Modern Villains's Objective Correlatives: Voldemort in Harry Potter

In the climatic scene of Harry Potter and the Order of Phoenix, Voldemort enters Harry's spirit and mocks his store of memories to shatter his confidence. Voldemort's attempt at psychological warfare fails when Harry ably points out his lack of a raison d'être: “You’re the weak one…and you’ll never know love or friendship. And I feel sorry for you.” Harry's dismissal of Voldemort stings because it rings true, perhaps not as a character truth, but as a structural truth. The series, much like Star Wars and Lord of the Rings, is juvenile opera. It's epic, melodramatic, and prolonged but its villains lack complexity. None of the films linger long on the diurnal existence of the antagonists because their sole motivation is antagonism. They can't succeed, because their purpose is to lose. There are no victory celebrations, speeches or yells of jubilation amongst the band of bandits because they “never know love or friendship.”

This is not so much a criticism of the villains as it is of poor backstory attempting to answer the unanswerable and failing to provide an adequate objective correlative. T. S. Eliot, the originator of the term, describes the objective correlative as follows: “The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is finding an 'objective correlative'; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.” Put another way, there needs to be sufficient story drama to validate a character's actions. For Hamlet to grieve through the majority of that play, he should be afflicted by enough trauma to cause paralyzing guilt. While Eliot only deals with the highest of arts, his statement provides insight into the structural mechanics of all dramatic endeavors: an explanation for a character's state of mind should be sufficient. Taking Eliot a step further, I would add that if insufficient, better not present.

This one of the reasons why the Star Wars prequels landed with such a hollow thud. In over eight hours of special effects and senatorial speechifying, George Lucas was not able to manufacture a compelling reason for Anakin Skywalker's transformation into Darth Vader. The perceived slights and miscommunication seem so petulant and unbelievable like the confused outbursts of a brat. The original trilogy succeeds because Vader is a compelling creation because of his nebulous origins. The “Dark Side” is creepily stoic but necessarily thin because further explanation is unnecessary. When “midichlorians” are discussed, the mythos loses its dreamy quality and is replaced by a concrete dreariness.

The same writing flaw permeates many recent horror films and updates wherein monsters are deconstructed through ingratifying psychoanalysis to become depressingly human. In Scream (1996), when Casey Becker is quizzed on scary movies, the killer is amusingly fuzzy on details. Nightmare is the one where “the guy had knives for figures” and Halloween is “the one where the guy in the white mask stalked babysitters.” If these descriptions appear circumspect, their triviality is trumped by their veracity. Freddy Krueger has a glove with razor blades and Michael Myers has a William Shatner mask and returns to his hometown on Halloween night to reenact the killing of his sister. Their is no further explanation because none was needed. Later in Scream, Billy Loomis mocks Sydney Prescott's search for motive in the plot's machinations: "Well I don't really believe in motives Sid, I mean did Norman Bates have a motive?. . . Did we ever find out why Hannibal Lector liked to eat people? Don't think so. See it's a lot scarier when there's no motive." (Ironically, writer Kevin Williamson's reflexive sense of humor would rear its head by pointing out this narrative truth while in a film where the two characters have motives: maternal abandonment and violence in film.) But modern writers have subtracted through adding exposition.

Part of Halloween's (1978) genius is that Michael Myers has no personality or devolution. He never speaks; he simply kills. He eats dogs and even stares at a victim by turning his head sideways like a confused animal. But later films added in plot points that made Laurie Strode his sister and made him bent on killing the rest of his family including nieces, nephews, and cousins. Rob Zombie's Halloween (2007) takes the sacrilege further by attributing motive to Myer's rampage: a physically and verbally abusive stepfather along with a stripper mom and hints of incest between the stepfather and his sister. The explanation is as unsurprising as it is uninteresting.

Similarly, Jason Voorhees had always been written as unstoppable gatekeeper – biblical even – unkillable, surviving drowning, stabbing, shooting, toxic waste, beheading, and electrocution. He is a mythical archangel that acts as the conscience of Crystal Lake offing teenagers for engaging in premartial sex, drinking and driving, and breaking and entering on private property. Jason is the red right hand of the silent moral majority, but as the series wore on, writers became more focused and less imaginative in detailing Jason's motivation. His killings were transformed into the cries for help of deformed boy was who belittled and knowingly allowed to drown by lifeguards and camp counselors. Jason is no longer a force of nature; he is a victim of malevolent nurturing.

