Virtual Fools

[Note: The images that I intended to have accompany this piece are stuck on my cell phone, which for some reason does not want to synch up with my computer’s Bluetooth. Until then, verbal imagination, not visual!]

It has been roughly a week since Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows has hit shelves across the world. People - fans and newcomers alike - are deadly series about this book. This strikes as slightly funny, since the title is almost an oxymoron akin to Harry Potter and the Jumbo Shrimp…a hallow, of course, being associated with religious rites, presumably in the name of life, consecration, and peace.

No one is laughing about the business of the book. Big business it is, too. Favorite retailer Deep Discount accidentally mailed copies a wee bit in advance, resulting in legal steps from the publisher and dismay from consumers. Reports of leaks and hacks prompted more news stories in the popular media than real crises. Hype reigns.

I work at a book store and have witnessed this book consume our practices, processes, and energies, sometimes to the detriment of other areas of our job. For the record, I “enjoy” these books and films, though with some trepidation, and disapprove of their total ascendancy in place of other stories, genres, and pursuits. With that in mind, I would like to share an anecdote, followed by showing two different ways of framing the phenomenon that help give it a better historical connection.

My usual hours coincide with those quieter moments when the store is closed and can be put back together again (late night into early morning). However, Harry Potter launch meant working this momentous - and momentous it was indeed, with thousands in attendance - event. By 12:01, following fanfare and the dodge of eager customers, I was located between the front store windows and the back of the registers, on display for all to view as I frantically removed books from sealed boxes and placed them by registers. Our particular store had 10 registers working continuously, meaning that nearly 30 of these lunky books were sold every five minutes. Two hours of this kind of placement meant tired limbs, near dehydration, but amazement at what was done. Integrated into the assembly line, I was Chaplin’s wayward tramp of Modern Times (1936), further alienated by the fact that books, reading, and the previously intellectual realm of solitary contemplation had become superseded by spectacle, noise, and nerves. Overall, the selling went off with little hitch and I look forward to reading the book, on my own time, once the hysteria dies down.

With that in mind, I’d like to share two avenues of approach for the Harry Potter books and films that help give it some context. First is an older essay by famous literary critic and teacher Harold Bloom. Bloom explains that Rowling’s world is modeled after a combination of Tom Brown’s Schooldays and Tolkien’s sense of epic fantasy. In general, he bemoans the enjoyment of the easy pastiche as opposed to the pleasures of the ingenious sources. It is well-known that Bloom has an active interest in canon-making and maintenance, so this is to be expected. But he has a point. Potter doesn’t really offer any spiritual enrichment in the transcendental sense, but rather a well-dressed endorsement of coming of age and succeeding at one’s goals. Though there is real imagination, some taut emotion, and lots of potted melodrama at work, there is little to change the deep depth’s of one’s life beyond spending habits.

The most recent (August 2007) issue of Sight & Sound contains an essay on the British school film by Andrew Roberts. Roberts contrasts the tradition of the Arnoldian - respectable, Imperial, hierarchical, traditional - “public school” with the tradition of dissent and subversion in the cinema. He laments two sentiments that I happen to wholeheartedly share. 1) the only challenging, anarchic, and undeniably masterful film in the cycle/sub-genre is Lindsay Anderson’s if…. (1968), itself absolutely one of the best films ever made and 2) that the two “British” directors who would be best suited to adapting the Potter books into something spectacularly cinematic are also the last two people who will ever be asked to do so (Terry Gilliam and Ken Russell, who are too “un-commerical,” “difficult,” “unbankable,” what have you). The best television view of the tradition of the British boarding school that I know of is “Tompkinson’s Schooldays” from Terry Jones and Michael Plain’s Ripping Yarns. Their view is more polite satire than upheaval.

One of Anderson and David Sherwin’s objections to this school tradition is the total, evidently absurd sort of ideological indoctrination that comes with the territory. While Mick Travis and his friends lash-out with uncoordinated, counter-cultural rigour, Harry and his friends mange light mischief combined with “schooling” for their Wizarding society. Though “bad” in some strictly behavioral ways, Ron, Hermione, et al. are the next generation of public administrators in their alternate reality. Like England itself, their Hogwarts education is a confused mix of tradition, progress, and eventual integration into a larger social order.