He never just has blue eyes and brown hair.
Sometimes when you’re watching a movie that is an adaptation of a book, and you see one of the characters you’ve read extensively, pictured in your mind, and the actor’s face just doesn’t fit with the portrait you’d painted you spit at the ground and wonder why they ever let some two-bit director take on your favorite novel as a project. That doesn’t really happen to me.
I’ve tried to be grateful to my imagination when I read descriptions of character’s features: light hair sitting on top of a sloped foreheard, stork like, effeminate, small-beady eyes that sparkle blue, sapphire in their slits. When I first meet a character, typically by name or voice or heresay, as opposed to narration, I can get a good picture but as soon as the author starts to describe the physical attributes I go hazy.
It frustrates me because I feel inferior about my reading skills. I simply can’t accurately follow along with physical descriptions and make a picture in my mind of a human being that I’ve never seen before and has, in fact, never really existed. And I feel like everyone else can.
I feel much more comfortable with a picture of the protagonist on the front of the book, which I refer back to repeatedly until I know his face as well as Brad Pitt’s or Barack Obama’s. I’d prefer to pick up a novel thats adaptation has already been cast so that I can use the performer’s makes and models as paper dolls in the landscapes of my mind. Or better yet, although I don’t know that I’ve ever met up with a book that fits this description, why can’t the author just leave the physical descriptions up to my mind alone. I don’t need a connect the dots without sequence or a paint by numbers without a traced sheet of paper to paint upon. I would prefer to make the picture in my head without later meeting a contrary, often insignificant, physical blueprint of the character in question.
But I think I’m alone in this. Obviously readers enjoy a physical description otherwise authors wouldn’t provide them with one. Or maybe people just don’t like to admit this fault of the imagination. I’ve felt this lack ever since I’ve been reading but never mentioned it before. I don’t know if there’s a way on Tumblr, but holler at me if you suffer from this same mind malady.
Before I read Catch-22, I already knew that Alan Arkin (amongst a star-studded cast) played the role of Yossarian. Knowing I wasn’t going to have to experience the anxiety of picturing the main character put me to no end of ease.
