Finally finished watching the Harry Potter movies last week, before I moved into my new place. It feels apt to have done that during my move back to London, although it's worth admitting that I'd be considering it for a while before I knew I'd be coming back.
I first encountered Harry Potter, in earnest, in about 2000 or 2001, though I'm sure I must have known about the books earlier. I was in Göttingen, wrapping up my year abroad and my final year of college, and suddenly all the bookstores in town (of which there were a few) had pictures of kids in wizard capes, as well as actual kids in wizard capes, running around.
After I finished I moved to London, where the fever pitch of anticipation for the first movie swept me up and I consumed the first four books in rapid succession. I watched the first movie that year, around the same time that I saw the first Lord of the Rings movie, and the second movie the following year... and then kind of stopped. The third movie, which a lot of people say is the best, passed me by, and I saw the fourth when I lived in New York, but as the whole enterprise went on I clearly had my mind on other things.
I did read the books as they came out, of course, and I remember, especially in the final three, seeing so many turns of phrase and ideas that I loved. One scene that sticks with me is when Mad-Eye Moody is showing Harry the picture of the first Order of the Phoenix, and describing the fates of each of the wizards in the picture. And I remember the satisfying final chapter of Deathly Hallows, where everyone's gotten together with who they should have and you see how the relationships, even with Draco Malfoy, have turned out - it stuck with me, for sure.
But a few things have worn away at my curiosity in the years since I read Deathly Hallows. One was the fact that Potter stuff is basically everywhere here in the UK - one of my offices was right around the corner from a VFX firm that did work on the Potter movies, so I must have seen a wireframe Dobby the House Elf hundreds of times. Add to that the fact that a lot of my female British coworkers were of an age to see it coming out in real-time, so I heard a lot of disquisitions on how hot the actor who played Neville Longbottom has become.
And I follow JK Rowling on Twitter, because she's funny, interesting and let's face it, there's hardly a better example of where a good story can take you. From single mother writing in cafes in Edinburgh to billionaire, you have to respect what she was able to create and, honestly, the integrity to make sure her vision came through both in the books and the movies.
So it was always floating around me, and finally I took the decision last year that I wanted to reread the books. But somewhere along the line I decided that watching the movies would take less time, and anyway it would be uncharted territory for me. So that's what I did.
In an illustration of how chance favors the prepared mind, HBO duly announced that it would add all eight movies to HBO Go on January 1. I'm pleased to say that I got through the first four in those days before I flew to London, and since then I rented the other four on iTunes, since I wasn't sure if Amazon would work out here.
The AV Club did a "Run the Series" article on the Harry Potter movies, where they said it was the greatest sustained series of fantasy films ever put on screen, and I have to agree. Lord of the Rings started out really well but with each movie got farther from what it should have been, and the Hobbit was even worse, while Game of Thrones can't be fully evaluated yet because it hasn't finished (and we still don't know how the books will turn out).
But the Potter movies work because they do a nice job of distilling and simplifying the stories as told in the books, so that after the first few films there's less about life at the school and more about bringing the plot forward. In fact, the worst of them, Chamber of Secrets, is the one that hews closest to the source material, and is accordingly the longest and least focused.
The other thing I like about them, stories and movies, is how well they play with existing myths and legends to weave together something new. I remember someone saying (dismissively) that Order of the Phoenix was stealing from Star Wars, but that's not a bad thing, because like Star Wars, it's lifting ideas and remixing them into a thing that resonates with huge numbers of people.
In contrast to Star Wars, though, Potter's remixing turns it into what you could call English fantasy, putting it in the same category as Neil Gaiman's stories (like Neverwhere or American Gods), Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell or even the Lord of the Rings. The difference as I see it between English fantasy and epic fantasy, which is the subgenre that LotR gave rise to, is the reliance on the trappings of fairy tales to tell something that resonates more. I talked about the difference between the two a few years ago, and the idea applies well to the Harry Potter movies.
While reading up on the books' reviews and criticism, I remember one reviewer pointing out the Anglo-Saxon origins of names like Dumbledore.
I'm not the only one who thinks so, as there's currently an exhibition at the British Library about the fairy tale and folkloric sources that Potter draws on. The write-up on it in the London Review of Books is probably another thing that made me want to watch the Potter movies.
You can argue that the movies aren't the best, just as the books aren't the best examples of writing, but as I say, the stories are satisfying, particularly as you chart Harry's progression from child to man. To say nothing of the pleasure of watching the characters around him grow up - like in real life, a person who you thought of as always in the background may end up having outsized significance to your life later on. Or, as in the case of Snape, finding that your initial opinion of a person is completely at odds with who they really are.
But again, the movies attracted most of the great British actors of the last couple of decades, with Alan Rickman's portrayal of Snape and his nuances being probably one of the high points. My favorite moment has to be in Prisoner of Azkaban, where they're confronted by Lupin in his werewolf form and Snape puts himself between Lupin and the three kids. It's a moment that a kid might pass over, but contrasting Snape's ultimate loyalties with how he and Harry take such an immediate dislike to one another makes it quite poignant.
As I say, there's a certain pleasure in watching Harry, Ron and Hermione grow up, along with their other friends. And it's interesting to consider the kids who filed in to watch the first movie had grown up alongside the characters, just as a couple of years earlier other kids grew up with the books. It's a bit of a sad pleasure, considering the characters and actors who've been lost during the story, and since, but it's a good depiction of growing up for all of us.
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