In Which Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince Lacks The Granger-Potter Intercourse We Were Hoping For

Harry Potter and The New Victorians

by ELEANOR MORROW

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is a short series of photoshoots assembled into an incoherent movie. If you didn't read the books, you wouldn't be crazy to ask what the hell is going on. I mean they basically ruined three of the central moments in the series here. I did not even cry when Dumbledore died.

Many have written themselves into a corner trying to hate on Harry Potter, most notably A.S. Byatt. As she put it:

Ms. Rowling's magic world has no place for the numinous. It is written for people whose imaginative lives are confined to TV cartoons, and the exaggerated (more exciting, not threatening) mirror-worlds of soaps, reality TV and celebrity gossip. Its values, and everything in it, are, as Gatsby said of his own world when the light had gone out of his dream, ''only personal.'' Nobody is trying to save or destroy anything beyond Harry Potter and his friends and family.

Whoa. All art serves a purpose. Whatever got 100 million people reading books can't be all bad. In translation, the films can't possibly represent the books, which are essentially an awkwardly written first effort from a juvenile-level author at best. Miss Rowling was in no position to write a great fantasy, but she gave it a shot, and it's easy to write this stuff. Stephanie Meyer owns NBC now, right?

Seriously though, the films were destined to be bad unless one person made them all Peter Jackson-style. They did a good job with the first one and the newness of it, and then the lighting design just started getting darker. Everyone's complexion became vampiric like Twilight. No one is having very much fun. It makes you wish they had all just rewatched Legend 5,000 times before shooting Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.

But hey, that's what Harry Potter is — it is so general, so easy, it can take on any cultural phenomenon and incorporate it within the flexibility of the narrative (if the lame, we must find seven parts of the villain's soul plot can be called a narrative). Harry and his friends are a projective lense through which we view the younger part of our population.

The news is not great, you guys. On the film or on the generation it purports to depict. The piece of art that accomplishes largely the same thing as Harry Potter is The Up Series, a British invention of documentary television that checked in on seven kids at ages 7, 14, 21, 28...every seven years and so on. The results were mind-boggling.

Neil turned out to be the most unpredictable of the entire group. At seven he was funny, full of life and hope. By the time of 21 Up he was homeless in London, having dropped out of Aberdeen University after one term, and was living in a squat and finding work as he could on building sites. During the interview he is clearly in an agitated state, and it becomes apparent that he has mental health issues and is struggling to cope with life; he mentions he had had thoughts of suicide. At 28 he was still homeless, although now in Scotland; by 35 he was living in a council house on the Shetland Islands, off the north coast of Scotland, writing and appearing in the local pantomime. By the time of 42 Up he had finally found some stability in his life (with some help from Bruce--he was living in Bruce's apartment in London and Bruce had become a source of emotional support) and was involved in local council politics.

Harry, Hermione and Ron are juniors in high school and yet they haven't ascended much further than heavy petting. The adults in their lives are impotent creatures — even the murderer who takes the Unbreakable Vow is kind of a weak shit in the end.

The biggest evidence we have of the most serious villain to haunt non-Muggles in history is a smoky shadow in the sky. This was Voldemort! He had unlimited power! His lieutenants murdered untold wizards. But hey, what could he do? These three were about:

Over time the series has resisted efforts to make it less British, and for an American child, Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince becomes a bizarre instruction of repressed sexual politics. The main crux of the matter is, all the pale faces have a very Victorian sexuality and have to observe customs or they're crying about another girl kissing their man, just kissing. How can an inner city girl who has worked two jobs by the age of 16 supposed to empathize with such an empty beacon of a woman?

A strange Muggle moment at a diner opens Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Harry gets hit on by an appealing black waitress who tells him that she gets off at eleven. It's obvious from her dress that she could have Harry screaming his dead parents names in ecstasy by the time she's done with him. Yet he happily retreats into his fake Victorian world — one that doesn't seem quite so magical anymore. I thought the point was that Hogwarts isn't identical to whatever Muggle High School Potter might have attended. I guess if Hermione can go to Clown College, Harry doesn't need more school.

On the whole, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince doesn't offer a terribly great image of English men and women, but it's an even worse portrayal of young people forging out in the world. Harry's bosom buddy Neville Longbottom has one scene in this movie, and he's serving Harry the lord a tray of hors d'oeuvres at a party for the more fameball Hogwarts students. And Harry thanks him.

