Christie Cary 

I am an addict. From an early age, I craved one thing: words. I was a purveyor of language and all it beheld—beauty, emotion, decay, thought, humor. I would lie on the sagging mattress of my bottom bunk, curled up with my herd of My Little Ponies, rereading my favorite dog-eared copies from my small library. While there wasn’t much funding for my miniscule library (think: a two-shelf bookstand), it slowly grew to include volumes upon volumes of The Babysitters Club, Sweet Valley Twins (and later Sweet Valley High), and Goosebumps. As I grew older, so did my library—moving beyond the craptastic tween dramas into J.D. Salinger, William Golding, and Harper Lee—and tucked among those growing shelves lay the original pages of many future movies. Then came Keira Knightley’s Pride and Prejudice. I watched it, enthralled and enchanted, and then, sacrilegiously, thought, “Wow. I think I might actually prefer the movie to the book.” When I confessed this opinion to my bibliophile friends, they slowly turned toward me in unison, necks creaking like something out of The Ring, eyes wide with betrayal. And so, I’ll say to you what I said to them all those years ago: Hear me out. 

Perhaps it’s blasphemy, but I think there are some stories that actually need the screen. When an adaptation gets it right—think The Shawshank Redemption, The Devil Wears Prada, or even The Hunger Games—it doesn’t just echo the book; it translates its spirit into something visceral, visual, and alive. A great adaptation isn’t merely reciting the words we’ve come to inhale and hold onto from the musty pages of our favorite books; it takes on a life of its own while still retaining the original’s shape, like a Russian nesting doll: a story within a story within a story.  

In the novel, The Devil Wears Prada, Andi’s boss is irredeemable—there’s not one iota of likeability about her. She’s cold, calculating, and cruel. However, on the screen, both the sharp script and the stellar performance of the incomparable Meryl Streep humanized Miranda Priestly. Suddenly, this monster of a boss became someone layered and vulnerable, someone even capable of heartbreak. One quiet scene, where she sits on the opulent couch in a French hotel room and admits her marriage has ended, reshapes everything we thought we knew about her. 

While The Hunger Games novels excel at world-building and character development, the first-person point of view can feel confining. We only see what Katniss sees and experiences. The films, however, break free of that limitation and exceed audience expectations. They pull back the camera, literally, and let us witness the ripple effects of her defiance across Panem. We see the explosive outrage, the quiet and not-so-quiet uprisings, and the gut-wrenching grief in other districts which, in turn, gives us a broader view that is a fuller and more dynamic sense of the world’s unrest. And then there’s the cinematography: the shaky handheld shots during the Games, the frantic cuts and blurred edges that mimic panic and chaos. It’s visceral in a way prose can’t quite capture. This is an embodied fear, not just a description of it. 

The Shawshank Redemption, from the mind of Stephen King, began as a story about a man with few real connections, locked in battle against three corrupt wardens determined to make his life a living hell. But the film gives us something the novella only gestures toward: Red, played by Morgan Freeman, who becomes Andy’s anchor and friend. Their bond acts as a humanizing touchstone—something for us to hold onto as Andy endures abuse at the hands of the other inmates, guards, and the warden alike. And those added moments, like opera music drifting through the prison loudspeaker and Andy’s triumphant stand in the rain, are among the most powerful scenes in cinematic history. They remind us that sometimes, seeing hope is even more moving than reading it. 

I still adore books, and in some ways, I will always be that small girl, curled up in bed with a book from my admittedly larger library now. The smell of old paper and the weight of a story in my hands will bring me comfort as nothing else can, but I’ve learned that words aren’t the only medium capable of moving us. Sometimes, the screen gives us another language altogether: light, sound, and silence. So, yes. I’ll always be a purveyor of language, but I’ll save a little shelf space for movies too.