Literature Does Not Exist in a Vacuum, and Other Things the Seventh Harry Potter Movie Taught Me

I don't think there are any spoilers in this post, but just to be certain, I am talking about the latest Harry Potter movie, so anyone who hasn't seen it might want to beware.

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Last night I was one of those crazy college kids out at midnight to see Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part One. This morning I am one of those crazy, sleep-deprived college kids who will go through thier Friday absolutely over the moon at the fact that the movie was so good. I was euphoric leaving that theater last night. I was so happy I had no words. I just sat in the car and beamed. This was the story I loved, the story I read aloud to my little sister and then re-read out loud just for fun a second, and a third, and a fourth time. They kept many of what I thought were some of Rowling's best bits and I was grateful for that.

I had a rough day yesterday -- I gave my book review of Android Karenina (coming soon to a blog near you!) and I taught part of a lesson on Narrative Poetry.  The poem I chose was one of my favorites, The Geebung Polo Club by A.B. Paterson, and the response volume fell flatter than a water balloon eating concrete after being dropped from the 90th floor.

It was bad, in other words. No one said a thing. Getting answers out of those kids was like pulling teeth. And after all that stress, I needed a win, and I found one. Dan, Emma, Rupert. David Yates and all their many friends and accomplices DELIVERED. But stories are curious things -- as we were watching the movie, my friends and I, we couldn't help making connections to other things we had seen, things we had read. Each of us brings a unique selection of prior knowledges and texts with us when we read: it's like packing a suitcase and stowing in on the train for the remainder of the ride. And for us, many of those things we were bringing with us were poems.

Before the movie began (we were at the theatre two hours early, we had to amuse ourselves somehow) we were singing quietly amongst ourselves. Selections included Pippen's Song from Return of the King, The Call from Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, and There and Back Again, also from Lord of the Rings. All these songs can link back to Harry Potter -- they talk about the eventual triumph over evil, the renewal of hope, and the belief that we, too, have a place and a purpose in the world.

During the movie I thought several of David Yates' nature shots looked like Lord of the Rings country (including one where Harry, Ron, and Hermione are walking through a field -- I wanted someone to start singing "There and Back Again" right there) that Locket!Harry and Hermione reminded me of some perverse version of Adam and Eve (and also, at the same time, Scary!Galadriel from Fellowship of the Ring) and, perhaps best of all, that Dobby's death reminded me of a poem, one of my favorites and one which, unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to share with my friends on the car ride home because we were too busy discussing the rest of the movie.

While Dobby needs no other epitaph than the tremendous life he lived, Robert Louis Stevenson's "Requiem" is, I think, also fitting given Dobby's final lines.

"REQUIEM"

Under the wide and starry sky,

Dig the grave and let me lie,

Glad did I live and gladly die,

And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:

Here he lies where he longed to be,

Home is the sailor, home from sea,

And the hunter home from the hill.

And more than anything else, I wish I could share this expereince of poetry with my students, the idea that it connects us and shares threads of experience just like stories do. It provokes emotion, attempts to answer our questions about life, and binds us to other people. It does not always have an arcane meaning. You do not have to beat it with a hose to get a meaning out of it, to paraphrase Billy Collin's excellent poem Introduction to Poetry. Sometimes you can merely let it be.

Authors on Film

Move over, Roland Barthes, the author ain't dead yet. At least, that's what Hollywood would like us to think. No less than four biopics concerning some of our favorite pen-and-ink men and women are slated to come out in the next few years -- Paul Giametti is playing Philip K. Dick, Sandra Bullock is tentatively going to star and co-produce a film about the woman who wrote Peyton Place, Ioan Gruffudd is hopefully playing Kenneth Grahame, the author of Wind in the Willows, and (perhaps the one generating the most buzz) James McAvoy is going to be starring in a film about Ian Fleming, the man who created James Bond. Having read a little about Fleming as well as all of his original novels, I'm super excited for the Fleming flick.

