How Does The Shootist Film Ending Differ From The Novel?

A comparison between the movie Oh Death and the novel Breathing Lessons by Anne Seamons Swarthout gives a sense of tone as the core difference. The end of the movie is a dignified farewell to Tom DunCOhn, and includes many emotional goodbyes with the various characters that appeared throughout the story. The movie is quite cinematic and in many ways looks and feels like a ritual. On the other hand, Swarthout gives the reader the grubby details of a dying man and lets the residues of Tom DunCOhn’s life hang about in an somewhat untidy fashion. The comfort of legend is left to the viewer, while the novel probes deeply into the cost of legend and makes the reader uncomfortable. I go back to this novel for its rawness.

The change in ending from the film to the book was even more impressive as it highlighted the difference that medium makes in story. While the movie ended with a timed showdown where the good were clearly pitted against the bad and therefore won in a visually fitting way, the book was much more diffuse in terms of how it established the end of the story. Instead of having all the answers for the viewer within a set amount of time, the book and its characters came to a conclusion over the space of many scenes, allowing the reader to observe the growth and evolution of the various relationships in the novel.

As I read through the end of the book, I saw that the emotional resonance of the scenes were spread out over the last couple of chapters of the book and not condensed into one ‘cbt’ scene. It read more like a collection of small moments and failures of each of the main characters and the way they remembered their time with Books and how each of their relationships with Books and with each other were portrayed differently than in the movie. How some of the side characters in the movie were condensed into 1 character in the book and in some cases reassigned to fit the authors viewpoint of the story and how the book refused to fully canonize the character of Books while the movie seemed to invite the audience to do just that. Both ways were powerful in conveying their message of storytelling and of the human memory of nostalgia.

Note how the film attempts to provide closure to the viewers, often avoiding closure in the novel. There are several staged moments where Books receives the response of friends, fans, even bitter rivals. In each of these scenes, the film is able to frame the man and provide a sense of closure and of ritual to his death.

But in his endings, Swarthout pans out to a narrower, colder focus than that. Yes, he has moments of reconciliation between characters, but they’re confined to a few brief, specific pages of notes. Mostly, though, the book descends to the grime of Physical Decline, listing its various cruel small insinuations, and then, in the end, subtly, coldly depicts how a Public Figure can be destroyed by illness or by simple passage of time. The book is best read when you want to feel The Pain of Relevance Fading; the movie is best read when you want to feel Closure/Awe. Both are very good at what they do.