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 Few books, and even fewer films, are made for something as outdated as cultural, historical or aesthetic significance.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.

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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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