death by harry potter (klosterman, esquire)
Death by Harry Potter
Ignoring a cultural phenomenon today may render you completely irrelevant in a few years. Just so you know.
Here is what I know about Harry Potter: nothing.
I haven't read any of the books about him, nor have I seen any of the movies. I know the novels were written by a rich middle-aged British woman named J.K. Rowling with semi-lush hair, but I have no idea what the letters J and K represent. I don't know the name of the actor who portrays Harry Potter in the films, although I think he has eyeglasses. I don't know the names of any minor characters and I don't know the narrative arc of the plot. I don't know where the stories take place or if they are set in the past or the future. Somebody at a steakhouse recently told me that Harry Potter doesn't die at the conclusion of the seventh book (and that this detail was important), but I wasn't even aware he was sick. Christopher Hitchens wrote something I didn't read about this series in The New York Times, but I don't think he mentioned Nixon. I assume there are dragons and griffins and werewolves and homosexual Frankensteins throughout these novels, but I honestly don't give a shit if my assumption is true or false. In fact, if somebody told me that the final Harry Potter novel was a coded interpretation of the Koran that instructed its readers how to read my thoughts, I could only respond by saying, "Well, maybe so." For whatever reason, this is one phenomenon that I have missed completely (and mostly, I suppose, on purpose).
Now, do not take this to mean that I dislike these books. I do not. I have a colleague who feels that anyone over the age of twenty-one caught reading a Harry Potter novel should be executed without trial, but that strikes me as unreasonable; the fact that they're written for British thirteen-year-olds probably means they're precisely the right speed for 90 percent of American adults. I don't hate these novels at all -- in fact, I suspect they're quite good. Moreover, I find it astounding that the unifying cultural currency for modern teenagers are five-hundred-page literary works about a wizard. We are all collectively underestimating how unusual this is. Right now, there is no rock guitarist or film starlet as popular as J.K. Rowling. Over time, these novels (and whatever ideas lie within them) will come to represent the mainstream ethos of our future popular culture. Harry Potter will be the only triviality that most of that coming culture will unilaterally share.
And I have no interest in any of it.
And I wonder how much of a problem this is going to become.
The bookish kids reading Harry Potter novels may not go on to control the world, but they will almost certainly go on to control the mass media. In fifteen years, they will be publishing books and directing films and writing broad jokes for unfunny situation comedies that will undoubtedly be downloaded directly into our brains. And like all generations of artists, they will traffic in their own nostalgia. They will use their shared knowledge and experiences as the foundation for discourse. So I wonder: Because I don't understand Harry Potter, am I doomed to misunderstand everything else?
I have a female friend who has never seen any of the Star Wars movies; if someone on The Office makes a joke about a Wookiee, she knows that it's supposed to be funny, but it never makes her laugh. I also know a guy from college who (under pressure) cannot name three Beatles songs unless you allow him to include their cover of "Twist and Shout," and that's only because it was used in Ferris Bueller's Day Off. On a practical level, those specific knowledge chasms do not hinder either of their lives; I'm sure some would argue they're better off not caring about such matters. But part of me knows that there's an intangible downside to having complete intellectual detachment from whatever most Americans consider to be common knowledge. It's not just that someone who hasn't seen Star Wars won't appreciate Kevin Smith films or that any person who doesn't know about the Beatles won't appreciate the Apples in Stereo; those connections are obvious (and usually meaningless). What's less clear -- and much more important -- is the degree to which all of culture is imperceptibly defined by whichever of its entities happens to be the most popular at any given time.(1)
Within any complex scenario, there are three basic kinds of information:
1) Information that you know you know.
2) Information that you know you don't know.
3) Information that you don't know you don't know.
I'd like to believe that my relationship with Harry Potter fits into that second category; I'd like to view the information in Rowling's books as something I consciously realize that I don't understand. But this is not the case. The phenomenon around these books is so large that I can't isolate the consequence of my unawareness. My relationship to Harry Potter actually falls into the third category: I cannot even pretend to predict what the social impact of 325 million books will eventually embody. As the years pass, the influence of these teenage-wizard stories will be so vast that it will become invisible. In two decades, I will not be alienated or confused by passing references to Harry Potter; very often, I will be unaware that any reference has even been made. I will not know what I am missing. I'll just feel bored, and I won't know why.
