Narrative distance is a medium property that film cannot replicate.

Evidence

It is known that in the Torless film1 large segments of Musil’s early novel were incorporated into the dialogue almost unchanged. They are considered superior to the lines by the scriptwriters, which no living person would ever utter, and which in the meantime have been ridiculed by American critics. In their own way, however, Musil’s sentences also tend to sound artificial as soon as they are heard, not read. … The artistic difference between the media is obviously still greater than expected by those who feel able to avoid bad prose by adapting good prose. Even when dialogue is used in a novel, the spoken word is not directly spoken but is rather distanced by the act of narration - perhaps even by the typography - and thereby abstracted from the physical presence of living persons. Thus, fictional characters never resemble their empirical counterparts no matter how minutely they are described. In fact, it may be due to the very precision of their presentation that they are removed even further from empirical reality; they become aesthetically autonomous. Such distance is abolished in film: to the extent that a film is realistic, the semblance of immediacy cannot be avoided. As a result, phrases justified by the diction of narrative which distinguishes them from the false everydayness of mere reportage, sound pompous and inauthentic in film. Film, therefore, must search for other means of conveying immediacy: improvization which systematically surrenders itself to unguided chance should rank high among possible alternatives, The late emergence of film makes it difficult to distinguish between technique and technology as clearly as is possible in music. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 246

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s aim of running Adorno’s method on posthumous media; the prose-adapted-to-film failure mechanism applies directly to modern prestige-TV literary adaptations. — connects to: Subjectivity requires physical proximity to other attentive bodies that media cannot replace. — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 303
• SEED: Angle: why literary adaptations so often sound stiff on screen—not the scriptwriter’s fault but a medium mismatch, testable against recent acclaimed adaptations.