^{The Lord of the Ka-Ching}

I've noticed that book people, myself included, spend a lot of time talking about movies. I'm not sure if it's just that movies are our dominant cultural statement or that there are fewer movies and so more chance for overlap in what we've seen. Or maybe it's simply a testament to the power of the visual image.

I recently read Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys and I couldn't help picturing Michael Douglas and Tobey Maguire as the male leads. This, despite the fact that neither fit the descriptions and I have only seen the movie's preview. I enjoyed the book despite the mental presence of two seriously annoying actors. I wanted to picture Orson Welles, circa Touch of Evil, because he fit the description better, but more often than not the narrator blurred into Michael Douglas because that's what I'd already seen.

Charles Taylor makes the argument here that book-types are ignorant fools who believe that movies are not art and adaptations inevitably bad. I agree with Taylor's overall point, that movies are art and can be challenging, but I think he generalizes too much to argue that the "literati" hate movies and he glosses over Hollywood's abyssmal record with adaptations.

I don't hate movies. I love movies, but with adaptations I weigh the greatness of the novel against the potential butchery of Hollywood. I will never see Ragtime or Snow Falling On Cedars. I ask myself, if I know Clockers is great, should I subject myself to a Clockers which looks just okay. (I did, it was okay.) I tend to stay away from adaptation that have a high suck potential, say The Lord of the Rings, or ones that have stapled on a happy ending to a book like Nabokov's The Defense.

I realize how idealistic and unrealistically non-capitalist I'm being, but I wish I could tell each person along the business chain that will set Harry Potter in visual concrete to leave it alone. You're going to kill the magic.

I don't mean this for my sake. I've never read a Harry Potter book, but the release of the last one was nothing short of stunning to me. Kids as young as six years old were counting the days, standing in line and getting incredibly excited about a seven hundred page novel. Suddenly reading was the coolest thing you could do in the pre-teen set. Little kids could talk passionately about their favorite parts of a book. How often do we see that?

Even if it is a successful, clever, fun movie - which is unlikely - it will kill the magic. After the movie, the world of Harry Potter will no longer exist in the imagination of children. It will be pre-formed and buried in computer generated effects and merchandise tie-ins.

I'm talking specifically about children's novels here. I'm not particularly bothered, for example, by Clifford the Big Red Dog on PBS (although I do a double take because Clifford speaks with John Ritter's voice) or the upcoming Spider-Man movie(s). Those characters already exist in a visual medium and in different variations. Clifford has sixty or so books and approximately one hundred million different Spider-Man comics have been published. I loved the Peanuts specials when I was little, although it's worth noting that Schultz decided right from the beginning that Snoopy shouldn't talk. He wanted the dog's voice to exist only in our imaginations.

Reading books without pictures is a threshold for children, one that frankly not every child passes. The imaginative work of reading a novel is not easy for kids. It's far easier to, say, watch TV or go to the movies. An OpEd in the Boston Globe (which I cannot find to give proper credit) about the Harry Potter movie used the metaphor of holding a child. It said parents want to hold a child so they're safe, but so they also have room to move around and explore. You don't want to hold them so tightly, they don't learn how to move and play on their own. Movies hold on pretty tightly.

A movie can define the scenes and characters of a novel, can set them in concrete for an audience, doing the work for us. Then the book is smothered with certain images, which, oh-so-coincidentally, fit many fine products you can buy. Years from now when fashions have changed, the Harry Potter books could be just as successful because kids' imaginations are the same. I say "could be just as successful," because the movie franchise will be there, saying Harry Potter looks and talks this way, which is going to seem so ten years ago.

In the words of movie ads and hype, Hollywood is going to take the Harry Potter books and "bring them to life." Listen to the kids talking about Harry Potter and ask yourself if he could be any more alive. A novel is more than a story placed in front of us like a shiny lure. Having someone retell the story to you with one eye on your allowance money just isn't the same. I understand that movies can be art and visual story-telling dominates the modern world. But let's face it, there's no real danger this generation of kids will grow up cinematically illiterate.

Movies for kids come out all the time, but it is rare for a novel to strike a chord with kids. Runaway Ralph was my favorite. Charlotte's Web. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Little Women. Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing. Harriet the Spy. Bunnicula. Kids have jumped into these books without the training wheels of pictures (moving or otherwise) to help them out.

Kids will flock to Harry Potter, the Movie because that's what happens. Six through twelve is a marketing demographic. Hollywood is just after the money, but it will take some of their imagination too.