Cinema vs. Literature: The Case of Cloud Atlas

Hey I know it's a crazy debate that is considered tedious even by the people who engage in it and incredibly dull to the vast majority of people, but to me it's a somewhat important debate – also I've always wanted to get my piece in. In my life I have watched many movies that started out as books. I even watched a series of movies pull an entire genre out of leftfield and into the mainstream (the 'teenage girls + Lord of the Rings = Twilight' formula).

I never really want to do the research. One masterful post about 90's action movies Judge Dredd and Demolition Man is the one piece of film criticism I've ever attempted (I wouldn't even call criticism that by a mile), but the fact that it came together at all is a miracle and premised heavily on my understanding of the 1990s and action movies. I would never put on airs about film. I didn't study film, I am no expert, and if I couldn't write a decent bit about it I wouldn't even dare tangle with such heady stuff. Just kidding: nothing is sacred and film deserves an honest thrashing beyond my abilities.

But so do books, which brings me to today's post, which will take all of my faculties firing at once. Books and film. Easy target. Why not the Jurassic Park series? Why not the Harry Potter series? Well, both of those movie series are premised on books written in the 90s and I don't want to overplay my hand. I want to up the ante, though, so I'm taking it up to the 2000s and the 2010s. Cloud Atlas, the novel, was published in 2004 by an English author named David Mitchell. It was a rather engaging, spirited, and creative endeavor that consisted of six stories and their mysterious interplay throughout the novel. With no one narrative, or style, it was consistently engaging to read, and the nesting of the stories (like so: 1/2/3/4/5/6/5/4/3/2/1 ), and their content lent the final conclusion an epic sense. What a book, David Mitchell. Good work.

For years I had encountered brief allusions to the book, and some people I know had read it, but nobody had recommended it to me. Then I came across a trailer for the movie version and the race was on: I had to read the book before the movie came out. I was determined to do that and then also go see the movie. Naturally it took until this very week (8 months after release in my region) for me to actually see the movie. Life interceded, but I did find the book and read it.

Between a book and the film inevitably made about it there is a chasm so wide it cannot be imagined. A book can take a year to finish but a movie only has the audience's attention so long. Therefore, any attempt made to transcribe an entire book into a movie (even if the visual medium optimally condenses meaning and collapses the long-windedness of writing into digestible, filmable scenes) would fall completely flat or be ludicrous or run for 9 hours straight. Film buffs and hardcore book worms don't even have time for that: the two mediums are a world apart.

The Fate of the Book

So much very subtle and quiet hype about the end of the bound stack of paper sheets known as 'the book'. There have been many books over the years, and I think everyone can agree that they were not always perfect, nor ever had an overwhelming reputation for improving the world. But there's a certain something to books and even if they are dying, take heart: our generation will be able to come by books cheaply for the duration of our existence, unless they begin burning bales of books.

If the global stock of books is significantly destroyed in the next twenty years, or publishing is severely repressed by economic or colluded forces, then at the very least books will have predicted that. Basic reading and communication skills will not likely be replaced, so language will continue, and the flow of ideas will merely take on another, potentially better form. Or our eyes will atrophy from an unmitigated hegemony of digital screens, flashing lights, and confused information.

Maybe there will be a tidal-wave of information in the future which will overwhelm us. Maybe it will get the better of us. We could be changed forever.

Or the book could go on well into the future, as some type of elitist symbol that nobody understands. Probably this view of the book's future is already some cliche that has been analyzed and exploited in hundreds of books. Maybe the book will suffer a renaissance in a few years, or maybe all the news sensationalism and existential dawdling will come to naught, and the book will be as ubiquitous and burdensome as ever – perhaps forever.

In the end, if it goes, the memory of the book will either be exterminated, merely forgotten, or enshrined by some freakish bibliophilia committee as the centerpoint of some futurist, knowledge-based cargo cult. And however it goes, the book will remain as at least a symbol.

But in the meantime there is all kinds of mawkishness about books and print media in general. It seems that the publication industry gets more fatalistic while the technology industry fills with empty hype. There is no real confrontation between the two industries. Largely, the recent history of the matter is that the print industry has had to accept and learn to work with tech, gadget, and electronics industries. It's not really the same as the music industry and the internet, though there are similarities.

So these publishers and maybe even some bibliophiles are very worried and the internet is very unconcerned. That's basically the gist of the story. In my mind television, the postal service, and radio are the real danger zones, and they're still around more than ten years after the internet. Writing killed or perverted most oral tradition anyway, so whatever happens at this point is fair and not unprecedented.

State of the Internet

There was a glorious time when lots of TV series were freely available on YouTube, and there weren't just nonsense links. That era peaked maybe four years ago, at this point in time. Piracy is obviously still rampant, but when you could rustle up a genuine, entire series on, at last resort, a Chinese or French video site – happier days.  Now you look around and your feet start kicking rebelliously at the leash. Unboxings, music videos, shout outs, 'viral videos': the entire goddamn world's PR department, is what this nonsense is. Oh look, some Minecraft videos, failblog videos, LPs, bro? Rants? No, YouTube is still of some definite worth.

I have been following at some distance The Young Turks' channel on YouTube; they always play a good hand at the stories they go after. Then there's the University of Nottingham's chemistry channel which is a nice blend of theory and sci-porn (mostly the former, obviously). There are also about 20 channels, each with three or four subsidiaries, which show up regularly (daily) in the top 100 - which as a rule I mistrust. Those view numbers are scary things, when you start thinking about the raw amount of time they represent. More or less, though, right?

Russia Today is always worth watching if you're in the habit of watching news and analyzing things as they are reported: I find that, between all the sources you are given as options, you get some shadowy idea of events, but very sharp impressions from the camera. That sounds in theory like a bait and switch scenario, right? I'm not trying to say anything that's just a consequential thought. Valid question I suppose.

And there are lots of niche channels that could appeal to you on YouTube and a fair bit of actually interesting or informative or pirated (good luck to the cyber detectives) material that can be found with the investment of a few minutes' thorough work.

Clearly, every wise person on earth would've thrown out their books if the internet was really the summit of civilization, so I think that book-apocalyptics stories about the internet, while dismally abundant, are still kind of a trite narrative device. So many noxious books have been printed and sold and hoarded and worshiped that, even counting the good ones, you have a general argument that a lot of paper was wasted and a lot of dirty solitary habits created. Some public habits, entire modes of thought, dependencies: you could go and talk about it.

But I recommend you read about it somewhere, instead.