Two great characters on the edge of chaos
On the weekend I saw Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, the new offering from JK Rowling. This movie is set in the Harry Potter world before the events of the Potter books, and I guess is intended to flesh out that world for a new generation of audiences. The movie itself is great and I strongly recommend seeing it, but the implications of some of its content for the broader world that Rowling has built, and for the viability of her vision of the world outside of the Potter stories, are dire. This movie raises some serious problems both about the structure of the world as it appears to have been envisaged, and also about the nature of the “good guys” in this world, and it rubs up against some of my complaints about the lack of imagination in modern fantasy. I’d like to talk a little about that and in doing so I’ll throw in a couple of minor spoilers, but first the movie itself.
This movie is set in New York in 1926, in the same world as the Harry Potter books. The main character, Newt Scamander, turns up just as a series of magical terrorist attacks are happening across Europe, blamed on some dude called Grindelwald. Scamander is carrying a suitcase full of magical creatures that he has collected for study, and by dint of a major series of accidents he ends up embroiled in a battle to save New York and a single child from a monster. In the process he gets caught up with a muggle (in America, a “no-maj”) called Jacob Kowalski, and two witches (sisters) called Tina and Queenie. he has to simultaneously protect his monsters from the US law that forbids all magical creatures (on pain of death apparently) and protect himself from the machinations of a sinister senior wizard called Graves. The result is a classic Rowlingesque rollicking adventure which in my opinion is in many ways superior to the Potter movies, primarily because it doesn’t involve children and doesn’t have the same weight of world-ending seriousness. It also lacks the stuffy public school atmosphere of those books, instead having a louche American roaring twenties atmosphere that makes it much more relaxed and fun. The setting, although completely different from the Potter stories, is seamless with them, and the movie manages to evoke the exoticism with which America was viewed by Brits back in the 1920s without deviating at all from the sense of the setting. In particular, the two women, Tina and Queenie, were genuinely exotic, in a very 1920s American way, and in my opinion Queenie in particular worked really well to separate the American setting from stuffy British Potter without in any way undermining the context of the original stories or this movie. The monsters were brilliant, either awe-inspiring (the Thunderbird, the Obscurus) or engagingly cute (the Niffler) and were true to the design principles and style of the original movies. Some of the interactions with them, especially the Niffler and the Thunderbird, were vintage Potter, and even if the movie had been in other ways second rate the rich scenes with the monsters would have saved it. But this movie is far from second rate: the action scenes are excellent, the pace is good, and the plot is a simple, coherent and believable story that comes to a quite well executed finale. It is internally consistent and doesn’t depend on the audience forgiving mistakes or suspending their disbelief, and has that feeling of a plot pared back to its essentials to make sure the viewer doesn’t have to do double takes or try to hold together a bunch of leaky ideas at once to accept the conclusion. It’s a big story but a tight, believable arc that holds the action together and keeps you engaged and enjoying it without thinking. It’s one of those movies which you know you would still have enjoyed even if the monsters were second rate – but they most definitely are not. The main characters are also great – Scamander, Queenie, Tina, the Niffler, and Graves are all excellent characters well acted. Scamander really comes across as the gentle well-meaning misfit that he is, as does Queenie, and Tina the slightly tragic investigator who hasn’t quite got it together. The only let down is the brief appearance of Johnny Depp at the end – I’m completely over Johnny Depp’s acting, though I used to like him, and I don’t want to see another one of his supposedly fresh and original but actually completely cookie-cutter eccentric performances outside of a Tim Burton makeover (which I won’t watch). I certainly don’t want to see it spoiling an actual decent movie. But besides his brief annoying cameo, everyone else was great. The movie has minor flaws, as most movies do, but they’re not worth even documenting. It’s great. See it. You will love it.
So what’s wrong with this movie? The first big flaw was the fact that this movie comes straight to the point about the magical administration ruling the parallel universe of witches and wizards in the Rowling setting: it’s straight-up fascist. Now I missed some of the Harry Potter books and movies (skipped the middle 77 and saw the underwhelming final two), but my impression was that in the modern era the magical administration is overtaken by a kind of military coup near the end and turns kind of nasty, but based on Fantastic Beasts it appears that the administration that was taken over by this supposedly nasty military emergency government was actually – well, not really any different to a military emergency government. Particularly striking was the ability of senior figures in the administration to summarily execute other wizards for minor crimes, without evidence or trial, to confiscate property and to invade people’s minds. Indeed, the person who gets the execution order is then put to death by one of her good friends in the administration, who seems to think the whole idea is fine, which suggests that there is a level of brainwashing going on in this organization that is up there with North Korea. Meanwhile this Grindelwald dude is running around the world trying to undermine the administration and blow the wizards’ cover and get them noticed by muggles – but when I see people being executed without trial by the wizard’s rulers I am not inclined to think he’s wrong. If it’s Rowling’s intention to flesh out the world of Harry Potter, she needs to be careful that she doesn’t flesh it out in a way that makes Voldemort seem like the good guy, because I was only a few minutes into this movie before I thought the forces of wizarding administration were the bad guys, and certainly halfway through I was assured of it. I should add that this seems to be a trend in movies recently, that the administrations of the “good guys” are way too evil to be good – I saw this also in the Bourne Legacy (awful movie, don’t bother) and pretty much any of the Avengers-type movies that I have been able to stir myself to watching. It’s really hard to convince myself to appreciate the good guys when the people they’re working for are, well, dictators and war criminals.
