Bird Box (Netflix original released December 21, 2018)

This is another one of those posts that started as a few small comments on Face Book when sharing a link to a review article of Bird Box.

The review article is here, and it basically has the monsters being social media. My few comments that turned into lengthy post basically wind up, by the end, comparing and contrasting that with a reading of the monsters as racism, including addressing a monsters-as-racism reading to which this article links.

So, the following is my unedited comments (I don't really have time to break things down into shorter paragraphs or tighten down and polish up the language and presentation).:

Interesting take on it. I definitely agree up to a point. There is definitely a strong point made about the conversation about the painting in the beginning and the death through the security monitor (thinking social media is only words on a screen, just like they assumed Riddle's diary was just words in a book). The "fake news" and "over there" and "invasion" thing with the news cast is also definitely a strong piece of evidence in favor of the social media reading.

This author and I might disagree on how prevalent race is or is not in the film (I think it's in the mix for both of us, it's just a question of at what level in comparison to the social media theme). I don't think it is the whole of the film but I do think it is central (although I read the piece mentioned on the Root and thought the person was a bit of an ass ... and I think that painting Bullock *only* as a privileged white and so starkly as such and the blindfold *only* as sticking one's head in the sand turns out a bit naive, for one by leaving you with no real place from which to agree or disagree; when Get Out ends with a black man saying "consider this shit handled," we can take the film makers to be saying that it is a good thing that the whites who have been taking over black bodies are all dead, we can safely assume a stage-affirmative stance toward "this shit being handled"; if Bird Box is about only Bullock as privileged and the blindfold as willing denial, where does that leave the resolution of the film as far as a stage-affirmative or stage-pejorative stance, which impact whether you think the film is good or bad. I think the author of the Root piece could find it good only if it could be said that the movie is really completely critical of Malorie and Tom and the people in the sanctuary, no sympathy for them at all based in any other type of meaning as characters ... What I mean when I say it is naive is that that author uses rhetoric that implies that you COULD have a story in which people thoroughly get beyond racism, but with that view of even the white people who AREN'T the ever-rabids, it basically means the white people dying, which really isn't getting beyond racism ... It would be like Get Out having not only the white body snatchers killed, but all white people who are complicit even unwillingly, which in our culture is every white adult, including myself ... I agree with a lot of points the Root author makes, but I don't think anybody is getting beyond racism in the way he tries to portray as possible, not even in art ... once race became so organically interwoven with other socio-economic factors like labor competition, it's not going away simply by "opening your eyes to it" ... opening your eyes to the reality of how pervasively it is woven into American structure really can lead you to the despair of suicide ... and I don't agree that other characteristics of humanity cannot function meaningfully in a world in which racism has not yet been fully vanquished, which is where the Root author seems to me to wind up).

In the end, I think that if Bird Box is about social media it is about social media as emblematic of something further back than social media itself, a negative potential in human behavior/nature that social media distinctly exacerbates (or a neutral one that social media distinctly helps to go in a negative direction), and I would say that racism is the older effect of that potentional (or the older versino of it being taken in a negative direction). I think the "family tree" is probably more like there is an original coin with two sides, xenophobia and "friend"-o-philia. While the latter is the conceptually more original drive based in insecurity (once we develop a concept of good-vs-bad and a concept of self, and one's own group by extension, we begin to worry about whether we are "good"), racism is the historically older sibling who emphasizes the xenophobic side as a first line of defense of identity ("of course we are good, look at how we are not them," which of course, requires a them; while the Augustine and other medievals conceived of good as having a positive existence beyond the opposition to evil, which has no positive existence, just perverting good, when it comes to racism, the white race NEEDS a black race to be over against) and social media is the younger sibling who helps the older through facilitating the "friend"-o-philia as the positive side that actually lets in newer forms of xenophobic violence and actual conquest (cyber-bullying is a real thing).

