Feature Films are a Curse
Monday, April 18, 2011 at 8:00AMOr, Why Harry Potter should never have been a Feature Film?
Over recent years i’ve seen too many great stories suffer the curse of the feature film. In other words, I feel i have seen great stories squandered and wasted by being shoe-horned into feature film boxes they just don’t easily fit. This is not to say that such stories were lacking cinematic quality but rather that the overt privileging of the Feature Film as somehow superior to all other cinematic, screen-based, moving-image forms, did the story a diservice. The long standing obsession with feature film as the pinnacle of screen narrative has created some tragic causalities.
Allow me to focus on just two - Harry Potter and Tomorrow When the War Began.
I would contend that the stories, characters and circumstances of these two are superbly cinematic and well suited to being on screen… BUT, that the choice to make each as Feature Films was a poorly considered one; a choice derived from some arbitrary privileging of the feature format. Both Harry Potter and Tomorrow when the war began are stories that got horribly short-changed by the constraints and structures of the 2hr movie.
Allow me to explain…
The best thing about Harry Potter is not the Plot - frankly the plot is banal and predictable. By far the best thing about Harry Potter - its real stroke of genius and the genesis of its phenomenal success - is its Story-World. The key returnable element, the drawcard that brought readers back again and again to read and reread the books was the richness, detail, complexity and tangible, visceral texture of the Harry Potter Story-World. Kids wanted to go to Hogwarts and spend time in that world as much, if not more, than they wanted to find out what Harry was up to. The plot is almost secondary of readers to just Be In Hogwarts with Harry and his Friends.
And this is where feature film is clearly and decidedly the wrong fit for depicting Harry Potter’s world on screen. The choice to make HP into a feature film is throughly misguided as the feature film format of a paltry, plot-driven, 2 hours is simply not suited to, or conducive of, developing and exploring a World. The structure and duration of a blockbuster feature film innately foregrounds plot - pushes it above all else - and this, in the case of the Harry Potter films, is effectively a promotion of the weakest part of the Harry Potter experience at the expense of the strongest.
Think of the famous (or infamous) Quidditch game in the first Harry Potter film. It is a scene of min-numbing banality and pointlessness which contributes nothing to the plot of the film. It is a grand hiatus in the middle of the movie where all forward progression ceases and has a nap. The experience and structure a theatrical release feature film compels the viewer to desire progression, indulging immersion in minutia details of a time and place is just not part of the common modus opperandi of feature films - or at the very least its not a strength of the medium due in large part to the sheer brevity of the form. Such story-world indulgence is the mainstay of longer-form episodic storytelling; most notably TV. Every time the Harry Potter movies drift into Storyworld territory the narrative progression comes to a screeching halt. The structure, duration and viewing mode (single, continuous, uninterrupted viewing) of a feature film is enormously unforgiving of such detours. And yet such detours are without doubt the best part of the Harry Potter books. In this regard i would contest that the the feature film format has done the Harry Potter story and experience no justice at all.
By contrast let us dane to imagine Harry Potter as 6 seasons of 12x1hr episodes - no less than 72hours spent at play in the Harry Potter world. In such a structure and long-form screen timeframe the Quidditch game of the first movie might be elevated from the banal story detour it is in the movie, to a dedicated episode unto itself. In a dedicated installment the game becomes the climax to a discreet episode that focuses solely on Harry’s rise to prominence in the school and his opportunity to prove that he is not just the son of his parents legacy but a genuine magician in his own right. A dedicated episode rather than a detour in a feature film allows for the real metaphor and concept of the Quidditch game to be examined (Not to mention an opportunity to make the game actually MAKE SENSE…!) A dedicated episode for the Quidditch game allows for it to be examined in a way that elevates the game as a rich story vein - embedded in, and symbolic of, the storyworld - in its own right, with its own dramatic structure, that delivers its own resolution and catharsis. As a dedicated episode the Quidditch game can exist in its own right and be mined for its real metaphoric value rather than a skimmed over, conceptually hollow, detour in a plot-driven story.
So lets move on to our second case-study, Tomorrow When The War Began.
