In Which We Read Them In The Hallway

Away From The World

by HAFSA ARAIN

When we were eleven we measured our adulthood through vice. Rumors would spread that a girl once smoked a cigarette, or that a boy got to first base with a girl from another school. When I was eleven, I was kept away from that world. This was partly because of my Pakistani parents, and partly because I was always reading. I was not wholly dissatisfied with middle school society; I had simply realized from a very young age that adventures were limitless on paper.

My school librarian introduced me to many books. She made sure I read Louisa May Alcott, Mark Twain, and S.E. Hinton. When she told me she had met an author named Rowling in Naperville, she insisted I read her work, Harry Potter. “I just ordered them for the school,” I remember her saying with a barely held excitement. My interest in being the first girl in school to read a new book was quickly squashed when I discovered they were fantasy novels. Witches, broomsticks, and dragons rarely interested me – I preferred a story I could relate to. My librarian was adamant, saying that I would find myself in Harry’s story. She said that everybody could.

As soon as I first starting reading Harry Potter, I couldn’t stop. I read on the school bus, and I read walking to class during passing period. In the middle of the night, I read when everyone else was fast asleep; my grandmother’s snores were audible on the other side of my bedroom. When I started reading at the dinner table, my father put his foot down. He disliked fiction, and he disliked fantasy stories most of all. “There is nothing of value in stories like that,” he used to say in his lectures. When he said those things, I would imagine myself in Harry’s world. I would imagine being away from my parents, my siblings, and my classmates in a boarding school. It was full of people like me, full of people who read books. Not just books – but fiction.

I wanted to be like Hermione more than I have ever wanted to be like anyone. She was the smartest in her class; she was so powerful in her knowledge. She was an outsider to Hogwarts at first, and yet she knew everything about it. In many ways, she was a young immigrant, like me. She left her parents behind, and immersed herself in a new way of life. In Chamber of Secrets, she goes with her family to Diagon Alley. They were foreigners; she had to answer all their questions. I thought of the times that I had to do the same. Like Hermione, I was somewhere between two worlds.

My grandmother left to visit Pakistan in the winter of seventh grade, and I used to lie on her bed to read Prisoner of Azkaban over and over again. I read about Harry discovering his godfather, Harry fighting the dementors. I cried when Harry had to discover that he would return to the Dursleys. I cried when I closed the book and realized I had to return to my world. It was the first time I had cried over a book. The tears that splashed on the paper left tiny wrinkles. Outside my window, I saw a chilly fog over the backyard. (Were there dementors there? I remember thinking.) A few months prior, my grandmother had woken up to hear me sniffling while reading in the middle of the night. “Don’t cry,” she had said in Punjabi, “It will be okay.”

I began to wonder if I was a witch. I wrote in my diary at age 13, “Maybe in American Hogwarts, the letters don’t get sent until someone turns 14. I might still get mine.” I dreamed of having my own chance to prove myself, of having my own moment of greatness. I didn’t realize it at the time, but there were many other children with the same thought. Harry’s life was not only full of adventure, it was just so certain. We wanted just an ounce of Harry’s purpose, just a fleeting feeling that we were doing the right thing. His life was sure, and our lives felt like they would never measure up.

On our beige Packard Bell I found websites dedicated to the Wizarding World. I found interviews with J.K. Rowling, character profiles, and theories on plot. Back then, social media was still in its earliest stages: comments on news articles were rare, and message boards and chat rooms were the norm. I joined the ones labeled “Harry Potter”, and found a digital space full of people like me. We wrote our feelings about the books, explained our admiration for Jo Rowling, lamented the loss of favorite characters, and threw out our predictions. As the series was slowly being released over years, fans would predict its ending in the most imaginative ways. “Dumbledore is really Ron from the future,” one post said. “Harry and Voldemort are really one person,” said another. I wrote my own theories down in my journal: “Harry has a long-lost sibling,” and “Snape and Lily were best friends.”

I had given up on the notion of being a witch in high school. I decided to focus on school and being a good student. Everyone knew about Harry now, but I was convinced the other students did not know these books like I knew them. Still, when I answered questions in class with my hand raised in the air, waving madly, other students would snigger, “Hermione Granger!” To them, it was not a compliment.