The other aspect of the movie that bothered me – and that dovetails with this fascist administration – is the callous difference between the wealth of wizards and the poverty of muggles. The movie starts with the no-maj, Kowalsky, going to a bank to get a loan to open a bakery. He needs a loan because he has no money, but the bank won’t give him one because he lacks collateral, and they don’t have infinite resources so they don’t want to risk some of their finite stock of cash on this dude with no money. This is classic scarcity economy stuff: nobody has enough resources. The bank dude points out to Kowalsky that there are machines that can produce a hundred doughnuts a minute, and Kowalsky replies by pointing out that his doughnuts are better because they’re hand made. Then halfway through the movie, Queenie bakes him a strudel that is better than anything he can make – and she does it in a moment, without touching it. Then at the end some wizards wave their wands and repair shattered and crushed buildings across New York[1] in a matter of minutes. We are repeatedly told that the wizards can’t allow their secret world to be discovered by muggles because this would spark a war – and you can see why. These wizards are sitting on power so great that they can rebuild shattered city blocks in a moment, and they’re hiding this power from their fellow citizens in a society that took years to build a single skyscraper. At the end of the movie Scamander leaves Kowalsky a suitcase full of silver eggs from one of his monsters, as collateral for his bakery loan – Scamander’s rubbish is worth more than anything Kowalsky owns. Yet these wizards and their fascist society refuse to reveal themselves to the normal people struggling all around them, for fear of starting a war.
They’re not the best people, are they? They could lower the veil, reveal themselves, have access to the institutions of a society of 3 billion people, and the cost for them would be that they might have to donate an afternoon a week repairing inequality and solving world hunger – but they are desperate to hide themselves from this society. It’s a deeply cynical view of who these people are – but these people are the people we’re meant to be sympathizing with. Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but I can’t. The only wizard who has anything good to say about this is Grindelwald, who wants to reveal the existence of wizards and make them deal with the human world. I think he kind of has a point, though he probably advocates slavery or something.
I don’t know where Rowling is going with this new series of stories – based on the first movie, it appears she’s going somewhere fun, which will be spoiled only by the presence of Johnny Depp – but if she doesn’t fix this little issue I can see it becoming increasingly difficult to paper over as she explores the context and social structures of Harry Potter’s world. I’m not convinced she can – Harry Potter, remember, is fundamentally a story about a boy who is born rich and receives everything he needs for nothing while those born poor struggle to get half of his benefits, even though they’re way better at what they do and work way harder – and although she’s probably a good enough story teller to get around it, for me this huge and glaring problem at the heart of the Potter world is going to only grow bigger as we see more of it. Harry Potter was a movie about the triumph of inherited wealth, in a class-based society (of the haves – mages – and the have nots – muggles – in the classically classist setting of England and public schools) and this movie is a story about the 1% – people so rich they can ignore the law of conservation of energy, and so idle and feckless that they refuse to share this power with the rest of society in case they might have to do a day’s work putting their powers to the service of those beneath them. But I am expected to side with the 1% in these movies. I don’t think I can do it for long.
But I could for this movie, which was fun. So watch it, enjoy the chaos and the sadness, and try not to think about the huge inequality at the heart of this fun and extravagant world.
fn1: Why do American movies love destroying their own cities? Is it a deep psychological scar?
Compromise and Conceit 
December 6, 2016 at 6:20 am
The Potter universe problems with inequality and democracy stem from a blindness to statistics. Any time you examine the demographics of the wizard World the answer you get back is gibberish.
Hogwarts has seven year levels with four houses in each year, each having a dozen or so kids. But it has approx. 1000 students (from an interview with Rowling)? The wizards produce nothing (except violations of Natural Law), but sit on gold stockpiles that would vastly inflate the total world supply of gold? They have ministries and bureaucracy, but it’d seem you could get all the characters and large families for each into a good sized ballroom for a party?
Each of these stem from classic unexamined English assumptions.
The school must be big, because it has to feel like a big boarding school. There must be a central bureaucracy to control things. There must be rich (Potter) and poor (Weasley).
But combined with the actual characters and World described, these break down immediately. There aren’t enough wizards for a large school or bureaucracy or even much difference in inherited wealth (cause apparently they date each other like Hollywood stars).
The wizard world would make more sense embracing that smallness. The school should be small. The bureaucracy should be non existent. The regard for material things should be discarded (eliminating poor v rich wizards). And the wizards should be a small enough part of the world population that even complete and endless effort on their part would not materially improve the overall situation.
