The many faces of the famous
I realize I haven’t really described what I look like. Sure, you already heard about the chiseled chin, and the steely blue eyes, and you know what kind of clothes I wear. I failed to mention my brownish-blonde hair, my broad shoulders, my above-average height, the minor cleft on my chin, and the slightly smaller than usual nose, which only helps accentuate my strong jaw. There you have it – me in a nutshell. Some of you are picturing me a certain way already. That’s fine. Stick with the image you have – that’s your privilege. But I only have one face, and despite the imagination of readers, that face is locked and unchangeable, just as my creator imagined it.
However, that’s not the case with many characters in the world of fiction. Whenever I frequent famous worlds, like say, The Maltese Falcon, I get to see what a well-drawn realm looks like. It’s wonderful to pretend that I have the same literary qualities as Dashiell Hammett’s creations. Now and then, I spot Sam Spade himself. He’s always cool, with a sly sense of humor, balancing honorability and greed. What a great character. Sometimes, Spade appears as Hammett wrote him – a blond Satan – and sometimes, he appears like the great human actor Humphrey Bogart. If he’s feeling particularly impish, he might take on the sly looks of the first actor to portray him, Latin lothario Ricardo Cortez. I guess it depends on what mood he is in.
That’s the thing about famous characters with multiple film and game adaptations – they have many looks. Sometimes they even have various and constantly shifting personalities, based on the different interpretations of them in the human world. Count Dracula, always the social party animal here in the realm of fiction, often appears like he was described in Bram Stoker’s original novel – a brute with a big, black mustache – but he also likes to don the faces of the actors that portrayed him. The elegant, intense features of Bela Lugosi seem to be his favorite, but Dracula is one of the most frequently adapted characters, and thus one of the richest. When he’s had enough of Lugosi’s thick Hungarian accent, he instead pines romantically like the feral Gary Oldman, and sometimes, he is an elegantly sadistic brute, like how the tall, dark, and gruesome Christopher Lee often chose to portray him. No matter which form and personality he takes, Dracula is a richly drawn character, and he is a superstar in our world.
He is part of the upper class of fiction. Unlike me, and so many other inconsequential characters.
Another thing that’s different is their radiance. Popular characters have a glowing aura about them. They glimmer and shine, lighting up the worlds of human imagination, drawing power from it and returning inspiration and joy to their readers and audiences. Standing next to them feels like standing next to high voltage power lines. You can feel the buzz of their life force. They are like perpetual energy machines, and as long as they are read and appreciated, they radiate this sense of absolute greatness.
Their worlds are no different. These are incredible places to visit. You feel the power of often-read worlds. That’s why most unread characters frequent them – to get a little taste of what they once dreamed they’d have.
But we little people are bound to our own worlds. Once they go, we go. We can’t escape into other realms. With the loss of the last copy of our work on Earth, we are doomed. We call it “fading.” And it is common… oh-so common. A great deal of fiction has vanished over the ages. Going back to when the Library of Alexandria went up in flames (something that actually happened to it more than once), throngs of characters were lost. The library likely housed well over one hundred thousand papyrus scrolls, and many of them were unique – not held in any other library in the world. Only a few stories from that era have survived.
Later, in the days of William Shakespeare, you’d think more remained. That is not the case. Most plays of the Elizabethan Era are gone, including, as I’d soon learn, a couple of Shakespeare’s own works. Books and plays continued to vanish over the next few centuries, and they keep vanishing up until this very day.
As for films, did you know that half of all films made before 1950 are lost? Some of these missing flicks are long gone, and some have a single surviving copy languishing in forgotten corners of the world. But it is usually too late to save them. As the film stock decomposes, these lost films won’t be found and rescued in time.
These facts were far from the minds of the likes of Dracula and company. Famous characters would never know the pain of fading.
Except, it seemed, for Dorothy Gale.
If she were really gone, that would change everything…