Harry Potter and the Tyranny of Meaning

I know you've probably heard nothing about this (ha!), but the new Harry Potter book comes out today. As a voracious reader of magazines and newspapers this means I am once again being inundated with stories about what the success of Harry Potter meaaaaaaans.

Of course I shouldn't be surprised. Here's the curse of being a writer: Ya gotta publish if ya wanna eat. Want to have a magazine or a newspaper? Be prepared to fill those column inches with content. Every day or every month. Over and over and over again. The same thing is true, by the way, with social science journal articles. It is my controversial opinion that entire fields of study exist solely because of the "Publish or Perish" rule.

In either case, Academia or journalism, scholarly journal or daily column, the fact is that what you write doesn't have to be true. It just has to be interesting. As a result, all manner of...well... to just say it nicely... nonsense... is espoused.

These perverse incentives lead to consequences much more dire than any related to the latest Harry Potter book, of course, but I'm still on summer vacation so it's Potter I'm going with.(The Sudan is just gonna have to solve itself for awhile. Sorry.)

Here's the thing: The Success of Harry Potter doesn't meeeeean anything. Nothing new anyway. I'm gonna tell you why the books are so popular right here and right now. This is the word of god from the gospel, people. Take it as such:

*J.K. ROWLING WROTE SOME REALLY GOOD BOOKS.*

There it is. That's it. That's all. No deeper meaning can or should be divined.(and anyone who reads the books knows that Divination is a useless class, anyway). Here - let me prove my assertion. Look at the history and the landscape of popular fiction. Across the landscape, who consistently shares the bestseller lists with Rowling? How about Stephen King, Tom Clancy and John Grisham. One writes straight horror. One writes spy vs. spy stuff. One writes Courtroom dramas. Rowling writes wizards. But really they are peas in a pod. They are authors with the talent to write the kind of book which should really have it's own meta-genre: "The Page Turner". The page turner can come from any genre. Romance, horror, sci fi, private school wizards or even, for Christ's sakes, siblings locked in an attic having incestuous sex. It doesn't matter. It's the talent the author has in pulling you through page after page of a very simple formula of protagonist vs. antagonist. It isn't the subject that matters, it's the style.

Want to test my theory? I did. When I was in junior high I wanted to see what all the fuss was over Stephen King. Could he really be that scary? So I sucked up my courage and biked down to the Glace Bay public library and (starting slow) took out Cycle of the Werewolf. Since it wasn't a real book, I finished it quickly and found I wasn't that scared, so back I went and sucked up my courage again and read either The Dead Zone or Christine or Cujo or Firestarter. I don't actually know which one it was because I read them all in such rapid succession thereafter. And THAT is because about 30 pages into whatever I read I was going "OH MY GOD! THIS IS THE BEST THING I HAVE EVER FUCKING READ FUCKING EVER!" I wasn't scared by it at all, I realised. I was just BLOWN AWAY. The characters had internal lives deeper than I was used to. They used quirky language that I'd seen people use in real life but which never seemed to show up in books, and there were these italicised capital lettered call back sentences that would just show up, to remind you of some thing earlier in that book that had seemed trivial but was now terribly ominous.

So after Stephen King, I thought to myself, 'well - I guess I'm a horror fan'. So I went on to read some Clive Barker. Clive Barker's prose is good. But the man can't write a climax. Then I went to Peter Straub. Same problem. His books are good but they just don't motor like Kings do. In both cases the word "atmospheric" gets used. Don't get me wrong - both are good writers, and when you are done with the frothy sugary treat that is Stephen King, they provide much needed substance. But like it or not, them pages just don't turn as fast as they do when Steve writes. Then I went to some other author whose name I don't even remember but whose books had great shelf space and scary two part covers that showed a little girl on the front but when you opened the cover her face turned into a skull! oooooh, scary. I can't express how much It sucked. Big type. Bad sentences. Wooden characters. Pedantic plot. It was dreadful. That was when I realised the whole "style not substance" thing. It was also when I stopped reading new horror authors because it became clear to me that I wasn't a horror fan, I was a Page Turner fan.

And that is ALL Harry Potter is: A really good page turner. Don't go looking any deeper into the psychology of its popularity than that. It's the style not the substance. People haven't finished Potter and hungrily gone to Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time because they can't get enough wizard.

Historically, the answer is the same. David and Goliath, Beowulf, the Odyssey, Thor vs. Loki. It's all the same. Exciting stories. Good Guy vs. Bad Guy. Someone to root for and someone to hate. Remember Sherlock Holmes? He was so popular that Arthur Conan Doyle had to resurrect the guy from a very deep tumble off a waterfall.

