Review of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince in the works. Meantime:
One of the things I've liked about the Harry Potter books and movies is J.K. Rowling's and Harry's own ambivalence about Harry' status as the Chosen One.
It's gotten to the point where I can't sort out whose Chosen One-ness came first and who's chosenness is informing whose, but it's now impossible for me not to see the two boy-heroes Anakin Skywalker's and Harry Potter's stories as running commentaries on each other.
Actually, there are three heroes to deal with. George Lucas tied Luke Skywalker's story explicitly to Harry's in the final scene of Revenge of the Jedi when he let John Williams quote the Harry Potter theme as Obi-wan delivers the baby Luke to his anti-Dursley aunt and uncle.
It's Luke who's Harry's double now, and in that doubling Anakin becomes a double for Tom Riddle, which amounts to George Lucas doing a self-edit, rejecting earlier conceptions of Anakin as the tragic hero of his saga in favor of returning to his original concept of Vader as the villain, a point Rowling started from. Vader. Voldemort. The irony is that Rowling gave up her original conception of Tom Riddle as a fallen angel in favor of making him a textbook sociopath.
In The Half-Blood Prince it's established that if Riddle wasn't born evil, neglect and abuse caused him to fail to develop a conscience or any sense that other people matter for more than their usefulness to his own narcissistic desire for power and he became a monster at a very young age. He became a monster before he had a chance to become a person.
That was disappointing because it meant that Harry was never in danger of going over to the dark side.
It wasn't that Riddle had given in to temptation. It was that he'd never been loved. This is psychology not literature. From that point the outcome of the final book was never in doubt. Not that it ever was. Rowling wasn't going to give her series an unhappy ending any more than Lucas would have ended his with the Rebellion's defeat. But the imaginary possibility of an alternative ending was closed off, in a way it never was in the Star Wars saga. We were and still are free to imagine Luke's giving in to Vader's offer or losing his last light saber duel. That failure is foreshadowed in the failures of various other Jedis in their battles with the Sith. Even Yoda fails. Dooku fights him to a draw and he loses to Darth Sidious. Qui-gon, the essential man, the one who could have trained Anakin by taming his ego, is defeated by Darth Maul, and even though Obi-wan slices Maul in two his victory is Pyrrhic because now he's responsible for Anakin and he's not up to the task. And of course he loses his important battle when he walks away without making sure Anakin is dead.
There are no similar catastrophic defeats in the Harry Potter backstory. Dark wizards are apparently as common as crooked Congressmen but ultimately just about as destructive. Voldemort is a once in a thousand years or more natural disaster, a particularly virulent strain of flu that infects other wizards whose moral immune systems have already been weakened by vanity, ambition, or fear. (This is why the most interesting character in the new movie is Draco Malfoy. Moral illness in inherently dramatic, but even more important, he's the only one in the movie who's shown as being in actual danger.) A powerful Sith lord calling across the chasm "Join me on the dark side" isn't necessary for a good Jedi to fall. The temptation is constant because it comes from within, from a Jedi's own self. It is the self. But Voldemort is a virulent germ and he's wiped out by a potent anti-biotic, Lily Potter's love for her child.
Both of his defeats, the one that starts the series and the one that ends it, are about as dramatically exciting then as the "defeat" of the Martians in War of the Worlds. He's not beaten by our hero. He just encounters an anti-body his own system can't handle.
This isn't necessarily a criticism. It just makes Voldemort a less interesting villain than Anakin/Vader. I mean as a literary conception. Ralph Fiennes is a far more interesting screen presence than Hayden Christopher Christensen. (Thanks to Bradley D. for the copy edit.) But it has the effect of making Harry's status as the Chosen One something of a bitter joke.
Anakin is the Chosen One because he is special. He is the most powerful and talented Jedi and he could be the greatest force for good the Force has ever produced. But the choice is his. Harry is only special because he's the Chosen One. There's nothing else extraordinary about him. Extraordinary relative to other heroes in other boy's adventure stories. He's Jim Hawkins with a wand instead of a flintlock pistol, smart, brave, resourceful, in over his head, and finally dependent on the grown-ups around him to save the day for him. Compared to other students at Hogwarts, he has more than ordinary amounts of luck, pluck, and decency, and he can think faster on his feet or on his broom than most other young wizards. But he's not a talented wizard. He's not inherently more powerful than anyone else and he doesn't show any signs he's developing any faster or that he wants to. He's not on his way to growing up into another Dumbledore or a Voldemort. That's not his ambition. He wants to be an auror---which is to say he wants to grow up to be a cop. He wants to be a top cop. Being an auror is the wizard equivalent of being a DEA agent working the Mexican border. But it's still a cop, a pretty ordinary dream job for a kid. That's the point, though.
Harry is fairly ordinary. And he'd like to stay that way. He doesn't want to be the Chosen One, and who would, given what the job entails, which is mainly hanging around waiting for Voldemort to try to kill you and hoping you survive his attacks until somehow, some way history repeats itself and Voldemort dies making one attempt too many. Not much of a plan and it's key that Harry's own survival is not a necessary part of the plan. He has his mother eyes, after all. No reason to think he hasn't inherited her decidedly mixed luck too.
For Anakin, and then for Luke, being the Chosen One is a destiny, and they are free to choose not to be chosen, as Luke does. Luke makes his own destiny. Harry can only get out of being the Chosen One if Voldemort lets him, and that isn't about to happen. For Harry, being the Chosen One is an assignment he didn't volunteer for and which he can't refuse. He's an agent of well-meaning adults who don't necessarily seem to regard his survival as important to their desired outcomes. There are times when Harry, and we, suspect that even Dumbledore's plans don't depend on Harry being left alive at the end and that the prospect of Harry's death doesn't seem to be as much of a downside in Dumbledore's mind as Harry would like it to be. Agent, then, may be a nicer way of saying "tool," and it's no wonder Harry doesn't want the job.
Which is fine with me. The proliferation of chosen ones in fantasy films and literature is a problematic theme. The ancient prototypes of chosen ones, from Hercules and David to Arthur are divinely chosen. The gods or God marked them for greatness from birth and they are more than agents of divine will, they are expressions of it. They are avatars, and when they come into their own they are more than surrogates for whatever divinity chose them, they are practically incarnations of that divinity. Jesus of Nazareth is the myth reduced to literalness. This has meant that every chosen one who has followed since have that element of god-ness in their chosen-ness. A chosen one isn't simply "special" he or she is superior, a demi-god or demi-goddess in disguise, and the implications of that when young readers or audience members are encouraged to identify with the chosen ones and see in them encouraging signs of their own "specialness" are frightening, or ought to be frightening, to societies that don't particularly want hordes of self-anointed supermen and women swaggering about and throwing their egos around, and it's no wonder then that in a more democratic age and culture stories of chosen ones are often cautionary tales or that one of the signs of being truly chosen has become that you don't agree with the gods' choice and actively resist it.
In short, the reason we know that Aragorn and Carrot are the one the true king of their respective fantasy worlds is that neither one wants to be king and each goes out of his way to avoid having to take on the job. And the reason we know that Superman is the greatest super-hero is that for him the most important deed he has to accomplish is to inspire human beings to create a world in which a Superman isn't needed.
One of the weaknesses of the Star Wars prequels---one of the many weaknesses---is that Anakin's attitude towards his chosen-ness is never a dramatic issue. In Attack of the Clones he's too wrapped up in sulking about, well, everything, and in Revenge of the Sith he's too busy mopping up messes from the Clone Wars until he goes over to the Dark Side and only then does it seem to dawn on him that he might be a demi-god. It's possible, then, that for a long time Anakin was rejecting the idea that he was the Chosen One as aggressively and successfully as Aragorn rejected his kingship and that his fall is even more tragic than we know.
What's not in doubt is that Luke never lets it cross his mind that he's now the Chosen One.
But Harry's resistance to his chosen-ness is different, partly because unlike the Skywalker boys he has no choice about it---resistance is futile in his case, which makes it more admirable but less heroic---but mainly because in Rowling's conception being the Chosen One is not a heroic thing. Divine ordination has nothing to do with it either. In fact, the grown-ups' use of the term Chosen One is as superstitious as their fear of saying Voldemort's name. One of Harry's more admirable traits of character is that for a wizard he is remarkably realistically-minded. He's almost like a divinity student who's an agnostic. His lackadaisical attitude towards his studies often seems to stem from the fact that he doesn't believe in magic. What his teachers are calling magic is a higher science they don't understand or know how to teach right. It's no wonder he accepts and follows the notes in the Half-Blood Prince's old textbook so readily and enthusiastically---besides saving him the trouble of having to do the work himself, those notes are clearly the work of a scientific mind, the mind of someone who doubted, questioned, tested, experimented, who looked for reasons.
The way he refers to himself as the Chosen One makes it clear that he regards the whole idea as a load of dragon dung. In this he's not just being a precocious skeptic. He's being a typical teenager looking at the adult world and deciding it's not all that adult or attractive and there ought to be an alternative to growing up into it.
