DENNIS O’NEIL: Do You Believe In Magic?
Here it is Tuesday evening and we’re still debating. Should we go to the 11:59 showing of the new Harry Potter flick at the local 21-plex or catch one of the early showings in the morning? Pros and cons on both sides. But we will see the movie within the next 24 hours; count on it.
Although I’ve enjoyed the previous films, I can’t call myself a Potter fan. I haven’t read any of J.K. Rowling’s novels, though I love Ms Rowling’s bio: single mom writing in a café becomes hugely successful author, celebrity, and megamillionaire within about a decade, without becoming a robber baroness. But Marifran’s read the books. Oh yes indeed. And so have daughters Meg and Beth. So I’m pretty up on the Hogwarts scene and when the final volume in the series arrives in a couple of weeks, I expect my conversations with my wife to be conducted in monosyllables until she reaches the last page and learns Harry’s fate.
I’m surprised that these things are so popular, as I was surprised at the resurgence of interest in J.R.R. Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings saga and the huge success of the movies made from Tolkein’s trilogy. The reason is, I thought we were past believing in magic.
Oh, sure, you don’t have to actually believe in something to enjoy stories about it. But we do have to be able to accept it on some level. It helps the willing suspension of disbelief your English teacher told you is necessary to the enjoyment of fiction if you can allow that what you’re being told about exists, or could exist, or at least might have existed. Hero stories are about as old as civilization, and the tale-tellers always supply a reason why their protagonists have extraordinary powers. In classic Greece, for example, and later in Rome, superpowers were explained by their possessors either being gods, or half-gods, or children of gods, or gods’ special pals. Then plain ol’ magic, origin unknown, was used to rationalize superhuman feats in folk tales like those in A Thousand and One Nights.