Why Joker Succeeds and Voldemort Fails (Part I)

July 17th, 2008 · 39 Comments · Albus Dumbledore, Deathly Hallows, Fate and Choice, Half-Blood Prince, Hogwarts School of Literature, Severus Snape, Voldemort

Since Deathly Hallows release last year, I’ve been perpetually puzzled by Voldemort’s characterization in the last two novels. Half Blood Prince humanizes Voldemort in a way that lends HBP a sophistication most of the earlier novels lack — Voldemort’s backstory both enlightens and befuddles the reader, at once shedding light on his origins and potential reasons for Voldemort’s tenor, yet never oversimplifying and reducing Voldemort to simply a pathology. The book sometimes drifts toward the possibility that Voldemort is unaware of and incapable of changing his decisions. Yet, HBP pulls back from that precipice and instead offers only Voldemort’s refusal to care about such a possibility.

Deathly Hallows, on the other hand, turns Voldemort into a cartoon character — more malevolent due to the incompetence of the supposed authorities (the Ministry of Magic) than any great skill of Voldemort’s or his minions. Within two books, Rowling constructs him as a marriage of complex humanity and psychology, only to immediately open the door to reveal nothing more than a tormented psyche shacking up with a massive egotism.

This all begs a question to me: Is Voldemort a flawed character? I’m not asking if he is a flawed character in the sense that Rowling simply made him a bit inconsistent. Deathly Hallows reconcentrates the reader’s attention on the conflict between Harry and Voldemort, whereas previous books had built Snape as the more compelling of Harry’s antagonists. Yet, in DH Voldemort and Snape essentially switch narrative positions. Snape’s everpresent station in Harry’s life is removed. He fades into the shadowy murk occupied by Voldemort for six books, while Voldemort emerges into the consciousness of both the reader and the characters. Essentially, Rowling had built Voldemort’s great power upon a scaffold of shadows and deception. Once she brings him fully into the light, we’re struck with his arrogance and stupidity — the Death Eaters begin to look more like the Keystone Cops.

Interrogating Voldemort’s character, especially in light of some other well known literary antagonists, shows Voldemort to be not just a flawed character, but that his development deconstructs him as a compelling villain, essentially reducing him into nothing more than a mesh of types. He is, in effect, a failed character. Bringing him more fully into view in Deathly Hallows forces the narrative to establish elements of him that are more than Shadow — once this is done, characters must be more than archetypes, yet Rowling does not successfully develop him. Half-Blood Prince constructs Voldemort’s vulnerability only so that Deathly Hallows can tell us that it ultimately does not matter.

The Funhouse Mirror
Given all the broo-hah surrounding The Dark Knight and Heath Ledger’s performance as the Joker, it seems a natural comparison to examine Voldemort’s character alongside Batman’s archnemesis. The narrative relationship binds Batman and Joker together in a kind of ontological dualism — one cannot exist without the other. Joker has evolved into a much more layered character in stories from the late 1980s onward, what one reviwer for The Dark Knight defines as “a mystifying squall of hatred and chaos”. Frank Miller’s two seminal graphic novels, The Dark Knight Returns (1986) and Batman Year One (1987), and Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke (1988) are largely responsible for establishing the tone and tenor of this portion of the DC Universe we’re all familiar with now — one that isn’t always well accepted by critics:

Miller’s legacy for comics has been ambivalent at best. Reflect on the fact that his rise coincides with the almost total failure of superhero comics to produce any new characters with mythic resonance.[2] The ‘maturity’ for which Miller has been celebrated corresponds with comics’ depressive and introspective adolescence, and for him, as for all adolescents, the worst sin is exuberance. Hence his trademark style is deflationary, taciturn: consider all those portentous pages stripped of dialogue in which barely anything happens and contrast them with the crazed effervescence of the typical Marvel page in the 60s. Miller’s pages have all the brooding silence of a moody fifteen-year old boy. We are left in no doubt: the silence signifies. (Fisher para 2)

This seems a reductionist reading of Miller’s ouevre, one predicated on some notion of Batman in these books as purely sadistic with no sense of self-reflexivity. For Fisher, it’s apparent that Batman never questions his motives or actions, despite the preponderance of textual evidence, especially in Year One. Bruce Wayne (before he concocts the Batman persona) takes a “twenty block walk to the enemy camp”, instigates a fight with a pimp even though he knows he “really shouldn’t”, and quickly realizes the error in his youthful hubris:

Idiot — never should have done this — have to get out of here before I draw attention — [...] Mess — made a mess of it — no excuse — didn’t control myself (Miller and Mazzucchelli 10-13)

Very quickly, in his fight against crime, Wayne realizes he has to negotiate a pretty vague distinction between Justice and Revenge, ethical twins whose differences aren’t always apparent. Batman Begins (2005) predicates the protagonist’s origin upon this very dilemma, embodied in figures of Bruce’s natural father, Thomas Wayne, and R’as al Ghul, a kind of father surrogate. The former is established in the film as the embodiment of patience, fortitude, and charity, building a railway system for all of Gotham, and constantly intoning an appropriate mantra: “Why do we fall? So we can get back up.” R’as al Ghul, on the otherhand, manifests as a demon in disguise, just as his name suggests. Think of al Ghul as a character akin to Grindelwald — seeking to remake the world in an image he sees as appropriate, developing a form of justice that is absolute and unwavering.

As Harry Potter readers, we’re used to seeing characters developed in these kinds of dualisms played out in juxtaposed characters. Harry’s consciousness is often a battlefield for difficult-to-rectify ethical systems and worldviews, some he recognizes as obviously flawed and others he desperately wants to be true. Bruce/Batman suffers the same psychological battle, one best mirrored in his most potent foe, Joker.

No matter which evolution of Joker one might consider (comics present a distinct problem with respect to establishing a canon), the character’s layering has taken on more and more sophistication in the last twenty years. Alan Moore stated in 2001 that “psychologically Batman and the joker are mirror images of each other” (para 12). Unpacking their relationship in light of this observation can lend some understanding to Joker as a villain — and more importantly, as a successful (broadly speaking) antagonist.

Joker’s psychology is debatable given the differing narratives established throughout the history of the series. In The Killing Joke, he’s the victim of circumstances stemming from a moribund middle-class life. Dissatisfied with his life, he quits a chemical engineering job, fails at stand-up comedy, and makes the desperate choice to help in the robbery of a chemical company out of the need to care for his family. The situation goes awry, and he ends up taking a spill into a chemical vat, leaving him physically scarred. This, combined with the murder of his wife, leaves him psychologically destroyed, choosing an alter ego within which he can submerge these problems. But this is only one version of the backstory — Moore’s book and Nolan’s new movie both reference the fact that Joker has told multiple versions of his origin story with no one version offered as definitive.

