I Always Thought Harry Potter Was Unrealistic. I Was Wrong.
Harry Potter. Image courtesy of Warner Bros.
These days British author and professional muckraker J.K. Rowling is best known for wading into trans-phobic controversies, unnecessarily retconning the Potterverse, and writing a novel under a pen name to test whether she was best loved for her literary skill or because she created an intellectual property more valuable than a diamond the size of the Ritz (turns out it was the latter). But before all that, she was better known as the brilliant mind behind Harry Potter, one of the most successful book series of all times, which was adapted into one of the most successful film series of all times. It even spawned a second film series, which is turning out to be an egregious piece of crap. But I digress.
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (the title was famously changed to Sorceror’s Stone for its American release, in order to accommodate the unfathomable depths of our nation’s stupidity) appeared on bookshelves in 1997, a quaint and breezy little children’s book about an orphan boy with an impossibly terrible foster family who finds out that not only is magic real, and that he has access to all the fantastical possibilities of a world in which magic is real, but that he is also a hero in that world. It is pretty straightforward kid wish fulfillment stuff, with imaginative characters and fun world-building. The series was immensely popular, as we all know, and the films made over $7 billion during the course of the 2000s.
As they became more popular, the books swelled in length and grew darker in tone - clearly, at a certain point, no one at her publisher had the courage to tell J.K. Rowling to cut anything out of her drafts. This is a common affliction for wildly popular fantasy book series. Anyway, the movies are a delight for the most part. Brilliantly acted, and with exquisite world-building, for nearly a decade they provided film-goers with a wonderfully detailed fantasy realm into which they could escape and follow the lives of 3 kind of uninteresting teenagers as they went through puberty and tried to navigate a world of magic and danger, a world in which nobody, apparently not even the wizard professors at Hogwarts, understood how anything actually worked.
The rules of the Potterverse were constantly changing, usually to service the demands of the plot or a particular character. I’m OK with that. This is, after all, a fantasy world full of made up gibberish. It doesn’t need to conform to a strict internal logic. If you back yourself into a corner, you can just hand-wave it away by making up a new spell called a Swaggwizzle or some shit like that. As long as the world-building is on point - which it was - and the characters sympathetic and likable and well-acted - which they were - then your wizarding world can basically just be an orgy of wonderful magical nonsense and it will still be great fun - which it was.
No, the thing I always found unrealistic about Harry Potter was not the magic. It was the way that Harry was ignored by the Ministry of Magic and virtually all the adults in the Potterverse whenever he tried to warn them about Voldemort. This always struck me as lazy plotting. Harry and his buddies, and only them, find out some secret about Voldemort and when they take it to the proper authorities everyone claims it cannot be true, averts their eyes, and plunges into a cocoon of willful ignorance, thus leaving the protagonists to overcome whatever the obstacle is by themselves with no help and in the most dramatic way possible. Come on, I used to think as I watched these films, that is such a thin narrative shortcut. How dumb would the Ministry have to be to ignore the return of the Dark Lord simply because it’s an unpleasant truth that they would rather not deal with? Nonsense!
Then, Donald Trump happened to America. With every passing day his unfitness for office, his disturbing rants, his authoritarian thirstiness become more and more obvious. And there have been quite a few Harry Potters out there running around since 2015 trying to warn everyone that the Dark Lord is here and he poses a real and serious danger. And everyone has been ignoring them, just like the Ministry of Magic! Slowly and gradually the institutions of the US government like the Justice Department have started to bend to his will and erode, filled with lackeys and boot-lickers like the Death Eaters. Bill Barr is basically just a saggier version of Lucius Malfoy.
It is amazing, depressing, disturbing and pretty scary that the part of Harry Potter which I always held out as merely a convenient plot contrivance has turned out to be all too real. It turns out people will gladly avert their eyes in the face of a clear danger to our republic and our democracy simply because they are too cowardly to confront and stand up to it. J.K. Rowling may not be the best writer on the planet, but she certainly had a penetrating insight into how systems are corrupted in the face of moral weakness. If only we had the luxury of making all this vanish with a wave of the Elder Wand, but unfortunately our Dark Lord is here to stay until at least November 2020.
