Muddled
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets opens with an aerial shot high above a stretch of identical tract housing in the London suburbs. As the camera swoops down to the Dursleys' front door at Number 4 Privet Drive, we realize what might account for the ongoing popularity of the Harry Potter franchise. Harry's fantasy world of Hogwarts, Witches, Muggles, and magic offers a brief respite, for children and adults alike, from an increasingly homogenized and suburbanized world.
This incipient critique of the disciplinary homogeneity of the middle class is furthered once we enter the home of Vernon (Richard Griffiths) and Petunia (Fiona Shaw) Dursley. The Dursleys' great fear is that someone, anyone, might find out about the Wizard/deviant living under their roof, thus compromising their own claims to "respectability."
Petty and concerned with appearances at all costs, the Durselys represent everything that is awful and dangerous in the "real" world. Lord Voldemort may be Evil, but in their rigid banality, the Dursleys are little better than thugs, obsessed with normality and order. It is none too surprising that Rowling would embed such class tensions in her novels, considering the struggles in her own life. Is it any wonder that a single mother on the dole would harbor such animosity towards the self-assured and self-complacent middle class? Good thing she was handed a get-out-of-jail free card in her meteoric rise from working-class mum to second richest woman in Great Britain (apparently only the Queen has more lucre).
The Chamber of Secrets' opening suggests the function of fantasy amid cultural realpolitik, and is the film's most complex moment. Unfortunately, it comes at the very beginning and is over almost immediately. From here, the second installment in the series suffers from the same problems of pace and storytelling that plagued the first, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. We can largely blame Rowling for this. The author has retained an unprecedented amount of control, insisting that the films must remain true to the books in order not to disappoint the fans.
Even though Rowling's specific input seems to have abated in the production of The Chamber of Secrets, director Chris Columbus and screenwriter Steven Kloves (who also adapted the first novel) have directly followed her lead. While this dedication to original source material is generally admirable (or at least understandable), it has resulted in another film littered with inconsequential details and "must have" scenes from the book that stop the narrative dead in its tracks. While many diehard Potter fans will surely be thrilled to see Harry (Daniel Radcliffe, whose acting brings the film to a halt repeatedly), Ron (Ruppert Grint), and Hermione (Emma Watson) repotting screaming mandrake plants in Herbology class, for instance, the scene does little to propel the story.
What makes The Chamber of Secrets even more frustrating is that, somewhat contradictorily, in the rush to cram in all the details, the weightier aspects of Rowling's novel get lost. There are moments when potentially pointed connections to and critiques of contemporary cultural politics pop up, only to be immediately lost in the clutter. The timeliest of these left-behind topics, and which to my reading is the most provocative part of the novel, is the question and negotiation of interracial relations and intolerance within Harry's magical world.
For those who aren't familiar with the nuances of the HP books, some family history of the three main characters is in order. Ron Weasley comes from a long line of Wizards and Witches and his father Arthur (Mark Williams) works for the powerful Ministry of Magic. In short, the "landed poor" Weasleys are, in the parlance of the books, "pureblood." Harry is also in good stead among Wizards, as he is half pureblood, half Muggle (on his mom's side), something like an immigrant's son, or first-generation Wizard.
Hermione's family, on the other hand, is resolutely Muggle. Her abilities and invitation to attend Hogwarts are something of a surprise to her and her family. She is an interloper, and we can read her scholarly dedication and desire to be top of the class as a stereotypical script of immigrant aspirations and work ethics.
Humans being what they are, whether Wizard or Muggle, these distinctions create hierarchies and intolerance. At one point, pureblood Dracoy Malfoy (Tom Felton) calls Hermione a "mud-blood," which causes something of an uproar. It's the equivalent of "nigger," "kike" or "faggot" in our world. Here is something akin to the color-bar hierarchies of the old American South. While Harry might be mixed, it's generally okay insofar as he has a good amount of Wizard blood. Hermione may be "pure" Muggle, but that only means she's "pure" mud/filth/abjection.
This question of interracial relations (here race is marked by magical abilities and bloodline rather than skin color) is the most engaging part of Rowling's second installment. And given the ongoing histories of racism and racial violence in both Great Britain and the U.S., and how they get caught up in questions of nationalism, belonging, and genealogical identities, this re-coding of intolerance has the most potential to subvert race/class hierarchies and to challenge reader attitudes and presumptions.
These questions are continually sidetracked by the dizzying array of unconnected detail. And so, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets is doubly damned. The film is muddled by its slavish dedication to the minutiae of events and at the same time, erases those aspects of the book that gave it real social and political urgency.
— 29 November 2002
