Thoughts for the Serious Reader of Harry Potter
Read about it all here. The lead child-exorcist will be going to Liberty University to further her education. Here’s hoping she doesn’t try to cast any demons out of Prof. David Baggett there! Check out The Daily Mail’s photograph at the article of dad, daughters, and terrific twin Harry Haters… If nothing else, I’m obliged to admire their zeal and the uncompromising nature of their quest.
Hat tip and thanks to Kathleen and Dr. Art for the link.
You can read the original facebook announcement on Ms Rowling’s page or the write-ups of same at HollywoodLife, FOX News, or MuggleNet.
Or just read it here if you haven’t already:
It all started when Warner Bros. came to me with the suggestion of turning ‘Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them’ into a film. I thought it was a fun idea, but the idea of seeing Newt Scamander, the supposed author of ‘Fantastic Beasts,’ realized by another writer was difficult. Having lived for so long in my fictional universe, I feel very protective of it and I already knew a lot about Newt. As hard-core Harry Potter fans will know, I liked him so much that I even married his grandson, Rolf, to one of my favourite characters from the Harry Potter series, Luna Lovegood.
As I considered Warners’ proposal, an idea took shape that I couldn’t dislodge. That is how I ended up pitching my own idea for a film to Warner Bros.
Although it will be set in the worldwide community of witches and wizards where I was so happy for seventeen years, ‘Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them’ is neither a prequel nor a sequel to the Harry Potter series, but an extension of the wizarding world. The laws and customs of the hidden magical society will be familiar to anyone who has read the Harry Potter books or seen the films, but Newt’s story will start in New York, seventy years before Harry’s gets underway.
I particularly want to thank Kevin Tsujihara of Warner Bros. for his support in this project, which would not have happened without him. I always said that I would only revisit the wizarding world if I had an idea that I was really excited about and this is it.
Three quick thought for your comment and correction:
Let’s be clear, there is no love lost between the Estate of J. R. R. Tolkien and the movie making empire that created the three LOTR films and, more recently, The Hobbit. For one, they are at legal nail, tooth, and tongs. More to the point of this post, though, the Estate considers the movies to be trash and a great betrayal of the written work, the artistry, epic, and meaning they are supposed to represent in a different medium.
You can read the interview with Christopher Tolkien in which he makes these points — and it is worth a close study, I think. Here is the highlight I think especially important:
Invited to meet Peter Jackson, the Tolkien family preferred not to. Why? “They eviscerated the book by making it an action movie for young people aged 15 to 25,” Christopher says regretfully. “And it seems that The Hobbit will be the same kind of film.”
This divorce has been systematically driven by the logic of Hollywood. “Tolkien has become a monster, devoured by his own popularity and absorbed into the absurdity of our time,” Christopher Tolkien observes sadly. “The chasm between the beauty and seriousness of the work, and what it has become, has overwhelmed me. The commercialization has reduced the aesthetic and philosophical impact of the creation to nothing. There is only one solution for me: to turn my head away.”
Three quick notes:
Harry Potter, St. Augustine, and the Confrontation with Evil
Jean Bethke Elshtain died last month at age 72. I suspect many readers here do not know who she was. I certainly didn’t until a septuagenarian friend in Bellingham, Washington, who had read Hidden Key to Harry Potter in 2002 and liked it, told me about the lecture she had given months before at the Smithsonian, ‘Harry Potter, St Augustine, and the Confrontation with Evil’ (above, given at a later date). My friend assured me this was big news that Bethke Elshtain had ‘come out’ on the for side in the Potter Wars that were raging then, because she was considered by thoughtful Evangelicals to be a political scientist and theological giant striding the earth.
Eager as I was for any kind of support for my book but especially for a recommendation that would have this kind of weight, I sent her a copy of my book and asked her, if she would be so kind as to read it, and, if she liked it, would she, could she write a short blurb?
Presumptuous hope? Oh, yeah. I did the same thing with Prof Alan Jacobs then at Wheaton College; he returned the book unopened and derided my literary alchemy and Eliade thoughts in an article in First Things. Which was probably the kind of response I should have expected for a ‘cold call’ request to “drop everything, read my book, and please endorse it.”
Prof Bethke Elshtain, however, read the book and very soon after wrote a very flattering and generous endorsement. Tyndale featured it in Looking for God in Harry Potter (2004). I have often thought this paragraph from a respected Christian thinker may have been the reason they decided to publish the book; it gave them significant cover in the world of Christian Book Sellers, all of whom carried her works because they and their customers admired her.
Forgive me, then, in my self-importance, for thinking that victory in the Potter Panic was won to some degree when this woman, diminutive only in appearance, took to the battlements. I know her kindness to me in this first request and in later correspondence about how she came to read the stories (grandchildren, as you might have guessed) and other subjects, were a great support to me when I wondered if my critics weren’t right in the consensus that I was a nutter for arguing that there was significant Christian content in the Hogwarts Saga and this was the reason for their success.
You can and probably should read the Wikipedia life summary and the obituaries at The Atlantic, the University of Chicago (where she was a professor, albeit long after my time there as an undergraduate), in The Christian Post, and the Chronicles of Higher Education. You’ll come away from those eulogies with some appreciation, I hope, of what an insignificant part of her grand life discussing Harry Potter was, — but in that small part, she made a critical contribution that changed the balance in what was then considered a lost cause.
Memory Eternal.
We are in the last months before Allegiant is published, which publication will reveal at last the secrets of the post-apocalypse Divergent psycho-drama theme park in Chicago.
Is it a mad scientist turned voyeur experiment for broadcasting a la The Truman Show? Are Tris and Tobias starring in another re-make of Special Service?
An Art Farm for human beings set up by aliens akin to King’s Under the Dome?
Or is this something like the Chicago ‘Projects,’ urban renewal and political correctness become self-perpetuating nightmare? Is Divergent something of a psychologist’s Cabrini Green?
Reading Louise Freeman’s thoughts last week about the possible revelation that Tobias’ dad is not the bad guy of the piece but a willing player in a drama has pushed my thinking in this ‘reality television’ direction, a grand re-make using psychological archetypes as shadow-makers of Plato’s Cave Allegory. That Tris’ grandmother is Amanda Ritter/Edith Prior (?), of course, doesn’t hurt this speculative thread.
I’ve posted the Manifestos of the Five Factions (with Veronica Roth dressed in her Faction-plate clothing…) after the jump to see if you think as I am beginning to that these statements were delivered to leadership by a higher authority, Ms Ritter’s idealist group?, and that Allegiant will largely be a Morality Play or ‘Everyman’ re-telling in which all the players get to face their personal/faction narratives as aspects or fragments of the whole.
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