I generally shy away from assigning intentional political motivations to popular filmed entertainment. Movies like A MIGHTY HEART, JFK, or THE KILLING FIELDS obviously DO embrace a particular political point of view and I'm happy to point them out when I see them, but those aren't the kind of movies I want to talk about in this post… no I’m more interested in the big summer blockbusters that, after the fact, attract the attention of political pundits in the Mainstream Media and blogosphere alike because of perceived political leanings that go this way or that.
Take 300 for instance. In the days after 300 shocked the world by knocking over the box office like a wave of impotent Persian infantrymen, the debate raged on the web as to whether the filmmakers meant for us to think of George Bush as Leonidas or Xerxes. Was the Battle of Thermopylae served up by the filmmakers as some methaphor for a brewing disaster in Iraq? Or was it a treatise on valor and heroism and a call to stay the course against the Al Qaeda horde in Mesopotamia? The very fact that both sides could muster up equally convincing arguments made the discussion seem all the more irrelevant and amusing to me, but director Zack Snyder’s bemused reaction to the debate was the nail in its coffin. He found it fascinating that audiences might ascribe contemporary political motivations to a movie that sought to replicate as faithfully as possible a graphic novel written before George W Bush was elected President, and which described events that happened well over two thousand years ago.
In a related dust-up, I also quite enjoyed the argument that sprang up between John Rogers (one of the writers of TRANSFORMERS) and the Libertas guys after Libertas wrote a review suggesting that TRANSFORMERS was pro-military and that the writers might have been espousing conservative values. Rogers took exception to that and wrote an angry rebuke, which is not really all that surprising. There's history in them thar hills.... Somewhere out there on the Web you’ll find a famous letter he wrote to the guys at Ain’t-It-Cool after a reviewer there had the unbelievable gall to suggest that THE CORE was not believable. I loved Rogers’ letter responding to the criticism… it really was a brilliant rebuttal, but dude, come on… if the guys at Aint-It-Cool aren't believing what you're selling, that's a You Problem, not a Me Problem. Yelling at the reviewer is missing the point. It's the writer's responsibility to sell the movie's, ahem, core concept to the audience... and in the case of THE CORE, I think Rogers failed to do that. I thought the movie was ridiculous the first time I saw it, too. And I don't care how many theoretical physicists told you your script made perfect sense, none of them were in the theatre with me when I saw the movie.
And in any case, let's not forget what Kevin Costner said in JFK… “Theoretical physics will tell you an elephant can hang from a cliff with its tail tied to a daisy.”
Now, enter HARRY POTTER: AND THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX …
I just got through arguing that big studio blockbusters almost never set out to make an overt political point... the very idea of being political is anathema to the concept of a "four quadrant" summer movie spectacular... every potential audience member you scare off with an overt political message puts you one step further away from breaking even. So I'd be crazy to reverse myself now and tell you that the new HARRY POTTER movie DOES make a political point... so I won't. But if you sat down to write a treatise on Libertarian philosophy, you could do worse than to liberally quote examples from this film.
There's a lot going on in the film but the main plot thrust concerns the attempts by a new Headmistress who represents the Ministry of Magic to micromanage everything the students at Hogwarts are learning. There comes a point in the middle of the film where she has added so many rules and restrictions to the curriculum, hanging framed versions of them one after the other on an imposing wall, that the students are effectively learning nothing at all. Rather they seem to spend the bulk of their days endlessly preapring for a series of standardized tests that test nothing about their ability to survive in the real world, but rather their ability to memorize a standard set of facts and figures. She sucks the life out of the school.
The nanny-state creep starts out simply enough with seemingly reasonable and well-intentioned rules about curfews and such... after all, she's only concerned about the safety of the students, who could be against that!? But by the end of the movie, the rules have been expanded to include serious breaches of civil liberties including bans on public assemblies of more than two students at once and outright physical torture for rule breakers. Soon an army of Hogwarts brownshirts, students conscripted into the power structure of the nanny-state, roam the halls informing on students they once called friends.
I read this as a not-so-subtle warning against the slow creep of popular but civil-liberty abusing laws like anti-smoking regulations... sure it's nice to hang out in a smoke free bar now, but what happens when government decides that because candy bars, or cell phones, or left turns, or radios in our cars are dangerous to our health, they should be banned as well, under the same theory. Having given the Government that inch, it will be that much harder to say no when they ask for a mile.
Not 24 hours after I made these comments while walking out of the premiere, I saw this piece, which perfectly crystalized my thoughts on the matter. So let that be a lesson to you, the Commander is all-seeing and all-knowing.
Now where I think the Libertas guys got into trouble was when they assumed that Rogers not only made the same point in TRANSFORMERS that they took away from the film, but that he did so intentionally out of a desire to make some political point. So to be fair, I want to point out that my interpretation of the new Harry Potter movie springs from my own political pre-conceptions... in fact, to show you how open minded I am, I'll give you an alternate interpretation of the same storyline, just for kicks.
The filmmakers dressed the headmistress in a classic, pink, high-collar wool outfit that was very reminiscent of the classic 50's conservative, middle-America, bible thumping, rock-n-roll album-burning mom. We also see her use magic to do things like force apart two students she spots kissing in the halls. Furthermore, the torture she uses to punish students looks an awful lot like the kind of turture we're used to seeing sadistic Nuns use in the movies when students do BAD things, usually relating to natural sexual impulses. So you could just as easily argue that the movie is a warning about right-wing ultra-conservative oppression, and not busybody left wing nanny-statism.
I guess the bottom line is that movies are what you make of them, and what you bring to them. But be careful when assuming that the people who make the movies you see are espousing one particular poilitical point or another. You're probably reading too much into it.
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