Personally, I am always excited when a movie comes out based on one of my favorite books. I think for many it is exciting to see the book come to life in front of our eyes rather than in our heads. Many of these movies have become huge blockbuster hits such as Harry Potter, The Twilight Saga, and The Notebook. Some even say that these movies end up being far better than the books themselves, but is this a problem?
By having the producers and director choose their cast and who will depict each character of the book onto the movie, it interrupts our imagination. Whether you try or not, when we are reading, we have a visual image that we create of how everything looks. The authors have the control of the details they give away, but the readers have the rest of the control on how we depict them. Any author might describe their character with brown hair and a pale face, but every reader does not create the same exact image. That is what I find most interesting about reading.
Don't get me wrong. I am a huge fan of both, books and movies, but I have realized how it affects our imagination. After I watch a movie based off a book I have read, no matter how hard I try, I can no longer picture the character I imagined. Whenever the character is brought up, I immediately picture the actress or actor portraying that specific character instinctively. For example, when I first read Twilight, I had my own version of how
Bella and Edward looked like, but now I can only picture Kristen Stewart
and Robert Pattinson.
I am not saying that books should not be transferred onto the screen. I am only stating that going from print to screen is highly affecting our imagination and creativity. Instead of doing the creative work ourselves, we are allowing the show business to tell us how the plot, setting, themes, and characters are portrayed. It is a difficult situation, but inevitable.
As much as I love seeing my favorite books on screen, I can see your point. The Twilight movies have altered the way I "see" the books in my mind, and I can't really create my own perspective after seeing the movies.
ReplyDeleteAnother thing is that movies often leave out important details that the books provide. When I saw The Lovely Bones in theater, I was greatly disappointed. The book is a favorite of mine, and the movie left out important parts such as the discovery of Susie's bone and the details of the love between Susie and the young man, I don't remember his name, before her death as well as her infatuation with him after.
I always get so excited to see the books I love made into movies, but always come out of the theater so disappointed. I had either pictured the characters in a much different way or the plot was changed and many parts that I thought were important were left out. I was obsessed with the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series when I was younger and not happy at all when they combined the last three books into one about two hours long movie. It left out huge amounts of the plot and changed the stories completely. It is also really hard to see a movie before reading a book because then you have a harder time imagining things because you keep picturing how it was in the movie.
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