So why is there such hype about this rather than other books? Well, Potter has "cross-over appeal." Kids can't really go crazy over Carrie all covered in blood at the prom, ya know. I mean I'd hate to see THAT dress up line up at Indigo Books. Harry Potter hit a sweet spot. It is easy enough for kids to read, and the books are involved enough for adults to enjoy. Families can enjoy it together. Couple that with great marketing and you've got a huge hit. An ingenious change in format happened between Book Three and Book Four. Books One, Two and Three are all softcover back of the bookstore thin children's fare. I never would have given them a second glance. But book Four is THICK. So are Five, Six, and Seven. I started reading Potter when I noticed the book Four marketing. To get to that interesting looking fourth book I had to buy and read the much more easily consumable One, Two and Three. So in one shot JK sold a lot of books. I'm betting I'm not the only adult who would confess to becoming aware of Potter at Book Four.

Regardless, in substance this is really just the original Star Wars movies all over again. Same shit different pile as somebody's grandpa probably once said.

Anyway, I don't mean to spoil your parade. If you need to analyse the hell out of things to enjoy them I guess I can't stop you. Impose whatever pet theories about what Harry Potter means about our time that you want. Jacques Derrida and that loud crazy pastor lady in "Jesus Camp" will thank you, I'm sure. But I'm telling you, you're just making it up as you go along. The Harry Potter books could have just as easily been a craze if they were written in 1977-1980 and the Star Wars trilogy would be just as big if episode IV came out for the first time in 2008. And if Stephen King were to put the manuscript for Carrie on the Viking Publishing House Desk for the very first time tomorrow, the reaction of the first reader would be exactly the same as it was way back then: "Hello? Boss? I REALLY think you need to read this."

Enjoy the good read this weekend. Standing ovation for Ms. Rowling. Well done, madam. Well bloody done. You've made a lot of children - and their parents - very happy for a time. And that is one of the finest things that any human being can do.

Hitch and Black?? Worlds Collide!

If you look at my facebook, you'll find that I'm a member of the Conrad Black Fan Club and the Christopher Hitchens Fan Club.  My reasoning for both is similar. I've been wildly amused by their newspaper columns. In both cases it is their arrogant, damn the torpedoes, in your face linguistic cerebry that gets me. Put another way, I don't really care what they're saying, so much as how deliciously they say it.  Imagine my surprise, then, at finding this on Slate.  Conrad and Hitch had a feud. Conrad hated Hitch and tried to make sure he'd 'neva wook in dis town aghen' or something.  Anyway, you'll enjoy this little eulofy by Hitchens, in which, he, like so many others, blames Barbara Amiel-Black for Lord Crossharbour's downfall.

 

For the record, I don't blame her for the excesses. I think if Conrad had ever said, "Look Babs, I'm rich but I'm not THAT rich so...you know... let's cool it" the marriage wouldn't have exploded. I think there was willful blindness going on. Lots of it. Conrad needed to feel invincible and she could hardly tell him he wasn't without bruising his extraordinarily famous pride so she assumed that what he spent he could afford to spend. And I'm pretty sure he assured her of exactly that.  

 

Anyway, regardless of that, the blame on Amiel will continue. Fortunately, though, when Conrad goes to prison I know exactly who Babs can start to hang out with. They'll have lots to talk about.   

Explicit Sex and Drama Don't Really Mix

Check this out. HBO is announcing a new series called Tell Me You Love Me.  As near as I can figure from the LA Times story I just linked to, the reason to watch will be explicit sex. The first episode ends with a handjob. But at the same time, they say, it's really about relationships and intimacy.  Interesting. I'll be interested in seeing if this can actually work. I'm not sure it can.  Why?

 

Because drama and explicit sex operate on very different "entertainment" parts of the brain.

 

To be sure, titillation is very much a part of mainstream entertainment. Endless programs have proven that. Showing breasts sells tickets and HBO has always pushed the limits from way back when Brian Ben Ben was Jack Trippering around an army of implausibly hot and naked girlfriends in "Dream On" (a great show by the way).  But explicit sex hasn't fared nearly so well. The Brown Bunny was a big Brown Bomb. Romance, likewise, went straight to the back of your locval video store. Short Bus became very popular at the cult level but even in that case the producers pointed out that they put most of the explicit sex at the front of the movie so it wouldnt get in the way of the later dramatic developments.

 

Near as I can figure - it works like this. People who want to watch explicit sex will find the relationships to be a distraction. People who want to watch the drama will find the explicit sex to be a distraction. This is (one of the reasons) why mainstream cinema has gone pg with far less  "racy sex scenes" these days (the other is that if teenagers can't get in that's a lost revenue stream), and why the san fernando valley has pretty much given up on writing cutesie plots and parodies.  The customers are focussed in one direction or the other and they dont really need the tween to meet. In addition, actors who agree to have explicit sex on camera tend to feel compromised at some point (generally once the tsking starts at the LA parties).**  So keeping the cast happy ought to be quite a tall order.  

 

With the Sopranos gone, HBO could really use a new hit. And if this gives them one great. But they're playing with fire.

 

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** I have absolutely NO evidence for this statement whatsoever, but I bet I'm right.

What he said...

Hitchens. On the botched England bombing.