This isn't a drop of the hat change for Hollywood, either. Helena Bonham Carter is playing Enid Blyton, the famous children's book author, in an upcoming BBC project, and at least two films that I know of dealing with authors came out this past year; Bright Star, about poet John Keats, and The Last Station, based on Jay Parini's novel about Leo Tolstoy. Before that we had Miss Austen Regrets and Becoming Jane, both about the venerable JA, Finding Neverland, about J.M. Barrie, The Edge of Love (Dylan Thomas) Iris (Iris Murdoch) The Hours (kind of about Virginia Woolf) Sylvia (Sylvia Plath and her husband, Ted Hughes) Love and War (Hemingway) Quills (Marquis de Sade) Miss Potter (Beatrix Potter) and Infamous as well as Capote, two films that came out almost at the same time dealing with Truman Capote.

So why do these films come out? Over my winter break I watched Love and War and finally understood why Hemingway was the way he was. It doesn't make me like his misogynistic writing any more than I did before I watched the film (even if he was played by Chris O'Donnell) but I got a fuller sense of him as a person that I wouldn't necessarily have been motivated to find in a biography. Over the last week I also watched The Edge of Love, even though I'm not a huge fan of Dylan Thomas, and Becoming Jane, which I had already seen.

The question "Why make an Author Biopic?" could probably be answered by "Why make a biopic at all?" The answer to that, I think, is the result of my Love and War watching -- we'd like to try and figure out what makes those we consider good and great tick. How was Jane able to write these fantastic love stories? She was conflicted herself about love. Why did Dylan Thomas produce all this wonderful poetry? He was a man with a lot of experiences and a lot of intense emotional things in his life. How did Ernest Hemingway come to hate women so much? He had a bad experience in one of the most difficult times in his life and never got over it.

Obviously the biopic is flawed for this reason -- in attempting to bring out these motivations Hollywood, in its true style, overdoes it sometimes. Jane Austen fans were a little miffed over how their beloved JA got turned into Anne Hatheway for Becoming Jane, who, apart from being too pretty and having a terrible accent, seemed to get far too much romantic attention than humble Jane ever got. (Come on, JA fans, were you expecting better? This is what happens to ALL your Austen adaptations.)

I personally liked Becoming Jane, not only because it was a movie filled with actors who are generally regarded as knowing a great deal about what they're doing (Maggie Smith, Julie Walters, James Cromwell, James McAvoy, Laurence Fox) but because the screen writers worked in elements from some of her novels to show a discerning audience "This might have been where Jane got the idea for..." Maggie Smith's Lady Gresham is Lady Catherine to a T, Rev. Austen's pupil Mr. Warren could be a stand in for Mr. Collins any day of the week, Jane's cousin Elizabeth bears hints of Lady Russell and Lucy Lefroy could be any number of Jane's daftly airheaded, only-out-for-the-manhunt filler characters.

If you're in the market for a movie this weekend, consider checking one of the films I've listend above out from your library or local movie rental place. If they're not profoundly insightful then at least they are an attempt to be both entertaining and educational. You might even be motivated to go out and learn more.

For Want of Words -- A few notes on Language and Identity

I know you are the Muskos' regiment:
And I shall lose my life for want of language;
If there be here German, or Dane, low Dutch,
Italian, or French, let him speak to me; I'll
Discover that which shall undo the Florentine.
-Parolles, All’s Well that Ends Well, William Shakespeare

I must be an English major or something – I seem to be seeing patterns of the linguistic variety in more places than I ought. Consider this blog post a musing on language as well as a movie review.

Last weekend was a weekend for entertainments of the cinematic variety, and since the LOTR marathon got culled owing to many primary participants being in Cork at the time, we settled down to watch Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. A clever and violent little film, but very good; I recommend it to those of you have a strong constitution when it comes to your history being challenged and your usual dose of movie gore tripled in true Tarantino style.

