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harry potter

The Anti-Potter, Part 2: Jeremy Corbyn and the Billionaire’s Authorthority

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Should Jeremy Corbyn somehow manage to win the United Kingdom’s General Election on 8th June, J. K. Rowling will be forced to take a principled stand against his rule.  Which will presumably mean that she’ll go and sulk in a tent for several months.  After all, she’s been vocal, even vociferous, in her opposition to his leadership of the Labour Party since before it started.

Well… it might not be a tent.  She’s a billionaire, remember.  This is something that people seem to forget, at least in effect.  But I imagine sulking would form a large part of it, even if it took place in very comfortable surroundings.  And snarking on Twitter.  That would be a big part of it too.  She’s done a lot of that about Corbyn already.  She has tweeted and retweeted truckloads of declarations of his unelectability, his incompetence, etc.  She piled on in the fake ‘Labour anti-semitism’ row, in which a handful of incidents – ranging from the piffling to the wantonly misconstrued to the fabricated – were talked up by the media into the chimera of a Labour Party stuffed with raging Jew-haters, with Corbyn as either Anti-Semite-in-Chief (Ken Livingstone presumably being his deputy) or as a passive permitter of all the internal Labour Party kristallnachts.  (This is all the more reprehensible, by the way, because there is evidence that anti-semitism is on the rise out in the real world.  But, surprisingly enough, it’s mostly not coming from Left-wing people who have issues with Israel.)

This isn’t to say that Corbyn is perfect.  I’m not here going to elaborate a full position on Corbyn.  If I did, I’d have many complaints to make.  But let’s just state something: when Labour loses on 8th June, the largest single factor will be Corbyn’s unpopularity, which is largely a media artifact.  I mean, you don’t have to especially admire Jeremy Corbyn to realise that when this manifestly sincere man is widely considered less competent, likeable, and trustworthy than Theresa fucking May – a woman he routinely trounces during PMQs; a woman so blatantly machiavellian that she does the Skeletor laugh, on camera, in the House of Commons – something funny is going on somewhere.

Of course, one expects the Right-wing press in Britain (which is almost all of it) to vilify the Labour leader, and especially to vilify Corbyn, a man with a long-history of principled socialist activism and campaigning.  The British Right-wing press thought Ed Miliband was a Marxist.  To them, Corbyn must look like an absolute lunatic.  Seriously, this is what they think.  Anyone who departs so far (which, by the way, is nowhere near far enough for me) from the Westminster consensus (i.e. the dogma of neoliberalism) must simply look, to them, like a twisted nutcase.  But the fact is, he looks like a twisted nutcase to most of the ostensibly Left-leaning British press, i.e. the Guardian, the Independent, and some magazines… well, just the New Statesman, if we’re honest.  (The Indy’s claim to be on this list is really just down to the fact that they have one or two left-leaning columnists.)…

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The Anti-Potter, Part 1: J. K. Rowling and the Effable Mirror

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Happy Friday, all.  Notices first:

There’s a new episode of Wrong With Authority up for you to download, here.  WWA is a podcast about movies about historical events, created and starring myself, Kit Power, Daniel Harper, and James Murphy.  We take it in turns to host.  This time, James is hosting, and we’re talking about Shadow of the Vampire and Gods and Monsters, two movies about the lives of genius directors of classic horror cinema.  So far, the show is getting better with every episode, so check it out.  I believe podcasts in which white guys talk about movies are a real rarity online, so tell all your friends.

I still have a Patreon, as does Eruditorum Press generally.

Sam Keeper is still being really interesting about Rogue One at the moment… and I’m not just saying that because Sam is saying nice things about me and Phil (though that obviously shows excellent taste).

I myself do have more to say about Rogue One and Star Wars generally, but I’m taking a bit of a break for now.  Instead, here’s the first of a new occasional series about another obscure, niche fantasy franchise you probably haven’t heard of.  

 

A little while ago, in the context of a post about John Hurt, I talked a little about the character he plays in the Harry Potter films: Mr Ollivander.  Ollivander is an interesting ‘way in’ to thinking about some aspects of J.K. Rowling’s weltanschauung.

