The Handsome Camel

The third movie in my Balad Air Base Boredom Film Festival, along with Transformers and Georgia Rule, was Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. For me, the Harry Potter movies, with the singular exception of Alfonso Cuaron's chilly third installment, have always functioned mainly as extremely expensive illustrations of the books, memorable for their (usually) well-crafted images, but hardly bringing anything new to the books in style, intellectual content, or emotional revelation. I always wished that they would, and Terry Gilliam mentioned once in an interview on NPR's Fresh Air that J.K. Rowling had asked for him as the director of the first film. He was brought in for a meeting with the studio, who of course had no intention of hiring a man whose previous films included the legendary financial disaster The Adventures of Baron von Munchausen and an abandoned wreck of an attempt to film Don Quixote. But imagine the possibilities!

One thing Gilliam would almost certainly have brought to the project is a sense of awe at the magical properties of the Potter universe, and indeed this is probably the one dimension that matters most in these largely redundant films. Rowling lays a good foundation in the books, sprinkling all sorts of little spells and bits of magical delight into the substance of her stories -- I'm particularly fond of the wandering headmasters in their paintings, Mrs. Weasley's clock, and even Dolores Umbridge's punishing pen -- but it's nearly impossible to do in writing what movies do effortlessly all the time, which is to allow us to experience two or three different levels of activity at once. The makers of Airplane! famously used this property of film for comic effect, as when Robert Hays earnestly tells his life story while his fellow passenger, unable to get away, hangs herself instead. The comparison between the ludicrous and the serious only makes the ludicrous funnier.

And I've always wished for those multiple levels in the Potter films. It seems to me there is no better vehicle for unfettered imaginative play than these stories which center around the training of young alterers of reality. Magic in The Lord of the Rings is largely confined to the realm of combat, apart from the Ring itself; it's rare that Gandalf indulges in magical play, though of course the opening scenes at Bilbo's party give us a taste of what he might be like in more serene circumstances. Magic in the Narnia stories is largely linked to morality, and anyway it's more a manifestation of the will and purpose of the universe than a tool or power that human beings use. (Indeed, the primary users of magic in Narnia are Aslan -- essentially, God -- and the witches who seek to usurp His place.) And the use of magic in The Dark is Rising -- soon to be released as a film, with the morphologically inappropriate Ian McShane as Merriman -- is so serious and purposeful that you can hardly imagine Will Stanton ever cutting loose in the manner of Fred and George Weasley. The Potter books, alone among the major fantasy series currently being made into films, offer filmmakers a real opportunity to uncouple the magical elements from the mere yoke of plot and let them become a source of wonder and delight for the audience. Yet no filmmaker so far has fully realized that opportunity, though Mike Newell had some nice moments with the Beauxbatons girls in the fourth installment.

The fifth film, then, is a fine continuation of this series of moving illustrations. David Yates gets in a memorable sight gag with Filch, the Hogwarts caretaker, and an increasingly crowded wall full of proclamations and rules. Characters who never add up to much in the series anyway, such as Ferensi the centaur, are neatly excised. When magic does get some free play, as in Dumbledore's vanishing trick and his climactic battle with Valdemort, it's magnificent. And if the films don't add as much as I'd like, their chief virtue lies, I think, in what they leave out.

The Harry Potter of both the books and the films can be a bit passive. Often he seems simply the catalyst of processes that pass him right by. But in the films we never know what he's thinking in his periods of inactivity, and this is perhaps a blessing. His frequent failure to affect events around him seems largely the result of his age, and Daniel Radcliffe's fresh-faced ingenue routine works to keep us on his side, so that when he does act, we are reminded of his good qualities, of why he's the hero of the story. The Harry of the films morphs back and forth from helpless child to courageous student leader, and we can see this movement as the maturation, and occasional backsliding, of a traditional hero.