As with Harry Potter, TWTWB is a hugely successful series of novels adapted for the screen. The perspective I’m proposing is that both these book series deserved and warranted being made for the screen but that both suffered horribly from the curse of the feature-film - that feature film was the worst possible format for their screen adaptation. TWTWB holds similar key strengths to Harry Potter; the most compelling part of it’s story is not so much the plot as it is the world it presents and the density of characters and personal relationships that reside in that world of extreme circumstances.
If we think of what the returnable element of the book series TWTWB is, what it is that we come back for book after book, it is fair to say that the plot of fighting the invading army is secondary to the interpersonal dramas between characters. The invasion is the backdrop rather than the foreground entity. It is just the extreme circumstances that frame the personal relationships, that elevate the stakes on character stories of love, hope and betrayal.
But then we make TWTWB as a feature film and by the very nature of the short 2hour form and format of the feature film structure (and audience expectations of it) we invariably prioritize and bring to the Foreground as Subject that which should be, and is more effectively, Background and Context. Just as with Harry Potter, the inevitable brevity and plot demands of feature film prioritize the weakest and least compelling part of the story.
In TWTWB we can see an effort on the part of the filmmakers to straddle this problem. The invasion does not take place for the better part of 30mins as we spend time with the teenagers as the go camping oblivious to the impending invasion. In the long forms of book and tv series this time is time well spent with it own peaks and valleys of hope and fear. But within the plot-centric demands of feature film, this extended intro period is just DULL! Much like pre-game entertainment by over-the-hill aging rock stars at a football game, it just delays the start of the real thing we came to the movie for.
This leads me to the self same conclusion as with Harry Potter; that TWTWB as a story has a core strength - and that strength is NOT its plot. Rather, the strength of TWTWB lies in the denisty and complexity of its shifting character relationships (that evoke over time) and a dangerous speculative fiction world. These two things - complex and shifting character relationships and speculative story-world - are simply Not best explored or engaged in the Feature Film format. Features are most often best for delivering Poetics and Plot, and fall far shot in delivering characters and world by comparison to long-form formats - namely TV and its episodic siblings. Thus the choice to make adapted feature films from Harry Potter and TWTWB I would contend is wholly misguided.
The question however - the big and important question to ask - is why Feature Film was the medium chosen for these stories when its obviously a very awkward and ungainly fit?
Is it because the filmmakers ignorantly failed to recognize what the core strengths of their source material was, and by proxy the inherent weakness of the medium they were adapting to? OR, is there something else at play here? Does the Feature Film have a magnetic attraction for other commercial, logistical, industrial reasons outside of its creative strengths (and weaknesses)? Reasons so compelling that the filmmakers judgement of what is the best medium for a story becomes clouded or skewed?
For such a long time there has been a perceived and, in many ways, overtly enforced (both passively and actively) hierarchy in screen media. At the top of this hierarchical pyramid rests the Feature Film - a place of privilege, prominence and reverence. Underneath this pyramid apex sit other screen mediums - Telemovies, serial drama, soap opera, live tv, online. And whilst all these layers of the pyramid underneath the feature film apex can be often larger slices of the screen media pie - both in volume and audience numbers - they have still been invested with a second-class citizen demeanor. We have privileged the Feature Film so long as the top of the pyramid that we have endowed it unthinkingly and unquestioningly with an importance and status that doesn’t wholly deserve.
Thus we might speculate that if Harry Potter had only been moderately rather than astoundingly successful in popularity the impetus to make a feature film of its story may have been greatly diminished and a TV series might have been considered. Evidence of this might be seen in the large number of TV shows that, having been successful in their natural medium of TV, are then output as a feature film. South Park, The Simpsons, numerous characters from Saturday Night Live, even our own Australian sitcom hit Kath and Kim is about to go into feature film production. The unvoiced, but absolutely apparent, implication of this trajectory is that large popularity warrants a rise to the top of the pyramid. Or conversely, that episodic TV is second class but if a show can be popular enough there it can be justified in being moved up the hierarchy to feature film status. What did the Simpsons, South Park or Kath and Kim gain by being made as a feature?
This is where i see feature film as a curse - a curse that has greatly hurt the screen story potential of adaptations such as Harry Potter and TWTWB. Because these book series were very, very popular there was innate attraction on the part of the filmmakers to the Feature Film form. Thus we can deduce there was in fact no real discussion of what might be the Best or most appropriate format and medium for a screen adaptation of these films, rather there was just an assumption and presumption that Feature Film is innately the ‘best’ Way to present a story and since the source material was very popular, the use of feature film can be justified.