I was still sharing a room with my grandmother when Order of the Phoenix was released. After I got my copy of the book, I sat in the hall with a flashlight to read it at night so as not to disturb her. When she woke up for dawn prayers, she stumbled upon me on her way to the bathroom. “Still reading that book?” she asked in Punjabi.

Deathly Hallows was released when I was about to be a college junior. I read it for the first time in my apartment in Chicago, miles away from home and from my grandmother’s bed. When Hermione erased her parent’s memories, I had to shut the book to let the thought of her action sink in. I thought of my own parents, of how many things I had kept from them over the years – all of those vices I had committed in order to grow up. I kept those things from them to protect them. I had to keep them away from America’s turbulent understanding of what it means to be brown, to be foreign, to be an immigrant.

Lately I have chosen to re-read authors like Zadie Smith and James Baldwin instead of Rowling. Though whenever I go back to the Harry Potter books, I find a warm comfort. I enjoy picking them up and starting from a random chapter or page. I do it with extra care now, for even though they are hardcovers, their binding is separating. My copy of Sorcerer’s Stone is held together with painter’s tape, the bright blue of it clashing with the typography on the cream paper.

I needed Harry’s world more than I can even remember. Sometimes, I still need it. But I cannot escape so easily now. I find that my responsibilities are too heavy, and that reality has settled permanently into my fibers.

Hafsa Arain is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living outside of Chicago. She tumbls here and twitters here.

"Home to Me" - Stefanie Heinzmann (mp3)

"Show Me the Way" - Stefanie Heinzmann (mp3)

In Which We Say Goodbye To Gryffindor

Multiple Personalities

by KARA VANDERBIJL

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2
dir. David Yates
130 min

Voldemort dies. Through a slightly confusing turn of events, Harry sacrifices the part of Voldemort’s soul that was imprinted on him, dies, comes back to life, and kills Voldemort. Voldemort has an issue with being killed, because he has been trying to kill Harry since roughly 1997. The flesh melts off of his face and turns into black smoke and disappears in the sky. Early on in the film, his bare feet are covered in blood as he passes through rows of corpses. His presence is unsettling, although perhaps not in the ways we would expect of him.

Harry’s life has quite literally led him to this moment, to face off with the most powerful wizard in the world amidst the ruins of Hogwarts. His parents, his friends and his classmates have all sacrificed something to preserve him for this moment. Somehow, he and Ron and Hermione are still alive after chasing the horcruxes and destroying them and meeting up with people who are not on their side.

Conveniently, it is easy to tell in the wizarding world when somebody is on your side: they don’t disappear trailing a cloud of black smoke or have skulls tattooed on their wrists. The only person in the story with ambiguous allegiance is Snape, but he doubles for Dumbledore at a high price: the woman he loves must be protected. We have no chance to wonder if losing Lily Potter will push Snape to the dark side — he simply crawls back to Dumbledore. When people say they learned more about doing the right thing from Harry Potter than from anything else, I laugh a little bit. What moral isn’t represented in this story? Take your pick.

Yates saw the final two parts as quiet, almost reverent in their solemnity, and bordering on restlessness. The action lacking from the first half of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows manifests in short, dream-like sequences. Any dialogue is exceptional, and for the most part, useless. Near the beginning of the film Harry and his friends spend ten minutes talking to Olivander about Bellatrix’s wand, but only three minutes are devoted to Snape’s early memories of Lily, Harry’s mother.

Where was Ron’s comic relief, I wonder, and does Yates know anything about what happened to Ginny Weasley? Or the centaurs? Or Hagrid’s half-brother? Or Dumbledore’s back story? Or anything else that Rowling wrote about in the series, except for Voldemort’s face?

Yates is obviously not afraid of Voldemort or else so afraid of him that he must ridicule him. If he hadn’t given Mother Weasley her “Not my daughter, bitch!” before exploding Bellatrix into a million pieces, we might have all stood up and left.

