Adapting from Page to Screen
Sometimes when having watched a movie and then read a book, I can say to myself, "Ok, I see why they changed that."
Sometimes it's a case of condensing a timeline or characters so as to make something easier to follow. Sometimes it's making characters older, younger, or changing something about their looks or personality to make them either more believable or more accessible to a broader audience. Sometimes it's adding "drama" (a problem that wasn't there in the original version to up the tension) or changing or leaving out something that the characters did to make them more relatable or sympathetic.
You may remember from my Ivey Ink Facebook post of July 17 that I recently watched In the Heart of the Sea. This is a movie based off a book that was written about a historical whaling ship disaster. The book was based on the accounts of several survivors of the Essex (a whaling ship); their stories also were a big influence on Herman Melville writing Moby Dick.
I enjoyed the film, and I found the book fascinating as well. However, upon reading the book, there were several very obvious, "wow, I see why they changed this for the movie" details. First of all, without some changes just for sake of narrative and the flow of plot structure, it would simply be a documentary that no one would watch unless they were interested in 19th century whaling and shipwrecks.
One of the major changes was the dynamic between First Mate Chase and Captain Pollard. In the film, Chase and Pollard do not get along, as Chase feels he was passed over for the position of captain simply because Pollard's father is a captain and one of the owners of the whaling company. In real life, Chase was several years younger than Pollard and they had been working their way up the ranks together for the last four years; Pollard had been First Mate previously and prior to that had been Second Mate, while Chase had previously been Second Mate and prior to that Harpooner. But which movie would you rather see:
"An orphaned farm boy* (played by the studly Chris Hemsworth) has worked hard to prove himself to The Man as capable sailor and has been promised a captaincy. However, at the last minute, he is passed over for promotion in favor of the boss's son (played by the brooding Benjamin Walker). Now they must struggle to scratch out a living from the violent sea with the forces of nature stacked against them."
or
"A tall 22-year-old and his pudgy@@ 28-year-old coworker of four years receive promotions and head out to hunt whales."
*And by the way Chase's father was still alive, and living in an expensive house in town, at the time of the voyage.
@@Yes, Pollard is almost consistanly referred to as "portly" in the book. (Maybe this is repeatedly pointed out to help explain why he was one of the few who survived. He had more excess weight that could be lost without major inconvenience.)
However, like I said, injecting some drama for sake of narrative is understandable. Another major change (or, rather, omission) is even more understandable.
I don't know what you know about whaling. I didn't know a lot before I read this book. The movie shows a whale being hunted and killed (and only one hunt is shown to completion in the film, when there would have been HUNDREDS during the actual voyage of the Essex). It shows a couple brief scenes to get the point accross - a whale being harpooned, a spray of blood landing on the faces of the whalers as the whale dies (we do NOT see the blood actually spraying out of the whale itself), and a few short shots of the whale being butchered. We are also treated to a scene of the cabin boy being lowered into a hole in the whale's head to scoop out the last of the oil. He serves as something of a bridge between the characters and the audience, as his obvious horror and disgust at this task is more along the lines of what people who grew up learning about environmentalism and animal rights would feel.
These scenes in the movie really gloss over the realities of whaling that are gone into in more depth in the book.
As I mentioned above, a whaling voyage that lasted two years (as most of them did) and returned to port with 1,500-3,000 casks of whale oil would have had to kill hundreds of whales to fill their quota. I had been under the impression that, like the plucky homesteader of a slightly later period, the whalers used all of the animal - sell the bones and teeth for furniture and jewelry, eat and/or salt down the meat to sell, do...I dunno, something with the skin. No. The oil and blubber are the only parts of the whale used and the rest is DUMPED INTO THE OCEAN. The book describes the Pacific as being just a slick of oil, blood, and decomposing whale during a large part of the 19th century.
From a contemporary perspective, it's disturbing. What makes it even more jarring is that in the book the scene of the full hunt and butchery of the whale comes either immediately before or immediately after a scene in which the sailors complain to the captain about their small portions of rationed salt beef and salt pork. You people are throwing away dozens of tons of meat every few days and you don't think to keep any of this to augment your rations?
What makes it even worse than that, though, is that on their way to the whaling grounds of the Pacific the ship stops at the Galapagos islands so that they can hunt tortoises to bring on the voyage as food. The tortoises were preferred to any other live source of meat because their metabolisms were so slow that the crew didn't have to feed them. The ship takes on dozens, possibly hundreds, of tortoises, fully intending to just leave them in the hold and not give them food or water. Ever. Until it's time to kill and eat them. The cabin boy's memoir reflects his misgivings about the assumption that just just because the tortoises didn't NEED to eat didn't mean that they SHOULDN'T, as he claims that every time he went down into the hold he saw them licking things.
If these weren't bad enough crimes against nature, one of the crew members set one of the Galapagos islands on fire. As a prank.
It's scenes like these that make it extremely difficult to think anything other than "I'm glad most of you died miserable deaths of starvation adrfit at sea - you're horrible people!" As I said, sometimes you have to change things in a story to make the characters relatable on screen. Even without these scenes shown in the movie, it's hard not to root for the whale when he attacks the Essex after the whalers harpoon another whale in his pod.
But, as my sister is fond of saying, "why ruin a perfectly good story with something like facts?"
