The Outsiders Movie And Book Comparison Essay

937 Words4 Pages

Imagine living in the Southwest in the 1960s, having neglecting parents, or no parents, and living out on the streets with your friends, and treating them like family — this is what being a Greaser is about! The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton is a book published in 1967 about Ponyboy Curtis, a member of the gang of Greasers, along with his two older brothers, Sodapop and Darry Curtis, and his friends, Two-Bit Mathews, Steve Randle, Dallas Winston, and Johnny Cade. The story takes place in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1965. Throughout the book, there is a rivalry between the East Side (the Greasers) and the West Side (the Socs), and Ponyboy struggles to live and mature in an environment where he gets made fun of and being jumped all the time. In 1983, after …show more content…

These differences may confuse people that have read the book before they have watched the movie. For example, the Greasers and Socs live in the North and South sides, instead of the West and East sides. In the book, the intro started with Ponyboy going out of the movie theater, but in the movie, we know in the very beginning that Ponyboy is writing a composition. In the scene where Ponyboy sleeps in the lot, instead of dreaming about the country and how life would be if his parents were still alive like in the book, the movie shows how his parents died: in a car and train accident (which in the book Ponyboy says is a car-to-car accident). As you can see, the movie for some reason tweaks some aspects of the book and these changes may confuse some …show more content…

This can immediately be seen in the beginning of the movie. In the book, the reader reads that Ponyboy is walking out of a movie theater and later gets jumped by some Socs. However, in the movie, it cuts to Dally waiting for Ponyboy and Johnny at Pickett and Sutton. As a consequence, the viewer doesn’t get introduced to other characters like Darry, Soda, Two-Bit, and Steve until much later in the movie. Moreover, after Dally’s death in the movie, it abruptly cuts to Ponyboy working on his composition. A lot of details are missed here; Ponyboy faint and get sick after Dally’s death, the hearing, Randy coming into Ponyboy’s house, and Soda pleading Darry and Ponyboy not to fight are just some of the events that are missing. The viewer does not even know that Ponyboy is failing his English class. As a result, the transition from Dally’s death to Ponyboy working on his composition makes no sense to the viewers. By and large, the movie cuts out crucial events from the book which nullifies existing