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.

The problem with my pitch, in a nutshell

The world is a subtle and difficult place, but people will listen only to simple messages.  

Is that really true? Most business people seem to think so, judging by the number of marketing experts and elevator-speech coaches I’ve heard tell me that no business idea will work if it can’t be expressed in 10 words or less. They say people are too thick, impatient, easily confused or fearful to cope with a complex or unfamiliar concept. So you have to dumb it down, jazz it up and make the message about those thick/ impatient people as well as for them.

But even that’s not enough, they say: What you sell – the reason for your business to exist – has to be so narrow and specific that people will remember your company for only one thing. If Thankgiving were a corporation, it would have to pitch its business as either ”turkey dinners” or “bringing families together,” but not both – and no mention of feeling gratitude for blessings. Too nuanced.

So what do you do with an idea that’s bigger than “juicy hamburgers” or “fewest dropped calls”?  

I don’t know. I’ve been trying for a couple of years now to find a good way to succinctly explain why creativity and innovation are so important and how my site will help people make better use of them. So far, no 10 words I’ve put together do the job.

And so business people tend assume that I don’t have a good reason to give people for visiting my site. But that’s just wrong. I have many good reasons to give them. They’re just not simple. And neither is my site. 

So business people think I won’t succeed. And yet we all live in a world where millions, even billions, of people appreciate subtlety in literature, music, art, film, theater, dance, politics, personal relationships, you name it. Even sports – don’t tell me baseball isn’t complicated.

But somehow, these same people who can debate the convolutions and subtext of Scripture, Dylan and the reverse force double play are incapable of absorbing the idea that my site offers news, ideas and goods from the creative frontiers of all kinds of fields and that people can use these to improve their lives and work? 

I just don’t buy it. I mean, the ”Harry Potter” stories are much more intricate than that and pretty much everybody on the planet has paid money for them. Ardently.

However, not buy it is what customers will do with my idea, so the business wisdom goes. Well, sorry. I’ll try to make it catchier. But I think ideas – and wisdom – should be bigger than something that fits in a fortune cookie.