Long Live Snape!

Sorry to see that Snape, my alter-ego, has died.

Pastor Deneff, Harry Potter, and Nay-Sayers

Got home from Bible study in time to see the end of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Throughout the entire movie, no one believed that the evil Voldemort was back.  Harry Potter was mocked as a fool, punished for being a liar. At the very end, the Minister of Magic and his retinue see Voldemort and in shock exclaim, "He's back!"

So Harry is vindicated. Standing behind the minister is the older brother of Harry's best friend Ron. If you read the novels, you'll know what the movies only hint at, that Percy is a jerk who thinks he's better than everyone else. He is a leader who prides himself on how much more he knows about everything and about how much more virtuous he is than everyone else. He is always ready to give advice to younger students who might want to follow in his footsteps.

In the final scene, the self-righteous Percy is confronted with the fact that in fact it is he who has been wrong all along.  He has maligned his parents when he was in fact the loser, and they the righteous ones.  He is the one without insight, without discernment.  I immediately thought of something Steve Deneff said in his sermon this morning.

The Percy type never admits they were wrong. They don't apologize. What they usually do is go on to be vociferously wrong again... on the next issue.

Harry Potter Childhood

My step-daughters were 5 and 6 years old in 1998 when Harry Potter first came out, the year I got married.  They are now 18 and 19.  In other words, the Harry Potter phenomenon coincided exactly with their childhood, from the point when they started reading to the point when they started college.

They truly grew-up with Harry Potter--I mean, the character.  Their progress through school paralleled Harry's progress through Hogwarts.  They read all the books--multiple times.  We can quote all the movies.  Everyone but me has a wand ;-)

Needless to say, we were at the midnight showing of the final installment of the series.  And when it was over, there was this strange sense they had, that childhood was now over.  They were now adults.

What is there, now, to look forward to?  Life as we knew it is now over... ;-)

Harry Potter and Language Games

For whatever reason, my family follows Harry Potter closely. My two step-daughters are almost the age of the actors and actresses and so have grown up with them. When my youngest children are bored at a restaurant waiting for food, they often play "famous people" with the characters from Harry Potter a regular feature. My wife has already bought us all tickets for the 11:59pm showing Tuesday night and has been rereading the books and having Potter marathons in the evenings at home.

And I have to begrudgingly acknowledge that Rowling is quite brilliant. The narrative world she has created is phenomenally clever at point after point. I come at these movies with a little different lens since I consider myself a philosopher of language and not too shabby a narrative critic.

Last night we watched The Prisoner of Azkaban (the best, I think) and I turned off The Goblet of Fire just before the last challenge. There's a brilliant line from a philosophy of language standpoint in Goblet. Harry and Ron aren't speaking to each other, so at one point they have Hermione brokering a conversation.

Finally, exasperated, she exclaims, "I am not an owl!"

I love that line. In any normal conversation in the real world (read "language game"), it is completely meaningless. What do you mean? You're not wise? You don't stay up at night chasing rodents?

Rowling has successfully created an alternative universe, a narrative world. In the language games of that world, owls carry messages back and forth between people.

As I once said similarly of Jack Handy, frustrated at my own mediocrity, "She's a master!" Bill Patrick, are you out there?