Harry Potter and the Total Loss of Perspective

The fifth book shattered your interest? Oh my. _Order of the Phoenix_ was by far my fave of the whole series. I thought the sixth was limp by comparison. Haven't seen the movie, though...haven't liked any of the HP movies yet.

And like your wife, looking forward to this weekend!

Just curious, what about Order of the Phoenix turned you off of the series?

Quidditch, Imperialism and the Sport-War Intertext

Great title for an essay? Or the greatest title for an essay?

I don't think you're going to make many friends with this attitude at a liberal arts college ;) Fact is that a lot of "not-so-serious" things are object of study for cultural academic disciplines. Heck, a lot of what we treasure as classics today was once written chiefly for distraction.

The problem I had with Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix really had to do with the failure to take advantage of the opportunity provided by the fourth book. The first four books are, to a large degree, idiot plots in that they could be resolved in ten pages if the characters would just talk to one another. This is prevented for a bunch of silly reasons, including the fact that none of the adults other than Dumbledore believe that Voldemort is still active.

In the fourth book, the idiotic lack of communication finally leads to the death of a student, and you have open action by Voldemort and the Death Eaters. This provided an opportunity to move beyond the fluffy school story format, and actually start to do something interesting with the fantastic element of the series.

Instead, we got another Idiot Plot, with all the adults in positions of responsibility struck down by a case of Author Induced Stupidity, continuing to refuse to believe that Voldemort is around and active. On top of that, we have Harry's overnight transformation into Petulant Teen Boy, and all the significant action is a direct result of his spending most of the book in a snit and not talking to anyone.

It was absolutely maddening. When you throw in the shriekingly awful Umbridge bits, it pretty much killed any enthusiasm for the series that I had.

I picked the first four books up at a jumble sale, read through them in a few days. They were okay, interesting in a "so this is what everyone's talking about" kind of way. When the fifth book came out, I took a look at the page-count, and decided I knew enough about the cultural phenomenon already.

I'm looking forward to the last book, and plan to start reading the first book to my daughter this summer (or likely a combination of me reading and her reading). I haven't seen the latest movie yet, no real rush though I'm sure I will see it eventually. I think the fifth book has its weak moments, like all of the books, but the frustrating way that the ministry refuses to believe Voldemort is alive actually rings true to me. How many global warming deniers do we have today? How many people still supported George Bush in 2004? People will believe things to avoid scariness or inconvenience, despite the evidence. In the book it was horribly frustrating, and yet effective for being just that. Likewise Umbridge represents the banality of evil, making the clear good vs. evil of the Potterverse more realistic with shades of gray.

I'm going to do as I did with five of the previous six and get the audiobook from the library.

I commute 70 miles a day, so this ought to be good for a couple of weeks' worth of drivetime listening. Plus, Jim Dale makes these books sound better than they really are.

On top of that, we have Harry's overnight transformation into Petulant Teen Boy

Have you really never seen a nice kid turn into a Petulant Teen overnight? That's half of what being a teenager is all about!

Personally, I'm just annoyed at book 7, because it will force me to spend about 18 hours in isolation as every single person I know reads it as fast as humanly possible, and then catches up on their sleep. It's only a book! It won't self destruct 12 hours after purchase!

I agree that the fifth book definitely did not live up the fourth (which is my favorite in the series so far), but I think it's also very worth continuing the series, the sixth book introduced a lot more complexity to many of the characters, and there are a lot of interesting ends to tie up in the seventh.

"resolved in ten pages if the characters would just talk to one another. This is prevented for a bunch of silly reasons, including the fact that none of the adults other than Dumbledore believe that Voldemort is still active."

Cause this never happens in the real world. All adults talk to each other all the time, egos and insecurities of public and private figures never get in the way.

I have to go with some of the other comments and point out that a lot of serious academic writing is about "frivolous topics". I used to think it was a bunch of bunk, too. But then a friend who is a little closer to this kind of work pointed out that these studies are not really about Harry Potter or whatever silly thing is the topic; they are really about us as a culture and why we find this stuff fun, interesting or whatever.

Have you really never seen a nice kid turn into a Petulant Teen overnight? That's half of what being a teenager is all about!

and

Cause this never happens in the real world. All adults talk to each other all the time, egos and insecurities of public and private figures never get in the way.

There's a famous line-- I think from Twain, but I'm too lazy to look it up-- about truth being stranger than fiction because fiction needs to be plausible. My feelings about these comments are sort of a variant on that: The fact that something is strictly realistic does not mean that it makes a good story. In particular, it seemed to me like the characters only acted like real teenagers when they needed to do something stupid in order to advance the plot.

I should note that I was not a serious fan of the books even before the fifth book-- they were enjoyable fluff, but not a transformative literary experience. The end of the fourth book gave me hope, though, in that I thought she had positioned herself to be able to open the story up and do interesting things with it. I was badly disappointed.

The sixth book was significantly better, but too little, too late. I am not wildly enthused by the idea of the seventh volume being Harry Potter and the Magic Plot Tokens, and I suspect the Snape storyline is headed in a direction that I will find annoying.

