Saturday, March 16, 2019

More Crimes of Grindlewald observations

So, we have the home video release of CoG.

I got it. I watched it again. I still have no further chiasm/ring analysis. I don't doubt it's there, but I think there are some things that make it take a more subtle role in the meaning than the ring element did in the first movie. Some of that is what I am going to go into, but I'm also working on a thought that John Granger and others may be right in saying that the removal of the ball scene impacted the final film in a big way, which I will try to flesh out below. It could be that the deletion of the ballroom scene throws an original ring all off; I simply can't tell without seeing a structure of the film with it in there where it would originally have been.

But first I am going to give one sideline idea of artistry that connects with literary alchemy, and then a couple observations that hopefully segue into the question of the impact of the removal of the ball scene, but we'll see how that goes.


Gold and Alchemy:

One would have to go back to John Granger's book The Hidden Key to Harry Potter that he put out after book 4 or 5 of the original seven-book Harry Potter series to get the real background on literary alchemy because I can really only put the salient points in here and really only in broad outline form. Everybody knows that the legendary magical practice of alchemy is turning lead into gold. But, as Granger discusses, for real alchemical thought, this is only symbolic. What alchemy really is is a personalist discipline: it's really about the transformation of the common person (symbolized by lead) into the "golden soul." As I said, you have to go to Granger's book to get a more detailed description of literary alchemy itself and how it plays in the original books, but it has to do with things like the four elements being: White on top for pure spirit = Albus Dumbledore; black on the bottom for pure matter being Voldy as a materialist (thinks nothing is worse than material death); red sulfur on the right for animal soul = Ron; quicksilver/mecury on the right for the rational soul = Hermione (named for Hermes, the Greek god who became Mercury in the Roman pantheon); the golden soul produced in the center in the crucible = Harry. A supporting bit of data for this reading of alchemy as being about personal transformation is that Karl Jung has a work called Psychology and Alchemy: people think of alchemy as mainly the forerunner of chemistry, but really it's more the forerunner of psychology; alchemy produces the golden soul, and psychology produces the healed soul (psyche literally means "soul" in Greek, the animating life force of a living being).

I have done writing myself, back in the Muggle Matters days, on the use of gold in HP fitting with ancient uses of gold as a religiously significant metal, such as the fact that, in the Old Testament, silver is the metal of commerce but gold has religious significance: all of the sacred furnishings in the desert tabernacle and the Jerusalem temple (the menorah, the table of showbread, etc) were to be plated in gold, and the streets of the New Jerusalem in Revelations are paved with gold, and so on. But I don't think Rowling is going that far back into the Judeo-Christian tradition; I think she stays more focused on the other classical and medieval uses of gold as a symbol in alchemy.

The main thing is, though, that gold has a significance beyond material value. But the elsson in alchemy is also that the material value functions as a symbol for the higher significance; it mirrors it and functions as a signpost for it. The personalist dimension of gold in alchemy is conveyed through legends of the practice of turning literal lead into literal gold. The artistry point that I want to make in CoG, which came to me on this viewing, is that JKR has a nice little embodiment of this fact, and one that ties in the fantastic beasts element as something more than simply the vehicle chosen to get this other story out there by hooking it to an element from the original series (the scuttle that I could pick up at the time the first film was announced being that JKR decided to write the story because she did not want somebody else writing her world but Warner owns rights and said they planned to make another movie on some of the rights no matter what and she could write if she wanted to, and it was Fantastic Beasts simply because that seemed like a concept they might be able to sell).

She incorporated the beasts well in the first film, and here again, the niffler functions centrally. In film 1, the niffler running amok in the bank symbolizes the funny chaos (and sometimes painful) that ensues when magic enters the muggle world.  Here it is the niffler tracking through the gold dust Newt spreads around in the street in the Paris version of Diagon Alley. I personally think it unlikely that JKR has a well-developed "physics of magic" explanation for that scene (why do footprints appear in gold dust? how does a niffler seeking the gold dust make the traces of the persons appear?). I think the point is simply to have the niffler's desire for the shiny physical gold be the pathway for finding the person Newt wants to find for more than material reasons (meaning that he is in love with Tina), and that that functions as a sort of symbol of the alchemical structure of the legends of making physical gold being the vehicle for concepts of personal transformation. I don't know how conscious it is on her part as an author, but I definitely think it is objectively there as an organic connection with alchemical theme from the original series. At least that is my personal pet theory. It's at least a hat-tip or salute to the literary alchemy element of the original series, and a wonderful little artistic touch.