Whatever Joker’s pathology, it is initially easy to dismiss him as a raving lunatic. But doing so removes from him agency, and thus responsibility. The Dark Knight Returns toys with the idea that the Joker is perfectly aware of his actions and their consequences, and he’s willing to manipulate circumstances for his own advantage. Miller’s plot begins with Joker locked away in Arkham Asylum under the psychiatric care of Dr. Bartholomew Wolper. Wolper paints Joker’s pathology as a sympathetic one through a distorted psychiatric jingoism to turn the responsibility for Joker’s crimes toward Batman, simultaneously painting Joker as a victim created by Bats for the purpose of satisfying his own ego and painting Batman as an “aberrant psychotic force — morally bankrupt, politically hazardous, reactionary paranoid” (Miller et. al. 41). Wolper offers up his theory concerning why Batman is responsible for the actions of his nemeses:

Batman’s psychotic sublimative/psycho-etoric behavior pattern is like a net. Weak-egoed neurotics, like Harvey [aka Two-Face, another Batman villain], are drawn into corresponding intersticing patterns. You might say Batman commits the crimes…using his so-called villains as narcissistic proxies… (47)

Though directly addressing the pathology of Two-Face, Wolper’s analysis applies to Joker, as well. Wolper pursues his line of thinking to near polemical levels, laying the atrocities of an ultraviolent street gang called The Mutants at Batman’s feet, too: “Batman should be considered personally responsible for every human being murdered by this gang” (113). The irony is, of course, that Joker describes his relationship with Batman in exactly the same fashion, only from an inverse perspective. Joker derives meaning from his existence by locking himself into a struggle with Batman. Nolan toys with this them in The Dark Knight film — Joker states “You complete me” after informing Batman he has no desire to kill “The Batman”.

Wolper dies at Joker’s hands while Wolper is parading him before the audience of a late night talk show — a parody of David Letterman, no less. The whole audience dies, as well. Within the scene, David Endochrine (the talk show host) seems to represent the general social attitude toward Joker and his crimes and, by extension, indicating the cynicism with which Gotham City’s residents approach the decay and chaos of their urban universe. David teases Joker’s appearance by calling him “a man who’s brought a lot of smiles to the world” (117). The glib joke both alludes to Joker’s preferred method of killing (leaving his victims with smiles on their faces) and foreshadows the mass murder he’s engineered for his appearance on the show.

Joker’s self-positioning seems to indicate something of a rigorous personal philosophy, both emotive and cosmologically significant. Batman himself affirms the relationship, ironically using some of Wolper’s language to do so. After a downtown explosion masterminded by Joker destroys a major building, Batman’s internal monologue is indicative of this conceit:

I’ll help the emergency teams as best I can. I’ll count the dead one by one. I’ll add them to the list, Joker. To the list of all the people I’ve murdered — by letting you live. (117)

Miller extends the philosophical question here by hammering away at a larger discourse running throughout The Dark Knight Returns — a public debate arguing the benefits and consequences of Batman’s character for Gotham City. A television program, Issues Within Issues, is the stage for this debate, reducing a legitimate discussion of Batman’s utility and ethical position into the brand of culture war rhetoric we’ve discussed here at The Hog’s Head from time to time. Complicating the problem is that the street gang, The Mutants, defects to what they consider to be Batman’s sense of justice once he defeats their leader in a bloody confrontation at a landfill. Their constant refrain that “Gotham City belongs to the Batman” (113) indicates a larger need for for a personality around which to rally, echoed in their new name, “Sons of Batman”. The fascist reverberations are apparent, especially in a splinter faction of the gang that openly adopts Nazi symbolism for themselves.

When combined with the narcissism and cynicism presented in many everyday Gotham residents, the cityscape manifests itself as a representation of Batman’s internal struggle — the need to act versus the need to delineate between Justice and Revenge. Batman Begins establishes this through Thomas Wayne and R’as al Ghul, as the latter provokes pre-Batman Bruce by telling him that his parents’ murders were Thomas Wayne’s fault — the result of Wayne’s “failure to act”. Virtually every Batman origin story emphasizes this event as pivotal in Bruce’s psychological and moral development. Tim Burton’s 1989 film adaptation even went so far as to posit that Joker was the Waynes’ murderer, before he adopted his criminal alter ego.

Joker’s position in all this, at least in these contexts, is as an antagonist that forces Batman to persistently re-examine both his ethics and methodology. Within the superhero-versus-vigilante debate, Joker continuously tweaks circumstances to confront Bruce with this question. So far, this seems pretty well in keeping with the relationship between Harry and Voldemort. Deathly Hallows does explore this kind of territory. We’ve persistently debated the way Harry and others use the Forbidden Curses. I’ve come to agree with some of the criticism that the impact of the events is removed because there is virtually no reflection on them, at all. Combined with the fact that Voldemort essentially ends up killing himself — that Harry doesn’t resort to such violence to kill his main antagonist — whatever Rowling was after in these plot details seems lost.

However, Batman has to deal with the consequences, at least in Miller’s versions. Gotham City’s take on The Dark Knight is always left in doubt, only sometimes praising him as necessary for the sake of city (this praise is the attitude producers of Batman: the Animated Series chose to emphasize in the classic early 90s cartoon). This sense of consequence is apparent in the final confrontation between Batman and Joker at the end of The Dark Knight Returns:

We kill…too often…because we’ve made it easy…too easy…sparing ourselves…the mess…and the work… (149)

This internal monologue parallels the media report of “sheer pandemonium” given to the reader, that “sixteen cub scouts [are] found dead” (150). The confrontation isn’t just a physical battleground, but also a symbolic climax for Bruce/Batman’s internal question of his ethics. If he’d killed Joker years ago, all the death and mayhem could have been avoided, yet he would have violated a cardinal rule central to the Batman mythos — he must not kill his adversaries. The new DVD Batman Gotham Knight intones this same principle. In one of the shorts, Batman states “I’m willing to put my life on the line to do what I have to. But it has to be mine — no one else’s”.

Figure 1. Extended Trailer for Batman Gotham Knight (2008)

Joker chides this principle in the end of The Dark Knight Returns as they fight within a tunnel of love in an amusement park. Batman has the opportunity to kill his nemesis by breaking Joker’s neck. Instead, Bats opts to simply paralyze him, a seemingly “good” alternative. Yet, Joker is “disappointed”:

I’m really…very disappointed with you, my sweet…the moment was…perfect…and you…didn’t have the nerve… Paralysis…really… Just an ounce or two more…of pressure…and…do I hear sirens…?…yes…coming close…you won’t get far… But then…it doesn’t matter…if you do…they’ll kill you for this… And they’ll never know…that you didn’t have the nerve… (150-51)

Joker then completes the job, forcing his neck to the full breaking point so that “whatever’s in him rustles as it leaves” (151). At this point, Batman’s place as out-of-control vigilante is cemented, especially after the reporting of the media. He has to fight his way out of the aftermath, killing members of the police department’s SWAT team in the process, blatantly flaunting a rule he just held in place for his worst villain. Joker serves to highlight this ethical problem maybe more than any other antagonist Batman faces in the DC Universe. One grand irony is that Joker persistently points toward the masculine egotism driving Bruce Wayne/Batman’s purpose. Joker doesn’t seek to kill Batman, only to set him into a framework wherein the police see Joker as the victim and Batman as the criminal — effectively placing Batman’s work under erasure.