 The core connective tissue thematically between the racism and the social media themes is "construction of identity." Racism takes a few sparse facts like skin pigment and geo-origin and constructs this thing called your "race" (as I have said elsewhere, race and ethnicity are not the same thing; race is what you get when you apply a capitalist social hierarchy to ethnicity). Social Media is the construction of digital identity, like the residual digital self image in the Matrix. There is a sage piece of advice that those who have tried online dating sites pass on to others: meet face-to-face sooner rather than later. The issue is that, in digital formats like email and profiles, the construction of identity presentation controls a lot more of the perception of the other person. We always construct and put together an identity as a front face, even in face-to-face conversations. But the difference is that, in fact-to-face, you can't hide your foibles; they slip through the cracks. And maybe some of what slips through the cracks is something the other person has too big of a problem with (although it might show up as "just not clicking" with your real face the way they thought the clicked with your digital face) and better to know sooner, because the person on the other end of the digital construction is also constructing a picture of you out of what you have selected to put on the page and the kind of person they are hoping to meet. Nobody is "lying" in the simplistic definitions offered by so many self-proclaimed moral experts on both sides of the conservative-liberal divide; both are trying to meet somebody and genuinely interact. But we simply construct; it's our epistemological MO. To borrow John LeCarre's language, building legends is what we do. We can't stop doing that, nor should we try; what we should do, whether in face-to-face or in digital, is allow the legends to be challenged and modified by real interaction with the other. But the challenging is easier in person and more difficult in digital (I remember seeing an FB add in front of some movie while I was in NYC that scared me because it seemed to actually advocate the digital construction as a completely safe and trustworthy, completely unproblematic, place from which to start a real-world friendship, with all the assumptions that what was seen online is accurate and adequate).

I disagree with this writer about the place of Malkovich's Douglas character, and particularly because of this reviewer's portrayal assuming basically just one basic type of "Trumper." In addition to the ever-rabids (those like Gary forcing people to look and either kill themselves or reveal themselves to be among the ever-rabids), who are the truly malignant, there are also the merely sickly, those who know there is something wrong going on, and they will speak against it if it comes out in big bold letters, but if not, they actually have a kind of morbid fascination with the minor forms, the kinds who were not "fans" of The Apprentice, but did find it interesting in some "wry" sort of way. They won't get sucked in by full-blown Trumperism (the most recent example I heard of is from a third party about a second party whom I stopped following on FB over 5 years ago because I found it simply pointless, a party 2 who voted against Trump in the primary, but joined the Trump bandwagon once he won the nomination, becoming one of those "let bygones be bygones" supporters who sees any criticism of the GOP candidate as pragmatically dangerous, and the recent example party 3 told me about was party 2 posting on FB of people on the left being inconsistent in criticizing Trump for not calling Mattis personally to fire him, since Obama did the same kind of proxy-fire, which is basically a straw man argument when taken in the scope of the whole never-Trump debate, picking up little minor inconsistencies and claiming to have given the never-Trumpers a good dose of humility, when in fact all they did was divert attention from the real issue, which is whether we should be scared shitless now that the adults have left Trump's room). But they are xenphobic and isolationist: Malkovich wants his wife not to try to help, and he is willing to leave pregnant Olympia in the house to starve. He's not the overt racist, the guys like Gary forcing things, but he also won't help others if he can help it. The middle Trumpers will be sure to let you know they voted against him in the primary, but that is really about all they have ever done to combat it (other than that, like party 3 above, they have been known to find Trump's "you're fired" show interesting back before his candidacy, even though, of course, they weren't, like, a "fan" who made sure to tune in every week or something like that ... they have a bit more "sophistication" than that, of course).
While Malkovich/Douglas is not a hardcore Trumplodyte, he winds up in the garage (and then ...) for a reason, which is that he was acting like a crazy xenophobic asshole. His *caution* was actually a good thing, and had he not been being a crazy xenophobic asshole, he might have thought of a way to discern the situation: "ok, we want to be charitable and help, but you have to show us EVERYTHING you are bringing in with you; you say there are crazies who can look, how do we know you're not one, let us see what you have in the case"; and then they would have seen what was in the case, and that would have been pretty suspicious. But he had to be one of these stupid "apostolate of the asshole" shits who realizes direct racism is wrong (although they're quite too stupid to be able to even begin to get their head around a concept like systemic racism) but they still have this drive to be an asshole and so they try to make it into some "virtue" that can actually be helpful in the good fight, yada yada yada, so they're tolerant of Trump and "forgiving" of the ways his supporters actively combat peace while (the middle Trumpers) being careful never to actually put a confederate flag on their own lawn. That's Douglas (Malkovich).

