We experience much the same today. One example, pointed out to me by one of my co-workers, is how documentaries on Netflix are always given high ratings, when point in fact not every documentary can be awesome. Given the probability of a hundred individuals making a film, what are the odds that all one hundred are going to be top quality? Astronomically high. It's not that all documentaries are awesome, it's that people don't want to disagree with a documentary because some group of people somewhere said documentaries are always awesome. I, on the other hand, can only think of a handful of documentaries that were interesting and deserved a 5 stars rating.
The second example is books. There is an old cliche surrounding contemporary culture that the book is better than the movie (and a cliche it is). Take for instance Fight Club. Here is a case in which the movie was far better than the movie. The book had no resolution, anti-climatic, and boring. But what a movie! But no matter the case, contemporary dogma holds that the book will always be better, period, the end, go screw off and don't argue. The same holds for music, in which the original is deemed always better than a cover. And I am not apologetic to any Beatles zealots out there, but A Perfect Circle's cover of John Lennon's Imagine is far more poignant and beautifully dark than Lennon's original. First time I heard Lennon's Imagine I cared little, save the stark contrast between a dark apocalyptic theme and the gay piano and the giddy "Yoo-hoo, ooh, ooh!" But when I first head APC's cover I had to pull over on the side of I-26 and cry because I was so overwhelmed by its dark beauty, and just not suitable to drive.
There is something in the translation of books to movies that is necessary for them to be successful, and as a consequence they will be different. And just because they are different doesn't make one better than the other. Several people I know find 2001 : A Space Odyssey better as a book than a movie, although the book was written so it could be made into a movie with the soul purpose of conceiving a plot. The film has a artistic licensing involved to translate a literary plot into a visual media that only film can achieve. If Eraserhead was later written as a book, how could the nightmarish imagery and non-linearity of that film be expressed verbally? There would be an incredible difference, which would seem impossible. It would be like asking a director to make Finnegan's Wake into a film... ?! The medium necessary to express Joyce's monumental perplexing work would have to be far different for it to be in the spirit of the Wake.
And on books in general, many people simply deem books superior, fin. In architecture school there are several books that are just total crap, but are held on high because some professor or starchitect said so. I was highly recommended by many students and professors to read Kunstler's Geography Of Nowhere. When I finally picked it up, I got about halfway through the book and threw it against the wall and never finished reading it. I did so, simply because it was nothing new. It was merely a reiteration of 19th and 20th Century architectural history with Jacob's The Death And Life Of Great American Cities (an amazing book, by the way) in mind. The only difference was that Kunstler had a catchy title. The same would be said for Frampton's Studies In Tectonic Cutlure, a tertiary source, an encyclopedia, and about as worthy of citation as Wikipedia or the Encyclopedia Britannica. I read the book, and have henceforth protested the teaching of it in classes. Some of my professors have taken this to be absolute blasphemy.
It is almost purely herd mentality as to why people prefer books to movies (even people who don't read), or the original to the remake, or documentaries over any other kind of film (except maybe foreign films, which is something I will never understand. Just because it's foreign doesn't make it awesome). A final example I find most compelling is Metallica's self-titled album (a.k.a. The Black Album). Almost everyone hates it, except me. Granted that Master Of Puppets and ...And Justice For All were incredible albums; this does not make the Black Album horrible, albeit it was the start of their downfall. Just because something is going downhill doesn't mean that the view is not still amazing. Once it's in the valley you can complain.
Just because some emperor (i.e. critic, group of social superiors, professor, admired friend, et cetera) claims these things horrible or awesome, doesn't mean that they are. That kind of judgment is subjective to begin with. It is thinking for oneself that liberates each individual from the enslavement of society's invisible bonds. It is the suffering youth of today feel to be free to the bondage of their peers, and the rejection from those supposed superior peers (who are only fools) that creates incidences like Columbine. If only Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold had simply not cared what the jocks and preps thought about them, liberated themselves from the judgment of mere fools high on a vagarious social ladder, maybe 13 people would not have died by their hands.
Apathy is not always a bad thing : if you don't care about... whatever, how can it bother you?
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