Are movies and books competitors?

I'm a book geek, no doubt about it. I love learning new things and getting new points. Often they come from books. There's nothing wrong with that. It's just that I have started to develop this quality common to many book enthusiasts: I criticize movies and TV, and sometimes my arguments rest on a level of "I think most of it is just crap." Even I know that's not an argument, that's stupidity! All this got me thinking that maybe I just don't get it right. I've always felt that books and movies are somehow each others' competitors or replacements. Are they?

If we stick to fiction for a while, a book is a story with the structure attached, but the details missing. So, one ends up filling in the details and picturing the landscapes on the go. This makes it easier (at least for me) to mentally transport myself into the story and hop into a character's shoes. That way, I learn better and can learn easier to the emotions of a character. Due to the relative freedom of imagination in visualizing the book, I can always imagine myself into the story.

With movies, the situation is quite different. What's written in the script is played on the screen, and there's no way of denying that the story is situated in the Rocky Mountains, if that's what one sees on the screen. I have to enjoy a movie as it is, whereas a book I can enjoy more just as an idea creator.

That was the familiar part, me displaying movies as somehow "worse" than books. I shall now dive into the part how they are also "better".

I've been to many movies, which I've enjoyed thoroughly. The best ones have been always been able to create a wave of emotion at some point. I even remember crying, or at least almost, in some movies. The wave of emotion is something I've never been able to achieve with books. Books can be exciting, to the point that I spend a night reading instead of sleeping. But at best, they stimulate my intellectual brain parts.

Also, not many books make me laugh like a maniac. That's why I love comedy so much. A good episode of the Simpsons is really all I need to get over a bad day. It would be almost comedy just to video me watching the episode alone, laughing like I'm crazy. How often does that happen with books? Quite rarely. So it's not just about the deep messages. Hear what Mike Royko said:

“I never went to a John Wayne movie to find a philosophy to live by or to absorb a profound message. I went for the simple pleasure of spending a couple of hours seeing the bad guys lose.”

All in all, I guess I have to admit that these two forms of entertainment are not from the same sphere. Both tell stories but with a different focus. And they both have their uses. Seems like reality bested my literature-biased sense once again. Maybe, one day, I'll write a book about it!

Rediscovering the joys of literature

Halfway through my present university education, I've noticed a worrying side effect of my education. I've lost a lot of my literary sense. Powering through thousands of pages of course books has taught me to try to remember the main factual content right away. Skimming the pages of management books requires a good sense of what the key content is, at least if one wants to save a lot of effort in the learning process. This is a useful skill, especially when reading other factual texts. It never hurts to discern the main arguments of a writer right away, and skipping - or rather skim-reading - the extra stuff certainly is a valuable timesaver.

The problem is, I seem to have lost the sense how to read more emotional literature. Well, serious literature, at any rate. I can still pick up any thriller and read it with the same ease as ever before, but with the more heavy novels I'm in trouble. These books owe their effects to a process of identification and affection with the characters and/or situations. The point of such a book is to make one feel, and that feeling then provokes thinking. Trying to see behind the story while reading results in nothing sensible, since one needs to read the story first and think about it afterward. Trying to do these simultaneously makes no sense, since the story is a whole not reducible to its parts. The same thing is with movies, the scenes are part of a story, and in a good movie few scenes would make that much of an impact on their own. At the moment, with my course book reading style I get stuck, trying to see the idea behind some character way too early. It's as sane as trying to analyze the motives and desires of a person you've just met and hardly even know at all.

The books of this limbo world of sorts are not everywhere. Books, which are very literary, yet have a lot to say. This includes some obvious works in philosophy, like Nietzsche, but also a lot of classics. Not the kind of books to pick up amidst a tight schedule and stress. Exactly the kind of books I've previously avoided and am only now filling my shelves with. I guess that is why I've managed to avoid noticing this obvious lack for so long.

Luckily, now I have a lot of time to read, and besides a share of factual literature I'll pinch in pieces of the aforementioned genre. According to my high school Finnish and literature teacher, one can never go wrong with classics. Time to see if she was right!