From Page to Screen: The Issue of Fidelity

When film adaptations offer something new, apparently that makes them a threat to their literary origins?

Jeannette Walls' bestselling memoir The Glass Castle, published in 2005, details the dysfunctional yet vibrant upbringing of her and her siblings. The book highlights Walls' incredible resilience in the face of adversity as well as her father's pursuit of redemption while struggling with alcoholism. The book was later adapted into a 2017 film which received mixed reviews.

I don’t think I’d ever clicked “Buy” on iTunes so impulsively, but after spending the past few weeks with my gaze glued to the pages of Jeannette Walls’ gripping memoir, The Glass Castle, I was certain this was the right choice. 

After all, I knew Walls intimately—I had followed the course of her unconventional, oftentimes turbulent upbringing at the hands of free-spirited, unreliable parents, and observed as she grew into the resilient, passionate storyteller she is today—I simply had to see her life story play out before my own eyes.

As I heard the unmistakable voice of Woody Harrelson, narrating as Jeannette’s father in a distinct southern twang, paired with the sweeping visuals of the American West, I knew then that I was in for a cinematic treat…so you can imagine my confusion the next day when I looked up audience reviews.

Long have angry mobs of book lovers taken to the internet, ready to burn an “unworthy” film adaptation at the stake for not doing the original masterpiece justice. The reason? Not the acting, not the cinematography, not even the visual effects.

The consensus seems to be that a good adaptation is defined by how closely it sticks to the source material. 

A recent survey conducted by SuperSummary, an online study guide for fiction and nonfiction books, asked 2030 people from ages 23 to 62 for their input on novels that had been turned into movies or TV shows.

82% of those surveyed agreed that “screen adaptations help books come to life” while 46% argued that film adaptations “would never be as good as the book.”

I couldn’t understand it. Why do audiences constantly have to make it a matter of “fidelity” to the original? Why can’t a film be good in its own right? 

According to Julian Hanich, an associate professor of film studies at the University of Groningen, this constant urge to compare film to book stems from the wider behavioural concept of  “mineness” —in short, the sense of ownership.

“Readers to whom a specific illusion-creating novel is important, and who have grown fond of it, have a tendency to want the film to look (and sound) as they imagine the world of the text to be,” states Hanich in his journal article, Great Expectations: Cinematic Adaptations and the Reader’s Disappointment.

As a result, seeing an on-screen adaptation of a story they know and love can feel threatening to the viewer, as they are essentially being confronted with another concretization of that same story.

In the case of the 2017 adaptation of The Glass Castle, fans of Walls’ memoir condemned the film as a sugar-coated reinvention of the truth which, in their opinion, was supposed to be about the author’s sufferings and sense of hopelessness throughout the novel. 

Funnily enough though, after attending a screening of The Glass Castle herself, Jeannette Walls had this to say about the experience, “I was overjoyed. They didn’t gloss over the weird, ugly stuff, but they also didn’t ignore the joy….It was raw –there was pain and there was joy and there was agony. There was hurt, and there was redemption… There’s all of those things—it’s life.”

Like most adaptations, this film undoubtedly altered some details, even omitting certain moments altogether, but there’s a reason for this.

Several factors come into play when thinking about film as a form of storytelling. For instance it’s important to consider that for the sake of timing, most adaptations condense the stories of their literary counterparts, otherwise you might be sitting in that theatre for 20+ hours.

Maybe you’ll recall instances where you were so enraged or disturbed by what you read that you had to put down the book and take a second to process your emotions. Or what about those dull, “in-between” moments where you skimmed over the text until something more interesting occurred? Would you really like to see that translated onto the screen?

Of course, it is completely within a viewer’s right to make criticisms; they’re just expressing their opinions after all. And they’re right, a film can go too far with its use of artistic freedom so that it bears virtually no connection to the source material. 

I would just point out that as story lovers, the least we can do is try to remain open minded and not judge a film based on what we think it should be. Otherwise, we’re really just setting ourselves up to be disappointed.

It’s worth saying that one should judge an adaptation by its own merits and remember that in the end, what matters most is that a good story is presented to us, just as the author intended. And even then, it’s not like the book is going anywhere.