There are other things that can cross over or be shared by the two themes: what is mentioned here as the entities appealing to sound through mimicking the voices of people we know can be social media's reproduction of FB friends, but it can also be, at the same time, a confederacy-sympathizer's claim to speak for the "heritage" of America etc., the voices of those gone by, those whom we should respect ("if you challenge this, you're saying your dearly departed father was evil" etc.). That was one of the things that actually caught my attention most in the first viewing: manipulation of knowledge/experience of the "past" in the form of appeals to things like "heritage."

Some Crimes of Grindglewald Thoughts and 1-4-7 Chiastic Ties in Harry Potter

Crimes of Grindlewald  Thoughts
So, I should be writing about Crimes of Grindlwald, and having seen it twice and bought the published screenplay, I do have some thoughts, although nowhere near as vigorous as the really active online pundit community (e.g., Credence has Ariana Dumbledore's obscurus; Credence actually is Percival Dumbledore's late-life, lonesome-in/from-prison lovechild; the HogPro crowd's "everything is narrative misdirection and everyone is on a secret mission for one of the ministries" take on Queenie being really on a mission). For one, the one-screen theater in my home town has been shut down since some time in June for repairs of parts of the ceiling that crumbled in, and it's never been a huge-profit game for the guy who owns and runs it, so who knows if/ when it will reopen, so that means a viewing has gone from being a five-minute walk to a half-hour drive, which means no viewing it five times in two weeks like I did the first Fantastic Beasts film (I am going to be majorly depressed if they can't reopen, and not just because of the pain in the ass of driving a half hour: my dad took me to see War Games at the Guthrie when I was twelve and I went to see a lot of Marvel stuff up through Infinity War there ... and five viewings each of Force Awakens and Last Jedi ... the Matrix, Wonder Woman, Return of the Jedi and Raiders of the Lost Ark, Temple of Doom, Last Crusade  ... five viewings of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them ... and the clincher on my interest in HP: after watching a VHS of of Sorcerer's Stone somebody had left in the home theater at the group boarding situation I was in, I went to see Chamber at the Guthrie when it came out, and that convinced me to read the books).

So, a brief version of my thoughts: (in order to get any of what is being talked of here, you will have to already know about the chiasm/ring structure and reading, which can be found in various pieces of mine across the past couple years, including some basic intro ones, which you can find by scrolling through the list of posts on the right side):In looking at the screenplay only quickly, I've noticed the differences between writing and viewing in that I think I even checked the time (showing booked at 8:15, with previews, you're looking at 8:25 start, I looked at the beginning of this scene and it was 9:20) and the scene in the middle of the film was the scene down into the ministry of France to find the Lestrange tree and Leta finding Newt and Tina and the escape on the back of the big Chinese Zouwu. But going by scene-count from the published screen play, it's the sewers hideout of Yusuf Kama. Some of that may be film producers cutting actual scenes in the second half (meaning after the ministry escape) and beefing out the pyrotechnics of the ones kept (so, with a different spacing because if some scenes were added back in in the material after the ministry, the screenplay could have reflected a feel in the film of the exposition in the sewers matching the exposition in the tomb, with the trip into the ministry and the escape in the middle of the film between them).

I do think there is meant to be something in that escape scene as central because there is such a concentration of obviously intentional matches with the central scene of the first film, which was the ministry and escape: an escape from a ministry aided by a magical beast (swooping evil in the first film and the Zouwu in this one ... and nice way to keep distinctive for this film series, keeping the beasts in the action, and therefore Newt as an apt main character, so it doesn't seem like they just chose Fantastic Beasts as a random title from HP to make some more money on their copyrights, which Warner did, but JKR is too much of an artist to settle for it); some members of the escape party are carried out in Newt's case by one of the members; key characters connect in the process (in film 1, Tina's "I love it" is her first real warming to Newt and entering into his mental world of wonder at exotic creatures, and in this film, Leta and Tina, who you would think are competitive for Newt, because Leta definitely still has emotions involving Newt, wind up being thrown onto the same side and accepting each other, or at least definitely being in the tension you would expect ... for one competition for Newt as the connection between them is replaced by sympathy for Credence once in the tomb: Tina wants him to be able to know who he is and to be safe and Leta wants to save him from being killed by Yusuf, wants it enough to admit her role in her brother's death).