By splitting himself into dual personalities — ones that compete for the true nature of Bruce Wayne himself — the Batman/Bruce Wayne personae help hide the true person to begin with, aiding in Joker’s endgame. In virtually all incarnations of the Batman mythos, the audience is left unsure of which persona more accurately reflects the true character. The Batman persona is an attempted march toward an ideal that must lead through the darkest territory of humanity. Batman as a character is a walking personification of a hero’s journey that the hero may actually be unable to complete. While much of his motivation is personal, drawing from the exigence of Thomas and Martha Wayne’s murder, the pursuit is very much a public exercise, creating a tension between personal hope and public necessity. Bruce tells Alfred in Batman Begins that he wants to strike fear into his “enemies” with “something elemental”. The bat metaphor’s darkness and persistent link in cultures around the world to all things evil serves the purpose, but the guise is a personification of evil without logic. That this strikes fear into Gotham’s criminal underbelly serves to underscore the bad guys’ humanity and simultaneously point toward the flaws in Batman’s ethical code — a version of imposed order.

Joker becomes a laughing hyperbole always exposing the fact that Batman’s choices may actually be arbitrary, though Bats feels as though he can only make the choices he does. Batman’s sacrifice for Gotham is his own psyche, even at the expense that his narrative, the legend that writes his history, will record him as a villain like those he opposes. Joker knows this, and uses it for his own whims. The villain’s purpose isn’t purely about social disintegration, but a personal stake in a nihilistic epiphany for Bruce Wayne/Batman. The “something elemental” chosen by Bruce is also personified in Joker. He is a “squall of chaos” wrapped in the distorted imagery of innocense and happiness that at one level hides Joker’s physical and psychological scars; yet, that imagery also pushes to such an extreme symbolism that those scars are very much exposed. It’s a mirror image of the bat costume that both hides the identity of its wearer and serves as an outward manifestation of Bruce’s internal crises. Joker becomes compelling, not so much because of his own characterization, but because he remains a symbol, even for his most intimate “companion”. The result is that Joker’s personality is a hyperbolic mirror of Batman’s. He’s a symbol of evil because he’s a cipher for human flaws exagerated to expose their simplicity.

Next week, I’ll post a closer look at Harry’s antagonists and argue more closely why Voldemort is a failed character in my view — one that threatens the integrity of the whole HP narrative.

Until then, hope you enjoy The Dark Knight this weekend. I know I will!

Primary References
Batman Begins Warner Bros. 2005.
Batman Gotham Knight Warner Bros. 2008.
The Dark Knight Warner Bros. 2008.
Miller et. al. Batman Year One. 1987.
—. The Dark Knight Returns. 1986.
Moore, Alan et. al. The Killing Joke. 1988.
Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. 2007.
—. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. 2005.

For Secondary References, follow the persistent links to the original sources.

Tags: Alan Moore·Batman·failed character·Frank Miller·graphic novel

39 responses so far ↓

1 Michael // Jul 17, 2008 at 11:45 am

I LOVE comics so this my friend was a wonderful read . Thank you!

In Australia the movie was released Wednesday so I’ve already had the privileged to see it and DAUM it was one fantastic movie.
2 Red Rocker // Jul 17, 2008 at 12:31 pm

To try to capsulize this so I can respond to it, are you saying that Voldemort is not a very compelling Shadow for Harry because the character doesn’t allow Harry to explore his own internal conflicts and struggles? And that this is contrast to the Joker whose character does provide this function for Batman? And that in fact in the hands of Miller - and I suspect Ledger and the Nolans - that is his primary objective?

Joker’s yang to Batman’s yin? If you complete me then I must complete you?

No, Voldemort is not that. Not at all in DH, although more so in HBP and, I would like to point out, in OotP.

But there are other characters who portray Harry’s Shadow better, aren’t there? Sirius Black, with his reckless disregard for his and others’ safety. Beatrix Lestrange, with her invitations to Harry to feel hate. Snape, of course, with his insistent demands for the ability to see past appearances, to see the true worth of a character, to be more like - Lily Evans. And dare I add to that list the name of Albus Dumbledore? There is Harry’s true Shadow, I think. Dumbledore lives out all the temptations and struggles which power brings with it, leaving Harry to be purely good.

And I think that is part of the problem - although I don’t see it quite the same way you do. I think that in DH Harry is fully engaged by Dumbledore. There is no room in his psyche for another Shadow struggle. You can only dance with one partner at a time.

BTW, I have been reading the reviews of Dark Knight closely (won’t actually get to see it for a while). There are two schools of thought. One school sees Ledger’s Joker as a masterpiece of inspired villainy, compelling, terrifying, chaos personified, and fulfilling pretty much the role you decribed for him. The other school feels pity, seeing a very talented actor struggling wildly to find the centre of a character which lacks one.
3 Shane Deal // Jul 17, 2008 at 12:35 pm

I have no familiarity with Batman, but that was a pretty interesting article.
4 revgeorge // Jul 17, 2008 at 1:03 pm

It’s been awhile since I kept up with Batman, so my guesses here could go far afield. First, though, a great essay, Dave, although I think I disagree with most of it so far. It’s a pretty meaty essay, & I’m sure there’s more to come in the second half.

I like Red Rocker’s summary, if that’s an accurate description. I don’t disagree that Voldy is a flawed character, not written as well as could be. But I’m more in agreement with Red Rocker that as things go in the books Voldy is not Harry’s main antagonist. He’s more a plot device that drives the rest of the action but he’s not the main thing. Harry’s real antagonists are Snape, Draco, his quests, i.e. the Tri-Wizard Tournament, his puzzling out of what’s going on in PS & COS, Sirius Black in POA but really his struggle to find out more of his past, Umbridge in OOTP, HBP I’m not sure, & DH, as Red Rocker says, Dumbledore & his struggle to trust someone in whom he’s lost some faith.

I’ll have to do some rereading of the essay here, though, in order to comment more on the Joker/Batman thing.
5 revgeorge // Jul 17, 2008 at 2:00 pm

I’m not sure HBP humanizes Voldy at all. In fact, I think it further dehumanizes him, showing that it _is_ his choices that lead him down the path to evil. HBP humanizes Merope, & to some extent Tom Riddle Sr., albeit his humanness is flawed. Voldy knows nothing of his parents. He’s in a void as far as that goes, just like Harry is. One could argue, too, that Harry has the harder childhood. Neither one has a perfect childhood, but in Harry’s case the Dursley’s actively make his life hard, whereas at the orphanage, the staff tries their best to care for their charges & do what they can with their limited resources to better the lives of the children.

And yet Harry turns out, for no apparent reason, to be a decent kid. And Voldemort chooses to be a manipulator & abuser of others. In fact, one could posit that Harry is more of a cardboard cut out than Voldy is. As we’ve discussed before, Harry just seems good & without an obvious fatal flaw. But Voldy consciously chooses to dehumanize himself, moving further & further away from his humanity, tearing apart his soul, leading to the eventuality that he loses the ability to make any other choice. But it’s his conscious pursuit of those ends that have led him there. He’s in a sense a self-made monster. Whether he could repent or not at the end isn’t really the question, but why would he even want to. All his choices have led him there.

