I came home from a hard day at work and found an Entertainment Weekly in the mail proclaiming J.K. Rowling the Entertainer of the Year.
Entertainer of the Year? Hell – Rowling is the Entertainer of the Decade. To me, the Harry Potter series exudes the ethos of the Bush era. Am I the only one?
I’ll use this as the pretext to put forward three cultural observations from the last year (after the jump)
Harry Potter and the Missing Yellowcake
First, the Harry Potter thesis.
Full disclosure: I’ve hardly read any of the Potter stories, or seen much of the movies.
Goaded into buying the first book when all of my colleagues suddenly started talking in chic Potterese back in 2001 ("Joe X is such a muggle!"), I was turned off almost immediately by what struck me as a tired old device of kids literature: killing off the parents. I later read about 20 pages of another of the books, a random icky swath from the middle of the fourth one, while babysitting for a friend. I saw parts of one of the movies on a plane (with no sound).
But some level of cultural bombardment has been inescapable. What comes across is a celebration of boarding school kids playing critical roles in the fate of humanity, calling on occult powers and secret spells to unravel dark conspiracies, as they fight bravely against nameless, faceless "forces of evil."
In other words, a charming, semi-fictionalized account of the overmatched, boarding school urchins of the Bush Administration, lacking adult supervision, discovering evil conspiracy afoot, and launching mystical quests in juvenile cliques to defeat evil or "terror" or islamofacism or whatever.
Both tales seem to feature a celebration of elite institutions, operating above the level that an average slob could possibly comprehend. In both there seem to be experienced, but damaged gray-beards trying to lend guidance. But, in the end, it is ultimately up to the kids to succeed... or fail. (Heroes, btw, seems to be another pop culture phenomenon in the same vein)
Stepping outside the stories, the way the marketers ruthlessly milked the series to death also struck me as a quintessential saga of our era. But I digress.
I have no reason to think that Rowling was directly commenting on Bush and friends – she must have written the first book before they even arrived, and I have no particular reason to think she would have been that interested in US politics.
Rather it seems to me that the Harry Potter series and its popularity is on some level a reflection – uncanny in its metaphoric specificity – of the celebration of juvenile fantasy and escapism from reality that has marked our downward spiral.
Those Lovable Marauding Pirates
Second thesis: If Harry Potter is an echo (or pre-echo) of the Bush-era worldview, the Pirates of the Caribbean movies are an echo of Bush-era values and hypocrisy.
Returning to the Entertainment Weekly, I also notice the dashing Johnny Depp among the Entertainers of the Year, based on the box office returns of the latest of his Pirates of the Caribbean movies.
Consider what future observers will make of the fact that these movies, some of the highest grossing pictures of our era, are celebrations of pirates – murderous, thieving low-life, criminals. With their disregard for life and propensity for collateral damage, you could almost mistake pirates for – gasp – terrorists!
Except that pirates are mainly motivated by greed – kind of a core value of capitalism. Which makes pirates OK, I guess. (Gangsters, too -- more on them later).
Go figure: the crimes of senior executives at Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, and dozens of others go overlooked or barely punished. The plutocracy (inside and outside of government) positions us daily to finance yet another massive public-sector bail-out of the financial services industry (ala the S&L bailout of the 1980s) as their mortgage-Ponzi-schemes collapse. Senior executives loot public and private companies with undeserved, obscene compensation packages while average incomes cannot even keep up with inflation. And hardly anyone seems to care.
Is it not somehow culturally consistent, then, that our most popular movies feature pirates as the sympathetic heroes – those crazy, lovable, murderous, thieving rogues?
That Annoying David Chase
Thesis 3. The last Sopranos episode was the best one.
Full disclosure again: I watched maybe 5 or 6 episodes of the Sopranos over the last 6 years. The violence bothered me, and the hipness seemed to somehow glorify the gangster lifestyle. It was only toward the end that I picked up the implicit, subtle, clearly intentional social commentary.
Most people likely recall that when Tony Soprano lived through the final episode, there was a significant backlash from fans and critics who felt cheated. They felt that the ending lacked resolution.
In fact, the last episode aired during a period when people were desperately craving resolution on many levels and fronts – Iraq, Justice Department scandals, war profiteering, countless other Bush corruption scandals, the Libby verdict.
I saw the final episode of the Sopranos, therefore, as particularly astute social commentary, perfect for its time and place.
For in the real world, the gangsters weren’t going anywhere, either.
They would still be out there, from the Old Executive Office Building, to the halls of Halliburton and Blackwater, to the conference rooms on K Street, to the quail-hunting blinds of Texas.
The last episode of the Sopranos aired at about the moment that it became clear that the vision of Democrats as knights on white horses was a total, vicious mirage – that there would be no resolution of past deception, mistakes and incompetence, no accountability for past (or current) crimes and corruption.
If the gangsters would still be out there plugging away, unchecked and undeterred in the real world, isn’t it only fitting that the same should be true in the world of TV?
As vapid as much of our popular culture can be, anyone looking back 50 years from now (assuming there is anyone to look back) will find ample material in our movies and books and TV shows to help explain the broader collapse of our politics and society.