By the way, where exactly did Lewis make this "undesirable hybrid" remark about style? If we're going to agree or disagree with Lewis, we should know what he actually said, and where he said it, what the context was.
Re. the movies: If people like a movie version of a book, then they like it, and that's taste, and that's just a fact, as far as it goes. But the eternally recurrent argument or excuse that an adaption makes converts for this or that book seems to me irrelevant, non sequitur, an attempt to switch to a completely different discussion. If I argue that a given adaptation is emotionally shallow and aesthetically stock, then that is an artistic criticism. Ticket and book sales have no bearing on it at all. As an individual reader or watcher, my reaction, what I experience and feel, my judgement on the artistic merits, isn't even touched by the question of what millions of other people are buying or not buying.
Bluntly, then, I simply don't care that the LOTR movies have boosted book sales sixfold (which they have --
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/u ... t=0&page=1 ). That is a datum for the marketing department, not for a reader or viewer _as such_. I have nothing to do with it.
"At the end of the day, a film can only include so much." Exactly: and what if that "so much" is not enough? What if the best things about a book, its voice, its spirit, its suggestiveness, its sprawling imaginative wealth, its sense of passing time, happen in a given case to be the sorts of things that don't go into film at all, by the nature of the medium? What if the result is a spiritually truncated, flattened out, hollywoodized, action-packed dumb-down of the original vision? Like an indoor grove of plastic trees in an amusement park -- when the alternative would be to go walk in a real forest? At the end of the day, an amusement park can only include so much. True. Too bad for amusement parks.
Also at the end of the day, people are free to make these movies or not, and go to them or not, and like them or not. So there should be nothing threatening about my growlings and barkings. Free speech for all, and hurrah for that.
Another by the way: Nerd42, I am a left-wing, anti-capitalist American (though from your posts, I guess that we actually have a lot in common). But I would object to adaptations of Lewis that tweaked him to make him ideologically friendlier to my own views. I hate that kind of meddling or touching-up (or misleading selective quotation, a tactic that has sometimes been used to make Lewis look like a Creationist). I'm betting that you actually are against such exploitations too. So let us have the full complexity, the whole sandwich. There is a reason why" Bowdlerize" is a term of derogation . . .