Tom Wolfe on what novels do better than movies
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Journalist and novElIst Tom Wolfe (1930-2018)
A few weeks ago, while waiting on my ancient laptop to do something, I pulled down Tom Wolfe’s essay collection Hooking Up and read one of his most famous and controversial pieces, “My Three Stooges.” The essay is one part a defense of his technique, especially as used in his novel A Man in Full, and one part a strike back against a gang of literary establishment figures who had led the charge against the novel, Norman Mailer, John Updike, and John Irving. I’m not going to relitigate that controversy (you can watch Wolfe talk about the novel and the controversy here), and Wolfe himself uses the kerfuffle with his literary elite Larry, Curly, and Moe as a jumping off point to describe the poor state of the novel in late 20th century America and what he sees as the solution.
Near the end Wolfe includes a striking passage on the strengths of different media in telling stories, and outlines his argument for the superiority of the novel over films as a storytelling medium. I love both books and movies and am keenly aware of both media’s limitations, so I was especially interested in what Wolfe had to say.
First, Wolfe explains the four specific devices “that give the naturalistic novel its ‘gripping,’ ‘absorbing’ quality.” The four devices are:
the author’s construction of the story as a series of scenes;
realistic dialogue, especially as a means to reveal character;
interior point of view, that is, “putting the reader inside the head of a character and having him view the scene through his eyes,” commonly achieved either through direct first-person narration or third person limited omniscience;
and, finally—and certainly the most Wolfean device of the four—what Wolfe calls “status details,” the myriad “cues that tell people how they rank in the human pecking order, how they are doing in the struggle to maintain or improve their position in life or in an immediate situation, . . . the entire complex of signals that tell the human beast whether it is succeeding or failing and has or hasn’t warded off that enemy of happiness that is more powerful than death: humiliation.”
With these four narrative devices in mind, Wolfe compares the effectiveness of the novel as a medium and the film as a medium:
In using the first two of these devices, scene-by-scene construction and dialogue, movies have an obvious advantage; we actually see the scenes and hear the words. But when it comes to putting the viewer inside the head of a character or making him aware of life’s complex array of status details, the movies have been stymied. In attempting to create the interior point of view, they have tried everything, from the use of a voice-over that speaks the character’s thoughts, to subtitles that write them out, to the aside, in which the actor turns toward the camera in the midst of a scene and simply says what he’s thinking. They have tried putting the camera on the shoulder of the actor (Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend), so that the audience sees him only when he looks in the mirror, and having him speak his thoughts in voice-over. But nothing works; nothing in all the motion-picture arts can put you inside the head, the skin, the central nervous system of another human being the way a realistic novel can. The movies are not much better with status details. When it comes time to deal with social gradations, they are immediately reduced to gross effects likely to lapse into caricature at any moment; the house that is too grand or too dreadful, the accent that is too snobbish or too crude.
Which brings us to another major shortcoming of movies as a technology: they have a hard time explaining . . . anything. They are a time-driven medium compelled by their very nature to produce a constant flow of images. Three movies have been made from things I’ve written, and in each case I was struck by how helpless perfectly talented people were when it came time to explain . . . anything . . . in the midst of that vital flow, whether it be the mechanics and aerodynamics of a rocket-assisted airplane or the ins and outs of racial politics in the Bronx. When a moviegoer comes away saying, “It wasn’t nearly as good as the novel,” it is almost always because the movie failed in those three areas: failed to make him feel that he was inside the minds of the characters, failed to make him comprehend and feel the status pressures the novel had dealt with, failed to explain that and other complex matters the book had been able to illuminate without a moment’s sacrifice of action or suspense. Why is it that movie versions of Anna Karenina are invariably disappointing? After all, Tolstoy put enough action, suspense, and melodrama into Anna Karenina . . . for ten movies.
For a big splash of icewater in the face on Wolfe’s last point, about the difficulty of visual media to explain, read Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death. I think Wolfe is expressing the same concern about the transition from a culture shaped by print to a culture shaped by images that animates Postman’s book.
Allowing for Wolfe’s characteristic overstatement, Wolfe is onto something when he cites the “constant flow of images” necessary to narrative momentum in a movie as a “major shortcoming.” (Postman makes similar arguments about TV news and other “educational” visual media, which can’t hold still without boring the audience.) Novels can pause, can draw out even a moment—sometimes for pages and pages—and give us space to process things characters notice. A novel can, I think, more accurately recreate the flow not of events but the flow of perception and thought. Films, by the nature of the medium, have a harder time doing that.
I happen to be reading Vindolanda, a novel by historian Adrian Goldsworthy that does all of these things exceptionally well. The novel takes place in Roman Britain during the reign of Trajan and concerns the danger of life on the frontier of the Empire. I’d love to see it as a movie—but even as I read I have puzzled over how a movie could possibly convey the delicate, carefully managed interplay of military politics, rank, ethnicity, and especially language that creates so much of the drama of each scene of Goldsworthy’s book.
Which, of course, is why adaptations of books for film are exactly that—adaptations.