There of course might counter arguments to make the case for why feature film was the best medium. For example it might be argued that the theatrical screen and feature release is the best vehicle for the grand spectacle of depicting high fantasy and speculative worlds. This has certainly been a valid argument in the past but im highly dubious of how it holds up in 2011. In an age of large-screen plasma and lcd tv sets, surround sound home theatre systems with floor rumbling sub woofers, bluray and downloadable high definition digital images, the technical quality supremacy of the movie-theatre is seriously challenged. Not only is the image and audio experience of a home theatre system outstanding, the other consideration often unvoiced is that of screen viewing ratio. If you are sitting at the correct viewing distance from your large screen TV, the ratio of screen width to viewing distance - and thus the apparent size of the screen as a proportion of your field of view - is remarkably comparable between home and cinema. The cinema screen may be physically bigger but you also sit a lot further away from it, thus its apparent size (how much of your view the screen occupies) is remarkably similar between home theatre and cinema theatre. Is the cinema really able to deliver an innately ‘better’ or even ‘bigger’ and more spectacular viewing experience than a good home theatre…? Im highly dubious. And frankly when you add in the comfort of my couch, the ability to pause when i want to go to the bathroom, and the fact that i dont have to put up with other Humans, im just not that impressed with going to the movies anymore. (hence the resurgence of 3d as a desperate attempt by the studios to reinstate the ever diminishing point of difference of the movie theatre - but thats for another post)
The other argument that might hold a bit more legitimacy concerns budget; the notion that the creation of the Harry Potter universe or invaded world of TWTWB demands lots of money and so cannot be spread over the many hours of a TV series without diminishing and spreading the money to thin. The counter argument to this would be to assert that the the evocation of a rich story-world does not require high budget effects in every frame - the tv series could be made smarter and leaner and still evoke all the compelling life of a fantasy story world. Indeed that the series by nature of its form and format shifts the emphasis away form the spectacle and onto the characters and the detail of the world. Moreover that this lower-budget shift is actually much more in keeping with the storyworld of the novel where special effects exist nowhere but in the mind.
The other counter to the budget argument would also be that Harry Potter and TWTWB had built in guaranteed massive audiences and the money that stood to be made from advertising and syndication of the series over time, along with long-tail dvd sales would be perfectly sustainable for the shows ongoing production even with a multi-million dollar per-episode budget.
Certainly the debates concerning, budget and spectacle can go round and around; but whats the real point of all this…?
Feature Films - by nature of their duration, single sitting continuous time-span and unbroken progression - are arguably a deeply flawed storytelling format. As a vehicle for narrative they, in effect, have much more in common with short stories and poetry than they do with novels. The traits of the feature film privilege brevity, poetry, solo protagonists and single narrative arcs. Yet when we look at Harry Potter and TWTWB there is no valid way to argue that these stories embody brevity or poetry, they do not have, or privilege, solo protagonists and they do not restrict themselves to singular narrative arcs.
My concern primarily is the primacy of the theatrical release - that cultural perception of a hierarchy of quality, importance, prestige and significance that positions the Feature Film as some kind of Holy Grail at the expense of other forms. I would contend that our attachment to the theatrical Release is the product of legacy and memory not artistic or aesthetic currency. We are attached to features because so many of our memories of great screen story experiences in the past are locked up in Features - feature films were the dominant and for many years, only means of screen stories. The status of feature film seems to me almost wholly reliant on Nostalgia and what concerns me is that with the weight of this nostalgia writers and filmmakers are not asking the prime question that should be apparent to them as artists - What is the best Medium and Structure in which to tell this story….? I contend that if that question had been genuinely asked Harry Potter and Tomorrow When The War Began would Never have been made as feature films. Like Cinderella’s ugly step sisters forcing their way into a glass slipper; these are story worlds that are simply a bad fit for the feature film form.
Reader Comments (1)
I would also take a bit of issue with "The structure and duration of a blockbuster feature film innately foregrounds plot". This may indeed be true for Hollywood blockbusters, but it's in no way a universal rule. There are more than a few 2-hour features that don't function solely on plot.