"I Hate Paris" Part I:

That is Grindlewald's line near the end, "I hate Paris." It struck me as odd. It can be just throw away as in "things went bust here; here is Paris; ergo Paris sucks," except that they didn't really totally go bust: he got a killing by an auror he can use for his line "we are not the ones who are violent; go tell people this," and he got Credence. But he does seem to say it with a bit of vehemence, and it is a bit distinct that Flamel says that if they don't contain him with the wands-in-the-earth thing, specifically Paris will be lost. So this got me thinking along some cultural and philosophical lines.

The cultural line is that a structure occurred to me this time, particularly in the relationship between Newt and Theseus and their respective interests. I think that, especially for JKR as English, the brothers represent the English, and particularly in a tension between newer American influence and older European influence. Newt is drawn by an American woman and Theseus by a woman of old pureblood French lineage who lives in England. There is no doubt that, this time (the five-film Fantastic Beasts project), JKR is painting on a larger canvas. In the original HP series, the main meaning was carried by Voldy's corrupt mentality and choice and Harry's choice of love over that kind of mentality, and Voldy himself is not pureblood; he mainly uses it as his vehicle for his personal mission. Really, he defines "pure" as devotion to himself. Grindlewald defines in that way too, but we are also dealing here with real pureblood prejudice from an actual, older European pureblood. HP stayed on the sized canvas that fit an individual maniac and those he hurt and an individual hero's choice of love. The size of canvas here is beginning to encompass cultures. And I think that the Scamander brothers may, for JKR, represent England in a tension between influence from old deep roots in Europe and newer individualism in American culture (with an odd twist that it is the younger American culture that has the more drastic official laws concerning intermarriage). It's definitely on a lot of English brains with the whole Brexit controversy, but it is also in JKR's literary lineage to have a central character (in this case the pair, the brothers) be symbolic of English identity in a current phase: she's actually mentioned Dorothy Sayers as a model, and Sayers's Peter Wimsey character is well-known to have been for her a symbol of England after WWI, scarred (PW has PTS) but surviving and, having learned from the past, moving on with life (his sleuthing and marrying Harriet ... the rumor is that Sayers had trouble writing any more PW after WWII started because he was was symbol of having learned from the Great War and being resolved, though bruised and battered, not to let it happen again ... but then it did, and the rumor is that that is when Wimsey as a project of writing a character really died).

Interlude on Culture and America: William Faulkner's Absalom Absalom

I have to be careful in how I phrase this part when speaking in the milieu of the frenzy that goes in in the online world of either (1) tying out literary sources in such a way as to view the present work as an updated or thinly masked simple reproduction of an original work (much the same issue as trying to discuss Tolkien's use of biblical imagery and narratives without falling into the trap of seeing him as simply doing an allegory of the biblical story) or (2) trying to make predictions based in material from literary models or allusions (Which predictions happen from other sleuthing methods too... all of which I appreciate and think some of it is very clever, not to mention helpful in providing raw data for my type of exposition, but it's simply not the kind of exposition I am doing here).

And I have to be doubly careful because I have no backing evidence or material to suggest that JKR ever works in American literature. American history in the form of 1920s eugenics societies, yes ... but that's not the same thing as drawing on specific works of American literature in  he way she has drawn on English and European. But I am going to throw it out there anyway. And who knows, if the resonance is as strong as I think it is, maybe  it is an instance of Rowling herself mixing the newer American with the older European in her British series.

