A Marksian Muggle?

by John Marks  (John’s blog entry originally posted on the Purple State of Mind website)

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.