2009-07-22 08:54:36

HARRY POTTER AND THE HALF-BAKED PROMISE

Filed under: Books, Harry Potter And The Half Blood Prince, J.K. Rowling, Movies
Posted by: John

Would you bother to criticize someone else’s wedding cake? That’s how I feel about the Harry Potter series most of the time. It means a great deal to so many people, but it wasn’t baked for me, and if it’s not to my taste, well, it wasn’t meant to be.

This conviction was reinforced last week when I took my son to see the latest installment, Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince. As soon as the Warner Brothers logo appeared in a welter of dark cloud, and the signature musical motif sounded, those seven or eight jingling notes, the audience applauded, and I sensed genuine excitement in the air, the moreso because I didn’t feel it myself.

I understood, though, or thought I did. I had the same nervous agitation when the first of the new Star Wars trilogy opened at the Ziegfield in New York. A child of the original Star Wars phenomenon, I was one of the wide-eyed thirtysomethings who lined up for the opening of The Phantom Menace and gave an ovation the minute that the Lucasfilm logo shimmered across the screen. It was downhill from there.

Harry Potter And The Half Blood Prince wasn’t as bad as all that. In fact, at moments, I thought it the best movie in the series, though as a whole it didn’t surpass the best of the bunch, Mike Newell’s Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire. Here’s the funny thing. Despite my lack of enthusiasm or sense of anticipation, I’ve seen every one of them in the theaters. I never miss a new Potter flick.

I can’t tell you exactly why. I have read the first three books aloud to my son and saw their charms, but didn’t love them; not by a long stretch. Tolkien saw to that. My wife, an avid reader (but no fan of hobbits), is even less impressed. My son is another story. He clapped with unfeigned enthusiasm at the logo. Around us, hundreds of kids of all ages and not a few adults did the same. Many of the teenagers had no doubt been watching this franchise ever since the first one appeared in 2001, eight years ago.

What’s comparable? The Planet Of The Apes movies, when I was a kid?

In our case, the night felt slightly momentous. We’d never seen a Harry Potter movie together as a family on the big screen, and the last time one of them appeared, our son hadn’t read any of the books and hadn’t yet demonstrated interest. A lot changed in those two years. As of the opening of this movie, he’d read the entire set at least once, and I was reading them to him again from the start.

When the movie ended, he turned to us and inquired eagerly whether we had any questions for him about the plot. He knows how it all turns out, you see, and can play the guide in ways that are rarely possible for a ten-year-old. The smile on his face seemed to say, “You may know a little more about the sequel to fourth grade, mom and dad, but you’re clueless when it comes to the Deathly Hallows!”

When he’s right, he’s right. Even after reading three of the books and seeing all of the movies, I’m clueless. I go to the movies as a private detective might return to the scene of a cold case crime, to look for answers that everyone else has missed, and yet I come out the same way every time: empty-handed.

It’s my failing, I know. I tell myself, when it comes to the movies, that the greatest actors of a generation in England have stocked the cast, one Royal Shakespeare prodigy after another. In the new movie, we get the enormous treat of Jim Broadbent as Horace Slughorn, yet one more Hogwarts professor with a Voldemortized past. Broadbent is fantastically entertaining, just as David Thewlis, Imelda Staunton, Michael Gambon, Emma Thompson, Kenneth Branagh, Helena Bonham Carter, Dame Maggie Smith, Richard Harris, Brendan Gleeson, Gary Oldham and especially Alan Rickman before him, and yet I had the same response as ever—isn’t the actor slumming just a bit, putting on the glamour of Old Blighty for a paycheck, knowing full well that the target of the performance is as broad as the side of a drive-in movie screen?

Doesn’t matter, you stinking Muggle, comes the reply. The actors, old and young, may be as stiff as figurines of bride and groom. What of it? It’s not your bloody wedding cake.

