Gotta Lotta Harry Potta

I've now seen the final installment of the Harry Potter series (twice, in fact, thanks to my daughter's obsession with it). What can one say? To praise the movies (or the books) is redundant, to critique them seems like sour grapes, especially when one is an aspiring fantasy novelist oneself. But for what it's worth, here's my assessment of "The Deathly Hallows, Part 2":

I liked it.

It was very dark--literally and figuratively; I had trouble seeing what was going on some of the time. The score was terrific, the acting was effortless, and there were a number of stirring scenes, notably the arming of Hogwarts. I also found myself moved by two scenes in particular: Snape's memories viewed by Harry in Dumbledore's Pensieve, and Harry's meeting with the shades of his loved ones in the Forbidden Forest. Though Voldemort's death was something of an anti-climax (less so, actually, than in the book, where he just kind of falls over dead), the film had a fittingly final feel. The promos read: "It All Ends," and though that may be a bit grandiose and hyperbolic, I didn't feel as if they'd left anything out or failed to tie up any important threads.

The only negative thing I'll say about the movie, or about the series as a whole--and this has nothing to do with J. K. Rowling or the film-makers--is that I just don't get all the reviewers and critics who write about the saga's profound religious and mythological resonances. I had the same objection to those who waxed eloquent (and incoherent) about the Star Wars films as modern-day myths. Yes, Harry visits King's Cross Station when he dies--and then he comes back to life, so you can definitely see the Christian imagery there. But the books (and the film adaptations thereof) don't strike me as carrying the gravity and significance necessary to proclaim them "mythological" or "religious." They're pretty simple fairy tales or action-adventure yarns: good confronts and defeats evil, all while riding on dragons and fighting ogres. If that's all there is to mythology or religion, so be it. I suspect, though, that there's lots more: like the complexity of faith, the puzzle of suffering, the relationship of humanity to the earth, the mystery of creation. Harry Potter (not to mention Star Wars) doesn't seem to have anything to do with those subjects, and so for me, it fails the test of myth.

But it fails that test only if we expect it to pass. If, by contrast, we expect it to be exactly what it is--a well-crafted story with appealing characters, a visionary dreamworld, and a compelling narrative--then it passes with flying colors.

Putting the "Christ" Back in . . . The Movies

It's the end of the year, which means it's time for the big blockbuster serial kiddie fantasies that have become Hollywood's mainstay since the dawn of the Star Wars era. I saw the first part of the seventh part of Harry Potter with my son and daughter, and I'll probably go see the latest Narnia installment with them as well; I might even check out the Tron remake (sequel?) for kicks.

But I'll tell you, I'm starting to get a bit annoyed by the way in which the studios, influenced by the likes of Walden Media, are inserting subliminal Christian messages into all these kids' films.

With Harry Potter--not a bad film, by the way, though it could have used a couple fewer scenes of Harry and gang looking scruffy and confused out in the British countryside--there's the whole Savior/Satan thing, with Harry being "The Chosen One" and Voldemort being, well, a snake. With the Narnia films, there's the C. S. Lewis Christian allegory (which was the main reason J. R. R. Tolkien, as stauch a Christian as his friend Lewis but a far better fantasist, hated the books). A while back, there was Bridge to Terabithia, with its really unsettling discussion of whether one of the main characters was going to hell or not because she didn't attend church regular; earlier this year there was the final Toy Story installment, with its title characters very nearly being consumed in a junkyard incinerator that was as vivid an image of hell as can be. So we're getting a good number of veiled Christian stories in our children's films, and I for one find this troubling.

Mind you, I'm not knocking Christianity. Nor am I arguing that there shouldn't be films with Christian themes. Christianity is a powerful and pervasive cultural force, and movies need to deal with it. What I object to is the use of children's fantasy films as a "wedge" to introduce Christianity into secular culture, much as Intelligent Design has been used as a wedge to insert creationism into the science curriculum and the Institute for Historical Review has used historical revisionism to insert Holocaust denial into the scholarly community. I don't have a problem with The Passion of the Christ (though personally, I couldn't watch it till the end; its depiction of torture was just too gruesome). I do have a problem with The Passion of Harry Potter.

If Christians want to disseminate their message, they are free to do so. I even encourage them to do so--if their message is to love one's neighbor, to do good, to forgive others their trespasses, to judge people by the content of their character not the color of their skin. But Christianity doesn't, or shouldn't, need to proselytize on the sly, through seduction or misrepresentation; if it's really as good as it claims to be, it should present itself openly, with no disguises, and let its audience judge for themselves. That was Christ's method, after all: he told it as he saw it, with no concessions and no prettying-up of the sacrifices entailed, and he let people choose for themselves.

A sermon should be a sermon. It shouldn't be a toy, wrapped like a Christmas present to tempt the young and unwary.

Ye Gods!

I saw the first Percy Jackson movie with my daughter today (she's a big fan, and we've been reading the books together, having completed the Harry Potter series last year). For those who haven't heard of it, the conceit behind the Percy Jackson series is that the gods of Olympus are very much alive and well; they've settled in America (for some reason having to do with their affinity for freedom or world dominance or something like that); and they've continued to parent half-blood children like young Percy, son of Poseidon and a mortal woman. In the first book, The Lightning Thief, Percy discovers his lineage and embarks on a quest to find the lightning bolt Zeus believes he's stolen. If he doesn't return it to Zeus by the summer solstice, immortal warfare will ensue and the world as we know it will probably cease to exist.

The book isn't bad, rather hip and arch and American, very unlike the stolidly British HP series. The author, Rick Riordan, is a somewhat better stylist than J. K. Rowling; he says more with less. And Percy, though he's essentially a demigod version of Harry--an abandoned, lonely child who discovers he's actually the most important person in an alternative world he hadn't known existed--is an appealing character, his pre-teen angst convincingly drawn and his quest to find his godly father and vanished mother emotionally resonant.

The movie wasn't half bad either--my daughter scored it a 7 on a scale of 1 to 10, and that's about where I'd have put it too--though of course it weeded out much of the interesting plot and character development in favor of strangely unconvincing CG monsters and frenetic car chases. Its deepest problem was that there was no real sense of urgency to Percy's quest; though we were told that divine warfare would decimate the planet, the most the movie could muster to suggest this threat was a bizarre storm cloud that slowly expanded till it covered most of North America. Maybe it's just me, but big dark computer-generated clouds don't exactly give me the heebie-jeebies.

Watching that cloud, though, I did wonder why the Olympian gods are back this year--not only in The Lightning Thief but in the soon-to-be-released remake of the 1981 Ray Harryhausen classic Clash of the Titans. Maybe it's no more than the perpetual fascination of these timeless myths, which I devoured as hungrily as any child from age 7 to 14. Or maybe it's our equally perpetual need for otherworldly explanations to the troubles of our own time; maybe that looming stormcloud signifies our anxieties concerning such god-sized problems as the economic crash, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the collapse of our planet's climate.

Fantasy, as I've argued in other posts, points both toward and away from the cultural crises of its time; it tells us what we're worried about while simultaneously telling us there's no need to worry. So instead of global warming we get warring godheads. Instead of war in this world we get the war of the worlds. Instead of corporate thieves we get lightning thieves. It's a handy trick; it may even be a necessary one. Who can face the realities of life without a little fantasy? Who can resist calling on the gods, beseeching their aid, cursing them for our fate?

In the myth of Perseus, the hero defeats Medusa by watching her reflection in his shield, thus avoiding direct contact with her petrifying gaze. Fantasy is like that: it shows us the horrors of the real world as if in a mirror, and in so doing places us at a safe distance from them. But in doing so, of course, it also gets them backward.