This essay originally appeared on the Hogwarts Professor blog on May 26, 2017. It has been lightly edited and updated.
“Professor Strand, which is your favorite Harry Potter movie?” a student asked recently as class began.
“I’m sorry,” I replied, “did you ask, ‘which is my favorite Harry Potter BOOK?’”
“Oh, yeah, right. Which book,” she said, unfazed. A few students murmured their understanding of her error, but most simply waited to see how much class time the question would chew up (a favorite pastime of my students: baiting instructor into digressive pop culture conversation).
I wasn’t altogether surprised by her phrasing, as I had encountered the same movies-as-primary attitude in a college-aged Potter fan just a few weeks before, as I attended a collegiate Muggle Quidditch tournament. Seeking an understanding of the viability of Quidditch on its own terms, I had asked one of the players if everyone on her Quidditch team was a Harry Potter fan, or if some players simply played for love of the sport. She informed me most were indeed big Potter fans, but there were one or two players who, she said, despairing of their poor taste, “haven’t seen any of the movies!” (Their attention to the books: not mentioned.)
Then two weekends ago, as I gave my lecture about the symbolic meaning of Quidditch at the Roanoke Harry Potter festival, two different (young adult) audience members challenged me on my assertion that James Potter was a Quidditch Chaser. “James was a Seeker,” they politely insisted. I tried to explain that on the level of symbols – which is the level on which Quidditch operates best – James has to be a Chaser, because that position corresponds to his role in the larger narrative. James is a member of the Order of the Phoenix and a goal-scorer in the fight against Voldemort, but not a Horcrux hunter (like Harry and RAB, both of whom were Seekers, on the pitch and off). Thanks to Google and the proliferation of smart phones, we discovered the source of confusion: in a 2000 Scholastic interview with J.K. Rowling, the author stated definitively that James played Chaser for the Gryffindor Quidditch team, although in the book she has McGonagall identify him only as “an excellent Quidditch player.” (SS 152) However, the 2001 Warner Brothers film adaptation of Sorcerer’s Stone misidentifies him as a Seeker, disregarding the nuances of a complex narrative symbol system. (And not for the last time.)
I stopped watching the Harry Potter films a while ago. I own all the films on physical media, and have watched the early Potter film installments many, many times. I used to enjoy popping one of the films into my DVD player when my need for a Potter fix was great, but my time for re-reading a 4200-page series was short. The films are classics, and they’ll always remain a part of my movie collection. But I don’t watch them anymore, and I won’t let my son watch them (not a single one!) until he’s read all 4200 pages of the Potter series. (Updated in 2025 to say: I achieved this parenting goal; after he’d read all the books, we watched each film only once as our fine local symphony played the score live before us – attending these performances became a beloved family tradition.)
This turning away from the films began when I heard Episode 10 of Mugglenet Academia about what is and isn’t canon in the Harry Potter series. In that episode, John Mark Reynolds gave his opinion – one I ultimately adopted – that the films would inevitably serve to “date” the books, making the story they depict seem as passé as some of the sweaters Rupert Grint was made to wear.
To be honest, I haven’t missed watching the films. For one thing, they can really mess with one’s understanding of Potter canon. For example:
- How does Harry learn his father played Quidditch? (1)
- How does Hermione help recover the Philosopher’s Stone? (1)
- Who are the “Marauders” of the “Marauder’s Map”? (3)
- What is S.P.E.W.? (4)
- Who gives Harry the gillyweed for the Second Task of the Triwizard Tournament? (4)
- What does Dumbledore do to protect Harry as they land on the Astronomy Tower after returning from the cave? (6)
- Why exactly does Neville kill Nagini? (7)
- What happens to Voldemort (i.e. his body) after he dies? (7)
- What does Harry Potter do with the Elder wand at the end of the story? (7)
If you’re more versed in films than books, you won’t even know how to begin answering most of these questions. Others you’ll get plain wrong. (Special thanks to my social media friends for helping me compile this list. Believe me, we could have gone on… and on…)
Maybe it doesn’t matter who gave Harry the gillyweed. But from a symbolic perspective, it certainly matters what position James Potter played in Quidditch (or rather, what position he didn’t play: Seeker). And it absolutely matters – especially if one appreciates the significance of the symbolism of a broken weapon and how that brokenness is resolved – what Harry does with the Elder wand when all is said and done. It may make for better cinema to watch him snap it into pieces and toss it off a high bridge, but symbolically that action is incoherent. On the other hand, in Deathly Hallows (the book), Harry’s temptation to use the wand to assert the ultimate power he is entitled to as its Master is the very obstacle he must overcome in order to heal his own personal brokenness, symbolized by his broken holly/Phoenix wand. Thus he uses the Elder wand to fix his own wand, affirming his emphasis, consistent throughout the books, on a life lived not in fear of death but in acceptance of it (holly is a very ancient symbol of Christ’s cross) – an acceptance which robs death of its power over our human condition (hence the Phoenix feather). Then Harry, in another highly symbolic act, stows the Deathstick where it belongs – with the dead (in Dumbledore’s tomb).
