Smart Talk on Harry Potter
Jim Dale press conference from Portus 2008
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{ 14 comments… read them below or add one }
I can’t wait to listen!
Travis,
Just listened to the pubcast. Thanks for the work in bringing us the Jim Dale press conference. Interesting stuff. Especially near the end with the questions & answers about the appeal of HP.
I’ve thought a bit about the people dressing up as Death Eaters & saying we need to hear their side. I made some comments on it somewhere but I can’t remember now, probably HP Progs.
Here’s some stabs at it. I think this phenomenon is two fold. One is our incessant desire to psychologize everything, to look for excuses for people’s behavior & trying to separate the behaviors from the person. Which is okay to some extent.
But I think we’ve reached a point in modern society when we refuse to believe that there are bad people. That many people like to do wrong. Instead, we want to find reasons for it, even justifications for bad people. Maybe if we can deal with these people’s bad circumstances or their problems that cause them to ‘act out,’ then they can be the good people we know they’d be. But until those problems are dealt with, they don’t have any choice but to be bad.
I think also relativism plays a part. What you think is bad the Death Eaters think is good & vice versa. What’s right for me isn’t necessarily right for you, etc, etc. We just disagree over the nature of right & wrong, so let’s agree to disagree. I’m reminded of a conversation in a book by Greg Keyes where one character is undecided about whether or not another character is evil. The other character says, “Well, maybe I am evil, but we just disagree about what evil is.”
Those are just some guesses. Such people may be well meaning, seeking to humanize people who don’t seem to be given a fair shake, who are just painted as evil, but while that’s possible, I don’t think it’s necessarily helpful. It ignores that understanding why someone may have done something, it does not excuse their behavior or make it ambivalent or subject to interpretation.
But, hey, I’d also like to talk about the power of fairy tales, but that’ll have to wait for another post.
I think the appeal to dressing up as a Death Eater is the same appeal as dressing up as any other villainous character. Whether it’s Halloween or anything else, many people dress up to be something they are not, something larger than life and fantastical. The people who dress up as Griffyndors or members of the other houses are focusing on the world of Harry Potter and how they would fit into it, but the Death Eaters and bad Slytherins are playing a character.
I know a lot of actors say that the Villain is the more fun character to play, because they don’t have to abide by morals or rules of society. The Villains can be extravagant and wild and silly. I think many of the Harry Potter villains lend well to this, Voldemort and Bellatrix particularly.
I think children see the story, and the characters of the story, as real, so of course no one wants to be the evil characters who kill people, but the older crowd has accepted that Harry Potter is not real, so the appeal is more on the world created in Harry Potter and having fun in it.
Mark-Anthony,
That’s what I originally thought, too. But the more I hear from Travis & Penny on this, it seems something a bit different. But I’m not sure.
Hopefully, it is as you say, just role-play, which I totally understand being a gamer myself.
Awesome! Thanks for posting this.
revgeorge: I’m not sure it’s relatvisim or a lack of appreciation for how bad people really are; I think it’s more that many people feel some kind of alienation from the mainstream, and they see and identify with that in those characters that are cast as the bad guys in the books (for somewhat of the same reason that children who were abused identify very strongly with Harry). And, in many cases, I think people are just out to have a good time, and Death Eaters do have more phone than stodgy, righteous Gryffindors.
Why am I represented by some kind of bunny-heart thing?
Greg,
Because the magic power of the avatar shows what you really are inside.
Interesting comments, though, on the people who dress up as Death Eaters. If it is because they feel some sort of alienation from the mainstream, they’ve chosen an ironic way to express it, since the Death Eaters seem to represent a great majority of wizarding thought. Most people aren’t as extreme as they are, but most of the wizarding world, or I should say, most of the hierarchy & privileged of the wizarding world do seem to share their prejudices.
Hopefully, it’s only because Death Eaters just wanna have fun, to paraphrase Cyndi Lauper.
First, the most important question: Greg, you’re represented by a bunny-heart thing because you haven’t signed up for an uploaded a gravatar. Without that, I’m afraid you’ll always be a bunny-heart monster.
Good thoughts by everyone. I think it’s most likely that one explanation does not fit all. I think revgeorge is probably correct that there are some who are moral relativists.
Mark-Anthony also makes a very good point that the bad guys are often more interesting and therefore more fun to play. I submit as exhibits A and B: (A) Alan Rickman’s Sheriff of Nottingham in Prince of Thieves vs. Costner’s Robin Hood, and (B) Heath Ledger’s Joker vs. Bale’s Batman.