Over the course of the series, J.K. Rowling moved away from the simple boys (and girls) adventure stories she started with and while she never arrived there towards the kind of young adult novel Judy Blume used to write. She let her thematic interests expand and mature with her characters' and her readers' interests and concerns as they matured. And an effect of this has been an undercutting of her own concept of Harry as a hero because she has made Harry's chosen-ness not a sign of his specialness but of his ordinariness.
What it means to be the Chosen One is very close to what it means to having to grow up.
What Harry has had to deal with as the Chosen One is the knowledge that life is full of sorrow and pain and loss, that those never stop, if anything they only get worse, that when one trouble ends or a problem gets solved, another one moves right it to take its place, that people place expectations upon you that are unrealistic and at odds with your hopes and desires, that you have responsibilities you didn't ask for but that you can't escape, and that just getting through the day is as much a matter of luck as anything else, that just being a good guy isn't enough, and that no matter how hard you work, no matter how smart you are, no matter how talented, no matter how hard you try, you can still fail or screw-up, and that you have to keep going anyway because there's no other choice.
Like I said, it's not a particularly heroic conception.
Which is why I like it.
Unfortunately, it's not a particularly dramatic conception either.
I should say it's not an easily dramatized conception and it's harder to do inside the confines of a fantasy-adventure.
Consequently, the movie version of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince continues a trend that began with Goblet of Fire and continued through Order of the Phoenix, anti-climactic climaxes.
But this is something I'll get into when I write my review.
__________________
Like you need a review from me: Matt Zoller Sietz has been there, done that, and liked it enough to have bought the t-shirt or at any rate write a positive review: Darkness Rising.
Craig Lindsay, however, thinks Harry isn't growing up as much as he's just getting old.
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"Rowling wasn't going to give her series an unhappy ending any more than Lucas would have ended his with the Rebellion's defeat."
Did you read that epilogue in book 7? Tragedy doesn't begin to describe it.
"those notes are clearly the work of a scientific mind, the mind of someone who doubted, questioned, tested, experimented, who looked for reasons."
Snape is really the only non-medieval person in the wizarding world and, from the evidence, he is clearly the most talented wizard extant. His situation and obeisance to both Voldemort and Dumbledore are left unexplained.
I haven't seen the movie yet. My youngest daughter just saw it in Venezuela and asked me to hold off until she returned so that we could go together. There probably aren't too many of those invitations left so I'll just have to be patient.
Posted by: Ken Muldrew | Thursday, July 23, 2009 at 12:21 PM
I don't understand a single thing you've said in this post. But then again, I suppose it's because I deliberately avoided J.K. Rowling's rip-off novels from the start. Yeah yeah, the books got kids to read, wonderful. But her good stuff isn't original, and the original stuff isn't good.
But I think it's problematic to compare Luke Skywalker to Harry Potter since both authors really ripped off major chunks of their plot from other genres. It kind of boils down to an attempt to compare the "Rambo" movies to the "Die Hard" series. Yeah, there may be parallels, but is it really important to the business of movie making?
Posted by: J. | Thursday, July 23, 2009 at 12:41 PM
"Ralph Fiennes is a far more interesting screen presence than Hayden Christopher." And as if to prove your point, it turns out his name is actually Hayden Christensen. Poor guy can't get any breaks...
Posted by: Bradley D. | Thursday, July 23, 2009 at 04:40 PM
Bradley D.,
lol. And after he did such great work in Jumpers. Thanks for the catch.
Posted by: Lance | Thursday, July 23, 2009 at 04:53 PM
Only saw the first and second Star Wars, which seemed to be about children pointing ray-guns at guys in white armor and saying zap zap, along with some mystical Frank Herbert stuff and odds and ends from a hundred pulp sci-fi stories. It's conceivable that the series got better, but those first two sort of sucked.
But where could you get the idea that Aragorn resisted being king? Seems to me the guy was the king and knew it, never resisted it in the least. Just had to spend a few hundred years with a bad attitude, rangering in the edge lands, playing a close hand, waiting for the situation to ripen, re-forge the blade that was broken, yatada. No resistance, none, zilch. He was ready when the time came and always knew he would be ready. Nothing in the story at all about him resisting. He turned down that hot horse-rider babe without a second thought for anything but kindness, knowing he had to go be the king. The Aragorn resistance is either something that was dreamed up for the movies or you got some re-reading to do.
