A/N: This was written on the day of the Royal Wedding but, alas, has not been exposed to public scorn until today. I am still a bit ill though, so forgive me.
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As I write this, I'm lying in bed suffering from stomach flu, which is what the doctor called it, or A Hideous Wasting Disease, which is what I am calling it. Literally, I am pretty sure it would be no exaggeration to say that I am sicker than anyone has ever been, ever, in the world. Literally.
In addition to the stomach pains and head that feels like it's been run over at least three times, there is really very little to do in my bed of pain other than watch Batman Begins, write embittered Facebook statuses and spill milky tea on my bedsheets. So, in a bid to distract myself from the circumstances, I'd like to address two things that seem to be dominating my consciousness over the last 24 hours: the Royal Wedding and the last Harry Potter film.
The level of vocal anticipation and support for both of these things genuinely astounds me. Yes, I sound like a culture snob, and that's probably because I am one. A rather arbitrary snob, it's true, one who intellectualises Doctor Who and analyses what went wrong with the original Batman film franchise with as much attention as one might pay to the oeuvre of Akira Kurosawa, but a snob nonetheless. And why not, I say. It's not like the general public are worth listening to. I firmly believe that the general public should never be allowed to decide anything. The general public watches Top Gear. Or, in the immortal words of Peep Show's Super Hans, “People like Coldplay and voted for the Nazis. You can't trust people.”*
Because people (many people) spent hours today standing outside for a glimpse of the wedding of people they didn't know and probably, if they really think about it, don't care about. I hear Bob and Sue in Taunton Heath are getting married. Aw, good for them. Now back to my life, I have stuff to do. In a sane world it would be the same thing when we hear that Will and Kate in Westminster are getting married too. In fact, it would be worse because Will and Kate in Westminster are getting married and we've given them thousands and thousands of pounds of our money to do it with. In the end, that's the only reason for me saying anything at all about this wedding. If I was really apathetic, I just wouldn't bother, other than to make sure everyone else knew how apathetic I was maybe. But we're a country in economic crisis and we're giving money to people already several hundred times richer than most of us ever hope to be, all so they can make a nice day of it. They say it raises morale and all that but really, I know my morale would be raised considerably more by the news that Will and Kate had decided on a small, private ceremony with family and friends and donated the extra cash to buy a new fleet of ambulances. By the way, this is no condemnation of the couple personally – I'm sure they're perfectly nice and I wish them every happiness in their marriage – but I just don't see a need for their special day to be conducted with such excessive pomp, other than tradition. And tradition alone is never a good enough reason for doing something.
And then there's the personal irritation that my Facebook page has been turned into a roiling mass of gooey approbation, even from usually sensible types and suddenly everyone's future happiness depends upon knowing what Kate Middleton's dress looks like. (I will say though, it is bloody beautiful and my thought pattern after seeing it went something like this: ooh, want it, sigh, can't afford it, eh, probably won't get married anyway). Sitting at home sick, I have seen today every possible permutation of a Royal Wedding related Facebook status that there is, from the “OH MY GEEE she looks BOOTIFUL, WillnKate 4eva!” and “fingers crossed for McQueen!” gushing to “wahey Pippa Middleton's pips”, “still one prince left” ribaldry. My favourite thing about today was the video clip of the verger cartwheeling down the aisle in Westminster Abbey after everyone else had gone home. At least he looked like he was having proper fun.
And so onto my second gripe of the day: Harry Potter. The trailer for the final film instalment has just been released and the internet/Facebook seems to be busy wetting itself in delight. It really surprises me how many people like these films – how many fans like these films. And believe me, I'm a fan. I queued up at midnight to get my hands on the sixth and seventh instalments of the series. I made a t-shirt. I can tell you the ingredients of a Polyjuice Potion and name at least three Quidditch teams. I am a fully paid up Harry Potter geek. Possibly this may account for my antipathy towards the films but I'm usually pretty rational about the feasibility of making adaptations live up to their source material (that they seldom do is hardly breaking news). But the books are so...English. And the films are so...American. I don't care that you've got the cream of the British acting crop plainly struggling not to roll their eyes and cry “I trained at RADA, you know!” every time they have to have say “Yes, he's plainly been struck by the Fidgety Widgety Curse”, those films have no soul.
