The Lovely Bones

While I was watching a movie the other night, I started thinking about novels versus movies. When I thought it through, I realized that I think it’s always better to read a story rather than watch the movie because you can almost make that story your own. You can imagine it in any way that you want to rather than having it created for you. In almost every case I can think of (Harry Potter, Twilight, My Sisters Keeper, The Kite Runner) the novel is always better than the film. Why do you think that is?

Last weekend I had the chance to watch the awfully depressing movie, The Lovely Bones. It is the story of a 14 year old girl named Suzy Salmon who is murdered by her neighbour. About a year ago, I also read this book and I found that the movie was a bit of a disappointment. The movie was based mostly around how Suzy’s murderer was going to get away with the crime and the family coping with Suzy’s death. The book had a more realistic ending for the situation, was more about how Suzy’s father tries to solve her murder, and how Suzy can’t move on to a happier place because she is trying to help her father solve the mystery. In my opinion, movies almost never turn out as well as the book does. In writing you are able to make the story as long as you want and you are able to create a mental picture for the reader so that everyone’s mental image of a certain character, setting, etc., is their own. When you then create a movie out of the story, the characters are almost never how you imagined them.

While I was watching this movie, I found a lot of archetypes that I wouldn't have noticed if we weren't doing this project. At the very beginning of the movie, Suzy has a snow globe in her room with a penguin in it. She's worried that the penguin is sad because he can't get out, but her dad says to her: "He's trapped in a perfect world." This foreshadows when Suzy passes away and she is stuck in heaven (her perfect world) but there's no way out. I also noticed that when Suzy is taking pictures of her parents in front of her neighbours house and her killer steps in front of the rose bushes and ruins the picture she says: "He stepped out in front of the bushes and ruined it. He ruined a lot of things." This foreshadows that he is the one who killed her, but the dad has yet to figure that out.

In the Lovely Bones I didn’t picture the characters to look like the actors in the film and the setting was not at all how I pictured it, so in a way that can ruin a movie. I think I find it is easier to interpret and imagine when reading a story rather than watching the story in a film because in writing everything is possible. I am the kind of person who likes fictional stories, which is why I think I like to read more than watch a story in the format of a film. Everything imaginable is possible in writing, while in movies you are limited to only what is possible to be created in real life.