And Greg has some really important insight here. Harry Potter has a very strong theme about marginalization of certain groups. What makes this very odd, however, is that those fundamentally responsible for creating a social hierarchy are Slytherins, particularly Death Eaters. So there’s something rather odd about folks identifying with Slytherins when Salazar Slytherin’s ideology is the central social justice problem of the Wizarding World and responsible for much of the subjugation of certain groups.
Are the bad guys often more interesting than the good?
I don’t think the two examples you cited, Travis, Rickman’s Sheriff and Ledger’s Joker, make the case. Rickman, a very talented actor, was acting against Costner, who is as white-bread as you can get. And Ledger has shown that he can invest a good guy with as much fascination as a bad guy, witness his last major role, Ennis del Mar. In both cases, Rickman and Ledger, I think the fascination comes from the talent of the actor, rather than the fact that the actor is playing a bad guy. In the case of the Joker, I think we have two talented actors (Bale, Ledger) playing against each other. But while Bale gives a very good performance (I go by the reviews since I haven’t seen it yet), Ledger gives an inspired performance, channelling a spirit of sado-masochistic anarchy not seen since – well Malcolm MacDowell in Clockwork Orange, with direct echoes Conrad Veidt’s Gwynplaine and a dash of Hopkins’ Lecter.
But in general, I think I’d tend to agree. Bad guys are more fun to play and watch. Someone’s alrady pointed out that people get to pretend to say and do things as bad guys which they wouldn’t normally.
Even so, I confess that the proclivity for dresssing up as Death Eaters worries me. I can’t remember if that is how JKR wrote them, but in the movie GoF, the Death Eaters look uncomfortably like Klan members. As well, there is more than a hint of similarity to Nazis, what with their proclamation of the virtues of PureBloodedness and their determination to wipe out MudBloods, including the systematic attempts by the Ministry to detect MudBloods when Death Eaters inflitrate it in DH.
So the question to me is, why are people so interested in channelling the Klan and Nazis? The usual explanations are the need for power, permission to hurt and destroy without sanctions, and the need to belong to a bigger, more powerful group with fun costumes. Given the fact that all the wizards, good and bad, have a lot of power, it can’t be the power thing. And it can’t be group thing or the costume thing: the good guys get costumes, and the good guys have clubs too: i.e. Dumbledore’s Army or the Order of the Phoenic. Which just leaves the second theory, with bits of the third.
I think that the appeal of the Death Eaters is the fact that they can hurt and destroy behind the anonimity of masks and costumes.
Which is what worries me.
There’s also the truth that being evil is easier than being good. Witness Master Yoda’s words in The Empire Strikes Back to Luke’s question, “Is the dark side stronger?” “No, quicker, easier.”
I totally agree that putting Rickman’s Sheriff up against Costner’s Robin Hood is like having a boxer in his first fight face Mike Tyson in his glory days. No contest. Can we say for Costner worst portrayal of Robin Hood ever?
On a side note, is it just a recent phenomenon that villains have become almost as fascinating or sympathetic as the heroes? And if so, does that say more about the nature of heroes & villains or more about us & our worldview? Which I’m sure we’ve discussed before, but hey, it’s been quiet lately.
Red Rocker Sure – not case-closing examples. But actors are every bit as much creators as writers. Of course they were good actors, but I’m talking about the popular response to certain bad guys as opposed to the good ones. Just saying, “Oh, it was just the good actor” is like saying, “Oh, it was just the good writer.”
But that’s sort of a side conversation and besides the point. The rest of your post is the very point I was trying to make.
revgeorge, I wonder how much the development of the gothic villain-hero (or anti-hero) has played a part in the growing fascination with the villain.
I’ve never been to an HP conference, but I’m a bit of a fan art nerd, and I often come across photos of people doing HP cosplays, and people are dressed up as Harry or other Gryffindors quite a lot. Also, in fan art it’s surprisingly rare to come across a drawing of Voldemort- you’re much more likely to see the trio depicted. That’s why I wonder if what you’re observing has something specific to do with conferences or with costumes, although I have no idea what that might be.
ned, very interesting! Maybe it is a costume thing.
At HP events, I’d say the slight majority of the artwork on display is Snape-centered, but you’re right – there are a lot more Harrys Gryffindors in the artwork.
revgeorge said: “is it just a recent phenomenon that villains have become almost as fascinating or sympathetic as the heroes”
Pathos as a form of rhetoric has been around for quite some time.