Here is what I imagine the seven Harry Potter novels are about: I imagine that Harry is an orphan who had a bad relationship with his father (kind of like Tom Cruise in Top Gun or Days of Thunder or A Few Good Men or any of his movies that didn't involve Ireland). He escapes some sort of abstract slavery and decides to become a wizard, so he attends Wizard College and meets a bunch of anachronistic magic-using weirdos and perhaps a love interest that he never has sex with. There is probably a good teacher and a bad teacher at this school and (I'm sure) they eventually fight each other, and then some previously theoretical villain tries to destroy the world, and all the wizard kids have to unite and protect the universe by boiling black cats in a cauldron and throwing lightning bolts at pterodactyls. Harry learns about life and loss and leadership, and then he doesn't die. The end.
Now, I realize I don't have to guess at these details. I'm sure I could read the entire four-thousand-page plot summarized in four hundred words on Wikipedia, or I could simply walk into any high school and ask a few questions of the first kid I find who isn't smoking crystal meth. I could just as easily buy and read the books themselves, which, as stated previously, I assume are engaging. But I am not going to do this. It doesn't seem worth it, even though I know it probably is. It's an interior paradox. I mean, is it my obligation to "study" these novels, even if I don't want to? Perhaps it is. In many ways, I am paid by Esquire to contextualize this sort of phenomenon, and I assume that will still be the case in the future. It is probably to my long-term financial benefit to read Harry Potter books; ignoring them is like not investing in my 401(k). Were I a more responsible citizen, I would force myself to consume everything I could about this goddamn teenage wizard, simply for economic self-preservation. Yet I still cannot make myself do it. At the end of the day (or at the beginning of the day, or whenever), I don't care if I don't understand this.
Which, I realize, is a dangerous position to publicly adopt. I am constructing my own generation gap on purpose. By making this decision in the present, I will be less able to manage the future. My thoughts about entertainment aesthetics will be outdated, and I will not grasp the fundamental lingua franca of the 2025 hipster. I will not only be old but old for my age. I will be the pterodactyl, and I will be slain. It is only a matter of time.
Footnote
(1) Which is, I suppose, the fundamental question about why "popular culture" is supposed to matter to anyone. Return to story.
Ignoring a cultural phenomenon today may render you completely irrelevant in a few years. Just so you know.
Here is what I know about Harry Potter: nothing.
I haven't read any of the books about him, nor have I seen any of the movies. I know the novels were written by a rich middle-aged British woman named J.K. Rowling with semi-lush hair, but I have no idea what the letters J and K represent. I don't know the name of the actor who portrays Harry Potter in the films, although I think he has eyeglasses. I don't know the names of any minor characters and I don't know the narrative arc of the plot. I don't know where the stories take place or if they are set in the past or the future. Somebody at a steakhouse recently told me that Harry Potter doesn't die at the conclusion of the seventh book (and that this detail was important), but I wasn't even aware he was sick. Christopher Hitchens wrote something I didn't read about this series in The New York Times, but I don't think he mentioned Nixon. I assume there are dragons and griffins and werewolves and homosexual Frankensteins throughout these novels, but I honestly don't give a shit if my assumption is true or false. In fact, if somebody told me that the final Harry Potter novel was a coded interpretation of the Koran that instructed its readers how to read my thoughts, I could only respond by saying, "Well, maybe so." For whatever reason, this is one phenomenon that I have missed completely (and mostly, I suppose, on purpose).
Now, do not take this to mean that I dislike these books. I do not. I have a colleague who feels that anyone over the age of twenty-one caught reading a Harry Potter novel should be executed without trial, but that strikes me as unreasonable; the fact that they're written for British thirteen-year-olds probably means they're precisely the right speed for 90 percent of American adults. I don't hate these novels at all -- in fact, I suspect they're quite good. Moreover, I find it astounding that the unifying cultural currency for modern teenagers are five-hundred-page literary works about a wizard. We are all collectively underestimating how unusual this is. Right now, there is no rock guitarist or film starlet as popular as J.K. Rowling. Over time, these novels (and whatever ideas lie within them) will come to represent the mainstream ethos of our future popular culture. Harry Potter will be the only triviality that most of that coming culture will unilaterally share.
And I have no interest in any of it.
And I wonder how much of a problem this is going to become.