One will have to go look on Wikipedia to get a better description and plot details, but I'll include here what I can. I simply can't shake the feel of William Faulkner's Absalom Absalom. I even went and looked it up on Wikipedia last night after watching CoG, since it has been a while since I actually read AA, and found the similarity even more striking. There is the obvious connection of "sins of the father visited upon the son," meaning the children suffering the fallout of the parents' prejudices, but I had forgotten that Thomas Sutpen has exactly the same behavior as old man Lestrange: going through a series of women trying to have a male heir on whom to build a dynasty. The other thing that rings so much is the French and exotic thing. Sutpen's first wife is the exotic, sort of like the Senegalese wife/mother in CoG, and Sutpen marries her in the French West Indies. The race aspect doesn't carry over, since LeStrange chooses a Senegalese woman but Sutpen leaves his first wife and son when he finds they are of mixed race, but there is a certain exoticness in common in the history of the two men going through a number of women trying to get a male heir and at least one of the women being from non-WASP/Euro decent. And there is a lot of French resonance in Faulkner's AA: In addition to the French West Indies, the first son's last name is Bon and he lives in New Orleans, and Sutpen brings with him to Mississippi a French accountant/teacher (who at one point runs away, and Sutpen goes out by himself into the swamps into which the Frenchman ran and drags him back to his employ). I simply can't shake the feeling of a resonance of tone (like Faulkner's symbol of wistaria vine that creeps everywhere and invades and saturates everything, like the honeysuckle smell in his Sound and the Fury) that seems to go along with some remarkable similarities in some thematic elements. If JKR is making a point, as she seems to be, about the twisted mentality of the parents and ancestors ruining the lives of the children and the descendants, and if she is familiar with Faulkner's AA, it is not a stretch of the imagination to think she might borrow tone and some elements from it for that project.

"I Hate Paris" Part II

The other thing that come to my mind from that line is the philosophical. I thought it was a neat concept when I first heard/realized that the series would probably be based around a major city for each film, but now having heard GG say he hates one of them (as well as his specific mention and phrasing of movie 1 as loosely "what they did do me in New York"), I think I can hear something that can resonate, even if only latently, on a philosophical level. Ever since Plato and Aristotle, the polis, literally the "city," has been a symbol of human society and societal structure (Pratchett has a wonderful tidbit by Captain Carrot in the discworld series, noting that the name "police man" originally literally means "man of the city" ... and there was only ever one woman for Lord Vetinari, and that is the city of Ank Morpork herself). I don't think it is a stretch to say that GG wants a society based in his own plans for domination to challenge and overcome all other structures of human society. As I say, it's latent, but I do think that that vehemence in the line "I hate Paris" and the fact that Flamel sees a danger to the city, rather than simply GG running off once he got what he wanted, does concretely lend to it.

A metro-polis is a sort of unique instantiation of human contact on a societal level. I don't know if one can really get it unless one has both lived in a metropolis like London, or in my case New York (living there for eight years: seven in grad school and one working construction), and lived in other forms of social organization against which to contrast the urban experience like suburbia. The city has a heartbeat of its own in which you can't escape the texture of other human personalities. It's why I go back a couple times a year if I can to bike in the adventure of that amazing, vast urban landscape call the five boroughs (well, not Staten Island; you can't actually bike onto there legally outside of one time a year, which the 5 Boro bike tour, when one level of one side of the Verrazano Narrows bridge is closed off for the tour ... but I never count SI in the boroughs anyway, it was only because of mob money in the first place, from what I have heard).

The rural and micro-urban (small town) will always be endearing in exactly the way that Tolkien loved it. But I think that the phenomenon of suburbia is a very major challenge to the polis. A couple of examples connect here in an eerie way. Henry Adams, at the turn of the twentieth century, contrasted the precursor of the internal combustion engine, the dynamo, against the medieval church, meaning specifically small "c" church as the church building in any given town (not capital "C" for the one, universal, Catholic), as contrasting symbols of social arrangement and interaction (this is in the "The Dynamo and the Virgin" section of his The Education of Henry Adams, written after seeing the early dynamos at the World Fair in Paris in 1900). A medieval city or town gravitated to a center, the church. From there, things radiated in levels such as the mercantile district with lower-cost temporary housing (the apartment above a storefront kind of thing), out to the more affluent property still in the city, and then out to estates of land holders and their bases of tenant farmers who rent from them. The dynamo, said Adams, is the opposite: it is about things being thrown outward. And he said that this would be the new model along which societal infrastructure develops. Things will go outward into segregation. And is you look at the arrangement of suburbam housing developments in relation to suburban shopping areas, that type of comparmentalization is exactly what has happened in suburbia (I remember noticing it as a kid visiting relatives in Greenville S. Carolina, that that place is miles and mile of traffic lights and shopping malls and cul de sac neighborhoods with no downtown I ever heard of; a friend told me that they have since manufactured a trendy little downtown area in an old industrial zone revitalization).

