Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them: Clothes on the Chiastic Body

This post is really a place for me to get out "on paper" an idea that has come to me in reading some materials on Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. It's not a long or complicated post, as it really is simply an added idea on top of my posts on layered chiastic structuring in the original Harry Potter series and in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.

I have been fascinated and excited in reading some of the material on the film at Dr John Granger's Hogwart's Professor site, particularly regarding some of the background allusions in the film. Particularly, there is a post by Dr Granger himself on interviews with Ezra Miller, who plays Credence in the film, and David Yates, the director, concerning eugenics societies in the 1920s in America (although, I must warn the reader that some of the conclusions, with which I agree, are chilling in regard to the history of our American identity ... but it is truly gripping material either way and impressed me very much with Miller as an actor and the research he does in order to play a role).

My interest for this post is where such allusions fit into the matter of chiastic reading and what I have been trying to develop as the body as a metaphor for layered chiasms within a ring-composition work. And my answer is, at least to a certain degree, that old adage that "the clothes make the man." These allusions are the clothing that an author or film-maker can put onto the naked body. They can be classical (timeless themes of death and virtue, etc.), or they can be more modern clothing that builds on and adapts older styles (Grindlewald's regime as being like Nazi Germany, for example in the name of G's prison Nurmengard resembling Nuremberg, a central locale for Nazi Germany where they held many party conventions, or the American eugenics styling of the Second Salemers in Fantastic Beasts). The key is that, in addition to the characters and themes grabbing us, the clothes can make quote an impression.

And, of course, as with literal clothing, the clothing of allusions on top of the body of layered chiasm and its themes flow with the movements of the body.