Somebody help me out here. Where did we get this idea that Voldy was destined to be evil, that he really had no choice? I don’t think we got it from Dumbledore, since he’s always harping about the difference in choices that Harry & Voldy make, even though they’re very much alike. Is it something we got from an extra-textual statement by JKR?

Anyway, I think you’re right, Dave, in that Voldy comes off at the end as an arrogant buffoon. Kind of like the Wiley Coyote of HP. But I think that says something about evil, too. That when it comes into the open, it is stupid & arrogant & unable to react to changes rapidly. And by stupid, I don’t mean unintelligent but simply bound by its own prejudices & inability to see any other way of doing things.
6 ned // Jul 17, 2008 at 2:29 pm

revgeorge said “But I think that says something about evil, too. That when it comes into the open, it is stupid & arrogant & unable to react to changes rapidly. And by stupid, I don’t mean unintelligent but simply bound by its own prejudices & inability to see any other way of doing things.”

I think that’s right on the mark. That’s essentially what Dumbledore tells Harry when he says “If he only could have understood the precise and terrible power of that sacrifice, he would not, perhaps, have dared to touch your blood… But then, if he had been able to understand, he could not be Lord Voldemort, and might never have murdered at all.” (DH pg 710)

To me, the point of Voldemort is that evil is essentially self-destructive; that choosing to forgo what is right is self-damnation in every possible sense. That may make him a bit cartoonish as a villain, but I think that’s okay because Voldemort is not there to be Harry’s ultra-complex foil; that job goes to Snape, Sirius, Bella, Dumbledore, etc. Voldemort is there to show where all of Harry’s temptations will ultimately lead, and perhaps even where all of his temptations come from.
7 Red Rocker // Jul 17, 2008 at 3:01 pm

I’ve gone off on another track.

To me, Voldemort fails not as much as a villain as a character. He is simply not a very compelling character. I was re-reading the final duel scene in DH the other day and I was struck by how stereotyped, how rote, how trite and old Voldemort’s lines were.

The only time he really comes to life is on the page is in HBP. His childhood interactions with Dumbledore, his seductions of Hepzibah Smith and Horace Slughorn, his confrontation with his uncle, all have a tension or a charge which is otherwise lacking.

And it’s the same in the movies. Compared to villains like Hannibal Lecter and (by all accounts) Ledger’s Joker, he pales. And this despite the fact that he’s played by Ralph Fiennes, who has created some pretty scary - and watchable - movie villains: Amon Goeth, Francis Dollahyde, the bad guys in The Good Thief and In Bruges). Interestingly, about the only time I couldn’t take my eyes off of him was the one scene where he had no lines: standing at King’s Cross in OotP.

My conclusion: Voldemort just doesn’t get any good lines. And why is that? Is JKR not capable of writing good dialogue? Well, no. Snape, Lestrange, the Minister of the day, Umbridge, and especially Dumbledore get marvellous lines. But JKR doesn’t write good dialogue for Voldemort. And why is that?

I think that part of it is that most of the time Voldemort doesn’t engage with anyone. He gives orders, he talks about his plans, he justifies himself, but there is no interchange. No dialogue. The man declaims. And that is just not interesting to listen to.

In contrast, during HBP he is actively engaged in dialogue with Dumbledore, Slughon, Smith. And that’s where he emerges.

What about his dialogue with Harry, you might ask? Should that final duel not have been a real conversation? Don’t we have the two opposing forces of the story standing, wands at the ready, discussing first causes?

Well, no.

There is a brief real exchange at the Ministry at the end of OotP. But in that last scene in DH Voldemort is not engaging Harry. He doesn’t see Harry as a person. He hears what Harry has to say, but he’s not reacting to Harry.

I think what we have is a character who is so totally self-absorbed and self-sufficient, that there is no possibility of meaningful interactions with other human beings.

And when you look at what he’s become at King’s Cross, that suggests that that is how JKR wanted him to be. Her idea of pure evil is not charismatic and compelling, but instead trite and boring and ultimately, pitiful. And Korg’s long-held theory about the origin of the thumping noises actually makes sense.

I’m not sure in my own mind that this is what JKR intended to build, or whether he ended up this way because she had no plans to give him substance. In which case, it’s the Tom Riddle we see in HBP which is the aberration; the author forgetting that she did not plan to invest this character with any intrinsic interest.
8 ned // Jul 17, 2008 at 3:35 pm

I agree with most of what you said except the last paragraph. I think Voldemort is most interesting in HBP because that is when he is the most human and the least evil. He’s heading towards the deep end, but he hasn’t gone off it quite yet. The more evil he becomes, the less interesting he becomes
9 revgeorge // Jul 17, 2008 at 3:47 pm

Okay, Red Rocker, I’ll buy that. And yes, Voldemort on his way to being completely evil is more compelling than the end result. I’d say in COS & HBP we get the best views of Voldemort while he is still somewhat human & thus able to be empathized with to some extent. Christian Coulson was able to pull this off to an extent in the film COS. We’ll see if whoever is playing young Voldy in HBP can do it.

Voldemort does become what he’s set himself up to be, a loner who only thinks of himself & only uses others. Thus, others don’t really count. They’re only things to be used or disposed of. I’m not sure what to make of his response to Bellatrix’s death in DH. Is his reaction one of concern for her (doubtful) or just a concern that one of his best tools has been done away with?

Whether JKR meant to show these things about Voldy or not, I’m not sure. The phrase she uses to describe his death is interesting, though. “With a mundane finality Riddle’s body hit the floor.” Mundane tends to infer something common & ordinary. The results of evil are not exciting or interesting but, as you say, trite, boring, & pitiful. Voldy’s death is anticlimatic, of no account, boring even. No blaze of glory for him. He’s tried so hard to be somebody, to set himself above others, to be unique but in the end he’s nothing special.
10 revgeorge // Jul 17, 2008 at 4:48 pm

I really should chide you, Dave, for putting out such a good post, ’cause it’s keeping me from working on my sermon for Sunday.

But just not to talk about Voldy, here’s some thoughts on the Joker et al. One, can we generally agree that most people in Gotham City are really screwed up? That it’s a dystopic setting? So, I’m not sure that the Joker & the Batman are complementary aspects of each other as opposed to both being just plain nuts.

First, Bruce Wayne. Let’s see, left a multimillionaire by his parent’s brutal death & yet we don’t see him getting any counselling at all. You’d think that’d be the first thing his guardian set up for him. And instead of using his vast wealth & influence to combat crime by providing better tools to the police or campaigning against the corruption of Gotham City or rallying the citizens to clean up their town, he slips into a form fitting bat costume & goes out into the night to beat up thugs.

As Alexander Knox says to Vicki Vale in the first Keaton Batman movie, “Your friend Wayne, he’s really screwed up.”

As for the Joker, one, I can’t really bring myself to trust the pyschological analysis of a doctor whose analysis of his patient gets him & a television audience butchered.

For the Joker himself, here’s Heath Ledger’s analysis of him, courtesy of wikipedia. Ledger characterized the Joker as “… a psychopathic, mass murdering, schizophrenic clown with zero empathy.”

