Everything is Something Else: Thoughts Sparked by The ‘Parasite’ Graphic Novel

There’s a Parasite graphic novel now. As far as the recycling of popular material, it’s as good a treatment as we can hope for when it comes to the modern masterpiece that is Parasite. Rather than an adaptation, it’s built out of Bong Joon-ho’s storyboards for the film, which, as long as people want to cash in on the property, this is a way to do it with some artistic integrity in a way that supplements and deepens our understanding of the film.

I’m not going to do a full take on this graphic novel partly because to do so would be to simply rehash my thoughts on the film.I wrote at the time I saw Parasite that the work of Bong Joon-ho “exhibit[s] a quietly mad poetics — like David Cronenberg but without men turning into human-fly hybrids—daring you to locate the insanity hidden at their center, an insanity that usually pertains to unequal socioeconomic relationships.” Bong’s work as a whole speaks in a register of waking unconsciousness, and Parasite specifically jars the viewer into a subtly altered state, even if that altered state may or may not be reality.

Most mainstream adaptations have a distinct quality of redundancy. In this way, the worst adaptations are those which hew particularly close to the source material. For example, I read The Hunger Games trilogy, which was fine, not by any means by particular cup of tea, but entertaining enough to sustain my attention through three books. The movies simply retold that story, but worse. They weren’t strong films and they did not contribute much of anything to my overall understanding of Suzanne Collins’ story. It’s just a way to sell The Hunger Games a second time.

Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is a much better adaption. A relative of mine, a Stephen King superfan, loves to complain about its deviations from the book, but we saw what happened when adapters got closer in the abysmal 1997 mini-series. Kubrick’s unique take on Stephen King changes what needs to be changed and serves as a supplement, an addendum, an extension, rather than a redundancy. Contrary to the kneejerk elitist mantra that “the book was better”, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is a better movie than Stephen King’s The Shining was a book.

When we allow ourselves to see the relationship between books and movies as more than a downhill book-to-movie pipeline — in which books are printed with eyes on their prospective adaptations, which are then released with eyes on selling the (better, they invariably say) book all over again — we can really look at what it means to adapt an existing work to another medium.

Notice, for instance, that whenever a movie is based on a book, that fact makes itself clear in the opening credits, usually taking a high billing near the screenplay, producer, and director credit. “Based on the novel by So-And-So”, the film proudly declares. It’s a badge of honor.

When a movie is based on another movie, though, that fact tends to take a back seat, often appearing as essentially a footnote in the end credits (which, especially in the age when streaming video maddeningly cuts off the end credits, many people skip), a fact I noticed recently when watching The Departed, a remake of a film called Infernal Affairs. Being an adaptation of a novel is a thing to publicize, especially given the more authorial status of the novel, but being an adaptation of another movie — the dreaded remake — is something to begrudgingly admit. Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria, my favorite film of the past 21 years, is a rare exception that stamps its cinematic source material proudly on its opening credits, and fittingly, it’s a film that proves that adaptations thrive when they reject cult-like devotion to the source material.

Novelizations are, perhaps, a different beast. As a marginal yet ever-present part of the book-to-movie pipeline, novelizations are, as Alex Suskind writes in Vanity Fair, “a way for fans to feel more connected to a story or property they love”. Suskind’s piece is a defense of a genre that doesn’t get much respect in the media landscape: books are better than movie adaptations are better than remakes are better than novelizations, the hierarchy might go.

Suskind’s piece quotes novelization writer Alan Dean Foster: “It’s always amusing to me, you take a book, say, To Kill a Mockingbird, throw away three quarters of it and win an Academy Award for best adapted screenplay” … “But if you take a screenplay and add three quarters of original material to it–which is a much, much more difficult piece of writing–well, that’s by definition ‘hackwork.'” Foster’s defensiveness towards his craft is understandable, and I’d never suggest that any novel-writing be considered inherently hackish. I would, however, point out that it’s actually extremely difficult to adapt books into cogent screenplays. That’s because a movie is more than just a shaved book. We’re talking about two entirely different modes of storytelling, and to suggest that adapting a book simply involves tossing out part of that book is just plain wrong.

The Foster quote is also important because it suggests the same hierarchy that leads to the kneejerk claim that the movie was better. Because novelization involves more words, it must be harder. Because a book contains more detail, it must be better, as if the presence of detail found in a book somehow makes a work of art better. This is the commodification of storytelling, as if stories can be evaluated by weight.

I would counter that, in many cases, lack of detail can be preferable to viewers who enjoy, you know, having an imagination. While movie adaptations can be, and often are, criticized for ruining the reader’s mental image of the book, fewer people point out that film enables imaginative hole-filling in other ways that might be ruined by a novelization writer adding material not present in the original. More is not necessarily better.

For the most part, adaptations simply serve to reiterate the source material for either a new audience or for an audience that wants the same story they’ve already experienced. We’re living in the age of adaptation, a time when seemingly every piece of pop culture is based on something else or soon to be the basis for something else. Everything is something else in potentia. Form has become secondary to content and the marketability of that content across media. Art, these days, is only as good as its word count.