Why Books Are Better Than Movies (Harry Potter)

This is something that I've always believed, though it's really come to a head with the release of the final Harry Potter movie and all of the hype surrounding it.

I hate the Harry Potter movies, but I'm a die hard fan of the books. When I explain it to other people, I often offer reasons like "they don't stay true to the books", or "when I read the novels, none of the characters have British accents (which does ruin a lot for me)". Thinking about it a bit deeper however, I think I came up with a more profound reason that can be applied to most movie-vs.-book cases.

Written stories are more like skeletal outlines of the actual story, and your imagination fills in the rest. That's one of the great things about books, that their meaning and power are so relative from person to person because your imagination is most of the story.

Movies based off of books end up confining the story into a smaller box, taking away the imagination aspect of the book. They give to you what each character sounds like, looks like, and acts like. They explicitly show you what every event in the story line is and exactly how it unfolds. Although a book may specify these things in writing, all of these details are still under the power of your imagination. A good example here could be the British accents of Harry and his friends. I do know that they live in the UK and would have British accents, but my imagination didn't give me that, and saved them from trying to sound heroic and macho with those prim and proper accents.

Another aspect of this is that because the power of books lies in each of our imaginations, we can assign greater meanings to the characters and events then we could with a movie. For example. The Tyler Durden of the Fight Club novel is the physical embodiment of an entire philosophy into one man. Tyler Durden of the novel is not just a man, he is an idea. Tyler Durden of the Fight Club movie is still a great character, but seeing him in the flesh detracts from the magnitude of his character. He becomes less idea and more human, which is not all that he truly is.

Through the power of our own imagination filling in the blanks, books engage our higher level cognitive faculties in a way that few movies ever could. Movies are only greater then the books when you enjoy the director's personal imagining of a story more then your own. And that rarely ever happens.

Note, however, that this is not a 2-way street. Books based on movies are generally not that good because the authors have to follow the strict guidelines that the movie has already imposed on the storyline.