Childhood’s end

Yes, talking about the new Harry Potter book is like discussing last year’s American Idol contestants: it’s old news already. But I’m a slow reader, so bear with me. What took my twenty-something sister-in-law less than one night to finish took me – in tiny, chapter-by-chapter nibbles – about three weeks. I guess that means Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince wasn’t a real page-turner for me.

But I did finish it, and I guess that means 80 million Harry Potter fans can’t be wrong. What I didn’t realize was that J.K. Rowling is given to tedious back-story exposition that takes about the first 100 pages to hurdle. "It’ll get better after the first few chapters," my wife promised. (They say this about all Rowling’s books. These are very forgiving fans, apparently.)

Fortunately, I had previously seen two Harry Potter movies (two and one-third, if you count the parts of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets I stayed awake for). So I kind of knew the characters already.

The thing that struck me about this latest installment in the seven-book series was its emphasis on terror and security. It seems that Voldemort (or, if you insist, He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named) has grown powerful enough to threaten the human (or Muggle) world with his dark powers. His followers, the Death Eaters, pose a growing threat that only teen wizard Harry Potter and the more benevolent faculty at Hogwarts seem to fully grasp. As usual, Potter and his pals leave for another semester at school via the Hogwarts Express – which leaves out of King’s Cross Station, coincidentally the scene of one of the recent bombing attacks in London.

Terror is much on Rowling’s mind these days, apparently, since it seeps into the lives and concerns of Harry, Hermione Granger, Ron Weasley and his family, and the Ministry of Magic – which, like its police agency counterparts in the Muggle world, is given to misdiagnosis and tragic error.

People are afraid to go out at night, and security measures are tight, perhaps signaling Rowling’s reaction to the post-9/11 Bush-Blair axis of power.

"The Dark Arts," says Snape, "are many, varied, ever-changing and eternal. Fighting them is like fighting a many-headed monster; which, each time a neck is severed, sprouts a head even fiercer and cleverer than before."

Hell, that could be Dick Cheney talking about Al-Qaeda. And what about this bit of post-9/11 reflection from Harry?

There was no waking from his nightmare, no comforting whisper in the dark that he was safe, really, that it was all in his imagination; the last and greatest of his protectors was now gone, and he was even more alone than he had ever been before.

This is a children’s book, recall. But I guess even kids have to be conditioned to the reality of terror nowadays. So much for childhood.

Fortunately, it’s not all gloom and doom. Rowling is very generous with her characters: she cares about them, and knows that her millions of fans also worry deeply about every pimple, bad hair day and passing emotional wave in their teen lives. This may explain the Potter books’ appeal to young fans. Rowling is a writer who understands — or at least remembers — the epic quality of teen problems.

For Harry, it’s not just the murder of his parents by Tom Riddle/Voldemort. It’s dealing with his growing fame at Hogwarts, where some think of him as "the Chosen One," while all the teen girls just swoon around him. (Shades of Prince William here, I guess.)

He remains an indifferent student, one who will never be as diligent as Hermione, nor as dumb as Ron. This explains why he doesn’t hesitate in following directions scribbled in the margins of his "borrowed" textbook in Potions class. Using expert recipes developed by the mysterious "Half-Blood Prince," Harry quickly gets a reputation as a potions wiz, which pisses off Hermione no end. Fortunately, Harry also has pluck and courage to guide him, even when he’s fobbing off someone else’s work as his own.

For the final book in the series (one all you salivating fans must wait yet another year for), Harry will be leaving Hogwarts for his lonely pursuit of Voldemort. He will probably be a very troubled young adult by that time, with even bigger problems to deal with. And his fans will have to grow up along with him, a prospect all of us must face as childhood ends.

Another childhood favorite for many was Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and its inevitable Hollywood version, Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Whatever childhood reservations we may have had about Oompa-Loompas or Anthony Newley’s infectious tunes, we have to admit the movie grew on us. It became a part of childhood that survived the leap to adulthood nostalgia. We can now fully appreciate Gene Wilder’s performance, with its acidic, ironic asides and bored, almost casual indifference to children and their parents. There was a human warmth, a glow, to that 1971 movie, after all.

And now comes Tim Burton "reimagining" our childhood, and giving it the trusty Burton stamp. His remake, titled Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and promising to be closer to the book, has a fine opening act, taking us all the way from Charlie Bucket’s sagging old house and the Indian Prince’s melting-chocolate palace to the bratty, updated kid characters — Augustus Gloop, Violet Beauregard, Veruca Salt and Mike Teevee. Yes, Burton’s reimagining works — up until the moment we enter the gates of Wonka’s factory.

Then you can really feel childhood ending — not with a whimper, but a loud, Danny Elfman-scored cymbal crash.

In the way of all Hollywood remake product, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory delivers its punches in a selfish way, pummeling us and forcing us to accept its version of what we, rightfully, would like to keep as personal and individual memory. It cares not for our interpretations, our childhood memories — it is committed to spending, and earning, a great deal of money, and it is determined to ram its message home.

At least, for a remake, it is better than Burton’s awful Planet of the Apes. But this is only because Roald Dahl’s fantasies seem like safer ground for Burton’s feverish, clockwork imagination to do its thing. And it does. Clever images and Burton touches abound: the drop of chocolate on the Indian prince’s forehead as his palace starts to melt; the nod to 2001’s monolith in the shape of a Wonka Bar; the squirrels tapping Veruca’s head to see if she’s a "bad nut."

But these can’t mask a darker truth: we just don’t like these kids very much, nor do we like their parents, nor Wonka, for that matter. Newley’s catchy songs have been jettisoned, replaced by Danny Elfman’s psychedelic escapades, none of them memorable, all of them annoying.

Then there’s Johnny Depp, who has studiously avoided aping Wilder’s Wonka and has gone instead for — what? Some say Michael Jackson, some suggest TV’s Dave Foley with a bad wig. Some say the characterization was based on Vogue editor Anna Wintour (she of the shiny black bob and oversized dark glasses). But I couldn’t help noticing another faint subtextural echo. Depp’s Wonka reminds me of — I swear — ’60s rock producer Phil Spector, who, with his black Beatle haircut and matching boots, was as deeply brilliant as he was eccentric. (A fine portrait of Spector emerges in Tom Wolfe’s ’60s magazine profile, "The First Tycoon of Teen," wherein he describes the producer’s distinctive nasal voice: "He has the only pure American voice. He was brought up, not in the Bronx, but California. It meanders, quietly, shaking, through his doldrum fury, out to somewhere beyond cynical, beyond cool, beyond teen-age world-weary. It is thin, broken and soft.")

Yes, Depp is doing Phil Spector, on some neurotic, unconscious level. Like Wonka, Spector and his "page-boy bob" was also an oddball driven by unconventional methods; like Wonka, he also dropped out of sight at the height of his success. Burton — on some level, who knows? — must have been thinking of Spector.

And there’s the essence of the problem of today’s movies. Even kid films are aimed, indirectly, at adults — and not at adults’ hearts, either, but at their crystal-clear memories, at their pop-culture minds. They seem to whisper to us: how clever we are, to recall what moved us as children, and to grow beyond it at the same time.