So, just my initial thoughts. I’ve read the essay twice now & will probably do so again. It’s kind of deep.
11 Dave the Longwinded // Jul 17, 2008 at 6:23 pm

Okay, revgeorge and Red Rocker are essentially hammering out Part II to all this! I should have known…

But, here’s the essential point from which I plan on backtracking in Part II: If Voldemort’s trite, boring, and pitiful portrayal at the end of DH is part of Rowling’s point, as is the notion that evil will ultimately turn on itself, then doesn’t this remove a large portion of the exigence for Harry’s heroism before he ever gets started? If Voldemort is bound to fail (or, at least, he’s most likely to fail), then why drag us through a 3000-page coming of age tale parading as a narrative of potential cataclysm?

I think Voldemort is supposed to be a portrayal of pure evil. My problem (again, that I’ll articulate more thoroughly in a post) is that Rowling seems to take much of Voldemort’s evil-ness and malevolence and diffuse it across several characters. Then, she takes many of those other characters and relegates them to the background in DH.
12 Red Rocker // Jul 17, 2008 at 7:48 pm

It’s not that simple. Dave.

Evil may be trite and boring and even pitiful, but it doesn’t follow that it will not cause a lot of harm before it is extinguished. And it doesn’t follow that it will turn on itself. Trite and boring doesn’t equal impotence.

Think of all the people Voldemort and the Death Eaters killed or destroyed. Starting with Harry and Neville’s parents, working their way through Cedric Diggory, Sirius Black, Severus Snape, Fred Weasley and Remus Lupin. Not to mention the collateral damage: Albus Dumbledore.

Voldemort’s evil turned back on itself, it’s true. But it didn’t turn back on itself out of some natural evolutionary process. It turned back because a hero stood up and said: I will lay down my life to end this evil. Voldemort’s evil was so potent that only the Christlike self-sacrifice of a seventeen year old boy willing to to walk to his death could end it.

It sounds like you’re saying that it was always a sure thing that Harry would live and Voldemort would die. And that this means there was no real menace and that the world was always safe. I’m not sure how to understand that statement. In one way it was always a sure thing, in the author’s mind at least. But how not? it is a story, after all. That’s the way she planned it. From that perspective, the outcome could never be in doubt.

Are you saying rather that the author never made a plausible case for the villain’s possible eventual triumph? I think there were too many dead bodies, and many of them the dead bodies of beloved characters, which argue against that point.

But I think I’ve worked my way to a moment of insight. I think that the real villain of the piece is not Voldemort, but death itself. In many ways Voldemort is as human as anyone else: terribly afraid of death, trying to avert it at all cost. He serves death, it’s true, but only to save his own skin. Harry’s real enemy is death, the curse no man can bear, and the only way to win against that enemy is the comfort of friends who live in one another still. I don’t know if JKR could have made that point in less than 3000 pages, but I don’t think there’s any doubt about the the worthiness of that adversary.
13 Red Rocker // Jul 17, 2008 at 8:05 pm

Not quite done yet.

So in that sense, Voldemort is Harry’s Shadow. He is the part of Harry - of every man - who fears death. He is what happens when we let that fear control our actions. And Harry’s triumph, not over death, but his fear of death, is not only a glorious victory over his Shadow side, but a triumph that speaks personally to each one of us.

Which is, if you think about it, where Deathly Hallows gets its power from. In fact, the last duel with Voldemort is anticlimactic. The important battle has been won. At that point the outcome is assured because the big enemy has been conquered.

Ask yourself this:

Is a boy who is not afraid of death going to be bested by a man who has been running from death for most of his life?
14 revgeorge // Jul 17, 2008 at 8:25 pm

Great points, Red Rocker, in both your above posts. Voldy is a personification of the fear of death & the desperate desire to conquer it or avoid it. His very self chosen name emphasizes this. One wonders if he realized his name means ‘flees from death’ as opposed to who he thought he was, ‘conqueror of death?’”

Harry’s story really becomes the story of the third Peverell brother, in a sense. And it’s appropriate that the quotation on the Potter’s tombstone is “The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.” But not in the way Voldemort thinks, by never dying, but by living beyond death.

Holy Sonnets: Death, be not proud
by John Donne

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul’s delivery.
Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke; why swell’st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.
15 Travis Prinzi // Jul 18, 2008 at 1:57 am

I’ve only skimmed most of this, and it’s great discussion. I’ll add a thought or two, which is dangerous, since I’ve only skimmed…but it’s late, and I’m still getting used to California time.

In fact, the last duel with Voldemort is anticlimactic. The important battle has been won. At that point the outcome is assured because the big enemy has been conquered.

Yes, well said. Harry defeated/mastered his shadow before defeating the archetypal representative. When he chose Hocruxes over Hallows…when he became the man who would later decide to leave the ring in the forest, that’s when he won his battle over evil. Killing Voldemort, who had become utterly absurd, because that’s what happens when you mutilate your soul, was easy to defeat in the end. Harry had already dealt with the internal Voldemort. The external Voldemort was no problem.

Again, I just skimmed…tomorrow, when I’m not feeling exhausted, I’ll read and digest the whole thing (and hopefully tomorrow night, I’ll get out to see the new Batman movie!)
16 Eeyore // Jul 19, 2008 at 12:36 am

I’ve been skimming as well–not the comments as they were mostly about HP, but the essay when I realized that it was so much about the new Batman movie which I have not yet seen.

Red Rocker said (very well) what I was thinking. I just want to add that I think that Rowling might have intentionally made Voldemort narrow and less complex by the time Harry faced him. If you think about real life evil villains, such as Hitler or Stalin or Idi Amin, and their ilk, they seem to be just as locked into the same sort of two-dimensional existence as Voldemort. They only see things from their own point of view, don’t listen to anyone else, don’t really have any concern for others and that sort of path leads them to their own end. It’s not that they will self-destruct if ignored or left alone; they could go on for a very long time if not challenged.

But that is the point, I think. When we see evil, we must confront it, and try to end it. Waiting for evil to turn on itself is like standing in the path of a forest fire and expecting to come out alive. Yes, eventually it will burn itself out, but in the meantime anything in its path is destroyed. They sometimes let that happen, but not without trying to remove people and animals who will be destroyed as well.

In the case of someone like Voldemort, who has chosen his own path with no regard for anyone else, to just get out of his way would be to allow his evil to overtake every aspect of life.

Someone asked the question about where we got the idea that Voldemort didn’t have a choice in turning evil. I don’t think that comes from canon or from Rowling–in fact, I think that she said the opposite. But there are a number of people who have made that intrepretation.

By the time we get to the end of Deathly Hallows, we are seeing the result of all that Voldemort did to flee from death. The reason that is such a stark contrast to the Tom Riddle/early Voldemort of Half-Blood Prince is that it’s a jump from the time he was fully human to the time when there is very little left of him that resembles anything human. In destroying so much of his soul, he has also destroyed the part of him that allows for relationship and any kind of meaningful interaction with other people.

And back to real-life villains, don’t we see much of the same thing? They become so self-absorbed that they no longer consider how their actions affect others, only how it benefits themselves.

