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Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Directed by David Yates
Warner Brothers
PG-13 rating
Commentary by The Rev. Torey
Lightcap
Before he undertook the Herculean adaptation of Harry
Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, J.K. Rowling’s
fifth installment in the inextinguishable Potter series, the
director David Yates dwelt mostly in the world of television,
making small-stage dramas about power—how it’s
wielded, who has it, how quickly it can transmogrify into
the apparatus of the corrupt or of the good. His HBO project
The Girl in the Café, concerning the battle
to adopt the Millennium Development Goals at the G8 Summit,
directly preceded his wide commercial venture into the Wizarding
World.
In
an early moment of Café, a woman (freewheeling
and jobless) notes to a man (a slavish civil servant) who’s
about to drink his tea that he’s certainly heaping an
awful lot of sugar into it. The man more or less agrees with
her assertion, adding that even on the worst of days, he’d
never put in more than four spoonfuls. We’re free to
take such dialogue as being fluffily comedic if we so choose,
but underneath it is a truth revealed by the story to come—that
the level of sugar a government desires is commensurate with
its appetite to hide the sometimes bitter taste of the truth.
The
worse the situation, the more lumps we request for our tea,
and therefore we continue to be suckered by the sweetness
of our own lie about things being fine, even as they’re
turning cold and sour on us. Sugar-coat it,
hide it, repress it … just don’t bring it out
into the light where we’ll have to deal with it.
Yates
has preserved the genius of this thoroughly English symbol
and re-presents it in Order of the Phoenix, again
as a cipher for denial. This particular denial comes in the
form of garishly pink-tinted sugar piled into the teacup of
one Dolores Umbridge (Imelda Staunton), a Ministry of Magic-approved
teacher sent to snoop at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft
and Wizardry, where Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe) and his
friends have come seeking a fifth year of instruction in the
magical arts. (See Goblet of Fire
and Prisoner of Azkaban reviews
for backstory and derring-do.)
Umbridge
isn’t just for laughs about proper British society folk;
she’s the heart of Rowling and Yates’ argument
that part of the way evil expresses itself is not so much
in its own direct assertion of itself, but rather in the numbing
fear it creates in those charged with officially naming and
confronting it. Evil knows the supposedly “good”
environs, systems, and power-players better than it knows
itself, and it masters them with their own self-delusion.
If we named it, we’d have to do something about it,
so the plain truth is left unspoken, even when we witness
it first-hand. Any child who acts otherwise is himself deemed
a naughty little liar, and, in Umbridge’s repeated declaration,
“Naughty children deserve to be punished.”
Everything
about the surface of Umbridge’s world belies the real
conflict boiling in the heart of Harry Potter. Dressed in
bright hues of pink, her office bedecked with kittens, she
gasps unflappable sighs of alrightness even as Hogwarts comes
tumbling down around her ears. Yet scene by scene she decomposes
until the pink is washed away, and what’s left is a
desperate beast with ultimate loyalties to an empty institution
propagating its own lies about the nonexistence of evil. She
is no Rasputin, only an automaton, and as we digest the headlines
these days, this should frighten us the most.
The
Jesus of the Gospel of Matthew has something to say about
this: “Do not resist an evildoer. If anyone strikes
you on the right cheek, turn the other also” (Matt.
5:39). If this were an invitation into total pacifism as some
have read, then Harry would be sunk and hopeless. But this
verse has also been rendered, “Don’t react violently
against the one who is evil” (Scholar’s Version).
Nietzsche, quoted by Walter Wink, puts it even more succinctly:
“Whoever fights
monsters should see to it that in the process he does not
become a monster.” Umbridge and her
boss, the Minister of Magic Cornelius Fudge (Robert Hardy),
have not seen their way clear to this counsel. Their system
is invested in the least amount of entropy and will use whatever
it takes to quell it. Meanwhile, the evil we deny slithers
on, unaddressed, as we fritter and lie, tie ourselves into
knots, drive ourselves on to the brink.
The
evil here, of course, being Lord Voldemort and his minions,
the Death Eaters. (Gulp—more sugar, please). By now
we should be used to seeing Ralph Fiennes with his face rubbed
away by computer artists, but the effect remains singularly
chilling, and it reminds us that Voldemort has traded his
wholeness for Grade-B immortality. No disfigurement, however,
can negate either his charisma or the loyalty felt by his
closest followers. In this sense, he, like Fudge, has been
elected to his post. Unlike Fudge, though, Voldemort is a
man (just a man, let’s remember) with a stunning and
stuntingly finite vision for himself, and his election is
a means to a personal end.
Here
we might recall Giddes MacGregor’s theological treatment
of power: “when you elect a man …, you should
recognise (sic) that the qualities of strength and power that
you have admired and for which you have elected him are such
as equip him to use his power against you as well as for you.
Once you have elected him, the very factors of ambition and
self-seeking that have made you elect him in the first place
are just those factors that will make him more likely to use
you than to serve you.” (He Who Lets Us Be,
p. 169).
It
turns out that we can basically take this at face value, at
least as far as Voldemort’s inner sanctum is concerned.
The programmed brand loyalties of an Umbridge pale next to
the unlimited fealty of Bellatrix Lestrange (Helena Bonham
Carter). Like Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme in our
Muggle world, Lestrange’s lifetime imprisonment for
crimes committed on the Dark Lord’s behalf is a trifle,
merely the effect of marching orders. Anything—even
murder—can be made to seem like fun if it can be construed
as a sacrifice to Voldemort.
Order
of the Phoenix can’t be regarded only as a bridge
film, though technically it may be. (Its final scene will
drive you nuts if you like closure.) Large, loud, and sleek,
it’s so much more—a technically adept and direct
accusation of our complicity in violence. Our response to
this film could well start with a prayer for deliverance—from
all blindness of heart, from false doctrine, from lightning,
and tempest—and a plea to bring into the way of truth
all who are deceived.1
1: Adapted from “The Great Litany”
in the Episcopal Church Book of Common Prayer.
Copyright
@ 2007 Torey Lightcap.
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