Lenny: Comparing The Book To The Movie

When comparing a story to a film, there are three ways that they can be translated. These translations can be a literal translation, traditional translation or radical translation. The literal translation can be defined as, "reproduces the plot and all its attending details as closely as possible to the letter of the book" (Cahir, 16). The traditional translation can be defined as, " maintains the overall traits of the book (its plot, setting, and stylistic conversations) but revamps details in those particular ways that the filmmakers see necessary and fitting" (Cahir, 16-17). A radical translation can be defined as one, "which reshapes the book in extreme revolutionary ways both as a means of interpreting the literature and of making the

I choose that this was an example of a radical translation for a number of separate reasosn. My first reason behind why I chose to classify it as this type of translation is because the movie changes the interpretation of the book, as defined in the definition of "radical translation." In the movie we first meet our main character Lenny, in his hotel room rather than in his hospital room like we do in the book. This difference does not allow us to see where Lenny has started but instead brings us to the main point in the movie where he is already searching for the man who killed his wife. A second reason is the ending of the movie. In the movie Lenny was never arrested like he was in the book. This was proven when the narrator says, " Earl is still smiling at the body as the car pulls away from the curb. The car? Who's to say? Maybe it's a police cruiser. Maybe it's a taxi. (Nolan)" With him not being arrested, the viewer doesn't have a definite ending to the story and doesn't have much guidance as to how it ends. This is unlike in the book where Earl is arrested and he forgets about what happened which allows the reader to draw the conclusion that he will never know that he got revenge for his wife's