Boy Wizards: Magical and Homosocial Power in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and The Covenant

Abstract

In the middle of a ‘magically charged’ car chase in The Covenant (Renny Harlin 2006, USA), an excited teen boy witch yells ‘This isn’t Harry Potter!’ He’s right, of course, though the film does in fact share some important features with Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Mike Newell 2005, UK). Though Goblet of Fire and The Covenant are widely divergent in style, tone and address, they are both dramas about teenage boys with magical powers. Both films include intense bonds between teenage male characters, and both attempt to displace, deny and contain any homoeroticism within these friendships. This chapter will use queer readings of these two films about ‘boy witches’ to indicate the ways that depictions of dyadic teen male friendships push against and complicate the heteronormative boundaries between homosociality and homosexual love. Remarkably, the heterosexuality of the primary dyadic friendship in each film is ‘protected’ with very similar devices of displacement and denial; but exposing these hetero safeguards also brings forward the queer possibilities they seek to deny. This chapter will frame the textually based queer readings within and against the teen film genre. It will also outline the strategies behind ‘reading against the grain’, particularly in the context of contemporary representations of masculinity in male-centred genres like ‘bromance’, buddy and action films.

This essay is a development of earlier doctoral work (Hughes 2013).