Harry Potter and the Spell of Creative Power

I went to a midnight screening Tuesday night (Wednesday morning?) of the new “Harry Potter” movie along with a couple of hundred excited teenagers, many of them decked out for the occasion in lightning-bolt scars, Potter glasses and makeshift robes. 

Like the J.K. Rowling books on which they’re based, these movies – six of them now - have been coming out every couple of years or so since most of the kids in the audience were seven or less, and each debut has long since taken on the significance and thrill of a ritual celebration much like Christmas morning, with family and onscreen friends convening once again to unwrap the glittering present that is the new flick.

Rapturously anticipated as each successive Potter book or film has been by all ages, I still expected – with advance irritation  – that the hordes of glowingly young, extravagantly gabbing revelers around me would utterly fail to shut up when the  movie finally started, and would spend the next 150 or minutes shrieking and texting and capturing illicit Harry pix on their cell phones until I was ready to jab them with their own fake wands.  The whole event seemed more like a social scene they were making in order to see each other, rather than the movie. I mean … they were teenagers.  

Then the show started.

And the instant the Warner Brothers logo gave way to the movie’s first musical notes and ominous cloud images, the crowd of what seemed to be too-cool, self-involved adolescents became as silent and wide-eyed as babies looking at their first lighted candle.

It takes power to do that. And the power the Potter films and books have over people young and old is as magical as the stories they tell. It’s a very old magic and, like Lily Evans Potter’s, it’s a kind of love. It’s called imagination.

We all have it and should be encouraged to use it a lot more often than we are. Most of us have it squelched out of us by rigid, humorless school administrations and fearfully dull jobs made duller and more fearful by narrow-minded, autocratic leaders.

Some people – probably those same humorless and narrow-minded ones mentioned above – have declared the Potter stories childish, shallow … Not Good Literature. They are so hopelessly wrong. And here’s why – because anyone can (and should) think up a lot of wild stuff, and quite a few people can write a dry, factual study of human behavior, but almost no one can integrate witty, inspired imagination with human truth that’s convincing both emotionally and psychologically, especially about children.

Rowling has what may be a unique gift: the ability to remember, observe, understand and describe, with fond amusement and serious compassion, exactly what it is like to grow up, and to illuminate through a world of mysterious delights and terrors the heady magic of intense young feelings. Unlike so many children’s books, her work is not earnest,  pious, cloying, fatuously wholesome, pompously didactic or grimly instructive. It’s subversive and mischievous – just like kids.

It’s also ironic, whimsical, clever and sometimes startling in its fantastical vision, but it’s never weird just to be weird. Everything Rowling invents, from character to circumstance, issues from the deep roots of natural human experience and so has meaning. It’s an imagination that explores freely, but never randomly – and that’s the best definition of creativity I can think of.

The movies can’t replicate all the richness of her storytelling, but they add dazzle to it. The effect is so strong, it works like a charm – even on teens.