A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010) re-envisions Freddy Krueger as a kindly maintenance man bullied and mistakenly accused of his crimes. This narrative U-turn is later upended as a trick, but Wesley Strick's and Eric Heisserer's twist is a gross miscalculation with the net effect of momentarily attempting to provoke sympathy for a child murderer and failing. What the remake misses is that Freddy's crimes are symbolic of the negligent effects of absentee parenting. In the original A Nightmare on Elm Street's (1983) opening scene, Tina is awakened from a nightmare by her mother and lecherous boyfriend. This is the last we see of Tina's parental figures and their departure allows a sleepover with Tina's abusive boyfriend and Tina's death the next night. Nancy has an alcoholic mother and a workaholic father who's never at home. Glen's parents lock him in his room and drink beer on the patio gossiping about the neighbors while Glen dies upstairs in his sleep. As far as we can tell, Rod has no parents and dies in his sleep in jail. In all of these examples, the writers' attempts to prolong a series by re-educating the audience with new hamartia to elicit additional catharsis flounder because of their illegitimacy and deficiency.

But unlike these horror films, the Harry Potter series like Star Wars aspires to be greater than a kid's serial boogeyman story with new chapters every year. Despite their ambitions, the films remained grounded in a jejune, adolescent, simplistic view of good and evil as well with poor objective correlatives. Voldemort is an allegedly irredeemable villain who has forsaken salvation for domination. He rules through fear and deception. Yet, though being the most electric and enigmatic of the characters, Voldemort's screen-time is surprisingly low. He reappears from time to time to hiss and wax acerbic on the futility of resistance, but there's little indication of depth outside of Ralph Fiennes's tour de force performances. Like Michael Myers and Freddy Krueger, he simply is... evil. Even the series' notorious double agent, Snape is driven by a schoolyard crush for a fallen love. Though in the background for significant portions of the films, his defining characteristic serves as the lynchpin for most of the plots, and one gets the feeling that if Snape were told to “grow up” there wouldn't be a story to tell.

Furthermore, like scary movies, the HP films use their antagonists only for enlightenment of the inferior heroes. True tragedy embraces its villains and presents them centerstage because they are the most compelling characters due to their hypocrisy and irrationality. Macbeth to Lear to Oedipus are all the main agents of their own demise and their self-ignorance is realized a moment too late. The villain's corpse is disposed and order is restored. The audience has learned a lesson from his trespasses, but the stage and play's fictive world is smaller due to the death of his larger than life persona. But Voldemort's end in Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows II feels truncated and unsatisfactory. Where is the rejoice and release? Despite hinting in the direction of Paradise Lost by making Voldemort's visage a snake, there is no sense of corporeal debasement or a perpetual extinguishment of conscience for the bodiless Voldemort at film's end like there is for Satan. He just vanishes into thin air like apparating in previous entries. For a series that lingered extensively on death and misery among the Hogwarts school (Cedric Diggory's death, Voldemort's graverobbing of Dumbledore, Snape's dying tears, Malfoy's “septum sempra” bloodletting in Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, Aragog's funeral), Voldemort's death scene is quick and painless unlike say Washizu's downfall in Kurosawa's Throne of Blood.

As a series, Harry Potter is less than the sum of its parts. The emotional resolution never feels complete because Voldemort's objective correlative was inadequate to his dramatic flair and bombast. In 2007, during an interview after the writing of the books, JK Rowling revealed that she always considered Dumbledore gay. This came as quite a surprise because it was not mentioned in any of the books and felt disingenuous to those that had read them all. Hopefully, she doesn't reveal in subsequent interviews that Voldemort was secretly Harry's father and wanted him to join the Dark Side.

Tom Hanks is Larry Crowne

Simplicity is a virtue, so sayeth the proverb. But is it the best virtue? Robert Zemeckis's and Tom Hanks's respective films and their collaborations provide an interesting point/counterpoint on determining the statement's truth, if not its accuracy.

The duo's most popular effort is Forrest Gump in which the unassuming, guileless title character is able to get one over on the whole world. Whether it's winning national championships for the University of Alabama, starting the jogging craze in the United States, becoming the catalyst for the anti-war movement, or inspiring Elvis's famous gyrating hips, Forrest's greatest attribute is his credulity. The film embraces a dangerous anti-intellectualism. More than just championing Forrest's ignorant ingenuity, it reimagines famous moments in history, not as products of greatness or genius, but as the hapless happy accidents of the artless dodger. These are moments where we know the stories and know the participants, and as a society, we aspire to emulate their abilities, but Zemeckis seems content to reorient their achievement away from Edison's inspiration and perspiration toward coincidence.