And it matters – oh, boy does it matter – when, in Deathly Hallows (the book), “Tom Riddle [hits] the floor with a mundane finality, his body feeble and shrunken…” (744) In 2007, political philosopher and ethicist Jean Bethke Elshtain gave a lecture at Notre Dame’s Center for Ethics and Culture about the nature of evil in Harry Potter, and its consistency with the thought of St. Augustine, especially in its depiction of evil – personified in Voldemort – not as glamorous, ultimately, but as banal. “Evil is banal. It lacks depth. It is a flattening of the world through a failure to engage it at its roots. It is nihil. It is a nihilism,” said Elshtain. WB’s film adaptation of book 7 (Deathly Hallows, Part II), however, made Voldemort’s death far from “mundane” as the book has it. The film depicted both Voldemort’s and Bellatrix LeStrange’s bodies disintegrating before our eyes, and floating away on the wind. There was a glamour, an extraordinary quality to their deaths in the films – one which unfortunately undercuts the depiction of evil at work throughout the series. Elshtain beautifully points out that in the Harry Potter books, evil is not unique, special, glamorous, glorious; it is, as Hannah Arendt called it, a fungus which grows on the surface of things. It is a parasite, living in the back of some poor professor’s turban, or off the milk of an enchanted serpent; it is a whimpering thing, stashed under a bench at King’s Cross station. And though the trappings of this world may glamorize evil, in its final defeat, evil’s banality is exposed for what it truly is: mundane, feeble, shrunken, utterly bereft of agency. In other words, like this: “They moved Voldemort’s body and laid it in a chamber off the Hall, away from the bodies of Fred, Tonks, Lupin, Colin Creevey, and fifty others who had died fighting him.” (Deathly Hallows, 745)
I do not wish to belittle anyone whose knowledge of the Harry Potter films outstrips their knowledge of the books. I also do not wish to set up dichotomies among Harry Potter fans; one is a “real” or “true” fan of something if one self-identifies as such. Period.
At the same time, I wish to invite those who haven’t experienced the richness of the Harry Potter books to keep at it. Keep reading, even if it takes you years to get through the books. No 200-minute film can express what’s in between the covers of any one of those seven books, nor indeed of any book, but especially not Harry Potter, which is itself a celebration of books – real, parchment and ink sort of books. In the essay collection Harry Potter and History, Alexandra Gillespie argues that Rowling does something very intentional when she fills Harry’s magical world with good-old-fashioned books, as opposed to Muggle technology like computers and smartphones. “She transforms the book (and writing itself) back into something magical, just at the moment when, so we’ve been told, its days are numbered. […] [The book] has an almost supernatural power: to bear words that contain and then stimulate the extraordinary force of the human imagination. […] The old books, quills, and scraps of medieval writing depicted in the Harry Potter novels have much to teach us – about the magic that is hidden in books…” (58)
For all their cinematic brilliance, for all their pervasive popularity, the films are a muddling shortcut on a narrative pilgrimage that should really take, well, as long as it takes. For walking through seven books with Harry Potter is indeed a pilgrimage, and on a pilgrimage, the journey is just as important as the destination.
2025 post-script: It will be very interesting to see how the planned HBO Harry Potter series treats the books’ intricate and often religious symbolism, given the shift to the longer-form television format. Fans of the books may be in form a treat – we’re due to find out in early 2027.