The Fans Own
the Magic
By Manohla Dargis and A. O. Scott
HARRY POTTER’S final battle
with Lord Voldemort will hit movie screens on July 15, but
that young wizard has already scored a decisive victory where it counts: at the
box office, on best-seller lists and in the crowded arena of fantasy-driven
popular culture. J. K. Rowling, a
single mother when she hatched a series of magical boarding-school novels, has
ascended to an Oprah-like level of wealth and influence, while Harry, with more
than $6 billion in tickets sold globally, has surpassed James Bond as the
top-grossing movie-franchise hero.
Like
the books the Harry Potter movies have grown progressively darker and more
complex, as the initially stark moral universe of good and evil became
increasingly shaded by prickly, often confusing questions of sex and death
(including the death in 2002 of Richard Harris, the first Dumbledore, who was
replaced by Michael Gambon). The books and movies have fed the imaginations of
fans with a richly conceptualized, densely populated world of plucky school
kids, giants, dragons, trolls and adult wizards, benign and malevolent, played
by the cream of British acting. Meanwhile Harry, Hermione and Ron, as
incarnated by Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint, have grown up
before our eyes.
“I
was on the train when I suddenly had this basic idea of a boy who didn’t know
who he was,” Ms. Rowling once said, explaining the genesis of her creation as
lightning hit her and then Harry. In the years since, the books and movies
along with all the toys, games and even a Harry Potter theme park have helped
show us that in today’s multiple-platform media landscape, a movie is no longer
necessarily an evening’s entertainment but, in the case of those who came of
age with Harry, that of a lifetime.
Here
we look at what has become a hugely profitable corporate brand, a fan-fueled
sensation and one of the biggest entertainment stories of the last decade.
DARGIS In anticipating the first Harry
Potter film Anne Collins Smith, then an assistant professor at Susquehanna
University in Pennsylvania, peered into her crystal ball and gave dark warning.
“It will take a strong individual indeed to say, ‘No, that’s not what it looked
like inside my head,’ and set the movie version aside,” Dr. Smith said. Worse
yet, “Those who see the movie before reading the books will never have the
chance to make their own vision” to the point that “for many people it will
replace their own imaginations.”
Many
millions of movie tickets, innumerable fan sites, wizard rock bands and
conferences later, it’s indisputable that for many if not most Harry Potter
lovers the movies didn’t replace their imaginations but instead enlivened and
even fired them up. On deviantart.com, for instance,
you can download work from a database of thousands upon thousands of fan-generated images of Harry, his
friends and enemies from the photorealistic to the broadly caricatured,
including anime-style creations with saucer eyes and heart-shaped faces, and
what the Japanese call kawaii or cute, for a kind of Hello Kitty Harry
confection. Elsewhere there are dirty-girl Hermiones aplenty and surprisingly,
er, friendly Harry and Draco liaisons.
SCOTT After the runaway trans-Atlantic
success of “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” and
“Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets” in
the late 1990s the appearance of each new Harry Potter novel was like the
opening of a blockbuster movie, but more festive and less dutiful than such
occasions tend to be. At midnight bookstores across the land would be thronged
with eager readers with wands and robes, round glasses and temporary
lightning-bolt tattoos, and for the next few days, on every bus and park bench,
everyone — schoolchildren, grandmothers, young adults with tattoos that were
not temporary — would be reading the same thing. And then, as the movie
versions started to come out, the scene would be repeated in the multiplexes.
This
is not the first time a popular series of books has been turned into a
successful series of movies, but the overlap between the literary and cinematic
versions of the Potter cycle was unusual, and has proven influential. Not every
effort to repeat the formula has worked — the “Lemony Snicket” and “Golden
Compass” franchises never took wing on screen — but the triumph of the Potter
model is reflected in the “Twilight” movies and also in the Swedish and
soon-to-arrive American versions of Steig Larsson’s “Millennium” trilogy, which
tumbled into theaters while their sources were still jumping off the bookstore
shelves. In this millennium, we like to take our stories serially and in
multimedia packages.
The
Harry Potter movies built on the fervid public enthusiasm for the books and fed
back into it, to the extent that it is not quite accurate to call the movies
adaptations, or to pursue the usual arguments about what is lost and gained
when stories make the transition from words on a page to images on a screen.
Remarkably large numbers of people were eager to experience the same stories
twice (or more), and if some may have had a preference for Potter in prose over
Potter in pictures or vice versa, it seems safe to conclude that the majority
was happy to have both.
DARGIS Before the Harry Potter movies started
breaking the first of many records, it was perhaps easier to believe that mass
culture is something consumers largely experienced top down, like the big
infantilized blobs in “Wall-E,” unthinkingly gulping whatever they’re fed.
Harry Potter fans have made it a lot tougher to sell that old-fashioned idea.
They have found an astonishment of ways to express their love (and sometimes
profit on that adoration) and also at times challenged the supremacy of Warner
Brothers, the studio that owns the rights to the movies. From the start the
studio had been fierce about protecting its property (in the case of Harry
Potter condoms, you can’t blame it), but in the process it also stumbled.
One of
its roadblocks was Heather Lawver, a Potterhead who at 14 created The Daily
Prophet, a fake (now inactive) online school newspaper about all things Potter.
