More Potter

     Last weekend I went and saw The Hunger Games on opening day.  It wasn't a bad movie, and it was a lot more faithful to the book than I expected, but in the film the supporting characters were left undeveloped and what changes they made were almost entirely for the worse.  In short, I feel the same way about The Hunger Games that I do about the Harry Potter series: the movies were decent, but the books were much better.  One can hardly blame the filmmakers for this; when you have such brilliant source material, I think it's all but impossible to capture all of that brilliance in an entirely different medium.  I had low expectations going into the theater, and I was not surprised.

     So why did I go?  If I enjoyed the book so much, and I knew the film couldn't be any better, what did I expect to gain from seeing it?  Well, I guess the short answer is that my friends were going, but then what did they expect to gain?  The Hunger Games and the last Harry Potter film have had two of the three highest-grossing opening weekends of all time.  So what's all the fuss about?  Why do so many people spend their hard-earned money to see a movie following the same plot as a book they've already read?  Most of them will just be complaining afterwards about all of the ways in which the book was better, everything the screenwriters changed or left out.

     One of the common complaints I've heard about the film adaptations of books like The Hunger Games or The Lightning Thief is something that doesn't so much bother me, but seems to really irk a lot of my fellow fans: the eye colors of the actors.  While I usually overlook these sorts of things in order to focus on the more substantial problems, it demonstrates a crucial problem which is universal to all book-to-film adaptations.

     See, one of the wondrous things about great novels is that they paint a picture in your imagination.  Whether or not you realize yourself doing it, as you read, you're probably visualizing the characters and scenes on some subconscious level.  Great novels provoke the imagination.  Countless readers have gone so far as to write out all of the details and extensions that their imaginations have built around the Harry Potter books, creating hundreds of thousands of "fan fictions."

     When you turn these revered pages into movie scenes, with actors and sets and props and special effects, you are overturning the images every reader already has embedded in their mind.  Yet, for some reason, we all go to see these movies anyway.  If asked, some might say that they want to see how the characters or events "really" look and sound.  Perhaps we go to these movies because we actually want our mental images overturned in favor of something that is somehow more concrete.

     And then there's Pottermore, the site I hailed five months ago as an "online, interactive reading experience."  Now I don't even know what that's supposed to mean.  The main draw of the site, for many fans, is new, exclusive text from the author herself about the Harry Potter series, its characters, and its universe - background information that has never before been released.  The site's backbone is a series of interactive artworks depicting scenes from the books.  Following widespread demand from early-access users, just a few days ago sounds were added to these scenes.

     All of this interferes with the imagination, but none more so than the new background notes from J.K. Rowling.  She wrote the books, and therefore we quiver on her every word about Quirinus Quirrell, we sit on the edges of our seats as we read a list of wand woods and their properties, immediately discarding any ideas about them that we might have already had, subconscious or otherwise.  We closely examine every pixel, hoping to find a hidden object that will unlock more secrets about this imagined world.

     Why do we care what that world's originator might say about it now, after it has already grown into a place of its own within our hearts and minds?  When it has already found an organic existence in the collective consciousness of its fans?

     Here I indulge in hypothesis: perhaps we don't specifically care as much as we might think we do about receiving official "facts" about the world of Harry Potter.  I think we respect and enjoy this new text more than fan fiction because Rowling is a great author and has a deep understanding of the world she created, and so we enjoy seeing the depth of her own imagination, but I think that's not the real reason we love Pottermore.  Though we might enjoy the enthralling visuals and, now, the immersive sound, I think they are not, in and of themselves, why we love Pottermore.

     I think we love Pottermore because moving through these scenes in a new way gives us a chance to experience once again the spellbinding power that Harry Potter had on us a few years ago, because reading the new text from J.K. Rowling reminds us of the first time we read the books, and because there are 686,609 other members telling us that it's still okay to imagine.