Ollivander is a rarity in Rowling’s work, and also in the films.  Not only is he irresolvably ambiguous, but he’s also a character who has a fundamentally different view of the world to everyone else.  These two things taken together mark him out.  There are other people in the stories who have perspectives that are unorthodox in the Wizarding World, but they are all either evil or foolish.  (In the films there is also Luna, who is neither… but screen-Luna is a very different beast to page-Luna.)

As I noted in the John Hurt essay, Harry – who normally arrives at very decided views on people very quickly, and who usually turns out to be right – is always unsure about Ollivander.  Of course, he turns out to be right about Ollivander anyway, in the sense that he’s right to not be sure about him.  Not because he later turns out to be evil, or a Death Eater (or is it ‘Deatheater’?  I don’t know, I listened to the audiobooks) in disguise, but simply because the books themselves aren’t sure about him.  He turns up again in later books and his character never resolves one way or the other. 

Rowling doesn’t treat Ollivander with her customary spite.  It’s an old saw that good writers have to be sadists towards their characters.  I’m not sure that’s true.  But that isn’t what I’m getting at anyway.  As a writer, Rowling generally has an extremely cruel and judgemental view of people.  She tends to be less judgemental than is warranted towards characters she has decided, a priori, that she likes and we should like too.…

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Harry Potter and the Popular Consumption of Hegemonic Bourgeois Moral Ideology

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Killing people.  It’s a tricky one, isn’t it?

We… (and, in this instance, by the word ‘we’ I mean that rather narrow band of people who produce and consume the artefacts of the Western narrative culture industries) … we want to tell ourselves – in those bourgeois morality plays we call entertainment – that killing is WRONG.  Wrong, wrong, wrong.

The killing curse is an ‘Unforgiveable Curse’.

“Make the foundation of this society a man who never would”.

Luke can’t be won to the Dark Side because he won’t kill his father.

“Coward.  Every time.”

“Stop!  I command it!  There will be no battle here!”

Etc, etc, etc.

But lookity here… our heroes kill people, or they support the necessity of killing people.  Even the ‘moral’ ones (i.e. the ones who aren’t James Bond) do so.  Luke is nobly refusing to kill his father even as Han and Leia and Lando are killing loads of Imperial soldiers in the big battles.  The Doctor refuses to kill the threatened people of Earth even as the survivors of the Gamestation are fighting and trying to kill Daleks, and Rose solves the whole thing by coming back as the Bad Wolf and committing magical genocide.  The Doctor decrees the end of the battle, but relies upon soldiers: the Brigadier, Bambera and Ancelyn… maybe even Ace too… and the Brig saves the world by pumping silver bullets into the Destroyer.

Etc, etc, etc.

Harry Potter never kills anyone.  He barely ever fights anyone.  But he manages this by hiding in a tent when the war comes, while Neville actually fights the Death Eaters in Hogwarts, and his mates form a resistance cell and an underground radio station.  Yet Harry accepts the necessity of killing Voldemort.  He passively accepts (as he pasively accepts everything) that killing Voldemort is his destiny.  Luckily, as in every other instance (something Voldemort rightly points out), something comes between him and the ugly necessity.  Wormtail dies when his own hand strangles him, assorted Death Eaters fall over and accidentally kill themselves and their friends in order to oblige Harry.  In the same way, Voldemort gets shot by a wand, acting of its own volition out of loyalty to Harry.

In the Potter stories, killing is categorically wrong, evil, unforgiveable.  So the goodies fight the magic-Nazis with jinxes that make you fall over.  Luckily, the magic-Nazis also (for some reason) generally refrain from using the killing curse.  Meanwhile, Voldemort clearly and explicitly needs killing… and Harry is Chosen to do it… yet he can’t do this without either

a) using the unforgiveable killing curse, or

b) getting very lucky (i.e. Voldemort accidentally trips over the hem of his own robes and falls onto the tines of a passing threshing machine).