A similar theme underlies Zemeckis's Back to the Future franchise. Canyons are named after famous western actors and names are mistaken for underwear designers because of the past and the future colliding in chance encounters. It's amusing that most of the planned interventions in the series are foiled time and time again, but the unintended ripples spiral outward early and often with little resistance. Most interpretations, including those by Cracked, focus on the racial overtones of Marty McFly's wrinkles in time. He tells the black menial worker at the diner that he should run for mayor and plays Chuck Berry's “Johnny B. Goode” years before either of those events happen. Similar to Forrest Gump, Zemeckis again rewrites the Civil Rights movement and the history of rock 'n' roll as products of white influence rather than black activism to comedic effect.

However, rather than racial, there are other dimensions to Marty's misadventures, namely democratic populism. Like Tom Hanks most well known characters including Forrest Gump, Marty McFly is an everyman, even if the suburban 80s teenager version. He is doing poorly at school due to lack of effort and disillusionment with the system. When he auditions for the school talent show, he is immediately disqualified due to being “too loud.” His family fares no better. As the film lays out the family dynamics at the beginning, they are well-meaning, “average,” middle class and share much in common with Middle America – an important populist touch. His dad works an unsatisfying job for an unappreciative, abusive supervisor, Biff Tannen. His mother's family has a few relatives in jail, possibly unjustly. Despite being out of high school, his older brother and sister still live at home working dead end, minimum wage jobs. The family all share a car that Biff wrecks and shamelessly refuses to pay for repairs.

But, by film's end, through the deus ex machina of nefarious time travel, Marty's family has been given, not earned, the American Dream. His father is a successful science fiction writer, his brother and sister have better jobs and better clothes, his mother is thin and has given up her alcoholism, Marty has a brand new truck and Biff now works for them washing cars and other odd jobs. His "new" family bears more resemblance to his happy, Republican home from Family Ties than his family from the film's beginning. Also, there is no sense that they are more talented or smarter than Biff or that their new circumstances are the result of effort. Instead, Marty's mad scientist routine has realigned his new 1985 and derived even his parent's successes from his DeLorean eucastrophe. Of course, there is no eulogy or remorse for Biff's plight, because in the film's universe, he deserves his new station because he's a jerk (and attempted rapist) and Marty's family “deserves” their success because they aren't.

Not all of Zemeckis's films follow this pattern. Another collaboration with Tom Hanks, Castaway is about a higher level executive with Fed Ex whose plane tragically crashes and strands him on a deserted island for 2 years. Chuck Nolan is no everyman; he is the Nietzschian superman, a demigod who makes fire and creates beings (Wilson) in his own image. He is ingenuous in his efforts to survive and thrive in the island's harsh, Hobbesian environment. Perhaps, Zemeckis's politics had changed or Hanks had a stronger voice in the creative direction as he is listed as a producer.

Tom Hanks's initial directorial effort from 1996, That Thing You Do, seemed to openly dispute Zemeckis's worldview offered in Forrest Gump and Back to the Future. That Thing You Do is a melancholy tale about how smalltown success does not always translate to life in the big city. Hanks's TTYD at the outset gestures toward a similar Zemeckis-esque conclusion and theme. Initially, the band is unsuccessful and Guy Patterson, between costing his parents' money at the family-owned store and being a terrible salesman, plays drums late at night to records. But an accident takes the drummer out of the picture and fate comes knocking for Guy to join The Oneders (later The Wonders). All that's missing is a phone call from the lead singer's cousin overhearing Calvin Klein playing Beatles hits at a high school dance. Yet, the film takes a different course: they don't end up conquering the music industry to become rock stars. The base player joins the army, the rhythm guitarist marries a showgirl, the lead singer breaches his contract by refusing the record the album in Spanish, and Guy leaves show business for the married life. Hanks as Mr. White has an important speech that flies in the face of Zemeckis's triumphant simplicity: “You know, Horace was right about you, Guy; you are the smart one. Lenny is the fool, Jimmy is the talent, and Faye is well, now, Faye is special, isn't she? And you are the smart one. That's what I think, anyway.” In Hanks's film universe, talent and intelligence exist and can lead to great things, but they are often clashing and prone to self-destruction.

With the just released, Larry Crowne, Hanks might be repositioning himself back in line with Zemeckis's initial philosophy though. Crowne shares the quality of consummate, professional adequacy with Forrest Gump. The marketing campaign has centered on Crowne as a multiple employee of the month award winner at a department store but is fired for not having a college degree. While sharing the bittersweet quality with TTYD's ending, Crowne's set up appears headed for a crowd-pleasing finale where the average man is able to succeed without the noisome prerequisites of gainful employment like education and training. If the moral of the story is that skills and abilities are unnecessary and “ah shucks” camaraderie takes priority, Larry Crowne could be an endorsement for a race to the middle.

