Have the Potter Films Changed the Way We Read the Books?

Changing Our Image

When I first started reading Harry Potter, I envisaged Hermione as a plumpish girl, not necessarily very attractive. Emma Watson changed all that, whether we or J K Rowling liked it or not. In a sense there’s no going back to the picture of Hermione that I had at the beginning.

It’s hard to visualize Harry himself, or Ron, without seeing Daniel Radcliffe and Rupert Grint. These people have become the characters for most of us.

This is a problem with seeing films of books we’ve read. It’s even more of a problem when the books and the films are intermingling the way the Potter series is.

Reducing Imagination

I remember reading George Eliot’s Middlemarch years ago, and having a very definite impression in my head of what the main character, Dorothea Brooke, was like. Some time later a superb television version of the book was produced, and the character was played by Juliet Aubrey. Sadly, my imagined Dorothea was gradually obliterated by her performance. I say “sadly” because I still feel that Aubrey’s interpretation wasn’t according to Eliot’s conception.

Defining Images

The same thing has happened to the Potter stories. Who can imagine Neville Longbottom, or the Weasley twins, or Draco Malfoy (or his father Lucius, for that matter) in any other way now than the characters as portrayed by Matthew Lewis, the Phelps twins, or Tom Felton (and Jason Isaacs). Some of the older characters, particularly Maggie Smith, Alan Rickman, and Robbie Coltrane were so well cast from the beginning that they seemed to match the characters in the book, but many other actors are different in subtle and sometimes not so subtle ways from their original counterparts.

Rowling’s Imagination

But if we the readers have found it hard to remove the screen versions of the characters from our imaginations, what must it have been like for J K Rowling herself? Is it possible that the books that have appeared since the movies were produced have differed from the way they would have been if the films had not yet been made?

I don’t thing there’s any difference in Rowling’s overall approach to telling her story as she originally conceived it. It remains as complex as ever (far more complex than the films). I don’t think her moral vision, and her conception of the characters and what they would do has changed.

But reading the latest Potter book you have to wonder if the action scenes weren’t written differently, almost with an eye to the way the filmmakers will screen them. You have to wonder if the actors’ personalities and mannerisms weren’t affecting her view of the characters and adding something to the way she wrote them. Could it be otherwise?

Rowling would have had to have been the strongest creative artist on earth to avoid being touched in some ways by the movies, especially considering that some of them (the third and the fifth, particularly) have had very strong directors with very personal visions behind them. (The changes to the mise-en-scene in the third movie was a shock to our visual understanding of Hogwarts, with its shifting of some strongly defined features, such as the whomping tree and Hagrid’s house.)

Point of No Return

There’s no going back. The movies and their view of the wizard world have both expanded and restricted our imaginations. Such a strange intermingling of books and movies hasn’t been attempted before, and probably won’t be attempted again.