Why is the Book Always Better than the Movie?

I recently watched the Netflix multi-episode adaptation of All the Light We Cannot See, which is a Pulitzer Prize–winning novel by Anthony Doerr about a blind French girl and a German soldier whose lives intertwine across the ether before finally colliding as the Americans arrive to liberate France in World War II. Amazon tells me I bought the Kindle version of the book in December 2014, and I recall how I could not put it down. Literally, I call it “reading to forsake your family,” and I have a vivid memory of my husband being out of town and me telling my teen children to figure out dinner for themselves because I could not tear myself away from this story. I remember the chair I sat in. I remember how it made me feel. I remember inhabiting the body of Marie-Laure LeBlanc, as Doerr strips the reader of sight to experience the war-torn world through her four other senses. Here is how he introduces her: “Marie-Laure LeBlanc stands alone in her bedroom smelling a leaflet she cannot read. Sirens wail.” Brilliant. I’m there.

The television adaptation is good, and if you will not read the book, watch the show. But it reminded me of something I’ve said and heard many times: the book is always better than the movie.

I’m not looking down my nose at people who watch stories instead of reading books, because that would be hypocritical. I love movies. I love television. I’m not here to debate whether books are superior to television or movies, because they are both entertaining and have their place, and I confess I don’t always read the book before I watch the movie. But there is no instance when I have read the book that I find the movie to be better. Directors hand the story to you on a silver platter, which is great, but there is something lost. I’ve been marinating on this ever since I finished the miniseries, and I’ve come up with a few key reasons a book is better.

Immersion into the Story

You might think that movies might have the edge here, but I find they don’t. A written story requires a commitment that movies don’t. The average word count for a fiction book is around 95,000 words, depending on genre, and the average person reads 260 words per minute (Brysbaert, 2019). This computes to an average of at least six hours of time invested to read a book. Movies ask for around two hours. (All the Light We Cannot See is around eleven hours of reading condensed into four approximately one hour episodes.) The time authors take to develop characters, telling you their backstories and communicating their thoughts and feelings and idiosyncrasies, immerses you in a story in ways a movie cannot.

Movies can’t put you inside the head of characters like books can because they are unable tell you what a character is thinking or feeling. Some actors are brilliant at conveying emotion through their face and movements, but not even an Oscar award–winner can reveal a character’s thoughts without a cumbersome voiceover or flashback. In books, authors seamlessly transport you from thoughts to dialogue to action and back again. Here is an example from All the Light We Cannot See:

What is blindness? Where there should be a wall, her hands find nothing. Where there should be nothing, a table leg gouges her shin. Cars growl in the streets; leaves whisper in the sky; blood rustles through her inner ears. In the stairwell, in the kitchen, even beside her bed, grown-up voices speak of despair.

“Poor child.”

Here we sense Marie’s inner frustration and how she experiences the world as a newly blind child. The actress who plays Marie in the miniseries is legally blind herself, and does a wonderful job with the part, but even she cannot take us inside Marie’s head the way Doerr does. She could grit her teeth, or voice her frustration in a movie, but it’s not the same. Doerr describes what she is hearing with words that have imagery and feeling. In the movie, all poor Marie can do is turn her ear like the Bionic Woman while we hear the sound. (Shout out to anyone over fifty!)

Books also control when and what you see, hear, and feel, but movies must fill the background. Even the extras must do something, so choices are made. Do they look sad, anxious, mad, annoyed? Are they rubbing their hands and stomping their feet from the cold? In a book, you get action clues along with dialogue to tell what and how another character is doing or feeling, but movies can’t have the characters stand by and do nothing until they are called upon. Books can. Other characters are out of sight, out of mind in a book. In a movie, they are always in view.

The Element of Surprise

Image by wayhomestudio on Freepik

I’m not talking about a surprise like people jumping from out behind the door because it’s your birthday, or an axe murderer leaping out from behind the bushes. Movies are great at jump scares, but this is no comparison to a long-simmering sudden reveal in a book. It only takes one sentence or a few seconds to change everything. “It was all a dream.” Boom. “I turned the corner and found him dead.” Boom. “Everything I had been told was a lie.” Boom. There is no background music to alert you it’s coming.

