 Harry
Potter and the Pride of the White Man
Hello again, I hope everything's going fine in your life.
Personally, I've just come through a very hard week full of exams and
assignments,
and the moment I got out of my last midterm, I took my sister to a movie:
"Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire." Instead of writing a regular
review of the film, I’m going to look at it from a different angle. I
don't know if you've ever tried to do it, but I love to see the things a
movie or a book tells us unconsciously--"the story behind the story."
This is because the effect of a producer's mind--the prejudices he/she
has, for instance--on his/her production is uncontrollable. [WARNING:
The rest of this article may include spoilers about the film production
of "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire."]
The easiest way to observe the producer's mind at work is
to examine the characters in a movie. Let me start with this question:
Who are the most important characters in this story? Harry Potter and
his two best friends, of course. And what do they have in common? "They're
all English" could be one answer, but it's not good enough. I'll take a
step further and say, "They're all English, and they're all white."
Of course, it wouldn't be fair to claim that we don't see
any important characters from other races. The girl Harry takes to the
party is obviously an Indian--in fact, she's so "Indian" that she wears
traditional Indian clothes throughout the movie. Moreover, the girl
Harry falls in love with is of Asian origin.
Such characters don't change the situation, though. Since
the beginning of the history of cinema, the movies have been full of
leading female characters from different races falling in love with a "wonderful
white hero." Except for some examples (such as "The King and I") in
which the woman is the symbol of cultural domination, a white woman
seldom falls in love with a man of different origin. There's no need to
say why: in a culture where the male symbolizes domination, it would be
a "shame" to see a white woman in love with an African-American, East
Asian or Indian man.
So, we could easily claim that Hogwarts is an interesting
depiction of an English school on the silver screen, featuring the
classical symbols of domination: students from different countries of
the Commonwealth, integrated into English education, living under the
strong influence of charismatic white leaders. Once we accept Hogwarts
as a symbol of English education, society and understanding of
interracial integration, the other two schools in the movie (the
Beauxbatons Academy of France and the Durmstrang Institute of Russia)
can be seen as obvious symbols of the societies of those two countries.
For instance, I'd like to point out that we see no
students of African origin among the students of Beauxbatons Academy.
This might give you a certain view about the French understanding of
integration (which is being widely discussed these days).
As for the Russians, I can tell you that the most popular
student in their academy is Bulgarian. Yes, most movies are full of
useless details. Yes, they're often senseless and deserve only to be
watched for a couple of hours and then forgotten. But if you want to
have fun while at the same time making social observations, you might
enjoy watching films with your eyes wide open.
İsmail O. Postalcıoğlu (POLS/III)
ismail_orhan@yahoo.com
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