Then, interestingly, the place where I have seen what I think is a very unfortunate conquest of the urban by the suburban is precisely in the major fruit of the dynamo, which is the automobile and it's internal combustion engine (Cake has a song called "Satan is My Motor" that is insightful on this score). The automobile is single-handedly responsible for the facilitation of precisely the compartmentalized societal model Adams predicted in the form of the suburb. The place that has saddened me recently is that Uber is having a very negative impact in NYC: traffic is getting worse and worse, particularly as a result of Uber's selectionist operations (you can choose the driver bease on personality-type matching ... interesting coincidence that the name Uber comes form the same language as Grindlewald's first name, Gellert, which is the German for "elite") that means that more cars are idling in the streets until not just any rider calls, but a rider matched to their personality/social/whatever type; and public transport like the subway is becoming worse (my friend's wife has specifics of the increase in time of her subwat commute from the Pelham neighborhood of the Bronx to the financial district to work at a non-profit for much less that she was making before getting a PhD and having a family) because of lower revenues, so track repairs etc take longer. Public transport is, in a way, a sort of symbol of accepting other humans: I have been packed in like sardines on the 4 train in rush hour five days a week before, and not really had any rubs, but you have to be accepting of other people's foibles, just as they have to be accepting of yours, and you both have to work on trying to curb things that might annoy others. Unfortunately, in the form of Uber (which has also lead to some cabby deaths by suicide: guys put up their house as collateral for a loan to get the medallion and then Uber comes along), the suburban model is invading the urban ... and unfortunately winning.

So, what is my point? That if you live in a suburban housing development or drive for or use Uber, you're an evil person worthy of employ by Grindlewald incorporated? No. We are all born where we are born and have access to the resources to which we have access, and we can't entirely, or even maybe mostly, control that. . I may think that England has a long history of empric evil, but I admire Churchill for standing up for his fellow humans in England and doing what needed to be done to protect them, and a single mother working to provide for her child/ren does not deserved to be bombed just because England as a country unjustly expanded it's empire and murdered people (I'm not in favor of visiting the sins of the parents on the children). And I definitely don't think of people who live in suburbia and are simply trying to raise their kids to be good people in the best way they can find to do so are evil. And I don't think that people eating all fast food and convenient store food (a particular struggle of my own) are evil gluttons ... but I also think that the fast food and convenient store food are hurting them. And I also think that the suburban model has some detrimental effects in making isolationism more likely.

For this post and CoG, I just think it interesting that there may be something in the villain, a component of his villainry (the "crimes of Grindlewald") that is at least latently an attack on the polis, which is actually to some degree under attack in the real world.

Grindlewald versus Leta

I'm hoping that that discussion of cultural and philosophical dimensions segues at least a little into the issue of the Lestranges, in the form of Grindlewald's narrative being in tension with another narrative. And this is the place where there is the issue of whether dropping the ballroom scene made a significant change, more of a change than any regular dropping of a scene (even of scenes that make a chiasm/ring tie out better on simply the mechanical level). I think we have had a big refresher in the past two years of how central a role is played by explanatory narratives (sort of larger versions of the "legends" John LeCarre's spies create) and choices between them, particularly in the narratives peddled in American politics. But here, the competing narratives would be Grindlewald's explanation of Credence as a Dumbledore and the theory that he was Corvus Lestrange Jr. We of course do still have those two stories as competing explanations in the final version of the film. But I think what we lose in losing the ballroom scene is seeing the grip that the Corvus narrative has for the pureblood world, which we see in all those whispered congratulations. I think we may have lost some tension that was meant to be there between the actual pureblood world's preferred narrative of Corvus returned to champion the pureblood cause and Grindlewald's lost Dumbledore narrative as he . Leta's turning on Grindlewald to let Newt and Theseus and co. escape would have then been a nice symbol of that tension complicating things for Grindlewald.

