15 July 2011 Volume: 21 Issue: 13 North Korea's ... - Eureka Street

Volume 21 Issue: 1315 July 2011Harry Potter’s victory over Christian wowsersFILMSTim KroenertHarry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Pt 2 (M). Director: David Yates. Starring: DanielRadcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, Ralph Fiennes. 130 minutesIt wasn’t exactly Nazi Germany, but it was, nonetheless, an appalling act of biblioclasm.Someone from the local community had donated a set of young people’s fantasy novels to thethrift shop attached to the church that I had attended since childhood. The then-managers ofthe store, whom I had thought to be kindly and moderate Christian folk, literally put flame tothe unfortunate tomes.This was no isolated incident, of course, but the destruction of Harry Potter novels, on thepretext that they promoted occult practices to children, had seemed mainly to be the domainof conservative American Christian wowsers. I was shocked, frankly, to find that similarattitudes existed so close to home, among people who I had known and looked up to.Such fanaticism was ironic, too, given the fact that the series’ author, J. K. Rowling, is aChristian, who saw her fantastical saga as a parable in a similar mould to C. S. Lewis’Chronicles of Narnia. Rowling went so far as to tell The Vancouver Sun back in 2000 that any‘intelligent reader’, if they knew the details of her religious beliefs, would ‘be able to guesswhat’s coming in the books’.Harry Potter is, after all, explicitly a Christ figure. This may be true of all fictional ‘chosenones’ who learn the necessity of faith and self-sacrifice on the path to overcoming evil. But theseventh and final Harry Potter book, The Deathly Hallows, and now this, the eighth film, whichcompletes the adaptation begun in last year’s The Deathly Hallows Pt 1, take the analogy to itsliteral conclusion.There’s not much plot to be revealed about this action-driven finale. It picks up where thedark and character-driven quest story of DH1 left off. Harry (Radcliffe) and his friends Ron(Grint) and Hermione (Watson) have taken the first steps in their mission to locate thosemystical talismans, known as horcruxes, that are tied up with the mortality of their evilnemesis, Voldemort (Fiennes).They arrive back at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, and to a world that hasbecome utterly oppressed by Voldemort and his army of Death Eaters. Here they prepare forbattle.Cinematically, the results are mixed. Where Rowling’s novels, particularly in the secondhalf of the series, suffered from a serious case of narrative bloat, the latter films have displayedtheir own related problems of poor plotting and pacing. This is true also of DH2, into which©2011 EurekaStreet.com.au 7