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.
No comments:
Post a Comment