Sink and Swim

How prose has changed since movies came

Parting Ways

In ‘the Movie Effect’ I noted the broad ways that films had changed how written tales are made these days. Here I want to look more closely at two specific traits of modern fiction and see how they too come from the movie effect.

When a new form of talespinning comes on, the audience is pulled in two directions. Some will like both the old form and the new, some will like one form more than the other. Some will leave the old form for the new. Some will disdain the new form and stick to the old.

The end of this splits the old audience. If we then look at the new audience for the old form after the split, we find it has a new face. It’s not only that the audience for written fiction shrank after film, then radio, then television came on the scene. Because the people who stopped reading in favor of movies or TV were of a certain bent, with certain tastes, the audience who stayed with written tales changed in kind as well as in size.

Simply put, the written tales that appealed to those who now watch movies instead, will no longer sell as well as they did before movies came along. And since the people who read these days no longer contain those who now watch movies, today’s reading public is made up of those who don’t want to watch movies.

In the pictorial arts, a like shift came in the 19th century when photography grew popular, and painting changed. The viewers who preferred the skill of representational reproduction moved to photographs; those who stuck to paintings did so because they liked the interpretation of the artist, and his colors and those aspects of his painting that did not simply reproduce what the artist saw in scrupulous craft and detail.

Different Content

One way that movies sifted through the readers of prose lay in the choice of subject matter. Some types of tales are more suited to motion pictures. It is hard for prose to match film’s beauty of realistic images, or its ability to capture speed or action. But some subjects are too costly for movies to achieve, such as science fiction and the vistas of strange and alien worlds. And the camera brings to bear a great, dead weight of realism, which makes realistic and naturalistic subjects more potent in movies, while fantasy and whimsy drift always just out of the camera’s reach to capture them without killing them.

Movies also sought to appeal to great mass audiences in order to regain the high costs of film production and distribution. Tales that appeal to a smaller audience, including regional, ethnic, cultural niches, found a better fit with prose, as the movies produced only a few of them at best.

The collaborative nature of most filmmaking also means that movies are weak in giving audiences a particular artist’s style and personal interests and views. Audiences who seek out such things do not find them in movies, and so stick to prose.

Deep Inside

Movies also find it hard to show the inner soul. Movies are so concrete and external by nature, that they can reach inside a character’s heart only when they fall back on a series of stylistic tricks which, since they fight against the nature of the film media, can only succeed in part.

Prose talespinning, on the other hand, found the experiments of the stream-of-consciousness stylists a ready model for subjective talesmanship. This as if falls out, suits well those who stick to written tales. For ‘book worms’ tend to be inward-looking and reflective themselves, with rich inner lives. Thus they like well those tales and characters that mirror the trait. And even in subjects that both prose and movies deal in, prose found that it could gain a natural edge when it stressed the inner reactions of its characters to the outer events they experienced.

I think this explains a lot of the preference now of subjective tales in prose, where the narrator is suppressed, and all scenes are written from the point of view of someone in them.

The reader is invited to sink into the tale, immerse himself deep inside it, and swim about as though the tale becomes a waking dream, an alternate reality for his alternate persona.

This is a strong trend in written talespinning today, and most writers and readers, and it seems all editors, have chosen to follow it.

The talesman who fights this trend thus condemns himself to a smaller readership, unless he manages somehow to distinguish his work by this very difference, and vault into the front ranks by his talent and showmanship. But this is long odds for all of us.

Soon enough computer graphics capabilities will erase the old problems that movies had in shooting both realistic alien worlds, and those scenes and tales once held too expensive to produce. So it seems likely that prose fiction will hold on to but the two advantages, in appealing to small niches of the audience than movies care to woo, and in delving deep inside the hearts and minds of its characters.

(Composed with pen on paper Wednesday, March 12, 2008)