The part about Harry Potter being normal sounds about right, judging from a first viewing of the first movie last night. It was surprising that Harry shook off growing up in a locked cupboard under the stairs so easily, but it was just a kid story with owls and troll-snot and flying broomstick hockey after all, not Tolkien.
Posted by: B'Hommad | Thursday, July 23, 2009 at 08:10 PM
Good stuff on many fronts here, and lots worth talking about.
Lance and Bradley,
Rofl on both fronts. Lucas couldn't cast Skywalkers for beans, could he? For a story told through the eyes that hobbled an awful lot from go. It did make Han, Obi-Wan, and the princesses mother and daughter more compelling by default, though, since they had to fill gaps left by the Chosen Wasn'ts.
Ken,
Now, now. Much of the epilogue feels a little like being able to read intestinal flu, sure, but the conversation between grown-up Harry and young Albus is 1) quite sweet in a genuine sense, and 2) makes a good bit of Lance's point about chosen-as-growing-up. Grown-up Harry much more fully understands at a depth of soul the meaning (both meaning in and meaning of) Snape's life. Snape was indeed the most scientific of wizards and had the immense advantages of that, which made him in many respects just as you say, especially in his potential more than his realized power. Very smart to bring that up, and I think Rowling kind of "got" that by the time she was writing Half-Blood. But Snape's power nearly always came up short or remained unrealized potential because of what he so clearly lacked: the strategic and philosophical depth of even Voldemort, much less Dumbledore, with the one defining exception of Snape's unwavering love for Lily. There, through that channel, he became both the man and the wizard (the only triple-agent who could keep it all straight) he *could* be. Dumbledore deserves even more attention than Lance gives (which is more than usual) to his ease using Harry as cannon fodder for a greater good (his old Achilles heel wrt Grindlewald.) But he understood and deeply respected both Snape's practical talents and that one place in his life where he showed the kind of depth of perspective that might have made him the defining wizard of the age. On beyond the (spoilers!) death scene, it was Snape Dumbledore trusted as Headmaster because McGonagall was such an obvious target for the Death Eater party and would probably have gone down swinging in sheer Scots bloody-mindedness (I speak as a carrier of the gene.) But Snape, Voldemort's inside man, could play his crucial part even to the (spoilers again) inevitable end. Lance has already done lovely pieces on why Dumbledore wasn't a Chosen One and why Neville could quite easily have been; I think there's another one out there about Snape as the other side of the coin, a tragic hero of growing-up. That for me makes him even more interesting than being a one man wizarding Galileo-Newton-Lavoisier.
Lance,
There's a whole other post out there about mythic chosen ones. Especially how the Yeshua-to-Jesus translation (from radical rabbi and pretender to the throne, to Holy Freakin' Trinity, Batman) fits into the larger Justice League of God-Boys abroad in Hellenistic culture (figures like Mithras, Sol Invictus, even Hadrian's boy-toy Antinous which was a far more deliberate effort to gin up such a figure rather than, as I suspect Yeshua's case was, an example of how one culture makes another culture's idea familiar to themselves.) Carrot is, of course, an ideal example, especially his genuine guilt that the old saw that "a hero is someone who gets other people killed" seems to follow him around in spite of himself. To be accurate with Tolkien, rather than Peter Jackson, Aragorn had made his peace with the *fact* of his kingship, but didn't seek the power for its own sake and assumed (in that grim, Tolkenian, survivor's-guilt-plus-Catholicism way) that the road to kingship was, like the mighty Elendil's before him (an even better, if shorter, example of a noble soul who had kingship shoved at him when he'd never wanted it), a road to inevitable tragedy and the failures of his descendants.
Sorry to ramble so long; it's an essay worth rambling about.
Posted by: El Jefe | Thursday, July 23, 2009 at 08:32 PM
Buffy also had issues with being the Chosen One.
Posted by: Nancy | Thursday, July 23, 2009 at 09:39 PM
Lance, I think the point behind Potter is not the classic hero, but the classic leader, a general, who rallies and marshals forces that ultimately defeat the evil.
In other words, Harry represents love.
I have not read the books nor seen this movie, i should add
Luke was an adult when his trials began. Harry was barely out of diapers. He had protectors and advisors. Luke had Obi Wan and Yoda and both abandoned him (Ok, died) before he could complete his training.
This is a different story altogether. But I do like your analysis.