A few years later Ms. Lawver herself became news when, in response to Warner
Brothers’ ham-fisted and -headed bids to shut down fan Web sites, some run by
children as young as 11 and 12, she helped start a boycott of Potter
merchandise (known as PotterWar), a press-relations stroke of genius (she
debated a studio spokesman on “Hardball”) that threatened
to derail the company’s strategy of global domination.
“It
really got me mad,” Ms. Lawver said in 2001, months before the release of the
first movie, noting that another site creator “was afraid these lawyers would
come banging down her door and take away all her family’s money.”
Faced
with being cast as a bully on the eve of its latest potential gold mine Warner
Brothers backed down as representatives insisted no harm was intended. (“We are
not a big, scary corporation,” one executive said.) Prof. Henry Jenkins of the
University of Southern California, an enthusiastic champion of fan power, has
framed the fight in near-revolutionary terms, writing on his Web site that PotterWar “may have been the
first successful movement of fans to challenge the rather blanket copyright
assertions of the major media producers.” Certainly it was a striking moment
for plugged-in Potterites, yet it’s debatable whether the type of fan triumph
that Professor Jenkins and others celebrate is as radical as sometimes
suggested. Warner Brothers, after all, still owns the film rights.
SCOTT If you asked a roomful of movie
critics to name the best Harry Potter movie, the consensus choice would be
“Prisoner of Azkaban” (2004), directed by Alfonso Cuarón, whose other
critically beloved films include the sexy Mexican road movie “Y Tu Mamá
También” and the dystopian thriller “Children of Men.” “Azkaban” was
stamped with Mr. Cuarón’s style; it was not only thematically more unsettling
than the first two movies (both directed by Chris Columbus), but also visually
stranger and more artful.
Perhaps
for that reason it is generally the least liked movie among hard-core
Potterites, which is to say those viewers whose devotion to the characters and
the story trumps their interest in the art of cinema for its own sake. Critics
have tended to assess each film on its own merits as an individual work, which
is perfectly reasonable — it’s our job, after all — but also a bit beside the
point, just as the demurrals of literary critics who find fault with Ms.
Rowling’s prose style or sense of narrative economy are both right and
fundamentally out of touch.
From
the start the appeal of the Potter cycle has been its generous dispensation of
narrative pleasure. You might find a particular installment or character or
series of incidents especially exciting or vaguely disappointing, but you would
not be fully satisfied until the whole thing was complete, until you had
plumbed the mystery of Harry Potter’s origins and witnessed the resolution of
his fate.
DARGIS More than a decade after the end of
PotterWar, the ideology if perhaps not the utopian spirit of media consumers
asserting their voices has become business as usual for media companies, which
insist it’s all about you you you and not them them them. It’s inspiring when
fans like Ms. Lawver assert that they too have a claim on favorite books and
movies, even those owned by corporations, just as there’s something hilarious
and maybe cathartic about rather grown-up interventions like “Strawberry
Yields,” a bit of “fanfic” by one “Dementor Delta” featuring Harry, Professor
Snape and some fruit. (“Potter had a fondness for bananas that was almost
obscene.”) But just because a media giant is having a party doesn’t mean you’re
actually invited.
The
idea that media consumers may one day be able to siphon media power for our own
purposes, as Professor Jenkins has suggested (if we can get around those pesky
copyright laws), remains open to debate. As is the idea that cultural
production is now a free-flowing two-way street because today’s fans, armed
with laptops and social media, can appropriate mass culture in a more immersive
fashion (i.e., online). The truth is that culture has never strictly been a
one-way street, even in the pre-Internet dark ages. For instance, back in
Hollywood’s golden age stars could be deemed box office poison by the front
office because audiences voted each time they bought a ticket. It may be that
instead of real choices, consumers now have just a lot of choices: thousands of
television channels instead of a handful, and an entire Harry Potter media
universe instead of a few rippingly good books and movies.
SCOTT The staggered appearance of novels
and films seems, in retrospect, to have been calculated, with almost diabolical
brilliance, to maximize the audience. The first cadre of 9-year-olds who read
“Sorcerer’s Stone” and “Chamber of Secrets” were primed to line up for the film
adaptations of those books, as the movies prepared new readers for the fourth
book, “Goblet of Fire,” and so on. Young people — those born after 1990 — were
the vanguard and the core audience, and even if Harry had not also appealed to
their parents, grandparents and older siblings, the Potter fan base represents
a fairly significant sample of the world’s population.
And
what has Harry given them? The movies have provided a showcase for the art of
acting. Some great professionals — Alan Rickman, Imelda Staunton, Maggie Smith,
David Thewlis and so on and so on — have demonstrated both high seriousness and
a fine sense of play, and Ralph Fiennes has proven that it can be done without
a nose. And we have watched potential movie stars of the future blossom before
our eyes. More generally, and perhaps more profoundly, we have immersed
ourselves in a world of grave danger and relentless evil that is make-believe
enough not to bleed into our own messy Muggle reality. The adults in the
audience have slid back into the breathless, compulsive readerly absorption
(and cinematic enthrallment) of childhood, while our children have, with equal
breathlessness, leaned forward into the complexity and exhilaration of growing
up. We can all feel, under the spell of these stories, as if we were in full
possession of our powers.
This article has been revised to reflect the following
correction:
Henry Jenkins, a professor of
communication, journalism and cinematic arts, teaches. He is a professor at
the University of Southern California.
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário