A new Harry Potter movie is coming out tomorrow and I’m not seeing it. Crimes of Grindelwald spoilers, I guess, though not the big one you keep hearing about.
Let’s start with this tweet, which (if you are avoiding spoilers) I don’t want to screenshot and shove into your feed. This has been a problem since the moment JKR made up Grindelwald’s war and said “Yeah, let’s slap that on top of WWII.”
There are no good options for the implications here. Either there are no wizards at all who were targeted in the Holocaust–which is SUCH a tangle of implications about this world and the logistics of magic and strongly implies that magic isn’t for Jews, which, yikes–or there are wizards who were targeted for the Holocaust and they just, what, let the Holocaust happen? Or let it happen to their neighbors and friends? You can’t cast a Confundus charm and send an SS officer packing to protect your neighbor?
If your gut response to that is “fucking hell I don’t want to ever see ‘Confundus charm’ and ‘SS officer’ in the same sentence again,” welcome to the entire problem.
The Holocaust is a real thing that happened to a whole lot of people and frankly serves as a strong argument against human beings as a species. Harry Potter is a series of children’s books. It gets more adult as Harry grows up, and the last book is pretty damn grim, but it still carries the baggage of being a children’s book at its start. There’s still silly goofy things–Hogwarts Hogwarts hoggy warty Hogwarts teach us something please–that are cemented into the lore. You can make the argument that the real world is both very silly and very serious and everything in between, but that’s besides the point. This is fiction; it can’t reflect the entirety of human experience–and it shouldn’t. Fiction has to choose what it shows and how it shows it. It makes these choices for a purpose. In good, successful media, every choice they make is driven toward that purpose, whatever it might be.
So let’s look at the choices Crimes of Grindelwald is making, shall we?
This series chose an era and chose to tackle secret war-behind-the-war of WWII. War movies, especially ones tackling WWII, tend to be serious because the kids of people who survived–or didn’t survive–those wars can be in the audiences of war movies. It’s difficult to make a light, happy-go-lucky war movie about a real war. (M*A*S*H is an interesting exception that I won’t get into.) But it’s hard to be war-movie serious when half your magical world has spells that are gutter Latin or jokes. Almost every scene in the original Harry Potter series exists in the wizarding world at Hogwarts or near it, which means it doesn’t have to address the real world. It’s a child’s world and therefore can be light, and silly, even in some moments of high drama. (“But there’s no wood!” “HAVE YOU GONE MAD? ARE YOU A WITCH OR NOT?”) Harry Potter isn’t worried about the IRA bombings of the early 90s and we can safely assume that wizards have nothing to do with the IRA. And that’s fine because Harry Potter, as a series, is a coming of age story about finding your place in the (fictional) world, the power of friendship, doing what’s right even when adults tell you not to, and realizing people aren’t always what they seem. IRA bombings are happening, the Gulf War is happening, Bosnian civil war is happening, Kosovo and the ethnic cleansing there, all of that is happening, but JKR made a choice to not include any of them because it doesn’t serve the book’s purpose. Harry’s fighting a different war.
That’s the crux of the problem, isn’t it, when we nest our fictional worlds inside of in our real one? Bad things happen in our fictional worlds, and they have stakes. Characters die. Bad things happen in the real world and they kill real people for reasons more complex than “GENERIC EVIL LUST FOR POWER.” They spill real blood. Using WWII as context for your wizard movie is really difficult the closer you get to it, because it uses the atrocities of that war as a prop. As a one-off mention in the books, this passes. As a five-part movie series, it can’t. Wizards and witches have real power in the series–power that could potentially change the course of a Muggle war and save lives. The fact that they chose not to, that they have to have chosen not to because of narrative demands of the text of the Harry Potter novels, is increasingly damning the more we see of it.
And that’s the real, boring reason why this is such a trainwreck. She didn’t think about “how do I deal with the Holocaust when there’s wizards” or “what’s happening at Hogwarts during the Blitz.” JKR just didn’t think about any of it, and as background texture in novels set in the 1990s it’s excusable, maybe. But when you go back to the era where it’s actually happening in front of people, and say that wizards are involved, it’s happening in front of their eyes and they are doing nothing? Fucking yikes. But JKR started working on these movies, digging into her era, said “it’s World War Two, but for wizards,” and continued not thinking about what that means.
So what is this movie series trying to say? The easy answer is that it isn’t trying to say anything at all; it’s trying to have plot twists enough to keep your attention and sell movie tickets and let everyone keep cashing on on the incredibly lucrative Harry Potter franchise. Which: fine. Fine, okay? I get it. That’s cold, but Warner Bros wants to make money. If it were just that, I wouldn’t have this strength of revulsion to even seeing it.
But it’s set during WWII, and we are dealing with a very literal resurgence of Nazis in the real world over here. I think it’s the responsibility of media-makers to consider the very real world that they are releasing their media into. “You’re going to have to pick a side” and “I don’t do sides” is a whole hell of a lot of centrist bullshit to hear right now with the ascendency of global fascism being a very real fucking thing in the lives of everyone in the west. And fuck the revelation that Grindelwald knew the Holocaust was coming and could have prevented it. To paraphrase the trailer: "You can move against Grindelwald. I can’t.“ You can’t, Dumbledore? But you can send other wizards against him, clearly. So just the one, then? Just the one wizard against the forces of fucking darkness and actual Nazis and the literal historical Holocaust? Fuck. You. And fuck this movie. Its premise is bad. There’s no way this can be good and I do not feel the need to hand over money to be sure of that. It’s bad art and I don’t need or want it.
Also, I sought out the big spoiler and it’s stupid.