If this was done, the the fascist problems you’ve spotted (and that I agree with – how were these bureaucracys elected?) would go. The class based reaource assumptions conflicting with violations of physics would go. And you could add a short historical note to explain why wizards don’t try (maybe Camelot fell because Merlin worked himself to death).
December 6, 2016 at 10:06 am
This inconsistency gets worse once you go to America I think. There were quite a few wizards in the movie and a large institution full of wizards – this is the full functioning apparatus of the administrative state here. You could probably make an interesting argument that the actions of wizards caused the great depression – the US was on the gold standard in 1926 and one slip up by a bunch of wizards could probably see the US suddenly have so much gold that its currency devalued rapidly overnight.
Your points about the Hogwarts scenario are true but my vague memory is they’re undermined by the end of the movies, when there were metric craptons of wizards going to war with each other. There were entire bureaucracies in those final movies. Certainly in this movie the wizards have the power to alter large areas of New York in an afternoon, which suggests that they could easily, for example, fix the housing problems in Harlem with an overnight construction program. Remember the 1920s is when the US built a lot of its infrastructure, and these dudes could have done in a couple of days what took the US years and tens of thousands of workers. Admittedly the Empire State Building Museum (which is great, I recommend it!) would be way less interesting if it was just a gold sign saying “The wizards erected this in an afternoon, in between quidditch matches”. But it would be better for humanity!
As a result of this expansion of the world from a couple of kids in an elite institution to a whole administration (with arbitrary powers and a very poor governance structure), it’s really hard not to think about how much good the wizards could do all of humanity. Also how much better their own world could be. The movie centres around a conflict involving what happens when wizards aren’t discovered, and are forced to hide their powers (I can’t say more without spoilers) – this conflict wouldn’t exist if wizards came out of the shadows and used the bureaucracy of the public school system to identify all potential wizards. It would ensure noone misused their talents, vastly increase the pool of talent available to wizards, and within a generation it would revolutionize human development. But instead they hide and fail to identify most talented individuals, recruiting primarily from amongst themselves and discriminating against people who are recruited from the muggle population (“mud-bloods”). This is why Merlin worked himself to death building Camelot, but if he had had access to a systematized national recruiting system, we’d still be living in the golden age of Arthurian perfection.
I think it’s easy for Rowling to escape the implications of this when she’s writing books about children, because nobody holds child characters responsible for the society they’re born into. But once you start doing movies about adults, well then we have to be asked to support them within their context, and at some point you start thinking “dude, check your privilege!” Which was the big downside for me of this movie.
December 9, 2016 at 9:43 am
I always thought the Ministry of Magic was a McGuffin. Voldemort wants power, so there has to be something for him to have power over. Can’t be the muggles, as that complicates things and does not fit with the rest of the story. Can’t be something as amorphous as the community of wizards. So there has to be a centre to seize. And, once created, the story demands it continue, even to the Americas….
December 9, 2016 at 10:12 am
Haha, and like all states, once created it had to grow and grow, which is why the ministry of magic has a massive platinum-plated building on 5th Avenue!
December 12, 2016 at 5:52 pm
@Peter T
“I always thought the Ministry of Magic was a McGuffin. Voldemort wants power, so there has to be something for him to have power over.”
I agree that the Ministry feels like a story device rather than an organic feature of world building. I still think the structure that device takes is driven by Rowling’s British expectations.
If she had been American, there is a much better chance that the wizard world would be governed by a series of local sheriffs and Voldemort had assembled a gang that sought to overthrow them all through duels on the high street – because that’s the sort of world build assumption an American is more likely to carry with them when they pick social structures out of the air instead of actually putting in the work to determine how a world would work.
Shamus Young has a good line of thought on Detail First stories, where the stories are a result of the world and details of the setting, versus Drama First stories, where the stories must happen and the world is patched into place around them (with the resulting holes). He went into it in his essay examining the Mass Effect series. Personally I’d summarise it as a the difference between hard SF and space Opera. Superficially they look the same (space ships, laser weapons, space!) but practically they’re incredibly different.
Harry Potter is like that for me. It’s familiar enough that you can use all sorts of unexamined assumptions to understand it (e.g. it’s in the UK, in the modern world, etc so anything that isn’t described is like you’d expect from a million other stories and movies). But once you start examining the effort that went into the world building and rules it starts to fall apart – Why can wands create pasta sauce but not food? How does an economy function on a gold standard when you can transmute anything except gold and there is a functioning muggle marketplace down the road that will sell you gold? Why do good wizards let bad things happen to the muggle world?
I’d also recommend Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality as a interesting thing to browse. I laughed aloud at the first dozen chapters as the hyper-rational version of Harry mused on arbitrage of the fixed exchange rate between silver and gold. But the central idea does get tiresome pretty quickly.
October 13, 2020 at 4:25 pm
hortense
Fantastic Beasts: Great Fun, but an Idea that is Unravelling | Compromise and Conceit