Pat
17 Red Rocker // Jul 19, 2008 at 1:35 am

Eeyore, it’s tempting to think that JKR deliberately constructed Voldemort so that the eviller he got (and the more he parsed his soul), the less interesting and one-dimensional he became.

The reason I hesitate to accept that is I’m not sure that she’s that good a writer. I think that she might have created a one-dimensional villain just because she didn’t know how to invest absolute evil with any interest. Or, perhaps like Dave is saying, she distributed the payload of evil amongst many other characters, leaving very little original evil for Voldemort.

To deliberately make your archvillain such a bland bore requires a complete lack of vanity, especially if you have a gift for making colorful villains.

So part of me is thinking that JKR slipped up with Voldemort, but in the opposite way from how she slipped up with Snape. She invested Snape with too much interest - dynamic tension - so he became more important than she had intended him to be. And conversely, she could not find a way of making her absolute evil villain compelling.

I’m thinking that the reason for this is what we’ve been talking about: Harry’s true enemy is not Voldemort but death; Voldemort is only death’s emissary, and ultimately prey rather than predator. Harry’s real dance is with death (and also of course with all the sub-Shadows, starting with Dumbledore). There really isn’t that much for Voldemort to do, except declaim and bore on and on about how clever he’s been.

BTW, here’s another way of looking at Voldemort’s lack of engagement with Harry. There is a saying: when you look into the abyss , the abyss looks back. Voldemort does not.
18 Watchmen Trailer and The Dark Knight « NoWhere on the Ohio River // Jul 19, 2008 at 10:53 am

[...] Watchmen trailer at the front of The Dark Knight. At The Hog’s Head, I’ve put up a new post examining why Joker is such an effective literary antagonist. If you haven’t seen TDK, yet, [...]
19 revgeorge // Jul 19, 2008 at 11:21 am

Dave, someone else has hit upon your point that Voldy works best in the shadows. This bit is from an Entertainment Weekly review of 25 best newer movie death scenes, where Cedric’s death in GOF is counted. The whole review is worth a read, especially as the author points out some of the same reasons why I thought GOF didn’t work as well. At least the movie. But here’s the link to the whole article & then the snippet referring to Voldemort.

http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,1131187,00.html

“Newell has a gift for light comedy, and he knows just how to release the sour-ball charm of his fellow Brits. He’s less good at the darkness, especially when Ralph Fiennes, under a heavy glaze of very bad waxy makeup (or, quite possibly, bad CGI), ultimately emerges from the shadows — and from Harry’s recurring nightmare — as the fearsome Lord Voldemort. Kids may be appropriately terrified, but to this overgrown Potter fan, Voldemort, the Darth Vader of the black arts, was a heck of a lot scarier when you couldn’t see him.”
20 Matt Jaworski // Jul 21, 2008 at 12:25 am

In fact, one could posit that Harry is more of a cardboard cut out than Voldy is. As we’ve discussed before, Harry just seems good & without an obvious fatal flaw. But Voldy consciously chooses to dehumanize himself, moving further & further away from his humanity, tearing apart his soul, leading to the eventuality that he loses the ability to make any other choice. But it’s his conscious pursuit of those ends that have led him there. He’s in a sense a self-made monster. Whether he could repent or not at the end isn’t really the question, but why would he even want to. All his choices have led him there.
21 Travis Prinzi // Jul 21, 2008 at 6:31 pm

revgeorge, very, very important point: Voldemort is scarier when you can’t see him. It’s all about fear. When he’s out in the open, he’s absurd, because anyone who has made the choices he’s made is absurd. But when fear of the name and fear of the shadow reign and are not confronted head on, that fear grows.

Matt, interesting thoughts - we never do really get the sense at all that Harry just might make a choice toward evil. It never seems to be an option for him at all. There is something a bit cardboard about Harry, I agree. For what it’s worth - I was just a Portus, and not a single person that I saw was dressed as Harry. There were Voldemorts, Snapes, Malfoys, Umbridges, Bellatrixes, etc; no Harry. The reasons for that are, I’m sure, multi-faceted; but could it be that Rowling, having written “shades of evil” (her words), made her baddies more interesting than the good guys?
22 Travis Prinzi // Jul 21, 2008 at 6:34 pm

Red Rocker and Pat, I think I’d take Pat’s side that Rowling actually is that good. I’m far less apprehensive about counting Rowling as a great writer now that I’ve heard someone of the caliber of James Thomas say that he thinks HP is better than Narnia and LotR (I’d put it above Narnia, but below LotR, personally).

I don’t find Voldemort bland and boring until the opening chapter of DH. The Dark Lord was “rising” in his own mind, but plummeting in mine.
23 revgeorge // Jul 23, 2008 at 1:32 pm

Uh, actually the comments from Matt are from one of my posts earlier in the discussion. I’m assuming Matt meant to comment on what I said but somehow either his comment got cut out or he forgot to add it before posting. Which isn’t that uncommon of a thing to happen.
24 revgeorge // Jul 23, 2008 at 1:37 pm

Travis wrote, “I don’t find Voldemort bland and boring until the opening chapter of DH. The Dark Lord was “rising” in his own mind, but plummeting in mine.”

I think HBP & DH contrast this view of Voldemort. In HBP, Tom Riddle becoming Voldemort, despite his bad choices & evil behavior, is infinitely far more interesting & even sympathetic to some extent than the end result, Voldemort. In the end, Voldemort becomes incapable of being anybody else than Voldemort, based solely on his own choices.
25 revgeorge // Jul 23, 2008 at 1:52 pm

Travis wrote, “I was just a Portus, and not a single person that I saw was dressed as Harry. There were Voldemorts, Snapes, Malfoys, Umbridges, Bellatrixes, etc; no Harry. The reasons for that are, I’m sure, multi-faceted; but could it be that Rowling, having written “shades of evil” (her words), made her baddies more interesting than the good guys?”

Reminds me of the scene in Animal House where Donald Sutherland’s professor character is discussing Paradise Lost & makes the comment, since Satan is the most fascinating character in Paradise Lost, is Milton trying to say that being bad is more fun than being good? Of course, a more nuanced reading of Milton shows that Satan is not as compelling as he’s made out to be.

Anyway, I think the phenomenon of people dressing up as bad guys is more down to people expressing in imagination what they would never be or do in real life.

That is, leaving aside the discussion of original sin & actual sins, most people act fairly decently towards one another. They get up, eat breakfast, go to their jobs, come home, & get ready to do it all again the next day. Most people don’t get up & plan to go out & be evil or do horrible acts to other people. So, these people could be role-playing stuff they’d never contemplate doing in real life.

Of course, another explanation is that we’ve gone so far down the path of postmodernism of making out villains to be simply misunderstood that we refuse to believe that some people are bad. That they’re not worthy of emulation or empathy. Instead we think of them as really just good people made bad by bad situations. This idea of antihero may have made people think more of villains & heroes as just the same thing. No difference underneath, just maybe in methods.
26 Red Rocker // Jul 26, 2008 at 6:48 pm

Been at the cottage for a week (no internet, no phone, no heat) and just came back. I was skimming through the posts, when this comment caught my attention: Harry as a cardboard cut-out.

