I was inspired by the thread below about books people would like to see as movies. Alot of my favorites would make awful movies because of the internal monologue dilemma.
Prime example: Dune. That book was interesting primarily because of how much of the story went on in the mind of the first-person narrator, even when the POV shifted. Unfortunately, that movie actually got made
Another good example is the Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan. Aside from the fact that a trilogy would be vastly insufficient, it would have to be like a dodecology…well, the internal monologues of minor characters are what actually glues the series together, without them we’d have no idea what was going on (not that we have much idea in the first place.)
Choose your genre, there are good examples there. Why is this a problem? Well, other than the very narrow “film noir” genre (or perhaps a Skakespeare adaptation), internal monologues are not a viable option in movies. Even within the genre it can often sound really bad, as in the sci-fi film noir “Blade Runner”. You could always have the characters talk aloud to themselves…but as a Days of Our Lives fan, I get enough of that as it is, and it’s the running joke of the show among fans.
Film has to be driven by either dialogue, imagery, or some combination of the two. A monologue or POV driven novel just won’t make a good movie. Since alot of the most thought-provoking novels develop character through POV scenes, this is a problem. This is part of the reason that the 90’s saw a sudden turn towards dialogue-heavy film, when they saw how well Tarantino was able to develop character through a mixture of mundane and insightful observations, and the characters talking about them instead of simply musing to themselves like we would normally do.
Hitch Hiker’s guide always struck me as something it’d be hard to do a good movie of since a lot of the humor came from descriptions and guide references. I haven’t seen the movie that’s been made, but I hear it’s not all that good.
Hitch Hiker’s guide always struck me as something it’d be hard to do a good movie of since a lot of the humor came from descriptions and guide references. I haven’t seen the movie that’s been made, but I hear it’s not all that good.
Yeah, and in the radio show, I believe that the narrator was credited as The Book, and got top billing. He read generous excerpts from The Guide, and I agree that it would be very difficult to make it into a visual medium that’s nearly as good. Yet I still think it should be made. The TV series (which I believe you are referring to) had pretty cheesy computer graphics to occupy the screen while the book was talking.
Vonnegut, “Breakfast of Champions”. The whole thing is basically Vonnegut’s internal dialogue including the description of what’s going on in the minds of the other characters, notably Kilgore Trout and Wayne (?) Hoover.
Yet they made a movie out of it anyway. And it stunk. (OTOH the movie of “Slaughterhouse Five” came out well. Just a different writing style.)
Nabokov’s Lolita. As a book, it’s a bizarre, disturbing, but brilliantly written character study of a truly twisted human being. It works so well because Humbert Humbert is completely unaware of what a revolting, horrible creature he is; it’s actually comical.
But try and turn it into a movie (even the most faithful version) and what do you have? Soft-core kiddie porn, more or less. I don’t see how it would be possible to make a good film out of it, since it’s not really the objective events that make the book interesting – it’s the protagonist’s twisted perception of them.
Winston Bongo, your first paragraph is a wonderfully succint description of the entire novel, you’ve hit it right on the head
Kubrick was smart enough to realize that he couldn’t make an adaptation of Lolita that was “faithful” to the book and still conveyed the themes of the book with that same dark irony. So he used the premise as a springboard for a movie of his own design. IMHO, this is an acceptable way to use a novel in making a film…it creates a new story. A film adaptation trying to be a direct transfer from the novel would have many difficulties retaining the spirit of the novel. (Notable exception: Harry Potter…the book was entirely event-driven, and the movie included almost every one of those events, it worked.)
