There seems to have arisen a sort of arrogance in our culture that if you’ve seen the movie, you’ve seen it all — that the movie is seldom truly worse than the book. But seeing is not understanding, not knowing, not believing – at least not the sort of seeing we normally mean. TV and Movies mediate experience – they put you at one removed from whatever is happening in order to tell you this is what you ought to see, this is what you ought to feel, this is the music you ought to hear alongside the same old bird chirp you’ve heard in every other film that ever had an outdoor scene.

That sort of passivity makes it much more likely that you find yourself susceptible to the sort of propaganda that we all, more or less, agree upon. For instance, that it’s always good to go see a movie: you’ll be hard pressed to show me a film that makes an argument against film in such a way that makes you both want to reflect and not watch a film for a year. Or the propaganda that it’s always good to consume something rather than to fast, that it’s always good to hear something rather than be silent, always good to see something rather than to sit alone in the dark, always good to be distracted rather than to let the boredom force you to think. And imagine.

Books fundamentally operate in the other way. King calls them telepathy and that’s right, they are indeed direct messages from the meeting of mind to mind. But they’re also something more like mind syncs in which we both receive and transmit. Maybe not back to the original mind, though there is less of a chasm between author and reader these days, particularly in modern books about bridges. In any case, we do participate: we build what we see. And this requires work.

And Americans do not like work, they like business. They don’t like production, they like consumption. They certainly don’t like the rigors of asceticism that liberate the imagination, they prefer the comfort of air conditioners and the coddling of rote memes.

So when you have a creative work that begins with the hard work of thought and imagination and ends with mere sense data, begins with the ascetic practice of sitting in a chair for long periods and meditating on the words of another from some other place and time – cocreating with them a sort of world, however near or far – verses operating as a sort of visual and popcorn funnel, that begins with thinking and ends without blinking, drool-like, at spectacle, it’s really no wonder.

The film is never as good as a book because reading a book is a productive use of time and a film is fundamentally a consumptive use of time. A book wants to be the first word on something and not the last, a book wants something to begin, to inspire. A film wants to be the last word on something – in fact most films win if you either never consult the book or, what’s far, far worse, never use your imagination when finding the book later because all you can think about is what you saw and heard and felt during the film.

Does this mean that films can’t mean something or can’t provoke depth?

Of course not. All it means is that films, inherently, do not set out to do that first and books, inherently, do.

You could do worse than cancelling your streaming service and going to the library. You could do little better than buying the book first.