Choice and its many consequences run like a silver thread through this messy little movie, the final part in the coming-of-age saga we were all beginning to search for circa 1999. People choose to die for Harry for no apparent reason other than they are biased against noseless wizards. Hermione randomly chooses Ron over Harry, although Yates’ tête-à-tête between Hermione and Harry in a tent in Part 1 would have had us believe otherwise.

Slytherin punks choose to spend the duration of the grand battle in the dungeons, Snape chooses to remain faithful to Dumbledore, Malfoy chooses to be the stock coward, the Grey Lady chooses to disclose the location of the lost diadem of Ravenclaw, and Harry chooses to die. Some of it is fate, yes, but most of it is just long shots of Harry looking into the distance with Ron and Hermione behind him and nothing but angst over what should be done.

It was simple when it started. Harry’s voice had not yet changed and Ron was vomiting frogs into a bucket and Hermione was still the obnoxious bookworm. They did things a certain way because they had been programmed to, maybe by their parents or just Rowling herself sitting alone in coffee shops writing while her baby slept upstairs. Maybe a curse had left a scar with a memory in it on their foreheads. Voldemort didn’t have a face back then, he was just pure evil, and when you are little it is so very easy to hate evil and be plucky and play Quidditch and do right.

In a heartbeat you are at King’s Cross station and it is a little bit like Heaven and Dumbledore is there, but there is also a screaming baby covered in blood that has Voldemort’s face, and you feel pity towards it or perhaps a little bit of love. “Do not pity the dead,” whispers Dumbledore. “Pity the living.” No one is totally clear on what that's supposed to mean.

Harry loses himself for a moment in the bright white light and forgets what to do. It is the only moment where he vocalizes any sort of self-doubt. Why go on living, if it is such a pity? Later, he snaps the most powerful wand in the world in two and throws it over the side of a bridge. Suicide. This strange and almost blissfully carefree behavior underlies every current of heroism in the film.

Do you choose your end, or is it chosen for you? Few people complained about the differences between Rowling’s books and Yates’ films until recently. This is so rare in screen adaptations that it would be an oversight not to call attention to it. Perhaps what is most shocking to us is that someone should choose to see a story differently than we have.

We grow up, and realize we have no idea what it means, so we grow our bangs to cover our scar and run around trying to destroy the evidence that we are here, splitting our possibilities in half with every step. There is another film, another Harry Potter, another J.K Rowling out there somewhere where the other choices — the ones we never picked — live until they have names we can say out loud and faces we can see.

Kara VanderBijl is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Chicago. She last wrote in these pages about books to read in the summer. She reviewed Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part One here. You can find her website here.

"Is It Done" - J Mascis (mp3)

"The Lung" - Dinosaur Jr (mp3)

"Said the People" - Dinosaur Jr (mp3)

In Which Harry Potter Answers An Unwelcome Call of Nature

The Boy Who Needed Two Parts

by KARA VANDERBIJL

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1
dir. David Yates
146 minutes

Watching the first part of the last installment of J.K. Rowling’s celebrated series and sitting through a very long plane ride are uncannily similar. In both cases the tickets cost too much and the food is bad and overpackaged. An unwelcome call of nature inevitably leads to embarrassing encounters with your neighbors’ knees. Your worst enemies are screaming children and giants. The only reason you put yourself through all of this is because it is taking you somewhere you want to be: namely, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, which brings me to the issue at hand.

Why is Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in two parts? I have a sneaking suspicion that this is the franchise's way of rudely gesturing at its current archrival, Twilight, the fourth installment of which — you guessed it! — is in two parts and also comes out next year. Still, a contest between which love triangle or battle for the universe will win more millions seems a tad immature, although appropriately so. Few books, and even fewer films, are made for something as outdated as cultural, historical or aesthetic significance.

Drawing attention to the resemblances between Twilight and this most recent installment of Harry Potter could scarcely benefit anyone. It is obvious that they resemble each other. If you don't believe me, just think about how from now on, anything including a love triangle and shirtless magical beings will allude to them both. I would much rather ponder about what it is, exactly, that makes Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 (now I know why most people just say HP7) a bore.

