Is the book always better than the movie?

Blazing Reader,

In Steven Pressfield's article on how film adaptations of novels destroy the writer's voice, he did add this caveat which I reluctantly agree with:

"By definition, you lose the writer's voice when you make a movie of a book. We’re no longer reading the writer’s words on paper and hearing them in our head, we’re looking at images on film. It’s a whole different vocabulary. The filmmaker can try using a voiceover, but that rarely succeeds. The one act that does work is when the director’s voice is as strong as the writer’s, as [Robert] Mulligan’s was with To Kill a Mockingbird, in which his filmic voice equaled or even surpassed Harper Lee’s voice as the novelist."

While I still feel the novel's running first-person point-of-view narrative worked better, the movie was a masterpiece that overcame the limitations of its medium.

For more on why I feel To Kill a Mockingbird was such a great novel (and movie!) check out my short video on "The Power of Harper Lee" at: https://x.com/JohnMan54880915/status/1852452422855037341

Stay sane and read great books (and watch great movies),

John C. A. Manley is the author of Much Ado About Corona: A Dystopian Love Story, the forthcoming All The Humans Are Sleeping and other works of speculative fiction. Get free samples of his stories by becoming a Blazing Pine Cone email subscriber at: https://blazingpinecone.com/subscribe/