Luckily, luck always comes to Potter’s rescue (as, once again, Voldemort rightly points out), and – through sheer good fortune – there’s some complicated business that means Voldemort gets killed by a sentient wand that, like so many expedient creatures before it, stands in front of Our Hero and does all the difficult, icky stuff for him.…

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The aliens… They’re just so… alien

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J.K. Rowling recently reignited the Potterite shipping-wars by saying that she should never have coupled Ron with Hermione.

Among the things she apparently doesn’t regret putting into the world’s most widely-read/seen Fantasy franchise of recent decades are the following:

  • Gold-obsessed Goblin bankers with big noses and a nigh-communistic inability to comprehend or respect ‘human’ notions of private property.
  • A race of willing slaves with brown skin, huge rolling eyes and ‘pickaninny’ speech patterns.
  • Giants who are born savage and thick, and who live in ‘primitive’ tribes.

Lest it be thought that I’m singling Rowling out for special snark, let me broaden this out immediately.  The SF/Fantasy genre, as a whole, contains a discourse of race that represents a peculiarly insidious reflection of racial ideology.  Race pervades these genres as a category.  Tolkien’s Middle Earth is full of different ‘races’.  The world of Star Trek is full of different ‘races’.  The world of Doctor Who is full of different ‘races’.  Just think how often we are assailed with ‘races’ in Fantasy that can be told apart by both physical characteristics (the blonde hair of the Thals, the crinkly noses of the Bajorans, etc.) and apparently inborn social characteristics.  The Doctor pronounces the Jaggaroth “a vicious, callous, warlike race” (my emphasis).  A social trait (the tendency to make war) is thus ascribed a racial origin.  And the ones I’ve mentioned are just some of the best known and most mainstream. 

Let’s look at another extreme example, which shows a particular kind of Fantasy worry about race:

There certainly is a strange kind of streak in the Innsmouth folks today—I don’t know how to explain it, but it sort of makes you crawl. You’ll notice a little in Sargent if you take his bus. Some of ’em have queer narrow heads with flat noses and bulgy, stary eyes that never seem to shut, and their skin ain’t quite right. Rough and scabby, and the sides of their necks are all shrivelled or creased up. Get bald, too, very young. The older fellows look the worst—fact is, I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a very old chap of that kind. Guess they must die of looking in the glass! Animals hate ’em—they used to have lots of horse trouble before autos came in.

H.P. Lovecraft, The Shadow over Innsmouth, written in 1931.

This is particularly interesting because the story is about ‘race-mixing’, expressing Lovecraft’s bigoted horror of ‘miscegenation’.  But he wasn’t writing in a vacuum.  He was a product of the late-19th and early-20th centuries…  and, indeed, being a man stolidly stuck to the past, he was also a distillation of much of the American 19th century.

The American 19th century was a period of intense construction of race and ‘races’ as a social category (which is what ‘race’ is with reference to human ethnicity; as a biological idea it’s essentially meaningless).  To quote Richard Seymour:

Historically, the act of oppression that produced the category of race preceded the systematic pseudo-scientific classification of human variation along racial lines.

…

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Harry Potter and the Labour Theory of Value

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Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. 

– Marx & Engels, The Communist Manifesto

In this post, I noticed that Star Trek portrays the society of the future as essentially capitalist (in all but name) despite the fact that the people of the Federation have ‘Replicators’ that can summon material objects out of pure energy. Such a development of the forces of production ought to have banished scarcity of any description, thus also banishing any need for the exploitation of labour, the extraction of surplus and the existence of class, along with many other features of capitalism which persist (open or half-hidden) in the Roddenberry/Berman utopia.  In short, given the technology it possesses, the Federation ought to look a lot more like ‘the Culture’ of Iain M. Banks’ (though, actually, the Culture is as much a liberal vision as it is socialist or anarchist… with its dependence upon the benevolent dictatorship of super-smart AIs and its liberal imperialism… but that’s a different essay).

