It is said that reading fiction is more enjoyable than watching movies, but actually I could share a few evidences that it is not always like that.
David Cronenberg was one of those geniuses that I began to discover through his old works. I was still shocked by ‘The Fly’ when his new release showed up: ‘A History of Violence’. I don’t know why I dragged my parents to the multiplex theater. It was certainly not what I call a "family friendly" thing to watch, but in spite of its rawness, surprisingly turned out to be a 4 out of 5 from the three of us. Anyhow, the fact here is that my brother appeared with the comic like one year later. ‘A History of Violence’… I had no clue the film had such a tempting precedent, so I jumped on it and read it in one go. As strange as it sounds, this time Cronenberg’s job was way better… I was facing a clear case of film knocking book.
Once I was told Hitch used to base his master pieces on average novels. And that should make us think for a while. If we compare the freedom felt while reading a fiction story with the experience of watching the movie, we could say that nothing can get better than satisfying one’s own imagination. Sculpturing the features and gestures of the characters as we please is one of the wonders that literature offers us. To picture their glances and to color the world around them with our own palette is a delightful practice that transforms the reading in a nontransferable experience. But being true that if we are talking about movies, the director and his crew will take care of those matters and your creative range will decrease a lot, if we have to consider it on terms of enjoyment… your satisfaction as a viewer may be immense in front of a fine script and a faultless visual job.
The quality of a work, its honesty and capacity to transmit something crucial and genuine and its tuning with us will determine our experience of it. After all, when it comes to the arts, enjoyment, as with beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. It doesn’t matter if it is a novel, a film or a tuna can on a museum stand.