Them’s fighting words.

First off, agree with revgeorge’s points: people dress up to express fantasies they’d never act out in real life. And also that a lot of people don’t really understand evil - although I’m not sure if postmodernism is the culprit : the great grand daddy of all antiheros, Manfred, was created in the early 19th century; later in the same century, women (and a few men) worshipped Rasputin, the Mad Monk who would have given Snape a run for his money for the greasiest hair sweepstakes.

I think that it’s always been the kids who dressed up as Harry. It’s the kids who can relate to him, and want to be like him. My 7 year old is not much interested in Voldemort or Snape or Dumbledore (except that he understands that and why I don’t like Gambon’s portrayal): he does, however have two Harry Potter posters hanging on his wall: one with Hedwig and one with thestrals. And was Portus not primarily a convention for grown-ups?

The point at which Harry connects with the adult world is in his struggle with faith, his self-sacrifice, death, and resurrection. Strongly Christian themes. And I somehow doubt that too many people would like to dress up as Jesus Christ. Just doesn’t sit well, even with the irreligious.

But let’s wrestle with the real question: is Harry Potter a bland and boring character? What does bland and boring mean? Too good? Too nice? Too predictable?

Well, yes, Harry is good. He loves his friends, he loves the family he never knew, he is loyal to his friends, he tries to help people, at considerable cost to himself, he tries to do the right thing. And he does give up his life in order to save the world. Is he unmitigatedly good? Not quite: he stubbornly believes the worst of Snape, he uses the HBP’s potions book without giving credit, he messes with a couple of dark spells. But balanced with saving the world from evil, his sins are pretty minor.

Is he boring?

I’ve got two response to that.

First, the story is told from Harry’s perspective. Third person limited perspective, I believe, is the term. In many ways, Harry is our eyes and ears. We hear his thoughts - and no one else’s. A lot of the time, we are barely aware of him because we are him. Few of his actions seem strange to us because we are on the inside looking out. Were it not so - if we saw the action unfold through Ron’s perspective, say, or even Snape, it’s quite possible that Harry would appear to be a much more exotic character.

Here’s an example - culled from the movies, unfortunately. In CoS, during the duel with Malfoy, Harry speaks parseltongue. To him it’s entirely natural. But then the camera cuts to Snape, and from the look on his face we suddenly realize what a significant event this is.

My point is, because we share Harry’s perspective, it’s hard for us to be fascinated by him. It’s different for children, although I’m not sure why.

I think - although I’d have to spend more time examining the evidence - I think that our relationship to Harry changes in DH. We still have access to his thoughts and motives, but he seems more removed, somehow. I get more of a sense of looking at him than looking through him. And he becomes more interesting as this happens.

But my most important point is this. As many times as I have read chapters 34 and 35 of DH, The Forest Again and King’s Cross, I am still incredibly moved. The language is beautiful, the cadences almost like poetry, or music. But it’s not the language. It’s the image of the person at the centre of the story. Harry walking to his death, seeing his living friends go by, seeking forgiveness and reassurance from his dead, scared and determined and incredibly human and incredibly heroic all in one package.

That is not a cardboard cutout. That is a true and moving image of a literary hero who is like a real person. He belongs in the same group as Sidney Carton, and Graham Greene’s Whiskey Priest. He actually has Carton beat because his loves and regrets and fears are much more tangible than Carton’s. The night Carton walks through the streets of Paris, looking at life around him before exchanging places with Darnay is very similar to Harry’s walk through Hogwarts just before he goes to meet Voldemort. But while Carton is looking at a life he’s never really been a part of, Harry is bidding silent farewell to his people.

The last crime Harry stands accused of is predictability. Is he? We could argue that it was always meant that Harry would triumph over Voldemort. Well, I think we all guessed that good would triumph over evil; there was little doubt that was the metanarrative. But did we all know that Harry would survive the war? And how many of us guessed what would have to happen for good to triumph? Who guessed that Harry would willingly walk to his death in order to conquer evil? How predictable was that? JKR herself argued that we should have been able to guess the outcome. But we didn’t, did we?

Don’t call the kid bland or boring. He’s an awesome kid.
27 revgeorge // Jul 26, 2008 at 7:34 pm

Just so you note, Reyhan, I don’t think Harry is predictable or a cardboard cutout. I just said if one wanted to, you could posit him as more of a cutout than Voldemort. I’m actually in agreement with what you express here.

In fact, I think it’s pretty scary the amount of times I’ve been in agreement with you lately. We’ll have to work on that.
28 revgeorge // Jul 26, 2008 at 7:36 pm

And I think most people were talking about Voldemort being bland & boring, not Harry. But I think we covered that. In the end, when Voldemort is fully revealed & has lost almost all his humanity, he is the one who is predictable.
29 Red Rocker // Jul 26, 2008 at 10:12 pm

revgeorge, I know it wasn’t you who described Harry as a cardboard cut out. It was Matt, above. And that’s not exactly what he said either. He said Harry was more like a cardboard cut out than Voldemort because he’s good and without obvious flaws.

Addressing his point directly, I’d argue being good and lacking flaws does not mean you can not be a tragic hero. We’ve been over this ground before: the death of anyone, and especially an innocent, and especially an innocent who sacrifices himself to save others, is tragic.

But actually, Harry’s fate approximates a classic Greek tragedy (rather than a Shakespearean one). He does not have a fatal flaw, but the the fates put him in a position that he must die in order to defeat his enemy and save the world. And Voldemort, in turn, seems to be the victim of Nemesis. Like Laius, the father of Oedipus, the Oracle tells him that he will be destroyed by a baby born at such and such a time. Like Laius, he attempts to kill the baby. And like Laius, his actions lead to a chain of events which result in his own destruction.

Harry Potter as classic Greek tragedy. Who knew?
30 revgeorge // Jul 26, 2008 at 10:51 pm

Actually, as I noted in a post above, the comments by Matt were actually my comments from way further up in this posting. I don’t know why they got posted under his name or if he meant to comment on them & somehow his comment got cut off.

But as I said, one could posit Harry as more cardboard as Voldy. But I agree with you in that I don’t think that’s the case. Harry does seem just good but there’s nothing too strange about that. One could say he decided early in life to not imitate his closest family, the Dursleys. And while he doesn’t have a fatal flaw, he also is not a perfect person. His faults are quite clearly defined. Who can forget his bout of arrogance & petulance in OOTP when learning Ron had been made prefect. But he recognized that & got over it.

And I agree, too, that HP fits more closely into the tradition of a Greek tragedy rather than a Shakesperian one. A classical Greek tragedy did not have to have an unhappy ending, which is what we moderns have come to expect when we hear the word ‘tragedy.’
31 revgeorge // Jul 28, 2008 at 6:57 pm

Okay, it’s been confirmed for us. Voldemort makes a more compelling villain than the Joker. Hollywood.com puts Voldy at #5 on the list of top 10 villains. Joker is only #10. Rickman’s Hans Gruber from Die Hard also makes the list as does a character Gary Oldman played in The Professional (?). Personally, Zorg from The Fifth Element should’ve been the choice for Oldman.

http://www.hollywood.com/content/feature_detail.aspx?id=5280993
32 Red Rocker // Jul 28, 2008 at 9:47 pm

Bowen acknowledges that Joker might make it higher on the list, but that he’s so recent we need to let it sink in for a while.

