A Road Less Travelled

My brother Jonathan loves me. I know he loves me because he convinced me to go see the 6th Harry Potter movie with him. I had seen movies 1-3 and then sworn off all Harry Potter movies because I just didn’t like the third one so much. But Jonathan said he’d buy my ticket to say thank you for taking care of his cats while he was in Erie recently and how can you say no to a free movie ticket? I’m sure somebody can, but I am not that person so I went and I was delighted. I have all kinds of reasons for why I was charmed by The Half-Blood Prince, but what I really want to talk about is why, in general, I don’t care for the Harry Potter movies.

It’s really not their fault. The issue is that they’re movies and so can’t do the same thing a book does. I think my biggest issue with the movies is that they can’t capture what I find so engrossing about the books

Harry is at the center of a war between light and dark, good and evil, charming and creepy. He is the lynch pin the rest of the fight is resting on, the one weakness of the uber evil villain, Voldemort. Harry started regularly fighting for his life when he was eleven and has had to do so again and again each book, I mean, year. In each book there is something to be overcome, some way to thwart Voldemort’s plans yet again, some crisis that forces Harry to grow up a bit more. And yet, when he wakes up the morning after the huge coup de grace he’s still just a boy.

Harry may be the epicenter of a war, but he’s also a kid going to school and having friends. So yeah he’s up all night fretting over the latest mystery, but in the morning he’s still going to have to take exams. He has two friends that will stick with him come hell or high water, but sometimes they have a fight. Sometimes Harry has to go say he’s sorry or figure out when to be truly honest and when to be tactful. Sure, maybe he’s the Chosen One who will defeat Voldemort once and for all, but there’s this girl that he thinks is really cute, but he doesn’t know how to talk to her. The grand, epic tale is told in the framework of everyday life.

This is the same reason I enjoy Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Buffy is, again, the Chosen One, the one imbued with powers to fight the forces of evil. But she’s still just a teenage girl. She might be late to class because she was talking to her Watcher about what she killed on patrol the night before. Or sometimes she needs to choose between fighting evil where it lurks or spending some quality time with her friends. Sure, the fight’s important, but so is her relationship with her mother. She only has so much time so which will she choose? The war she is fighting is fought in big and little ways throughout her day.

This is something that you just cannot capture in a movie. There’s just not enough time. So what ends up happening is that each Harry Potter book with it’s slow unfolding of events and it’s rich detail of daily life turns into an action movie with the one task that Harry must focus all his screen time on. The ins and outs of daily life are lost and the many of the hard decisions between destiny or friends are assumed. Destiny, of course; we don’t want this movie to be too long.

But that seems to miss the point. That turns stories that are about the tension between being special and being normal into straight up adventures. The movies lose so much of the lush details that make the Harry Potter world such a delightful and terrible place to be. And it removes the war from daily life. Suddenly the war Harry is fighting is a series of events that happen in a year and not a daily struggle.

I feel like there is profundity there, but that could just be because I enjoy the books so very much and look for profundity everywhere. But having the time and space to make the hero of the tale a normal person who is special means quite a lot to me. Because I am a normal person. I am a normal person in the middle of a way and while no, I’m not the Chosen One, I’ve still got my bit to play. There is a fight that is not primarily in the big events, but in everyday life. Battle lines are drawn up on whether or not you shout at that child, serve that person, speak those words. Battles are waged by very normal people who are also very special. And if my life were ever a book I would want it to be full of details and textures so that the world I walk through could be felt and understood. So that the reader could fall in love with the world they see through my eyes.

All of which is a luxury that is simply lost when a seven hundred page book is converted to a two hour long movie. Most of the bits I find so delightful are lost in the adaptation and all I’m left with are the highlights. I like the movie world Harry walks through and because I’m such a sucker for nifty visuals I might come to love it, but not nearly as deeply as I have through the books. The nuances are lost and the slow building of a mystery is completely shot to pieces. Much of the whimsy is maintained (for most of the movies anyway. That third movie was just too artsy.) and the important relationships are given their space and time for all that they aren’t completely fleshed out. So they are enjoyable moves, but they’re just not what I’m looking for in a Harry Potter story. This won’t stop me from watching them, but it makes reading the books afterwords that much better.