Star Wars
The Magical Amish
04/12/08 19:27 Filed in: Harry Potter
I've recently become a frequent visitor to the "You
Tube" library of videos, wandering up and down its
many corridors, checking out the wide variety of
items it has to offer. The other day, on one of my
wanderings, I stumbled across a fascinating little
video in which a young woman (maybe 12 or 13)
recorded her immediate reaction (live and almost
unedited) upon completing her first reading of
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
I was amazed at the level of raw emotion on display. The young woman was so overcome at times that she actually had to turn off her recorder and take a moment to compose herself before starting it up again. My first thought was to marvel, yet again, at the tremendous impact of the seven novels on their reading public. Then I wondered how Jo Rowling must feel if and when she comes across these kinds of tributes in cyberspace and sees, first hand and unedited, how strong an impact her books were having. Then I started to recall recent studies that have been done on how the young people of the 21st century are seeking and finding community in cyberspace to share and deal with even their most intimate personal issues: parents divorcing, family members dying, break ups with boyfriends or girlfriends, eating disorders and suicidal thoughts.
After a while, however, the irony hit me. This young woman's video on You Tube captures her emotional reaction to the final novel about a group of 21st century kids who have, apparently, completed rejected the cyber age.
What does that say about the millions of people who love Harry Potter?
Especially the young fans?
I find it amazing that the most successful collection of children's novels in the 21st century involves a clear repudiation of science and technology. Children are putting aside their cell phones and iPods, their XBoxes and Wiis, turning off their TVs and their internet connections, to read these books. And the children in the books — even though they apparently live in the same time and place as their fans — never (and I mean never) access the many technological wonders of the modern world. I don't think that the words "internet" or "e-mail" appear even once in the seven books.
I have long compared the Harry Potter series to the Star Wars series of the 1970s and I think the comparisons are valid (see other posts on this website) both with regard to the internal world of the two series and with regard to the fan phenomenon they have created. But the original Star Wars series was all about technology — even the good guys, who embraced magic (sorry, the "force"), had space ships and blaster guns and androids and light sabres. Harry Potter carries in it a distinct, unchallenged distrust of technology.
There is, in fact, little or no science in the books. The closest course to Science at Hogwarts is Potions, which seems a little like chemistry but really isn't. These people trust magic but never seek to explain how it works. Even when we are privy to the lessons the students are taught, we find very little interest in explaining why things work, why a potion is effective, how an effect is created.
Harry's cousin, Dudley, loves his technology. He has TVs in every room and a computer upon which he plays. It's no surprise, then, that Dudley is portrayed as the worst kind of child, spoiled rotten and a bully to the core.
The only person from the wizarding world who shows any interest at all in scientific questions is Arthur Weasley. He takes Muggle cars apart and marvels at their trains that run underground. He states in book six that his greatest ambition is to figure out how airplanes stay up, yet he shows absolutely no interest in understanding how broomsticks stay up.
Let's face it, the wizarding world in the books of J.K. Rowling is practically Amish in its rejection of technology. If it weren't for the Hogwarts Express — an actual train — we would find absolutely no remotely modern technology among the witches and wizards.
What do we make of this? In an era where we find it impossible to get young people to put their technology aside even for a minute, why is this Amish world of magic so insanely popular?
It's possible, just possible, that the children of the 70s still hoped that technology could be trusted to save us from ourselves, from the damage we've done to the planet, from the damage we threaten to do to each other, and that the children of today no longer share that trust. And J.K. Rowling has tapped into that in creating an alternate world that is free of the nastiness that technology threatens to bring.
(An interesting side-note to this issue is the fact that the second trilogy in the Star Wars series, released at about the same time as the Potter books, continued to cling to technology and was, at least from what I can see, significantly less popular than either the original trilogy or the Rowling books).
Interesting. And yet the same kids who are loving the books are also streaming their immediate emotional reactions to those books through You Tube in cyberspace. Hmmmm...
And of course I wonder at the relationship between the wizarding world and the Muggle world in Rowling's creation. We learn that witch burning in the 14th century was a waste of time because the witches just cast a spell that caused the flames to tickle rather than burn but what about pollution and nuclear weapons? What about disease and starvation?