The corrupt DEA agent Oldman plays in The Professional does belong on this list, in my opinion. His manic enjoyment of his murderous sprees falls in the same class as McDowell’s Alex and Ledger’s Joker.

I would have nominated Fiennes’ Amon Goeth over his Voldemort. But perhaps it was a wise choice to leave Goeth out of this list; while all the others are over-the-top caricatures of evil, he is the real thing.

But since we are doing over-the-top caricatures, I would also nominate Ben Kingsley’s Don Logan in Sexy Beast, Staunton’s Dolores Umbridge, Robert Mitchum’s Preacher in The Night of the Hunter (really scary stuff!) and Max Cady in Cape Fear, and Daniel Day Lewis’s Bill the Butcher in Gangs of New York.
33 revgeorge // Jul 28, 2008 at 10:28 pm

Ah, I was afraid you’d read the article closely, Red Rocker!

Yes, I caught the bit about the Joker maybe being higher up, too, after some more time has passed. So, I guess this is no confirmation at all.

The discussion will have to continue.
34 Red Rocker // Aug 4, 2008 at 12:46 am

Here is a mildly interesting commentary on why the villains are generating more interest than the heroes, with a paragraph on Tom Riddle / Voldemort.

http://www.firstshowing.net/2008/08/03/sunday-discussion-the-villains-reign-supreme-in-hollywood/

The one idea I picked up from it is that the villain is the one who makes things happen. Without him, there’d be no plot.
35 Mike A. // Aug 4, 2008 at 10:52 am

Voldemort succeeds as a villain in the first four books because he pops out at the end as a surprise: In Philosopher’s Stone, we are focused on Snape as a villain and forget about Voldemort; in CoS, it is Slytherin’s monster; in Goblet of Fire, we are thinking about the final task of the Tri-wizard Tournament and are plunged without warning into the graveyard in Little Hangleton. In every case, JKR distracts us from thoughts of a villain with some more pressing problem. When Voldemort suddenly appears it comes as a shock and our horror is heightened. And it certainly doesn’t hurt that he appears in some horrible form—- on the back of Quirril’s head, as a ghost becoming solid, emerging from the cauldron in Goblet of Fire.

But JKR can’t do that in Deathly Hallows. The whole book is leading up to a final confrontation with Voldemort. And we know it. So Voldemort’s final appearance has no strong impact.

The solution, I think, would have been to make Voldemort a major character in DH. She should have cut down on the camping and increased the Dark Order Triumphant stuff.

The problem with doing that is that she is limited by the third-person-limited point-of-view that she has used in all the books, except for the first chapters.
36 revgeorge // Aug 4, 2008 at 1:12 pm

Mark A. wrote, “She should have cut down on the camping and increased the Dark Order Triumphant stuff. ”

The more I read the books, the more I am convinced that the so called camping time is an integral part of the work. A wilderness wandering & the long dark tea time of Harry’s soul, as Douglas Adams would put it. It’s here where Harry grapples with all sorts of issues. And by definition a lot of it is introspective, which in our modern society, which hates critical thinking & wants only non stop action to entertain us, doesn’t fly well.

So, if the camping time was only about a week long & Ron was gone one day & back the next, etc., a lot of the tension, a lot of the struggle, a lot of the tentatio, a lot of Harry’s own indecisiveness & grappling with doubts & direction would be gone.

JKR gives us both introspection & non-stop action in the same novel. After the Trio go to Gringott’s, the action doesn’t stop until the end. So, we have both & both play their own important parts. So, I find it disappointing that so many people dismiss the so called camping time as just wasted space. It is not.

And besides, I’ve come to agree most firmly with Red Rocker, that Voldemort is not the true villain of the story, Harry’s struggle with death is. And through all the book Harry comes to realize that in his struggle with death, it is not mastery of death that will matter but coming to terms with it. In essence, he learns the lesson of the 3rd brother.
37 Red Rocker // Aug 4, 2008 at 4:26 pm

Going along with the perspective that villains are interesting because their plotting moves the action along: wouldn’t it really be a cool thing if it was the hero who plotted actively against the villain, and made the action move?

When this happens, when the good guys seize the initiative, we get much more interesting good guys. Dumbledore, for example, gets much of his fascination from the fact that he know more than anyone, schemes and plots, and for the most part, makes things happen the way he wants. And perhaps not coincidentally, he has a strong streak of the dark side in him as well. As for Harry, he is the most interesting when he takes matters into his own hands, as with the episode of the socks in CoS, taking off from Hogwarts at the end of HBP, and deciding to walk into the enemy’s hands, in DH.
38 Mike A. // Aug 4, 2008 at 9:02 pm

The camping isn’t all that bad really. But it does cut the trio off from all other people for most of DH, which greatly decreases the emotional interactions and quirky incidents that usually take place in a Potter book.

I like the idea of the good guys taking the initiative, especially of Dumbledore, say, putting some final plan into effect from beyond the grave.

Of course he does do that to a certain extent. He provides the trio with the three gifts that allow them to destroy the Horcruces. And he sets Snape up to tell Harry that he is a horcrux.

It is all just too slapdash though. Compared to Voldemort’s tricky schemes, Dumbledore’s plan is a Exploding Snap house of cards.

Maybe this is JKR trying to emphasize faith over logic. Or something. Whatever the reason, I don’t think it makes for a very satisfying ending.
39 revgeorge // Aug 4, 2008 at 9:22 pm

Well, we’ll have to disagree on that. I think it is a very satisfying ending. But I agree with you that she has always kind of pushed this idea of there being something beyond visible events pushing the action. Of unknown & unprecise branches of magic screwing up the best laid plans of mice & wizards.

Voldemort attributes, in DH, all his setbacks to his carelessness & so having his plans defeated by luck & chance. But really his plans are defeated because of something unknown, some deeper magic if you will. Lily’s sacrifice, House Elf magic, Harry’s sparing of Pettigrew, Snape’s love for Lily, etc, etc. There are probably dozens of things else to note that Voldemort really doesn’t understand because they are beyond the pure realm of skill & so beyond control to an extent.

Even Dumbledore’s plans go awry, albeit for the better, because of that mysterious & unknown branch of magic relating to wands. Dumbledore intends to die undefeated. But because of Draco’s disarming of Dumbledore & then because of Harry’s snatching of Draco’s wand in an instant of conflict at the Malfoy Manor, Harry becomes master of the Elder Wand & thus Voldy’s finally spell is deflected back on himself because the wand wouldn’t attack its master.

Jo’s indicated these things in her interviews. That the fate of the wizarding world comes down to two young men struggling physically over a wand. And not to any pure display of magical skill or power.

Reminds me of Gandalf’s words to Frodo about Bilbo finding the One Ring. That there was more than one power at work there & a power that foiled the intent of the Ring’s maker.