LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, WE HAVE A NEW CHAMPION; THE OUTSIDERS, THE NOVEL!!!
The Outsiders
The Movie VERSUS The Book
THE BOOK
The first thing I thought of when I realized the plot of the book, was “rich kids beating up other kids who are in a gang? Never would have happened.” If Dallas (a secondary protagonist) could get his hands on a gun and ammo, what was to stop them from shooting one of them and slipping away? Or go to the Soc’s territory (the main antagonists in the book) and beat them up?
Undoubtedly, there are plot holes and inconsistencies throughout the book, but overall they only take away slightly from the story. The story itself is fairly original, a rich gang/street gang feud, and the experiences of one of the youngest of the poor kids (henceforth known as greasers) as he fights through this. His reaction to one of his friends almost being killed as they try to help others, and his eventual death. In the book, his reaction was easily imagined, and it definitely provoked more of an emotional response than the movie (whoops, staying away from that topic for now). Ponyboy, the main protagonist, changes only slightly throughout the book, as his personality isn’t drastically changed throughout the story, just things around him and therefore he must learn to deal with them. One of the recurring ideas I found as I read was everyone close to him was still treating him as a child, but he was being thrown into situations most people wouldn’t face throughout their lives. Because of this theme, he was forced to change the way he responded to certain scenarios, and this was attempted to be shown throughout, with varying results. Altogether, I did not find that the personality change that I saw attempted to be shown was very successful, the story itself was interesting and original.
If I had watched the movie before reading the book, I do not think the story would have made much sense to me, as it does not explain who the Socs are, or much else in the way of setting. You’re kind of thrown into a characters life, without any sort of background knowledge, and expected to know what’s going on. Various scenes are hard to make sense of, or make sense, but are too badly acted or edited to care about.
To me, the book did an overwhelmingly better job at presenting the story and characters. In the movie, the characters did not act as people, but as robots that were given a specific way of reacting to everything they faced. In the book, I found it possible to see the difference in scenarios, the backgrounds of the characters, and how their pasts would influence the decisions they made in the story. In the movie, I was expected to know these people, and understand them completely through the things they did in very odd circumstances. The character development did not seem to exist, however faulty it was in the book. I could not believe these were actual people, and not just actors, paid to read words for a camera. One area where the movie did do a better job than the book was describing the minor characters, as the book did not have much description of any of the characters, which, though helpful with imagining the major characters, made it hard to envision any of the smaller roles. The movie, giving these characters definitive faces and personalities, helped their roles, however small, be more understood in the main plot.
Speaking from the perspective of a person who has read the book and knows what to expect, the beginning did not do the story justice. It explained none of the relationships between the characters, just threw you into a scene copy-pasted from the book, processed through a customized blend of odd character personifications, bad acting, and terrible effects. Most of the scenes were either like this, or a scene that doesn’t actually happen in the book, but someone decided was a good idea to write. In my opinion, It did not represent the book well, nor show many aspects to the characters, merely presented them as static objects that responded one way to a specific scenario.
Overall, I feel the book did a better job of explaining the characters, while still giving them enough ambiguity to let the reader imagine the finer points of their personalities and leaving them room to grow. Though the movie did describe the smaller roles better, the acting and set of the movie took away too much from the story, compared to the somewhat-successful character development and plot holes in the book.
THE MOVIE