An interesting future story (and one that has been featured numerous times on Star Trek) might be what happens when the wizarding world decides that it MUST intervene to stop the Muggles from destroying the planet we all share. Interesting.
I was amazed at the level of raw emotion on display. The young woman was so overcome at times that she actually had to turn off her recorder and take a moment to compose herself before starting it up again. My first thought was to marvel, yet again, at the tremendous impact of the seven novels on their reading public. Then I wondered how Jo Rowling must feel if and when she comes across these kinds of tributes in cyberspace and sees, first hand and unedited, how strong an impact her books were having. Then I started to recall recent studies that have been done on how the young people of the 21st century are seeking and finding community in cyberspace to share and deal with even their most intimate personal issues: parents divorcing, family members dying, break ups with boyfriends or girlfriends, eating disorders and suicidal thoughts.
After a while, however, the irony hit me. This young woman's video on You Tube captures her emotional reaction to the final novel about a group of 21st century kids who have, apparently, completed rejected the cyber age.
What does that say about the millions of people who love Harry Potter?
Especially the young fans?
I find it amazing that the most successful collection of children's novels in the 21st century involves a clear repudiation of science and technology. Children are putting aside their cell phones and iPods, their XBoxes and Wiis, turning off their TVs and their internet connections, to read these books. And the children in the books — even though they apparently live in the same time and place as their fans — never (and I mean never) access the many technological wonders of the modern world. I don't think that the words "internet" or "e-mail" appear even once in the seven books.
I have long compared the Harry Potter series to the Star Wars series of the 1970s and I think the comparisons are valid (see other posts on this website) both with regard to the internal world of the two series and with regard to the fan phenomenon they have created. But the original Star Wars series was all about technology — even the good guys, who embraced magic (sorry, the "force"), had space ships and blaster guns and androids and light sabres. Harry Potter carries in it a distinct, unchallenged distrust of technology.
There is, in fact, little or no science in the books. The closest course to Science at Hogwarts is Potions, which seems a little like chemistry but really isn't. These people trust magic but never seek to explain how it works. Even when we are privy to the lessons the students are taught, we find very little interest in explaining why things work, why a potion is effective, how an effect is created.
Harry's cousin, Dudley, loves his technology. He has TVs in every room and a computer upon which he plays. It's no surprise, then, that Dudley is portrayed as the worst kind of child, spoiled rotten and a bully to the core.
The only person from the wizarding world who shows any interest at all in scientific questions is Arthur Weasley. He takes Muggle cars apart and marvels at their trains that run underground. He states in book six that his greatest ambition is to figure out how airplanes stay up, yet he shows absolutely no interest in understanding how broomsticks stay up.
Let's face it, the wizarding world in the books of J.K. Rowling is practically Amish in its rejection of technology. If it weren't for the Hogwarts Express — an actual train — we would find absolutely no remotely modern technology among the witches and wizards.
What do we make of this? In an era where we find it impossible to get young people to put their technology aside even for a minute, why is this Amish world of magic so insanely popular?
It's possible, just possible, that the children of the 70s still hoped that technology could be trusted to save us from ourselves, from the damage we've done to the planet, from the damage we threaten to do to each other, and that the children of today no longer share that trust. And J.K. Rowling has tapped into that in creating an alternate world that is free of the nastiness that technology threatens to bring.
(An interesting side-note to this issue is the fact that the second trilogy in the Star Wars series, released at about the same time as the Potter books, continued to cling to technology and was, at least from what I can see, significantly less popular than either the original trilogy or the Rowling books).
Interesting. And yet the same kids who are loving the books are also streaming their immediate emotional reactions to those books through You Tube in cyberspace. Hmmmm...
And of course I wonder at the relationship between the wizarding world and the Muggle world in Rowling's creation. We learn that witch burning in the 14th century was a waste of time because the witches just cast a spell that caused the flames to tickle rather than burn but what about pollution and nuclear weapons? What about disease and starvation?
An interesting future story (and one that has been featured numerous times on Star Trek) might be what happens when the wizarding world decides that it MUST intervene to stop the Muggles from destroying the planet we all share. Interesting.