Literature in any form can be an extremely powerful tool, if used effectively, in persuading its audience in a particular direction. Since the dawn of time, written literature has been largely unchallenged as the dominant force in terms of its vast influence on society. Yet the massive technological innovations of the past century have caused a major shift in the literary forces at work across the globe. No longer was it necessary that in order to gain substantial influence over a widespread audience, one would have to craft words and sentences on a page in a most careful manner to evoke a powerful sense of intrigue, emotion, and imagination.

With the advent of film and particularly, when the visual and sound aspects were paired in the late 1920s, came an incredible new means by which an audience could be influenced. In the century since, Hollywood and the film industry as a whole have swelled to massive proportions, becoming a multi-billion-dollar industry. It is worth pondering what has caused literature to shift from solely written consumption to the immersive lifelike experience that we have come to associate with cinema, and through which means of literature it is easier to influence and manipulate an audience.

Though it has certainly opened the doors to many artists whose expertise falls outside of written literature, film is an art form in itself that many endeavor to learn but a relative few truly master. In order to directly compare written literature and the literature of film, take into consideration a theoretical situation in which a highly skilled writer and a highly skilled filmmaker were both attempting to manipulate their respective audiences to follow the same specific belief or line of thinking on a given topic.

The skilled writer is at both an advantage and a disadvantage in that they are generally working alone; whereas a skilled filmmaker in almost any case must collaborate and share their efforts with a few or many other creative experts throughout the process of creating a movie. Thus, for the sake of maintaining an equal comparison, we will focus on the screenwriting aspect of film, for that is where skilled authors in both fields can be found.

Given this, a screenplay writer finds that they have at their disposal the visual and auditory elements that both are absent in a mere series of words on a page found in a book. The impact of written literature depends to some extent on the audience, its attentiveness, and its willingness to immerse themselves in it. Of course, such factors can be applied to a film as well to a certain extent, but the visualization provided by films gives an overwhelming edge to the filmmaker in that they remove the need for the audience to imagine for themselves as is often necessary for readers.

The popularity of film has caused it to become a much more influential means of literature because it is more likely to captivate its audience–even when executed simply–as opposed to written literature that, especially today given its declining popularity in comparison to its more lifelike counterpart on the screen, requires more effort than ever to sucessfully capture and manipulate readers.🔹