It's very comforting to feel that success is a result of luck rather than hard work and that fringe benefits are given rather than earned. It's tempting to believe that the towering achievements of history are the result of Forrest Gumps rather than Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Abraham Lincoln, Albert Einstein and Mahatma Gandi. The comfort and temptation of these modern myths mystifies the true labors that lie at the heart of our fruit. If nothing else, though, at least our children can save us from perpetual mediocrity and redeem us thanks to the flux capacitor.

Boston Cinema

In the 15 years since Good Will Hunting was released, perhaps no city has been more represented cinematically than Boston. From the adaptations of Dennis Lehane's novels to occasional film from Matt Damon or Ben Affleck, audiences are privy to a recounting of an entire city's modern crime history and its generation of fatherless children. Frequently, the screenplays do not attempt to attribute an overarching motive or reason for the crime aesthetic. And when they do, the answer is always the same: family. Like a Bushido oath, a life of crime is seemingly inherited from father to son and brother to brother. Despite having many male relatives serving decades in prison and coming from broken homes or foster care, the sons maintain a stoic attachment to their forebearers that inevitably dictates their futures. The Town, written and directed by Ben Affleck, is a superior genre picture because it places itself within this Bostonian crime heritage.

Affleck gives significant mileage out of the locale, because, unlike a slew of similar genre films, Boston is as much a character in these films as the people themselves. Rather than try to hide identifying features by using aspecific surburban stand-ins, the gold dome of the Boston State House, Boston Harbor, and Fenway Park are all showcased to consciously fixate the film in a specific place. Ordinarily, this might appear as flashy posturing to unnecessarily draw attention to the scenery, but this is not the case. Affleck smartly incorporates the local fixtures into the story to illustrate the different socioeconomic backgrounds of his main characters. Doug is a working class, second generation (at least) criminal from Charlestown; Claire is a white collar, Bank manager transplant from a rich neighborhood. The film never directly attributes their plights to their upbringings, but it lays out all the pieces for that conclusion. Whereas Claire is funded enough to be able to quit her job and still afford a picturesque loft apartment, Doug and his friends are always in search of more money despite being in the lucrative trade of robbing banks. The Charlestown Boys and Girls Club has no ice for the hockey rink and even the local garden is overgrown and haggard. These realities are not attributed to fate or circumstance. Claire, Doug, and even his friends all allude to the government's disregard for the community and its inhabitants. Because of this, the local criminals are seen as heroes.

Crime then becomes a matter of pseudo civic virtue and vigilantism becomes justice. Like his father and like his "brother," Doug robs and eventually murders but is not portrayed as a villain. At the film's end, he uses the money to relocate and escape and leaves the rest to be donated for the local ice rink. He is the hood with a heart of gold. Through narration and exposition, we learn that when he was younger his hockey talent gave him a way out, but he squandered it. Like Chuckie Sullivan from Good Will Hunting, he is wiser than he is intelligent. He understands that he is too gifted for manual labor but too stubborn for an honest day's work. For him, it's simpler and more honorable to level the playing field through petty thievery and chicanery than to go it straight.

However, if the tortured genius of Will Hunting and the wasted potential of Doug McCray are possible outcomes that both lead to flirtation or outright affairs with crime before Joycean departures, we see one other possibility: working for rather than against the system. In Mystic River while Jimmy Markum is a crime boss, Sean Devine (Kevin Bacon) becomes a cop. In Boondock Saints while the Brothers MacManus are hitmen with a higher calling, Paul Smecker (Willem Dafoe) is the FBI agent leading the hunt for them. But in these films, the cops and criminals are both motivated by similar passions of revenge and redemption. In The Departed, all of the main characters (Billy Costigan, Frank Costello, Colin Sullivan, even Sgt. Dignam) have allegiances, hidden and apparent, on both sides of the law. In The Town as well, Adam Frawley (Jon Hamm), while being an FBI agent, is more ruthless, predatory and conniving than the criminals. Amazingly, Affleck has managed what 5 years of womanizing and chronic alcoholism could not: he has demystified Don Draper. The ease and natural smoothness he displays while seducing Krista Coughlin belies a deeper truth -- that in the cinematic Boston, police are the thugs and criminals are the defenders.

The unnatural inequalities present in Charlestown are what foster the breeding ground for crime. Simultaneously though, crime is a life raft and an anchor for the town. Despite their best misguided efforts at escaping lives of ill means and repute, the Bostonian men are perpetuating the destructive cycle that has lead to their predicament. While they toil away in jail like Stephen MacRay or die prematurely like Jem Coughlin, their wives and sisters and children "survive" them in name and trade only. The smart ones leave and become cops (or filmmakers), the honest ones get blue collar jobs, and the "honorable" ones follow in their fathers' footsteps. If the recent cinematic history of Boston has taught us anything, it is that in Boston and particularly in The Town, there is honor amongst thieves.