It started out so well! They had us early on — they had us when we were ten in 2001, and we were so easily lured. We were drawn in by our own naiveté and the fact that, like Harry, the thing we knew best was the inside of our own closet. And we found out, like The Boy Who Lived, that there is just a small step between learning what you are and engaging in what will cost you your life — that is to say, your life.

One of the most entertaining aspects of Harry Potter was watching Harry and his friends grow up; it is sobering to realize they are now adults. Did you notice how many times parents and relatives are outdone by their offspring? Hermione doesn't give her parents much of a choice when the Dark Lord comes: she Obliviates them. Harry sends his relatives off packing; even Lucius and Narcissa Malfoy cower behind Draco a few times. As such, Harry and his peers become rebels much in the same way that Voldemort did. It is only the confines of the movie’s plot preventing them from going berserk, drunk on power.

Well, not quite. When the trio infiltrates the Ministry of Magic looking for a locket horcrux, it is amusing not only because of the famous Polyjuice Potion plot device but also because the potion gives them bodies that they wear badly, like new clothes. This discomfort characterizes the whole movie, mostly in scenes involving Harry and Hermione together. They look curiously childish, especially during a scene in which Harry pleads with his best friend to destroy the horcrux. As the locket explodes and Voldemort's soul seeps out, Ron is confronted with his worst nightmare: a world in which he is not needed or wanted. Spectres of Harry and Hermione engage in an embrace which expresses what they feel but don’t dare express, trapped as they are in that strange space between childhood and adulthood.

This partially funny, partially painful tension between Harry, Ron and Hermione strikes a chord in the film that it never did in the book, since the film version of Harry constantly attempts to come onto her where his print counterpart was content with Ginny. The extended slow dance in the tent between Harry and Hermione, as well as their almost-kiss will spawn a decade's worth of fanfiction among faithful Harry/Hermione supporters. Never mind that the film could have been doing something much more interesting at this point. As always, Ron's inexhaustible comic relief throughout is comforting, proving once and for all that even after ten years some things never change. Ultimately, this is why Hermione will end up with him. Everything comes back to logic.

Meanwhile Harry pulls a Bella Swan and claims he's not worth dying for (conveniently after Mad-Eye already has), and also begins to engage in self-destructive behavior. I lost several imaginary extremities to imaginary frostbite every time I saw him diving into freezing water and walking around barefoot in the snow.

Speaking of clothes, the wizards are substantially underdressed for the weather. Only an Urban Outfitters model (and hobbits) can pose in snowy climes barefoot and wearing nothing but a pea coat, thank you very much. Later, the cast dons flannel and jeans on the beach while mourning the death of a house elf. I had forgotten that part from the book, but was so distracted by Harry's wet denim and sandy knees (pet peeve!) that I could not sympathize.

Visually, Yates' direction doesn't disappoint. The spirited animation of the tale of the three brothers constitutes a welcome refuge from the film's ubiquitous forest settings. Forlorn landscapes reminiscent of Forks, US of A engage in an almost Romantic entanglement with Harry's moods. At one point, I could have almost sworn Yates replicated Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. The magical creatures are fewer in this film than in previous ones, which is probably why they felt forced.

When Kreacher appeared, I wanted to ask why there was an elf in the cupboard, and then remembered where I was. And like anything else, Voldemort was far scarier when nobody said his name and when he didn't have a corporeal body. The faceless intruder in your closet is always scarier than the one you can identify. He is especially (and only) scary when you can't remember what films he had a nose in and when he played Heathcliff opposite Juliette Binoche.

We saw far too much of him, and far too little of all the people I really wanted to see: Harry’s parents, Snape (although we did see his Patronus), and a fully clothed Ginny Weasley. I suppose that we will have to wait another six months for the real fun to begin, and by that I mean that we will actually be able to shed this dust jacket of a first part and dive into the crooked binding of J.K Rowling’s imagination, if you will excuse the poorly executed metaphor. See you in 2011. 

Kara VanderBijl is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Chicago. You can find her previous work on This Recording here. She last wrote in these pages about Rene Magritte. She tumbls here.

"Talk You Down" - The Script (mp3)

"Breakeven" - The Script (mp3)

"The Man Who Can't Be Moved" - The Script (mp3)