A cliffhanger at the end of a chapter will keep you reading into the night—the Renaissance precursor to a binge watch. Once again, it is the investment of time and story that makes the difference here. If, by page 250, you believe you know someone because of everything you’ve been told, the first sentence on page 251 can catch you completely off guard if it is unexpected.

It’s hard for movies not to give more clues, because the actor playing another part knows they are the bad guy, or the camera zooms in on his fingers, which are raw from grave digging, or creepy music plays when he comes around. It’s kind of like an episode of “Murder She Wrote” or “Law and Order,” where we guess the bad guy right out of the block. Some actors just look like the bad guy from the start. If we see Willem Dafoe or Christoph Waltz or Christopher Walken or Kevin Spacey or the cop guy from Terminator (Robert Patrick), we're thinking “don’t trust him, he’s the bad guy.” We're usually right.

Books create characters in your mind you’ve never imagined before, who do things that shock you and make your mouth snap open in the most delightful way. The floor can drop out in a book and it becomes a completely different story. Words can turn a plot on a dime, with just a few keystrokes. Writers can plant suspicion with one well-placed adjective, i.e. “shifty,” “nervous,” “fidgety.” Or a book can be a deliciously slow burn to a cathartic ending you saw coming that still jolts you deep inside. Authors aim to surprise their readers, and a good book always succeeds at catching the reader off guard in ways a movie cannot.

The Power of Words

Movies don’t do metaphors, and they can’t capture the elusive beauty of the written word. Don’t believe me? Here are some examples:

“Your hand touching mine. This is how galaxies collide.”

— Sanober Khan

“He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“You are sunlight through a window, which I stand in, warmed.”

— Jessie Burton, The Miniaturist

“Memories cartwheel out of her head & tumble across the floor.”

— Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“[W]hen I tell her what I’m thinking and she tells me what she’s thinking, our each ideas jumping into our other’s head, like coloring blue crayon on top of yellow that makes green.”

― Emma Donoghue, Room

“That Sunday, clouds spilled down from the sky and swamped the streets with a hot mist that made the thermometers on the walls perspire.”

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, Shadow of the Wind

“She wasn’t doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.”

— J. D. Salinger, “A Girl I Knew”

“Sometimes I can feel my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded; not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night.”

— Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

Enough said. And never enough said.

The Transportation of Imagination

Words paint pictures in the mind that eyes can never see. Imagination transports us to other worlds to spend time with people we will never meet. Movie and television adaptations of books have their own beauty, but they can't capture the entirety of what the words convey. They are merely echoes of the feels a book makes you feel, or the thoughts a book makes you think.

Here is a quick visual illustration of one of the many limitations of movies: casting.

Rue from "The Hunger Games"

“She has bright, dark eyes and satiny brown skin and stands tilted up on her toes with arms slightly extended to her sides, as if ready to take wing at the slightest sound.”

— Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games

Elrond from "Lord of the Rings"

“The face of Elrond was ageless, neither old nor young, though in it was written the memory of many things both glad and sorrowful. His hair was dark as the shadows of twilight, and upon it was set a circlet of silver; his eyes were grey as a clear evening, and in them was a light like the light of stars.” J. R. R. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

Bagheera from "The Jungle Book"

“It was Bagheera the Black Panther, inky black all over, but with the panther markings showing up in certain lights like the pattern of watered silk. Everybody knew Bagheera, and nobody cared to cross his path, for he was as cunning as Tabaqui, as bold as the wild buffalo, and as reckless as the wounded elephant. But he had a voice as soft as wild honey dripping from a tree, and a skin softer than down.” — Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book

These actors did a wonderful job in the movies, and Disney's animators did their best, but they can’t capture the wholeness and depth of characters the way a fusion of words and imagination can. Imagination is “the act or power of forming a mental image of something not present to the senses or never before wholly perceived in reality.” (Merriam-Webster) Movies are bound by the realities of vision and sound, and though they artfully use skilled actors and powerful moving pictures and soaring soundtracks, they can’t come close to the power of our imagination.

I’m still going to watch movies, and I won’t always read the book before I see it interpreted on screen. If you’re not a reader, by all means, get the next closest method of capturing a great story and watch the movie or miniseries. But just know this: the book is always better.

No one can sum it up like Hemingway: “All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.”

Amen.