 I try not to get political in what I write on this blog, but the past two years in America have been hard to watch. And one of the most notable elements is the tension between the group and the hero they have chosen. There can be hardly any greater disparity than that between Trump's gold-plated life in Trump Tower and the rural poor lives of the base on whose votes he relies (I take Trump's gold to be like Solomon's, and for Solomon, I take the biblical text as using a cipher-symbol, which is having his throne plated in gold, having his political furniture be treated the same as the religious furniture in the temple, as symbolic of the reason the kingdom was split, symbolizing the political taking over the religious, as was the case with the political marriages to wives and concubines being the pathway for worship of foreign gods), or between the disparity between McConnell as possibly the richest senator being voted into office for three decades in what is possibly the poorest state in the union. I would have found it interesting in CoG to see a more clearly drawn tension between GG's aim and those of the purebloods whose sentiment he manipulates to achieve his own ends, to see it in a tension between competing narratives of how Credence may be the weapon. GG is more of an actual pureblood than Voldy (well, with a Muggle father, Voldy is not pureblood at all, and his use of the pureblood concern is purely a lie), but he also I think has some contempt for those he uses, other purebloods. His narrative for who Credence is and why that may be important is about himself as an elite even within the elites: Credence could be the weapon based in the narrative of him being the long lost brother of the only wizard GG ever felt to be his own equal, Albus Dumbledore.  The larger pureblood world's narrative is different: he is the long lost heir of a pureblood line (the male heir that old man Lestrange did so much to get and then lost at the hands of one of his discarded female children).

The removal of the ballroom scene may even be part of why it is so hard fore me to get traction on a chiastic reading of the film. If the scene played the kind of role for which I think it has potential, it could have been a major hook element in a chiasm (maybe even the crux, if was in the center, who knows). It has no real purpose in the mechanical plot, BUT it is very highly stylized, with all the whispers building up to the clearest statement of triumphalism in the man's close-quarters "congratulations," and the imagery of the dancer with the ascending and flowing thing. Whenever something is that stylized and ethereal and  also serves no mechanical plot service, my ears prick up and I look at it from theme AND from potential for chiasm. The fact that a scene doesn't play a role in advancing the "main" plot does not mean that it does not play a role in a ring structure. The recapture of the the erumpant and the occamy in movie 1 don't advance the Credence/Graves/Grindlewald plot at all, but they are big hook pairing for the chiasm/ring, and they relate to the thematic element of beasts representing magic (is it dangerous or wonderful, or both?) and the theme of treatment of creation and treatment of other humans going hand in hand.


Conclusion

Anyway, those are my things I have picked out in, I guess, now three viewings. I really enjoy the film. I think it is cool that JKR and Yates are giving each film so far a distinctive flare of the city in which it is set too. I like cities. Someday I want to bike Paris, and London, and Taipei, and Hong Kong, and Prague, and Berlin, and Vienna, and Chicago, and Quebec, and everywhere. There is no better way to get the lay of the land of a city than on bike. Automobile now lays a new structure of limited access highways over the actual historical layout of the city (except maybe in Pittsrburgh, where the mills more dictate that even the newer limited access structure follows the same contours that those hills and Mount Washington dictated for the pre-auto development), but you simply can't cover the kind of ground on foot that you can cover on a bike. If you want the layout, bike a city multiple times using different routes each time.

I'll also say, in closing, that I think the ability of the films to carry this type of meaning through onto the screen is greatly aided by some masterful performances by all. Law is an excellent DD (please, please, PLEASE ... if you do a "later in DD's life scene," age Law and DON'T bring freaking Gambon in, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES) and Depp has so much texture as GG, and your heart breaks for Leta and Yusuf and Credence and Nagini, and you love Tina and Newt ... and that scene with Queenie and Jacob in the street in London was so well-done in its tension.

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