Movie Magic

Abstract

The subtle interplay between our world and Magic world presented through the depiction of advertisements in the Harry Potter books is given a further turn by our world renderings of the books on screen. The advertisements in the Harry Potter books in some sense become advertisements for advertisement itself in our world (the magic of advertising); the screen versions of the Harry Potter books are, in a similar fashion, larger than themselves. They draw attention to the illusionary qualities of films generally, and the manipulations that underlie them, in our world. This is so because the phenomenon arising from the Harry Potter books has been so spectacular that the film versions could not but be deliberately phenomenal; the filmic replication of the texts and of the phenomenon arising from them necessarily becomes a process that interrogates the film medium. That the market conditions which brought about this particular situation also, almost simultaneously, generated the film version of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings is noteworthy too. This calculated coincidence probably indicates the degree to which the Harry Potter phenomenon, with the implicit social and political effects, has impacted on the field of filmic reproduction generally. The market manipulators of our world have arguably abstracted certain magical qualities of the Harry Potter phenomenon that can be transferred to other media, and turned it into a producing and consuming frenzy of magic (and fantasy). How magic may be extrapolated from the Harry Potter books as a matter of social and political effect is the subject of the next and final chapter of this study.