I watched the latest Harry Potter film (Deathly Hallows, part one) last night after reading the last four books earlier this week. It will take some time to digest this mammoth tale.
I found particularly evocative and beautiful the animation rendering of the tale of Death and the three brothers who respectively receive from Death the gift of the elder wand which can defeat any other, the resurrection stone, and Death’s own cloak, which allows its wearer to be invisible, even to Death. The shadow figures reminded me of cave drawings or Tim Burton’s elegant elongations.
In the book, Harry and his friends Hermione and Ron discuss which of the three Hallows they would choose. It is intelligent Hermione, rather than Harry, who chooses the invisibility cloak, the humble and wise option chosen by the youngest brother (always the survivor in the classic structure of fairy tales). Harry, for his part, confesses his preference for the resurrection stone.
This choice seems odd, until we realize he already in fact possesses the invisibility cloak, which has saved him and his friends on many adventures. The resurrection stone, on the other hand, offers Harry what he most desires – the opportunity to bring back his lost loved ones, the parents who died when he was an infant, and the parent-surrogates he repeatedly loses, including his godfather Sirius Black and his mentor Albus Dumbledore. Harry, like Frodo and many other reluctant heroes before him, is the Knight of Pentacles, fallible and weak, unclear in vision (the eponymous glasses) yet doggedly persisting against all odds – for he has been chosen through suffering, not because he has chosen this arduous path. The defining question of this form of Quest is: why me?
Love and loss define Harry, just as the pathological search for power is the essence of his arch-enemy Voldemort, constantly grabbing other men’s wands as he seeks the elder wand, which he believes is the ultimate weapon. Voldemort’s mutilated nose reflects the obvious phallic connotations of this need to compensate for a missing masculinity. This need is echoed in Ron’s preference for the elder wand. There is a particularly poignant moment when Ron is tormented by his insecurity about whether is loved by his parents, desired by Hermione. Don’t they prefer Harry over Ron, who wouldn’t, really? While Ron comes through the test, as we know he will, even after the downfall of Voldemort, Ron still has some regret that Harry will return the wand to Dumbledore’s grave rather than taking on the traditional alpha-male role of master, King.
In fact, Harry (‘the boy who did not die”) is more Christ Child than King Arthur – allowing other near-peers such as Ron and Neville to wield the sword of Gryffindor to fight evil, while he breaks Voldemort’s spell through willing self-sacrifice. The resurrection stone is made available to Harry “at the close”, and he is able to walk to certain death in the ghostly company of his loved ones. Once he has received their solace and the reassurance that their love will endure after death, he is able to let Voldemort destroy that aspect of himself which craves life, the seventh of the Horcruxes in which Voldemort has displaced his own shattered soul. After a long conversation in the bardo state with Dumbledore, Harry makes the Boddhisattva choice to return for the sake of all the others still engaged in the fight.
Although both Voldemort and Harry have met Death and crossed the bridge to the other side, Harry, like the youngest brother, no longer clings to life, and so is no longer mastered by death, unlike poor Voldemort, who kills again and again, striking out in his frantic quest to secure some form of enduring survival for his own undead corpse. (Speaking of the undead, Helena Bonham Carter does a fabulous comic turn in the movie as the bad mad knife-throwing aristocrat Bellatrix Lestrange, Voldemort’s frenetic, chaotic and disconnected anima, dishy and dishevelled as she threatens and tortures the young witches who are drawn to Harry - Athena-like Hermione, intuitive and cool Luna, and his true love Ginny – until good mother/grizzly mama Mrs Weazley puts an end to manic childless family-mocking Bellatrix. I’m looking forward to seeing that fight sequence in the last movie.)
This penultimate film ends with a neat counterpoint between Harry cradling dying Dobby in his arms, able to mourn his dead, as opposed to Voldemort violently robbing Dumbledore’s grave to grab the elder wand which he gloatingly raises to the sky, powerful but ignorant, unaware that this potent erection will bring neither victory nor release.
In the archetypal struggle between love and hate, we know who will win: prefigured on each previous encounter between Harry and Voldemort, the depiction of their final fight is perfunctory, almost anticlimactic.