In the books, on the other hand, we frequently dawdle in Harry's thoughts -- and for the most part his thoughts reveal someone thoroughly unlikeable. Harry is quick to take offense and enjoys a good stew -- he stews about the Durzleys, which is understandable, but also about Ron and Hermione, about Sirius, and always, always, always about Dumbledore. He doesn't trust his friends a whit, assuming the worst of them whenever his feelings are chafed: when the other students don't write to him over the summer, he assumes they've snubbed him; when Dumbledore doesn't disclose every aspect of his plans to Harry or, at times, avoids contact with him, Harry immediately believes the old wizard is slighting him, although Dumbledore has shown time and again that he does nothing without good reason. Even when the reason for something has been thoroughly explained to him, as in the case of his occlumancy lessons, Harry can't help seeing it as a punishment and an oppression. Well into the seventh book, long after every major character has proven both smarter than Harry and doggedly devoted to him, he can't simply go with the flow and trust Dumbledore's plan or his friends' motives. Everything that doesn't break his way aggrieves him, while on the other hand when something comes to him too easily, he hardly gives it a second thought. Apart from making him seem a little spoiled, this makes him not only a sucker for Valdemort's tricks (as when, in Order of the Phoenix, he goes rushing off to the Ministry after a "vision" from Valdemort), but also a profoundly uncurious soul. (If the sword of Gryffindor had shown up randomly where I was camping in the woods, I would have been made profoundly uneasy by this undeserved and improbable stroke of good fortune, but Harry hardly seems to register the profound queerness of it.)

Moreover, as Chris Dahlen points out at SaveTheRobot, Rowling's long and exclusive excursions into Harry's consciousness mean that we often miss what's going on in the heads of more interesting characters -- particularly, in the sixth book, Snape and Draco Mallfoy, who bear most of the plot burden and face the most interesting tests.

There's a case to be made that Harry's profound insecurity and inability to trust stem from his childhood as a neglected orphan. And certainly there's no law that says the hero of a children's fantasy can't at times be a jerk -- Edmund in The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe is a thorough prat and a traitor before being reformed by Aslan's forgiveness. But Lewis never asks us to see Edmund as anything but a jerk -- we are not invited into Edmund's mind and asked to sympathize with page after page of his self-pity.

The maddening thing is that I can't decide whether Rowling means Harry to be a sort of anti-hero, whose frequent lapses into angry sulking are meant to shock us out of our stereotypes of what a hero looks like, or whether she really wants us to sympathize with Harry's endless travails at the hands of his reliable, helpful friends. Certainly she knows how to write a traditional hero, at least from the outside (Hermione fits the bill, and many times I've wished we could get a series of books about her instead), which seems to make it possible that she's presenting us this balky, difficult hero on purpose. But....

But there's something almost inappropriate about this approach, if it is intentional. Because Rowling limits our experience, for the most part, to Harry's perspective, we might be tempted to see him as an unreliable narrator, and not to take his calculation of the emotional import of the proceedings at face value. But Harry is not the narrator -- it remains a third person narrative, and Rowling doesn't mind leaping away to things Harry can't possibly see if it will develop the plot or elevate tension, especially at the beginning of each of the later books. Moreover, her characterizations tend to be stated emphatically and without filtering through Harry's mind -- Dolores Umbridge doesn't just look like a toad to Harry; she objectively looks like a toad. Snape's hair is greasy, and he does hiss when he talks.

And it's clear on every page, especially as we approach the end of the series, that Rowling doesn't want us to retain emotional detachment from the proceedings, as we might if it were told strictly from Harry's perspective and we knew him to be a tetchy, biased narrator. Our whole investment in the heightened emotional stakes of the story -- and by the end Rowling is pulling out all the stops, mostly successfully -- depends on our believing that defeating Valdemort really is important, that Harry's and his friends' sacrifices are meaningful, that their deep love and affection for one another makes them both better and, ultimately, more powerful than those whose only love is for power.

In this she succeeds, and there's a firm, objective reality outside Harry's head in which the emotional charge of the story is grounded. This is not an avant-garde novel shaped by its anti-hero's twisted perception of reality. And yet Harry doesn't fit comfortably into what we hope for in the hero of a children's fantasy. As noted above, Edmund in the Narnia stories is a jerk in the beginning but undergoes a profound change. Milo in The Phantom Tollbooth undergoes a similar if lesser transformation -- bored with life at the beginning, curious and eager by the end. Will Stanton in the Dark is Rising starts out ignorant and has a terrible failure of nerve at a crucial moment, but we never get the feeling that he is ignoring his friends' obvious good qualities and churlishly seeing the worst possible explanation for things. Will is fundamentally decent, despite his failure. With Harry, it's always a bit of guess whether he's really good, or just rebellious. He's got guts, no question -- but often it seems that his ability to stand up to people like Snape, Umbridge, the various Ministers, and even Valdemort amounts to little more than knee-jerk contrariness. Dumbledore's assertions at the end of each book notwithstanding, it's by no means clear, at least until the seventh installment, that Harry is particularly loving or moral.

The films, which spend no time at all dwelling on Harry's perceptions of things, relieve us of this uncomfortable characterization. And while that makes them considerably less complex and challenging than the books, it's also something of a relief.