The paring back of all the original and interesting material from the novel notwithstanding, what's left over is a bunch of teens who bear more resemblance to the cast of Gossip Girl than the fearsome force that created Dumbledore's Army in the previous novel. In addition, Rowling clumsily wrote all her best characters out of the script. Harry's uncle Sirius, played by Gary Oldman, formed a unique relationship with the orphan wizard. And then Sirius was killed off for no real reason, and Hagrid got turned in an impotent animal lover. For shame!

Shit, even House Slytherin looks like they're going to break into tears at any moment. Draco Malfoy shouldn't engender sympathy, you want to scream at David Yates, the film's clearly overmatched director. I'm not sure what's worse: that he thinks a giggling schoolgirl who likes Ron should get all the laughs, or that the only lines granted to people of color are apologies and invective?

A major element of the previous films, and somehow deleted in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, is the idea that what appears one way on the surface is something different indeed. I saw the film with a capacity crowd on 66th Street, and there was the occasional gasp at some new special effects feat — the way leaves moved on a tree, or the sight of dead tarantula as dusk fell on Hogwarts.

But mainly everything is exactly what it seems to be: Snape is the villain getting his task from his master, and the film ends when he carries it out. Dumbledore has Harry's best interest in mind, everyone gets with the person they're supposed to. The worst thing you can do is not make choices in a fantasy.

Since Rowling isn't much of a writer, the books follow a similar, easy template. There is some sort of mystery that these three Scooby Doo types must sort out.

In the films we are thankful for this progression; it keeps us guessing instead of watching a series of interrelated scenes that never quite add up to a whole. In The Half-Blood Prince, the point was supposed to be us finding out who the Half-Blood Prince is. But no one every really asks that question, no tries to solve it. It's the entire plot of the book and yet it has disappeared from the film! I'll grant you that it's not a very satisfying riddle, but at least it was a riddle.

So we're left with the personal issues of these three beanpoles.

Even stripped of the magic that made Harry a sensation, screenwriter Steve Kloves could have been forgiven had he not directly ignored and never sufficiently investigated the love between Hermione Granger and Harry Potter. "You're my best friend," she tells him as she leans up against him. They know each other too well. They don't know Ron: he's like a child that needs constant reassurance, and they both fail to connect with the other adults in their lives. Here they had something, and they threw it away.

Harry Potter was about being an outsider, an outcast. The first image of this film is flashbulbs popping off at the newly famous Potter. He's not an outsider anymore, he's a star, and it doesn't matter if Hermione Granger's parents were dentists — she's going to Brown now. Harry plans to drop out of school. He's mired in existential dread. "Voldemort killed my parents," he tells everyone in hearing range, as if they didn't remember. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince features Harry losing yet another father figure. I'm afraid I cried all the tears I had for the last three.

Eleanor Morrow is the senior contributor to This Recording. She lives in Manhattan, and tumbls here.

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In Which We Do What We Do When We Do It For the Children And Them Alone

How I Got This Way

by ALEX CARNEVALE

As I got older, I learned some tough stuff about the world. For instance, that there was no Jack in the Box on the east coast. I still don't get that.

And once I was able to be a little more choosy about my own reading, all these saccharine kids' books really led me in a differnt direction. Here's where I ended up:

Big Friendly Author?5. Danny the Champion of the World, Roald Dahl

Dahl was an admitted anti-Semite, making it all the more inappropriate that my parents permitted me to read his books. Many of his books have outrageous Jewish stereotypes, and I'm sure this one is no different (it's not kind to Gypsies either), but at the time, it was a simple story of revenge and wonder, plus the nature element. It's the best of his books and it's not particularly close, although the Henry Sugar novella always will hold a steely place in my heart.

4. Incident at Hawk's Hill, Allan Eckert

For a kid's book, this was some pretty dark shit. This was the assigned reading in Mr. Z's sixth grade class. Mr. Z himself was a psychotic local Republican who somehow was permitted to teach children reading. In hindsight, this book was wholly inappropriate, as were his frequent stories about how he once had a leg cast as a kid and he kept shoving food down there and he got maggots. I've carried that with me long enough.

 

3. Books of Blood, Clive Barker

After a bad experience in 1994 when I had to run into my mother's arms because Jurassic Park was way too real for me, I realized I had to toughen up. Fortunately or unfortunately, I decided to toughen up on the greatest series of horror stories ever written. Barker's a native Englishman perhaps most familiar for the Hellraiser series. He's a capable novelist--Weaveworld and The Damnation Game are both enjoyable for what they are--but Books of Blood, which brought Barker onto the scene as a master of the genre, blows anything he ever did after BOB away. This stuff is still scary to me today, and it's flat out fun to read. It's probably available as a dollar paperback at any decent used bookstore.