In the end, trying to comprehend my own relative indifference, I see the Potter books as canny catch basins for every stray bit of mythology that ever passed through the childrens libraries of the Twentieth Century, each familiar character and monster then stripped of its previous context and retrofitted for the computer age. Magic, in J.K. Rowling’s series, is inevitably analagous to technology. Wands are IPods and IPhones. Broomsticks are electric cars. Magic mirrors are computer screens. I don’t see how it’s possible for kids of our era to read those books and not make such a connection, conscious or otherwise, but I don’t think that’s the whole story.

There is something else, and I will always miss it. These books, this mythology, doesn’t belong to me, and never will. It belongs to my son, to millions of other children like him, even to millions of adults never before swept away by such a tale. If I’m ever asked, I’ll simply have to reply that I was married at a young age to other sorcerers, other dragons, witches and wardrobes, and must remain loyal to the end.

In short, Dumbledore will always taste like cut-rate Gandalf to me. But that’s to be expected. I can’t have my wedding cake–Middle Earth with Narnian frosting—and eat this one, too.

Comments (4)

4 Comments »

1. John,
   I like your analogy to the wedding cake. Of course the it seems most couples hardly get to taste their own cakes in the busyness that is the wedding reception, so while they may have been baked for the couple the consumption is by the guests. The important thing about weddings and receptions is not the cake but the couple and the gathering of friends and family to celebrate their new lives together.

   That children or younger adults have this story is the joy and reason to celebrate the phenomena that is HP. I hear expressions similar to yours in my life and line of work; life long church attenders who grew up with “traditional” worship shaking their heads and whispering about watered theology and casual / irreverant, presentation of “contemporary” worship. That is when they are not actively opposing such in their congregation or denomination. In speaking to people on either side of that issue I always refer to worship expressions as languages of worship rather than styles. Styles lends one to compare and choose one over the other which is a defacto way of judging the validity of one over the other. Worship languages however, are not better or worse than others, they simply speak to people in ways they can better understand. While contemporary may not be the language of some, it is the language of others and speaks to them just as traditional worship speaks better to others. Also, given that, for Christians, the canon is closed and “they” aren’t releasing new material, the art and practice of preaching is largely reframing the same material so that it will be able to speak to persons in their current places and times in life.

   I suspect that when Tolkien first spoke of Middle Earth etc. there were those critical of him, that he was just taking older mythology and repackaging it, which he was, but it was the repackaging and the reopening for you and so many others to the teachings and commentary on the human condition that is all mythology, that was important and made his work so important. Rowling has simply carried on the teaching and commentary for another generation to digest and treasure. I celebrate that so many have come to the Potter reception and are partaking of muggle and wizard cakes.

   Comment by Kenny Dickson — July 22, 2009 @ 10:12 am

2. Kenny,

   Thanks for posting the 1st and 3rd paragraph. I’m not sure why you inserted worship languages right in the middle. Not only does it seem out of context with HP and the wedding cake analogy, simplifying the worship issue to traditional vs contemporary is just silly. What about a third group that doesn’t understand either of those languages, but is wondering how worship plays out in the lives of the poor, homeless, and voiceless?

   Comment by Joe S — July 23, 2009 @ 12:33 pm

3. John,
   I wasn’t connecting worship and HP just lifting up similarities between what I understood to be your experience watching HP and what I often hear in my world. HP may not have the same effect on you as it has on “Potterphiles,” or “Potterites” to risk using religious sounding language, but the effect it has on them may be every bit as profound as Tolkien had on you.
   You are correct that worship is far more complex and varied to be broken only into two languages / forms, but for the sake of this forum I thought that such a generalization sufficed. Additionally, what constitutes
   “traditional” and “contemporary” is far from universal. Also, as you correctly point “worship” is not limited to location or any liturgical form. Feeding, providing housing, rebuilding after natural disasters is in the faith context worship.

   worship.

   Comment by Kenny Dickson — July 24, 2009 @ 8:23 pm

4. Kenny, That response didn’t come from me, but from Joe S. Thanks for the comments. John

   Comment by John — July 24, 2009 @ 9:03 pm

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