Posted by: actor212 | Thursday, July 23, 2009 at 10:13 PM
Forgot this earlier (bring in the comfy chair!):
Rowling, who probably goes on the books with Wodehouse as "best namers of characters in Englishsorrybritish literature since Dickens," even makes something like Lance's point with her hero's name. One part the archetypal English boy king post-Arthur ("Cry God for Harry, Hogwarts, and St. Mungo's Hospital for Magical Maladies!"), one part a verb typically used in relation to gardening one's herbaceous borders.
Posted by: El Jefe | Thursday, July 23, 2009 at 10:15 PM
But where could you get the idea that Aragorn resisted being king?
Do you recall the speech Elron gives to Aragorn when he hands him the sword?
"Put aside the ranger. Become who you were born to be."
It was clear throughout the trilogy that Aragorn was resistant to claiming his throne, altho he knew it was to be. Remember his sadness at the failure of the Fellowship to deliver Frodo to Mount Doom? This was a sign that he felt unsure he could really be a king.
It is not until Boromir's death, in the movies at any rate, that he even talks about defending Gondor.
Posted by: actor212 | Friday, July 24, 2009 at 09:39 AM
In short, the reason we know that Aragorn and Carrot are the one the true king of their respective fantasy worlds is that neither one wants to be king and each goes out of his way to avoid having to take on the job.
Movie-Aragorn, that is. Book-Aragorn is on a multi-decade program to become the king, because
1. That's his destiny.
2. It's not only his destiny, it's the thousand-year destiny of his branch of the royal family to reunite the lost kingdom of Arnor and restore the royal rule to Gondor.
3. Elrond tells him in so many words that Arwen will marry no Man less than the king of both Arnor and Gondor.
Posted by: Mike Schilling | Friday, July 24, 2009 at 10:59 AM
Nancy, I've got to watch some more Buffy.
El Jefe, B'Hommad, Carl, lots of interesting points. Thanks for taking the time.
Mike, you've got me wondering about something. Has Jackson rewritten the novels, added to the myth, or created a separate version all his own? I'm not sure if it's possible for me to think about the books apart from the movies anymore.
J.: But I think it's problematic to compare Luke Skywalker to Harry Potter since both authors really ripped off major chunks of their plot from other genres. It kind of boils down to an attempt to compare the "Rambo" movies to the "Die Hard" series.
J, Hmmm. Rambo vs. Die Hard? Rambo vs. Die Hard? I think there's a post in this!
Posted by: Lance | Friday, July 24, 2009 at 11:19 AM
Harry is not, IMHO, the only reluctant Chosen One to prefer ordinariness. I'm pretty certain that part, if not most of the hesitancy of one of the first Chosen Ones, Moses, was a private ambition of the life of a gentleman-farmer. It takes some fair cojones to argue with your tribal deity -- Moses had a good thing going in Midian, and he's supposed to give that up to take on the might of Egypt? For the Israelites?
Posted by: Mike | Friday, July 24, 2009 at 03:45 PM
Not directly related, because I stopped reading the Potter novels at number 4, which was a mess, but as someone who reads a lot of SF and fantasy, god I'm sick of the reluctant hero motif. You're the only person who can save the day, shut up, stop whining, and get to it. Yes, for some reason you wanted to be ordinary, but let's face facts, in many cases being the chosen one has some pretty great perks. It reeks of hollywood celbrity whining. Yes, there's a downside to your life, but the upside is pretty damn good, and unlike celebrities, you have an opportunity to do great good.
Voldemort is a very uninteresting villian. As for Star Wars, episodes 1 through 3 are virtually unrelieved horribleness, with bad actors acting badly, and good actors apparently strangled by bad directing, wooden dialogue and characters who are almost universally unsympathetic. What is clear about Lucas is that he doesn't actually understand what made the first trilogy work anymore, something which is made extraordinarily clear when he did the re-edits of the original star wars and put in Han Solo moronically waiting to be shot at first in the Cantina scene. In the original, making Solo shoot first made it clear he was the sort of person who would shoot first, and made it believable that he might walk away from the Rebellion.
Posted by: Ian Welsh | Saturday, July 25, 2009 at 01:26 AM
Yes Lance, you should watch all Buffy episodes - all seven seasons - and 5 seasons of Angel for extra credit.
In the last episode of season 2, Buffy and her mom have it out over Buffy's vampire slaying gig and Buffy explains why it sucks having to save the world all the time:
http://www.hulu.com/watch/14645/buffy-the-vampire-slayer-becoming-part-2
Although my favorite character trajectories in the series are for Willow and Spike, both of whom are in the position to save the world at some point too. And the actors who play those characters are arguably the best in the series.
Posted by: Nancy | Sunday, July 26, 2009 at 04:21 PM