The film, whilst it is being an inglorious bastard to many of its characters, is also making fun of a number of its own elements, including the genre of American war films in general. (This much most everyone who saw the trailer knew.) Here we have heroes doing unheroic things in an unheroic fashion, the momentum of this coming to a head in Hugo Stiglitz, the mass-murderer roped in by the Basterds who gets a superhero-esque title fly-in when his name is mentioned. The film industry gets another well-timed baseball bat to the knees with the premise of the film within the film, the propagandist Nation’s Pride (which, if you’ve been living where I have for two months, sounds a lot like a company that bakes bread.)


What little we see of the film is full of hammy, overdramatic acting at its finest, and from the reactions of the audience you’d think it was Oscar award-winning material. It is here that we find the angelic, pristinely uniformed, bring-him-home-to-your-mother-for-tea-and-scones hero we’re used to seeing in war films. Beside the Basterds, Private Fredrick Zoller (a very cute Daniel Brühl) is nothing more than a fop. And how we hate him!


The Basterds, headed up by their ridiculously other-end-of-the-war-movie-stereotype leader, Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt in a flash of comic genius) are the absolute parody of the World War two action hero. These guys aren’t fighting for nationalism – they’re just out to, as Raine succinently puts it, “Kill us some Natzis.” The Americans are counterbalanced by a brilliant cast playing the Europeans, and here Tarantino gets out the baseball bat again, this time taking a wack at American identity in the world today.

This is where the bit on language comes in – I told you I’d get there eventually! All the other characters in this film speak at least two languages – Colonel Landa, the German head honcho in France regarding the jewish problem, converses easily in French, German, Italian, and English, and I’m pretty sure if there had been a few Red Guards wandering in and out we would have found he speaks Russian, too. (The actor portraying Landa, Christoph Waltz, apparently had to study really hard to get his English as good as it is in this film. Lemme tell you, he nailed it. This man is AWESOME.) But the Americans only speak one language – English. This, of course, lands them into trouble when their more culturally competent allies (including a deliciously British, upper-crust, toffee-nosed-and-useless army officer/film critic played by Michael Fassbender) all get shot in an underground barroom brawl, leaving only one maimed moviestar (the always gorgeous Diane Kruger) to help carry out their plans.


The point is obvious – If the Americans really want their finger in every pie and their ear at every door like Landa is, they’d better make sure the ears at the doors know what’s being said about them and their average citizens can at least converse in something other than their mother tongue.

Language is always a great way to show intercultural competency (and I use that term only because it seems to be a concept being feted in the academic administrative world at the moment.) In Literature class now, we’ve just finished reading Brien Friel’s Translations, a wonderful little play about the land survey of the 1830s that went around ‘standardizing’ Irish placenames by Anglicizing them. The play is written and performed under the understanding that, while all the characters are delivering their lines in English, some are really speaking in Gaelic. The two British officers sent in to conduct this survey (only one of the many translations of the title) take two opposing roles, one the man willing to learn the language of the place he is in, and the other the consummate imperialist ready to let translators do his job for him even if some of his meaning is lost in the process.

Several of the characters speak in Latin and Greek as well as Gaelic and English, and Friel’s message with these characters is the same as Tarantino’s – the more languages you know, the more perceptive you are to the world around you and the more open you are to change.

Studying as I am now in the Gaeltacht region of Ireland (essentially a linguistic heritage zone) I’m seeing and studying the importance of language as men like Douglas Hyde and Franz Fanon see it – as a tool for revolution and change. The language you use shapes the world you see – more languages, bigger world. Different language, different world, different identity. The gaelic speakers around here order their thoughts differently, becuase thier language is structured in a slightly different way. Hyde, founder of the Gaelic League (a community effort to revive the old pre-English Irish culture) and the first president of Ireland, postulated in his “Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland” speaks along the same lines regarding language as Fanon does later in Les Damnés de la Terre regarding culture as a whole: “We must teach ourselves to be less sensitive, we must teach ourselves not to be ashamed of ourselves, because the Gaelic people can never produce its best before the world as long as it remains tied to the apron-strings of another race and another island, waiting for it to move before it will venture to take any step itself…I would earnestly appeal to every one, whether Unionist or Nationalist, who wishes to see the Irish nation produce its best … to set his face against this constant running to England for our books, literature, music, games, fashions, and ideas. I appeal to every one whatever his politics -- for this is no political matter -- to do his best to help the Irish race to develop in future upon Irish lines, even at the risk of encouraging national aspirations, because upon Irish lines alone can the Irish race once more become what it was of yore -- one of the most original, artistic, literary, and charming peoples of Europe.”