     

2. Speaker for the Dead, Orson Scott Card

The first book in the series, the universally acclaimed Ender's Game, is the ultimate kid's science fiction book in that it's wonderful throughout, but once you know the end, it's friggin' pointless. South Park parodied Ender's Game with an episode that had Kenny playing the PSP against Satan's Army. Having delivered one decent book that gained a massive audience, Orson Scott Card--whose politics leave something to be desired--had it in him to write one more great book before resigning himself to a lifetime of mediocrity.

That book is Speaker for the Dead. The two books have very little to do with each other besides the same central character. SFTD holds up quite well--it's a philosophical intrigue that even young people can digest, and the mystery behind everything is fun and enjoyable to grasp. In many way it reminds me of Joe Haldeman's far superior All My Sins Remembered (one of the greatest science fiction novels ever written) and any comparison to Haldeman is high praise from me.

1. Harry Potter, J.K. Rowling

I didn't read Harry Potter when I was very young. The first Potter came out in 1997 (I was 14), and it wasn't very good. It had some great world building and plenty of memorable characters, not much of a plot. The Potters are hardly my favorite children's books, but they are wonderful, and since they're going to be far and away the first real influential books of this century it's worth thinking about what they might be doing for our culture and whether or not they're actually bad or good.

People who don't read Harry Potter irritate me. If something is going to hold this kind of thrall over young people, who are digesting 600 page novels as if they were Pop Tarts, I'd say it's pretty important to get your hands on a copy.

In short, if you really care about reading, and what the future of prose literature might be, you have to have read this.

Like I said, the first one's just world-building. The second one has some high notes. The third one, adapted into another terrible Alfonso Cuaron film that looked great, was the best up to that point. Goblet of Fire topped it with its massive set pieces and violence. The Order of the Phoenix was Rowling going a bit crazy with exposition and a tedious final scene, with plenty of more adult fun in between.

one could hardly call such a thing beautyThe next one was a better effort than the Order, but churning them out at such speed hasn't helped the quality, though Rowling's improved at plot tremendously as she's moved along.

A.S. Byatt, a marvelously talented writer in her own right, penned the strongest possible repudiation of Rowling, although like most criticism of institutions, it was rendered pointless. The book is "cliched"-- thanks, we didn't catch that.

Byatt's argument:

Ms. Rowling, I think, speaks to an adult generation that hasn't known, and doesn't care about, mystery. They are inhabitants of urban jungles, not of the real wild. They don't have the skills to tell ersatz magic from the real thing, for as children they daily invested the ersatz with what imagination they had.

Similarly, some of Ms. Rowling's adult readers are simply reverting to the child they were when they read the Billy Bunter books, or invested Enid Blyton's pasteboard kids with their own childish desires and hopes. A surprising number of people — including many students of literature — will tell you they haven't really lived in a book since they were children. Sadly, being taught literature often destroys the life of the books. But in the days before dumbing down and cultural studies no one reviewed Enid Blyton or Georgette Heyer — as they do not now review the great Terry Pratchett, whose wit is metaphysical, who creates an energetic and lively secondary world, who has a multifarious genius for strong parody as opposed to derivative manipulation of past motifs, who deals with death with startling originality. Who writes amazing sentences.

It is the substitution of celebrity for heroism that has fed this phenomenon. And it is the leveling effect of cultural studies, which are as interested in hype and popularity as they are in literary merit, which they don't really believe exists. It's fine to compare the Brontës with bodice-rippers. It's become respectable to read and discuss what Roland Barthes called "consumable" books. There is nothing wrong with this, but it has little to do with the shiver of awe we feel looking through Keats's "magic casements, opening on the foam/Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn."

Say what you want about her views, but Byatt's identified the trend here--consumable books not designed to be savored, but to be ingested or plowed through like Lost on DVD. The problem Byatt faces in dissing Rowling is that she has to find something to praise. Terry Pratchett's an even more terrible writer, so that's not gonna help.

The chief benefit of this phenomenon seems to me to be that people are reading, and that it doesn't really matter what. Overall, after taking the interweb into account, it seems that people are reading as much as ever, if not in exactly the same way that the publishing companies would like them to. This is a notable change in world culture, and for us to process what it really means will take some time. For now, who cares what children read? Why bring taste into a discussion that already has babies in it? Babies only know what tastes good.

LULLABIES FOR THE LITTLE ONES

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