The novelist John le Carré says that he will never write again about George Smiley. Le Carré cannot think of Smiley anymore without seeing Alec Guinness. The actor stole the author's creation, hijacked it into flesh. One remembers that some primitive peoples feared being photographed because they thought the camera would make off with their souls. Mention George Smiley to anyone who knows Le Carré's spy novels and his memory will instantly throw onto its screen the image of Alec Guinness. Smiley will not be fat and smudgy looking, as the novelist imagined him. He will be simply, immutably, Guinness, impersonating Smiley. Incarnation of this kind is an interesting negotiation between words and pictures. It is a form of translation.
A one-way form of translation: the filmed flesh, the visible image, seems to have the advantage. Great movie characters do not often beat on the gates of prose, begging to be turned back into words. (Movies get "novelized" sometimes, of course, but novelization is merely a spin-off, like a doll or a T shirt.) Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind sold a million copies in its first seven months. After the movie appeared, Rhett Butler was irreversibly Clark Gable. Scarlett O'Hara was Vivien Leigh. Mitchell's prose withered to the irrelevance of an architect's blueprint after the house is built. Dashiell Hammett created Sam Spade. Humphrey Bogart became Sam Spade. The idea of a character becomes imprisoned in the body of the incarnator, and even the creator cannot liberate the prisoner. The character has acquired features and hair and costume. But something valuable, the subjective suggestiveness that hangs around the edges of words and comes alive only in the reader's imagination, may have died of specificity. Abruptly, the embodied character takes on the limitations of individual flesh.
Sometimes the incarnations compete. In the early film versions, Ian Fleming's James Bond became Sean Connery. Then Bond turned into Roger Moore. Convinced that Bond was Connery, some moviegoers dismissed Moore as an impostor. Charlton Heston, conversely, performed a miracle of dramatic consolidation in the 1950s and '60s. He became Moses, Ben-Hur, Michelangelo, Andrew Jackson and John the Baptist: everyone this side of God. Heston possessed such brooding gravitas that he could plausibly pass for an abstraction, the decalogue with a strong chin.
The translation from one medium to another becomes stranger when one of the mediums is reality itself. If one thinks of George Patton, the image that appears on the mental screen is that of George C. Scott. The officer, real in history, a vivid and powerful coherence, a life proceeding through time toward a death, becomes someone else. The writer Cleveland Amory has reported taking his father, who knew Patton well, to see the movie. When the general's aide, Charles Codman, was introduced on the screen, Amory's father protested, "It isn't Coddie." Amory whispered that it was not meant to be Coddie, it was just an actor playing Coddie. But Amory's father insisted, "If they could get Georgie, they could certainly have got Coddie."