Language is powerful. Language shapes our thinking, and our identity. In my own writing, I love pulling in language phrases distinct from my own English base, though it’s often said that writers should avoid doing this. I believe the criticism comes from the manga fanfiction community where those fans with Japanese cultural jealousy (for a complete explanation of what that is, see my Galway Rover Blog) throw in their unnecessary token words with wild abandon to somehow prove they are worthy of writing Japanese characters in a Japanese context. There, the usage is to prove inclusion in a group – I use my foreign words to prove difference, because of that removal from the text that they create. If my readers don’t understand it, good. Now they know how it feels talking to my trilingual poet in real life. (I also find linguistics a good way to show off your research skills, but this doesn’t work all the time and sometimes it’s just plain annoying – see Kate Horsely’s Confessions of a Pagan Nun for token words at their translation foot-noted best.)

I shall lose my life for want of language, Parolles laments in All’s Well That Ends Well. I hope that doesn’t happen to me any time soon. Judging from the length of this blog post, I’ll probably lose my life for surfeit of it.

Outsourcing- the New Colonialism

Yesterday I went to see the movie "Outsourced" (See the official site) at the Gene Siskal Film Center in Chicago. If any of you reading this blog get a chance to go see it or see that it's playing in your area, GO. It is a funny, intelligent, well-thought out piece of filmmaking, an independent that looks and sounds like a mainstream romantic comedy with a liberal helping of a few college professors of economics thrown in.

The movie centers around Todd Hamilton, a thirtysomething working as a supervisor in the Wish Fulfillment (fancy term for order-taking) section for Western National Novelty Company, an Oriental Trading post type shindig that sells hokey kitsch (a word that makes an appearance in the film to much hilarity) to Americans across the country. Then Todd's told his job is being outsourced -- and that he has to go train the new call center people to get their MPI (minutes per incident, or amount of time taken talking to the customers) down to six minutes. It's a thankless job, one that involves getting to the small town where the call center is located, surviving some of the local cuisine, and trying to figure out the nuances of Indian culture. He makes friends, falls in love, and gradually learns to like India, a transformation that's shown rather brilliantly in the film by a baptism of sorts in a river and the ensuing changes in the way Todd dresses.

But what makes the film really resonate is the way Todd at the beginning of the movie has a hard time dealing with Indian culture. He wants his employees to sell their kitsch and move on. But there are cross cultural barriers that need to be fumbled over first, and Todd, at the beginning of the movie, doesn't understand that. He's another colonialist, part of the new colonialism -- the outsourcing movement. But the Indian people who are working with him understand that, and they tell him straight out that he needs to understand India if he wants to get this to work, a very post-colonial idea. One of the characters (the future love interest) stands in in a staff meeting after Todd has just told them they need to learn to speak English and tells him, flat out, "English is the first language of the government here in India. We got it from the British and so did you."

Todd does some other colonizing, too -- he sets up an incentive program to push the MPI down by using some of the products that the employees are selling, like a Packers cheesehead (which he has a hard time explaining the use of at a staff meeting) and a hot dog cooker. His boss calls him angrily after he's placed the order and asks him why he should ship these products half way around the world. Todd replies "Because I want to introduce them to a market of about a billion people." The boss then replies, cool as a cucumber, "I can have them there by Friday." Just like the British, Todd and Western National are conquering to open up new markets.

Bottom line, Outsourced was a great movie with a message for people who wanted to find it and a good story and some first-rate comedy for those who just want to sit and eat their popcorn. It's on my list of DVDs to purchase now.