The limits of politics in 'Beasts,' 'Harry Potter'
In a long essay published earlier this fall about J.K. Rowling's "Harry Potter" stories, the British writer Laurie Penny argued that "Potter-themed memes emerge wherever young people are disappointed by society's failure to deliver on the basic middle-class promises of human decency, social mobility, and authority that doesn't run too rampant," whether they're protesting school fee hikes in the United Kingdom or embracing a study that suggests Potter fans have been rendered immune to Donald Trump.
Penny's essay suggests that fans of the Potterverse have put Rowling's concepts to ends more radical than Rowling herself might have created, mining a story about an elite boarding school and a magical aristocracy for concepts and language that can be deployed in service of movements such as Occupy. Published before the American presidential election, Penny focused on the relationship between Rowling and her readers and the question of who has ownership of this very famous work, and who has the right to interpret it. But it nagged at me a bit as I tried to process my response to "Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them," a movie intended to kickstart a whole new "Harry Potter" franchise, which arrived in theaters last weekend.
On one level, "Fantastic Beasts" is an enjoyable trifle. Eddie Redmayne is winning as awkward, impassioned naturalist Newt Scamander, who travels to New York City in search of a rare creature, and ends up accidentally tangled up with aspiring baker Jacob Kowalski (Dan Fogler), disgraced former Auror Tina Goldstein (Katherine Waterston) and the unintended consequences of Mary Lou Barebone's (Samantha Morton) campaign against magic.
But "Fantastic Beasts" is also a movie divided against itself, torn between the happy antics of Newt's creatures - including an especially a voracious niffler glorying in the riches of New York storefronts - and its setup for the franchise's real business. "Fantastic Beasts" turns out to be the first installment in a prequel to the "Harry Potter" novels about Gellert Grindelwald, the Dark Wizard who was Voldemort's predecessor.
In "Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them," the Magical Congress of the United States of America is populated by immigrants and led by a black woman, President Seraphina Picquery (Carmen Ejogo), which hasn't prevented it from embracing a strict isolationism from humans, whom wizards are forbidden to befriend or marry, and a sharp ban on magical creatures. In the human community, the forces of repression are represented by Mary Lou, who leads the puritanical New Salem Philanthropic Society, which advocates for the extermination of magical people. She's mostly a marginal crank, but she manages to gain the ear of Langdon Shaw (Ronan Raftery), the youngest son of newspaper mogul Henry Shaw (Jon Voigt), who sees magic as a new front in the family's morality campaign.
In other words, "Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them" reproduces the most vexing and simplistic part of Rowling's politics. It's not, as critics of the franchise and the readers who find political meaning in it, that the "Harry Potter" stories involve wizardry, or that the virtuous characters in the novel value "house-elves and children's tales ... love, loyalty and innocence" and believe that these things have "a power beyond the reach of any magic." Rather, it's that in Rowling's universe, good and bad are so neatly and consistently aligned.
On one side of the battlefield in the original novels stood middle-class and public-service-minded families such as the Weasleys, muggles, wizards of muggle extraction including Hermione Granger, liberated house-elves, giants and centaurs who break with their communities' separatist instincts, intellectuals and free-press advocates. On the other, we found a small group of wealthy fascists, obsessed with blood purity and domination, defined by their grand, cold aesthetics, who periodically seize power by force. It's the liberal coalition ranged against the fantasy of the opposition as talented but ultimately marginal.
In this political schema, there are very few difficult choices within what might be broadly described as Dumbledore's Army. No one is ever faced with the prospect of, say, dumping house-elves from the coalition to preserve the loyalty of working-class wizards, or playing down the need to protect muggles to reassure fearful wizarding families.
When someone who properly belongs on one side of the divide crosses over to another, such as bus conductor Stan Shunpike, who ends up in the company of Death Eaters, it's because he is under magical mind control, not because he genuinely shares Voldemort's politics. People who fail to resist Voldemort's rise stringently enough for Harry's satisfaction tend to do so out of social or moral weakness, rather than legitimate strategic differences with the Order of the Phoenix. Rufus Scrimgeour, the minister of magic, ends up dead for his obstruction. Percy Weasley, who fell out with his family over his work for the Ministry, is ultimately redeemed when he rejoins the resistance.
In our own, real, vitally consequential politics, we certainly have a tendency to fall for the idea that we have to choose between two ideas that might, in fact, be perfectly reconcilable. Vermont Sen. Sen. Bernie Sanders' post-election dismissal of "identity politics" in favor of a renewed focus on class is one instance of a politician framing a false choice as a necessary one.
But in Rowling's imagination, potential incompatibilities in his coalition are reconciled mostly off-page during Dumbledore's absences from Hogwarts. Harry Potter himself is a symbol, not a strategist. And the prospect of a populist embrace of blood purity doesn't seem to have occurred to Rowling or her characters; there is no magical Oswald Mosley, and Voldemort has no real constituency.
In a similar way, "Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them" doesn't really engage with the possibility that either Mary Lou or the Shaws might represent a genuine movement, or reckon with what the adherents to that movement might be motivated by. The elder Shaw brother, Henry Jr. (Josh Cowdery) is a senator, but he's killed relatively early in the movie before we hear anything more than a fragment of a standard moral-crusader stump speech. And Mary Lou is reduced to street preaching and recruiting indigent children to distribute her leaflets with the promise of free meals. She's mad, but the Shaws, it's implied at the end of the movie, may polish up her ideas and use them to pursue their own interests on a grand scale.
The fundamental task of politics in the "Harry Potter" universe is to resist authoritarianism, which is a noble goal, and one that's absolutely relevant to the winds of change raking Europe and the United States. But the way that work is accomplished in J.K. Rowling's world is to stop a small minority who have illicitly gained power from bamboozling and abusing the masses, who are either presented as apolitical or on the side of right.
The Order of the Phoenix is a small, elite secret society that carries out covert operations. Dumbledore's Army, which causes trouble within Hogwarts, is an unusually persistent school club. The Quibbler, an eccentric and briefly dissident newspaper, is the product of a lone kook. The minister of magic is appointed, but there are no parties, and no one ever seems to call an election. Hermione Granger's plodding work on the Society for the Promotion of Elvish Welfare elicits only chuckles, until the central realization behind the campaign becomes essential to the final novel in the "Harry Potter" series.
There's little organizing in "Harry Potter," no campaigning or persuading, and certainly no moments when our heroes are forced to reckon with the prospect that their convictions and their sense of what's right is truly marginal. Maybe that mundane politics is just for us muggles, who don't decide our elections in wizards' duels. But it's the task that's before us now. "Harry Potter" may provide broad inspiration. We need strategy, too.film-beasts-comment