Umbridge represents the banality of evil, making the clear good vs. evil of the Potterverse more realistic with shades of gray.

See, I didn't find her particularly banal-- she was shriekingly awful every second, and the fact that she was clearly intended to be somehwat satirical just made it that much worse. Really good satire requires a deft touch that Rowling just doesn't have.

In a lot of ways, the Umbridge sequences were like having the bits with the Dursleys-- which I find creepy and painful and not at all amusing-- extended over a couple hundred additional pages.

Just have to say I agree with you. The fifth book ruined the series for me. The most significant, obvious reason for my dislike was that I couldn't stand Harry for most of the book. Your reference to Mark Twain is useful; just 'cause it can happen in real life doesn't make it fun to read. Or interesting. My real problem, though, was that Harry spent the whole book hitting one single note, and it was an ugly one. I never found the books to be great literature, but they were fun. Book 5 was not fun.

Now to the less-obvious reason. I was so turned off by whiny Potter that I never really explored my deeper disappointment, but I think you've hit on it. The end of Book 4 set me up to expect that things would be different. Now, I don't necessarily need everybody to have been on board with "Voldemort is back." I think there's an interesting story to be told with people wanting to stick their heads in the sand. But that, too, was done on a single (shrill) note. I really don't like when plots hinge on stupidity, and somehow this book ramped the stupidity up so that we had the blindness of the Ministry, the blindness of the public, *and* the blindness of Harry. (Not to mention Dumbledore's abandonment of Harry for the duration of the book. Whatever.)

I enjoyed the 6th book, and will read the 7th just to get closure, but the 5th destroyed any magic the books had previously held for me.

[One final note, on the movie: The director chose to keep Harry's standoffish whining to a minimum, and to resolve that aspect pretty quickly. What's left is a certain amount of guilt over Cedric's death, and struggle over his identity -- good v. bad, whatever -- which I think was in the books but which I'd had a hard time hearing over Harry's obnoxious behavior. So for that choice and some neato effects in the final battle, I give the film a tentative thumbs up.)

Chad, I'm not playing Devil's advocate to be perverse.

Book 5 needed editing. However, the longest book was wonderfully adapted into the shortest of the 5 movies so far. The film of Harry Potter & the Order of the Phoenix leaves a lot out -- and swoops with great velocity and style.

I sincerely believe that J. K. Rowling is a deeper writer than you allow. Fool that I am, I used to underestimate Stephen King, until finally I saw what complete control he had of exactly the things that the literati ignore, but which I as a writer, editor, and publisher appreciate.

In my view, the best Fantasy movie last year was The Devil Wears Prada (film), the 2006 film based on the the 2003 novel by Lauren Weisberger.

Fantasy? Absolutely. Quintessential Fairy Tale, in what is superficially the real New York and Paris, the same way that Harry Potter is superficially set in the real London and Scotland.

But profoundly about wishes, beliefs, values, the glory and terror of human transformation, the gold of chemistry versus the gold of alchemy, Art versus Illustration.

What ties things into a neat knot is the subplot in The Devil Wears Prada about impossibly (Fantasy!) getting the unpublished manuscript of the new Harry Potter.

The Devil Wears Prada also very correctly examines, explicitly, "going over to the Dark Side" -- hypertextually linking to Star Wars, which fools think is Science Fiction, and we know is Fantasy thinly disguised as Sci-Fi.

Neither Harry Potter nor Stephen King nor The Devil Wears Prada are "frivolous topics."

To think so is akin to the aristocrats who told Shakespeare: "Billy, Billy, when will you give up those silly little plays for the groundlings, and get back to the REAL art of epic poems about Greek Mythology?"

The official border between High Art and Low Art is as fractal and fuzzy and Heisenbergian as the border between Big Science and Little Science.

Honestly.

[My quote]Umbridge represents the banality of evil, making the clear good vs. evil of the Potterverse more realistic with shades of gray.

[Chad] See, I didn't find her particularly banal-- she was shriekingly awful every second, and the fact that she was clearly intended to be somehwat satirical just made it that much worse. Really good satire requires a deft touch that Rowling just doesn't have.

I don't think it was intended as satire. Instead, we have a "good guy" doing awful things to Harry because she thinks she is helping him. This is not trivial, nor satirical. Instead, it should give us all pause, to think about how we think we are helping others and whether we are doing bad things in the process. In other words, this is a lesson in "the ends don't justify the means."

Have you really never seen a nice kid turn into a Petulant Teen overnight? That's half of what being a teenager is all about!

No, that's the stereotype of what being a teenager is all about. And that was the problem with Harry's character development in Book 5 - it was a naff charicature of a real teenagers' emotional development.

That said, I still believe that Book 5 could have been almost as good as 4 if the editors had done their job and trimmed the fat, of which there was much. It seems to have been a victim of the 'George Lucas effect' - her vast success and being hailed as a cultural icon mean that no-one was willing to give Rowling an honest opinion.