There is a similar problem for the ‘wizarding world’ of Harry Potter, for all Rowling’s hasty and hamfisted improvisations about it being impossible to magic-up food. We know that magic allows wizards to transform goblets into rats.  Why then do 11yr old wizards, preparing for their first year at Hogwarts, have to go to Diagon Alley and buy rats (or cats or toads or cutsey owls) from a shop?  In a world where magic washes the dishes, there can be no need for labour.

If one can make things without labour, why labour?  Why produce, distribute and exchange?  Why teach?  Why make or do anything?

Labour – making things, doing things, thus changing your environment – is perhaps the most essential aspect of human nature.  In the wizarding world, this essential human quality is degraded and potentially denied.  Maybe this is why so many of the inhabitants of the wizarding world seem to empty and sterile and dull… they are deprived of any real meaning and content to their activity as human beings.

Yes, I know it takes a lot of work to make a potion in Professor Snape’s class… but the question remains: why not just magic-up a potion from thin air?  Or just magic-up the desired effect of the potion?  Is this impossible?  Okay… then the immediate next question is: why?  The wizards can magic-up light from nowhere by just muttering “lumos”.  Light is material, remember?  Why is this material summonable ex nihilo while others are not?

The cynical answer is to do with J. K. Rowling being a lazy hack.

The cuddly answer is to do with it just being a bit of fun for kids (okay, fine… but somebody please remind Rowling, yes?)

The interesting answer is that there is no answer and cannot be. …

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Potterless

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I can scarcely believe I’m doing this…

Saw the Potterocalypse.  Well crafted.  I’ve had worse afternoons in the cinema.

One of the most interesting things about the films is how much better they are than the books.  That goes for all of them.  This last is no exception.

Rowling is a poor novelist but Kloves is an excellent adaptor.  It’s quite amazing how he streamlines the windy, pompous, digression-ridden plots so that audiences can follow them without flowcharts. 

Also, the films have always made Harry easier to like than the books, partly because Radcliffe is naturally likeable and partly because cinema can’t give us what Rowling insists on foisting upon readers: unfettered access to Harry’s every self-obsessed, uncharitable, weak-willed, petulant thought.  Again, in this latest film, Kloves helps mightily by snipping out acres of Potterian sulking and obsessing over irrelevancies, like the ancient and brief moral failures of mentors, etc.. 

Harry’s wobbles over loyalty to his dead headmaster go on for faaaaaar toooooo loooooong in the book… and yet, in the film, even after all the set-up from the last film, we get only the briefest hint of Aberforth’s resentments before Harry states that he trusted Dumbledore And That’s All There Is To It.  Harry doesn’t even ask the spectral Dumbledore about it in the dream/afterlife bit (which is filmed in a pleasingly 2001: A Space Odyssey-ish way).  I’m not complaining about this, but it’s odd how breezy is the treatment of the whole Dark Dumbledore Backstory in Deathly Hallows Part 2, given how much attention the set-up stuff (i.e. conversations at the wedding, Rita Skeeter’s book) gets in Deathly Hallows Part 1.  This is an odd but ultimately minor stumble, largely because this subplot is fundamentally uninteresting and they are quite right to sideline it. 

One of the worst of Rowling’s many, many, many flaws as a novelist is that she doesn’t understand her own characters.  She knows who she wants them to be… no, hang on… a better way of putting it would be that she knows how she wants her readers to view them, but this often fails to jive with how they actually behave.  For example, she damn-nigh instructs the reader to love Harry because he’s kind and brave and heroic and full of love, etc. etc. etc. ad nauseum, but actually depicts him (especially in the final book) as a thoughtless, selfish, grumpy, maudlin, indecisive, clueless little irritant.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with having a flawed hero – especially if that hero is a teenage boy, since they’re usually pretty damn flawed – but it becomes a problem when the authorial voice fails to percieve the flaws, and has the embodiment of moral authority in the books (Dumbledore) treat Harry as though he’s a ruthlessly efficient intellectual humanitarian.

But then the embodiment of moral authority is deeply flawed too.  His actions make him – to any disinterested observer – a cynical, calculating manipulator with a revolting streak of sentimentality and an outrageously brazen habit of indulgent and permissive favouritism towards certain of his pupils. …

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