The books are not pretty books. There are few Tolkien-esque passages of dramatic description. What we are offered is something very humble, in its essence: the adolescence of a typically emotionally stunted teenage boy, going through school as an average achiever, and the school just happens to be one for wizards. And the boy just happens to be the saviour of the society he exists in. If it sounds like I'm being facetious, I'm really not. The books are largely written from Harry's point of view and Harry is a humble person. Every time he defeats evil, he shrugs and goes “Well, I dunno, it just sort of did it and I had help anyway.” Hogwarts is not a majestic fantasy world, it is an eccentric one, in the best tradition of British eccentricity. It's all about rubbing along together and overcoming differences to give the baddies a jolly good seeing to. (There were far more double entendres in that sentence than I intended.) It's also sort of about how anyone can be a hero: Harry was marked out as a child for a role he doesn't seem to have any special abilities for, he just rises to the challenge and that makes him admirable. It is this ordinariness and this humbleness that the films can't quite get their collective celluloid heads around and this understated teenage heroism doesn't sit well with the Dark And Edgy tone the films try to paste onto it.
Again, it should be no surprise that a huge, money spinning franchise is more interested in blowing things up and dramatic spectacle than finely crafted character development, it's just that when they do attempt the whole characterisation thing it seems (in my opinion) to go so horribly, horribly wrong. Oh, I do try not to rant about Emma Watson. I do try. And really, I think I've made a breakthrough in recent times because I've freely admitted that she is very beautiful and probably a very nice person if you know her. I've conceded that the woeful characterisation is probably not her fault. But the combination of her record-breakingly weak acting and that horrible, horrible mutant version of my eleven-year-old self's heroine is frankly unforgivable. I and dozens of others like me (including J.K. Rowling herself, she's said) were mini-Hermiones: dowdy, know-it-all social misfits who managed to find a few good friends if we were lucky. We weren't feisty or cool and we weren't girly or giggly. Here, at last, was our patron saint. So it pained me greatly to watch the films slowly turn that delightful bushy-haired little prig into both a feisty girl and a girly girl with little evidence of the fierce, library-devouring intellect that supposedly burned beneath. There are other, less glaring offenders. The entirety of Harry's parents' generation has been cast with actors in their sixties, rather than their thirties – very good actors but actors who were probably too old to read the books to their kids, had minimal contact with the source material and so are just doing whatever the hell comes into their heads, *cough*Gary Oldman*cough cough*David Thewlis. But now we're getting into the realm of “But it's not like that!” arguments, which are never enough on their own, so I'll wrap things up.
Ultimately, I just don't think the spirit of the books can ever be represented well on film. The fact is, film is a visual medium and there is something remarkably non-visual about those books. They're told from Harry's POV and Harry is not the most observant creature: in seven years, we never once get descriptions of his best friends beyond their basic hair colour/height/one other defining feature. He does not look at the world around him and record it in fine detail, so finding an aesthetic to fit to the Harry Potter universe is a riddle without an answer, and I like it like that. Every kid who grew up loving those books did so because it was incredibly vivid and inventive on its terms, yet possible to fit inside your own imagination and do wonderful things with. That's why I never warmed to the films anyway, and it surprises me that more fans don't feel the same way.
And to put the cherry on the fluey, weddingy, Pottery cake, Temple of Doom is on the television, possibly the least good (we do not speak of Crystal Skull) of the Indiana Jones films, a film that can be summarised as Look, Look, Sexy Indiana Jones, Sexy Harrison Ford, So Sweaty, Mmm Yeah, Work It Doctor, RACIST INDIANS, Sexy, Shirtless, Brainwashed, Homicidal Indy, RACIST INDIANS, eyes-o'-madness blonde lady screams. Again. (And to cap it all, I just switched over to the other side and Keira Knightley pout-vehicle and general atrocity 2005 Pride and Prejudice is on. Oh yes, I'm a fan of the 1995 one.) Not my day, really.
Actually, just seen on the news that Prince William chose what was, essentially, a posh version of fridge cake to go alongside the proper wedding cake. Suddenly find him much more endearing. Fridge cake is great.
Also just seen pictures of Beatrice and Eugenie. Shine on, you crazy diamonds, shine on.
*If you can't tell, all that was written with tongue firmly in cheek. Well, a bit.
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