Things I learned from watching the most recent – and only the most recent – Harry Potter movie.

  1. Some movies, indeed some movie series, can be enjoyed starting with the final act on. Harry Potter is not one of them.
  2. Movies for kids now use techniques previously restricted to horror movies, thrillers.
  3. If you’ve built a large enough fan-base, your plot and dialogue can be almost entirely esoteric (impenetrable) even as you command a mass-market budget.
  4. All movies are dreamlike but some are as nonsensical as dreams.
  5. The first Harry Potter movie (book) must have been very good – charming – for its adaptation of magic (which is always magical thinking) as both a crutch and the birthright of every child. The undertow of imagination.
  6. Burying an elf – a body the size of an infant, wrapped in a white sheet – is a surprisingly effective conveyance for mourning the loss of childhood innocence.
  7. Movies are about bodies more so than they are about ideas (values, beliefs); given the laughter certain moments of sexual tension elicited in the audience, I would guess that much of the Harry Potter film series is about the changing bodies of the protagonists.
  8. Perhaps this series is especially effective at marrying the para-text of the actors’ real adolescence with the primary text of the fictional narrative as the storyline is driven by the fear with which the adult contemplates the end of childhood – a fear that is then communicated and/or transferred to adolescents who cannot know what death is but for whom eros is life itself.
  9. (the para-text of the actor’s life: everything you know about the actor before the lights dim and the projector starts; the actor’s fame or notoriety, his or her body of work; John Travolta in Pulp Fiction, Robert Downey Jr. in Chaplin and Iron Man, Madonna in Who’s That Girl, etc.)
  10. Depicting the desire of young people as a good thing is an interesting affront to a society that talks to itself with promise rings and celibate vampires.
  11. Blockbuster movies must invoke and repeat previous blockbuster movies: chase sequences, gunfights and the highly codified (“formulaic”) language of special effects, both visual and sonic; the stuff YouTube supercuts are made of.
  12. I got the feeling the original text, the book series, has a great deal of fun with words – riddles, spells, names. That’s awesome. I wish this movie had more fun with words.