Treating Movies as Novels

Watch more Movies.

Everybody always says, read more books.

But I’ve never heard anyone say watch more movies.

I use reading to give myself a break from working on computers all day. But there are times where the book doesn’t work for me. Where the author’s best efforts at spinning a tale and weaving lessons through the vanilla-colored pages falls short.

One time, I was reading “The One Thing” by Gary W. Keller.

Finished it in one day because I threw it out the window. It said nothing new to me. It was a copy-pasted blog post. It could’ve been an email.

Film is a more flexible medium than written word.

We process visuals 60,000 times faster than words.

This creates a medium for providing layers of storytelling and meaning in each frame from the outfits to the setting to the score to the word choices to the nuances on an actor’s face. Everything comes together to form a cohesive narrative. Movies live by the guideline of show don’t tell.

All these levels form a unified story providing more depth and understanding than a book with 10pt black ink font and few images can.

The most powerful, pervasive, and persistent ideas are encoded in story. –Tommy Dixon

Both books and films do this.

They encode their lessons in story. But film has the advantage of embedding storytelling elements to each level to add more nuance. We don’t learn lessons if they’re spoon-fed to us in a list, but if we get a story to guide us and serve as an example for us to follow.

Not all movies are good, similar to books. But there are movies, like books, which strike the right emotional chord for you & you never forget.

The most recent example was the book American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kal Bird & the movie Oppenheimer (2023) by Christopher Nolan.

In the book, I gleaned lessons from Oppenheimer’s life. Leadership style. How he tackled problems. His moral scruples with the atomic program during and after. The book was in-depth and gripping, weaving a tale from Oppenheimer’s insane early days of poisoning an apple, dropping luggage on people’s heads, and bouts of hysteria to a polymathic physicist with ocean blue eyes who became the great salesman of science.

From the odyssey the audiobook took me on, I understood the importance of Oppenheimer, his role in history, and his mental state throughout the Manhattan Program.

But there was 1 scene where the movie surpassed the book.

Oppenheimer has to address the people at Los Alamos about how the bomb obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

We experience everything from his perspective. He’s proud but simmering under the surface is a maelstrom of emotions. It looks like he’s speaking in one breath. Each break in his speech emphasized the turmoil like he needs to muster the energy to say the next words. We don’t hear the cheering crowd, but instead hear the awkward creaking of wooden benches as the crowd stands and waves the U.S flag. Oppenheimer half-smiles as they cheer unsure whether he believes what he’s saying.

But the silence is broken by a blood curdling scream.

We don’t see who screamed. Oppenheimer’s eyes scan the crowd. Steel gray radioactive ash falls from the ceiling and a bright flash of an atomic explosion surrounds Oppenheimer. We see the peeled skin off a woman’s face flail in the wind from the shook wave. The blast of reality hits us and Oppenheimer as he’s walking through the crowd after finishing his speech. People pat him on the back, but he looks exhausted from his vision. He takes one step forward until crunch. He looks down and sees himself ankle deep in a charred body beyond recognition. He looks at the crowd. A few people are crying. A few laughed. Most were silent.

In reality, we can’t get into Oppenheimer’s mind and see the storm. An associate recalled running into Oppenheimer on his way to work. He heard him repeat again and again of the Japanese victims: “Those poor little people, those poor little people.”

If the book helped me understand Oppenheimer’s conflict, the movie immersed me in it.

Books are sketches of an author’s imagination. Movies are paintings.

Before writing stories, we spoke and reenacted them.

Adding vitality to ancient tales performed through full-body expression. Books broke the shackles of geography and allowed us to share our stories with anyone, but we lost the ability of vitality in our expression. Written word limited us to the deftness of our mind and the sharpness of our pen. Our tonal inflections, our gesticulating arms, and wide eyes were lost in written word. Try conveying sarcasm over text.

Some see film as an antagonist to books.

An enemy rising and pulling our attention spans away from the wisdom carved in the pages. But film is a natural extension of human storytelling. It extracted the human spirit from written word by providing avenues of expression from acting to design to dialogue.

We watch movies to understand the world an author’s built. To see beyond the written words and see the world through their eyes.

As filmmakers, we see the written word and breathe meaning into it.

Film isn’t an enemy to books. It’s a celebration of an eternal truth every storyteller knows.

Sitting around the fire, enraptured by the people around us, we shared stories.