It sounds lame, I know.
But with the mind-set that my current Contemporary Media paper has put me into, it's been hard not to notice some of the clever and consistent digs at politics and the media which JK Rowling and the ever-changing directors have put into the stories.
First of all is the very obvious example of Rita Skita. Aside from the fact that she'd drive anybody potty, she epitomizes the unethical journalist who twists quotes and events to portray a false sense of reality. The media, in essence, has an obligation to the public to provide a balanced and un-weighted portrayal of contemporary facts; leaving it to the public to interpret events in coordination with their ideologies and viewpoints. Yet journalists, like Rita Skita, very rarely do this. Most of them eventually even publish books (poor Dumbledore) to mind-wash, dictate, and corrupt the public into seeing their narrow-minded viewpoint (or, at least, the viewpoint of their mass media corporation *cough cough* Fox News, *cough cough* The Daily Prophet).
There's also the political agenda. For instance "Undesirable Number One" = Harry Potter one minute, Death Eaters another, briefly followed by a mugger and robber, then back to Harry Potter. I mean seriously, just try to interpret that in a way that doesn't relate to the seriously confused propaganda bullshit that most governments (particularly the American Republicans) try to spoon-feed us.
A similar point is the consistent portrayal of Sirius Black as a notorious mass-murderer who's on the loose. This is echoed in the phase of ridiculing Dumbledore while promoting Umbridge, followed by ridiculing Umbridge when she completely fucks up. Her hatred of "progress for the sake of progress", combined with corporal punishment, is a clear (and totally fair, of course) attack on conservative government. And their denial of the very existence of Voldemort until way too late reeks of the governmental cause of almost everything that's ever gone wrong on a large scale in our world.
So next time your English teacher tells you that Harry Potter isn't a very deep text, give them a lecture.
No comments:
Post a Comment