The bookish kids reading Harry Potter novels may not go on to control the world, but they will almost certainly go on to control the mass media. In fifteen years, they will be publishing books and directing films and writing broad jokes for unfunny situation comedies that will undoubtedly be downloaded directly into our brains. And like all generations of artists, they will traffic in their own nostalgia. They will use their shared knowledge and experiences as the foundation for discourse. So I wonder: Because I don't understand Harry Potter, am I doomed to misunderstand everything else?
I have a female friend who has never seen any of the Star Wars movies; if someone on The Office makes a joke about a Wookiee, she knows that it's supposed to be funny, but it never makes her laugh. I also know a guy from college who (under pressure) cannot name three Beatles songs unless you allow him to include their cover of "Twist and Shout," and that's only because it was used in Ferris Bueller's Day Off. On a practical level, those specific knowledge chasms do not hinder either of their lives; I'm sure some would argue they're better off not caring about such matters. But part of me knows that there's an intangible downside to having complete intellectual detachment from whatever most Americans consider to be common knowledge. It's not just that someone who hasn't seen Star Wars won't appreciate Kevin Smith films or that any person who doesn't know about the Beatles won't appreciate the Apples in Stereo; those connections are obvious (and usually meaningless). What's less clear -- and much more important -- is the degree to which all of culture is imperceptibly defined by whichever of its entities happens to be the most popular at any given time.(1)
Within any complex scenario, there are three basic kinds of information:
1) Information that you know you know.
2) Information that you know you don't know.
3) Information that you don't know you don't know.
I'd like to believe that my relationship with Harry Potter fits into that second category; I'd like to view the information in Rowling's books as something I consciously realize that I don't understand. But this is not the case. The phenomenon around these books is so large that I can't isolate the consequence of my unawareness. My relationship to Harry Potter actually falls into the third category: I cannot even pretend to predict what the social impact of 325 million books will eventually embody. As the years pass, the influence of these teenage-wizard stories will be so vast that it will become invisible. In two decades, I will not be alienated or confused by passing references to Harry Potter; very often, I will be unaware that any reference has even been made. I will not know what I am missing. I'll just feel bored, and I won't know why.
Here is what I imagine the seven Harry Potter novels are about: I imagine that Harry is an orphan who had a bad relationship with his father (kind of like Tom Cruise in Top Gun or Days of Thunder or A Few Good Men or any of his movies that didn't involve Ireland). He escapes some sort of abstract slavery and decides to become a wizard, so he attends Wizard College and meets a bunch of anachronistic magic-using weirdos and perhaps a love interest that he never has sex with. There is probably a good teacher and a bad teacher at this school and (I'm sure) they eventually fight each other, and then some previously theoretical villain tries to destroy the world, and all the wizard kids have to unite and protect the universe by boiling black cats in a cauldron and throwing lightning bolts at pterodactyls. Harry learns about life and loss and leadership, and then he doesn't die. The end.
Now, I realize I don't have to guess at these details. I'm sure I could read the entire four-thousand-page plot summarized in four hundred words on Wikipedia, or I could simply walk into any high school and ask a few questions of the first kid I find who isn't smoking crystal meth. I could just as easily buy and read the books themselves, which, as stated previously, I assume are engaging. But I am not going to do this. It doesn't seem worth it, even though I know it probably is. It's an interior paradox. I mean, is it my obligation to "study" these novels, even if I don't want to? Perhaps it is. In many ways, I am paid by Esquire to contextualize this sort of phenomenon, and I assume that will still be the case in the future. It is probably to my long-term financial benefit to read Harry Potter books; ignoring them is like not investing in my 401(k). Were I a more responsible citizen, I would force myself to consume everything I could about this goddamn teenage wizard, simply for economic self-preservation. Yet I still cannot make myself do it. At the end of the day (or at the beginning of the day, or whenever), I don't care if I don't understand this.
Which, I realize, is a dangerous position to publicly adopt. I am constructing my own generation gap on purpose. By making this decision in the present, I will be less able to manage the future. My thoughts about entertainment aesthetics will be outdated, and I will not grasp the fundamental lingua franca of the 2025 hipster. I will not only be old but old for my age. I will be the pterodactyl, and I will be slain. It is only a matter of time.
Footnote
(1) Which is, I suppose, the fundamental question about why "popular culture" is supposed to matter to anyone. Return to story.
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12:35:00 PM
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