probably deliberately.
I don’t have a preference one way or the other. I don’t have a problem visualizing characters and settings in novels. If I do, I blame the author.
If I read the novel after the movie, it’s either because the movie raised questions (No Country for Old Men) or because the movie was so fabulous (The Lord of the Rings), I wanted to revisit it in depth, in a different medium.
I must be exactly the opposite of you on this topic. I often get frustrated within the first few minutes of a movie because they’re showing you stuff and you don’t know what it means. For instance, there might be some shots of a building, interspersed with some shots of a woman’s face. (Yeah, I’m just making something up here). Is the woman in the building? Thinking about the building? Is someone else thinking of the woman and the building? What is the significance of this?
Whereas a book has to spoon-feed you a bit. It has to build the pictures out of words, which give me a bit more to go on. Also, I admit, if things are really crawling, and I hit upon a paragraph which begins, “Under the gray sky, the wind was sweeping lightly through the…” I can skip ahead to where something’s actually happening.
So I feel like a dolt with no attention span for that.
I’m kind of wrestling with this very thing. I’m currently reading Frankenstein and I’m trying to use my own imagination for the character…very difficult when Frankenstein is such a recognizable character.
I’d much rather read the book first because I’m almost always disappointed with the movie. There have been cases for me where I’ve been inspired by the movie to read the book. Cases in point: The Green Mile and Shawshank Redemption.
I like using my own imagination for the characters. It’s interesting to see the movie maker’s take on what the character looks like…it’s usually completely different than my own (sometimes better but usually not). For me, this has a huge impact on whether I like the movie or not.
I’m one who prefers to see the movie first if possible. If the movie is good then I’ll read the book and the book always ends up better than the movie and then I fall in love with that story.
If I read a book first and then see the movie then I am almost always disappointed with the movie and my love of the story goes down a bit.
Two fer instances:
Interview with the Vampire. I was not aware of the books until I saw the movie and then I went and read a whole crap ton of Anne Rice.
His Dark Materials. I was not aware of these books until the Dope started talking about the movie that was coming out. So I decided to wait and see the movie and then if I liked it I would check out the books. I liked the movie and so now I am in the middle of the second book.
I’m saying this with my tongue in my cheek but maybe you were disappointed with this movie because it was utter crap (my opinion of course). I enjoyed the book tremendously and laughed and rolled my eyes all the way through the movie. The only redeeming factor was Kirstin Dunst as Claudia. Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt were ill-cast and, for me, ruined the movie completely.
The only movie I’ve ever loved better than the book was To Kill a Mockingbird.
Reading a book after seeing the movie version seems the ‘wrong’ way round for me. With a book, I can visualise the author’s conjurings according to my own imagination, and can then watch a movie version and see somebody else’s take.
If I watched the movie first, it would feel too ‘redundant’ to then read the book, even if they differed in the ways that works split across these media often do. It would feel too much like hard work - I’ve already ‘seen’ the characters, the settings and so on so why would I then read a book about it and try and forget or undo all of that?
I think it comes down for the most part to time - a film of two hours is a lot less of an investment than a 300 page novel. It feels like wasted time for me to read a book after seeing the film, when there are so many books I could be reading instead.
Granted, I have made exceptions. Fight Club, for example, was one instance where I read the book after seeing the film. I enjoyed both, for all their differences - i.e. I think the film did amazingly well considering the constraints of the format. I read Dick’s Androids after seeing Blade Runner, but only due to the fact that they were wildly different and I barely remembered Blade Runner in the first place.
One recent example of my preference in this matter is with Pullman’s His Dark Materials. As the release of Golden Compass drew closer, I wanted to read the books more and more as I knew that if I saw the film I likely wouldn’t ever bother picking up the book. I read the book, and enjoyed it, but have no inclination to see the film or read the other two, so perhaps it is not the best example.
Sometimes I’ll read a book before the film, sometimes its the other way around. I can’t say one is consistently better than the other. I’ve seen great films made from mediocre books (“The Godfather” is the classic example") and great writing ruined (Carl Haisens’ “Striptease” turned into Demi Moore’s “Striptease”). Both are valid - it’s nice to have images in my mind to hold as I read the book, but I can also prefer my own visuals if the movie version didn’t appeal. For instance, none of the Terry Pratchett TV movies have worked for me, and the less said about any visual representation of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” the better.
