Harry Potter’s True Nemesis

Like many bad parents, I went to the midnight opening of Harry Potter with my family last night.  There is something about midnight showings that I find compelling.  Perhaps it was a year in high school spent at the Rocky Horror every Friday and Saturday night, but I find going to midnight showings is an important ritual of social solidarity embedded in mass consumption and pop culture. And I am not alone.  Harry Potter grossed $24-million last night and the Twilight movie Eclipse grossed a whopping $30-million last June at its midnight showing.

Why are so many of us—seemingly reasonable people—willing to forego a night of sleep and risk our children’s health and grades by making them attend school the next day? Because like all truly sacred rituals, midnight showings re-enchant our everyday lives with the possibility of connection.  The audience produces a collective solidarity as a result of the mutual exhaustion and simultaneous exhilaration at being the “first” to see an installment of our most compelling narratives.  People show up in character and in pajamas.  There are more than a few drunks scattered in any midnight showing and they are far more wont to laugh aloud or whistle or applaud.   And as a social ritual Harry Potter VII Part 1 certainly did not disappoint last night.

But the The Deathly Hallows, the book and the movie, disappoints because it is just not as good a story as the previous six installments.  Oh I know that the intellectual snobs among you will scoff at my lack of taste.  ”Harry Potter is a terrible story, not one of the most important stories of our time.  J.K. Rowling is a mediocre writer because she neither wrote a literary masterpiece nor created a completely different reality (like the Lord of the Rings series did, for instance),” you will say in your intellectually snobbish accent.  But I am interested in Harry Potter not as literature, but as narrative and as narrative the series works perfectly.

First and foremost, Harry Potter works because it is neither here in the muggle world nor there in the wizarding world.  It is the very liminality of Potter’s world, the mundane difficulties of living in a completely dysfunctional family that locks you in a closet with the more spectacular difficulties of learning to be a wizard that marks the series as a sacred text.  Liminality is always that state which moves us from here to there, earth to heaven.  Think of the excitement after Thanksgiving, but before Christmas, as our lives are electrified with the possibilities to come.  Think of the engagement period of a couple who are in a constant state of excitement as the “big day” approaches.  Neither Christmas nor a marriage are ever as exciting as the days leading up to them.

But this is the problem with the last book in the Harry Potter series.  It leaves us not with liminality, not with possibility, but with certainty. (Warning- spoiler alert.) At the end of her remarkable series, J.K. Rowling ties up all the possibilities of the major characters’ young lives into the knot of marriage.  Every one of the major characters who begins as a child, grows up into an adult who gets married (to their high school sweethearts, no less).  Each of these characters reproduces children and then sends the children off to Hogwarts.

No one spends their twenties having lots of sex with lots of partners like that other sacred text Sex and the City. No one refuses heterosexuality (except poor closeted Dumbledore, who is of course killed in Book VI).  No one refuses the certainty of dyadic coupling in lifelong monogamy.  So it is that the last part of the Harry Potter series is ruined by a rather mundane view of love and its possibilities.  Which is ironic since the whole series begins with Harry being saved from Voldemort’s evil by a mother’s love.

But love is not exciting.  Falling in or out of love makes for good stories.  The liminality of these states of entering and exiting excites us with possibility and promise.  But as Tolstoy told us in Anna Karenina, happy families are all alike; it’s the unhappy ones that have a story to tell.  Watching as Ron and Hermione, Harry and Ginny, and all the rest fall deeper into the everyday existence of married, reproductive coupling, the magic gets drained out of a story that up until now was worth staying up all night to see.