 But I can't pin down more than that EXCEPT to say that: whether the sewer or the ministry is at the center, it's all about the Lestranges. And that brings me to my one and only even possible "prediction": I would not be surprised at all if movie 4 (the chiastic pairing with this one) has some big reveal about the Lestrange family's involvement. John Granger and company at HogPro are all abuzz with comments on narrative misdirection, especially John himself with his excellent exposition all the way back between books 4 and 5 of the original HP series of Rowling borrowing the third-person-limited-omniscient narratival perspective from Jane Austen for narrative misdirection in the original series (can't really do that in a film though, which may be why, in my opinion, the film series became so horrendous after movie 2 or 3). Some of what they get into, I'm like "hmmm, that could be interesting" and some it I go "I dunno, sounds like it would be narrative misdirection distracting from literary quality, where in order to figure out the mystery, you have to step away from the literary encounter with theme and character, and even structure within each work as singular works, or at least from what those structures can convey or reveal, which is usually thematic rather than mechanical" ... it's one of the dangers in certain approaches: you can get too caught up in trying to pin down material plot predictions and lose literary quality, or you can get so focused on developing or uncovering the physics of the magic that you lose site of what magic is meant to symbolize or the thematic meaning the story is meant to convey through it and the connection with character as having moral quality [excitement over some statement that DD says because it means Ariana's obscurus could have been transferred and neglecting to ask "if that is the case, what does he mean when he says Credence "could be saved" ... put it in another host, a kid whom you could expect to die within years because the usual is death by 10? Does that sound like the Dumbledore we know?If anything is possible on that line, I think it is his mention of "brother" and the possibility of him taking it in and that's how be beats GG, but that's a stretch at this point ... in the end, I at least, have to wait]).

Anyway, the only main thing to say with that little digression on narrative misdirection is that, John has done some good work on it in the HP series, and I don't doubt he's right in the film series: she did it with Charity Barebones in film 1 and she did it with "Credence is Corvus" in this one. What I wonder is if the "fooled you; Credence isn't Corvus" is ALSO misdirection, but misdirection concerning the Lestrange family itself, with or without Credence in it. The viewer tends to think, "Corvus is a dead-end as far as explaining what happened as far as Credence and predicting what will happen, therefore the Lestrange family is a dead end in those regards, therefore they won't be important in these films; JKR just used them as a ruse to set us up in this film to drop the real bomb at the end: either Credence is Arelius or GG has some really devious plan in telling him that he is." I think that could be a case of narrative misdirection and that that family could wind up having revelations about it being more central; Yusuf could play a big role in that.

All this comes from thinking, "if the center is either the ministry or the sewers, and either way the tomb scene is a big element, that seems like an awful lot of time to spend on something that will go false in the end ... it feels kind of like a dud to me, especially for something as enigmatic as GG's statement at the end (with narrative misdirection, when it does pay off, it needs to pay off clearly, like Harry thinking Snape is trying kill him at the match in book 1 pays off in Snape was actively trying to save his life, not Snape was interested in what was going on in some way but we're not quite sure exactly how) ... but maybe it's not such a dud; maybe it's narrative misdirection on the Lestranges in the larger context of the chiasm/ring and some big reveal about them will happen in movie 4." There is definitely a lot of pay off that could happen with Lestrange thematically, with things like the tree recording only the men, which explains Corvus Lestrange Sr. as a real patriarch of elitist thinking, but sexist and pureblood (that whole thing, with Yusuf on a quest, and his ethnicity, gives me a strong feeling of Thomas Sutpen leaving Eulalia Bon and their son Charles when he finds out that Eulalia is mixed race in Faulkner's Absalom Absalom ... it doesn't tie out directly, in that Yusuf is not the son of Corvus Sr. and Corvus Sr. does not reject a "candidate" on ethnicity, although in this literature, magic-versus-non is what stands in for race, but it just has that feel of what purebloods do in begetting their "heirs," especially the feel of Paris that can feel a lot like what plantation decor in the antebellum South tried to style itself as ... Corvus Lastrange Sr. wasn't a philanderer; the bastard was effing Henry VIII).

 Beyond that, I'll just say that I really like the characterization of Dumbledore and Grindlewald. Everybody else too, but especially them. I also found the WWII prediction interesting on a couple counts. The first is Jacob's horror at the idea of another war. I think that people forget the impact of WW I, but JKR is more likely than most to realize it, since she has stated being a fan of Dorothy Sayers, and particularly her detective fiction, which mostly means Lord Peter Wimsey(Montague Egg is very fun, but small material, just eleven short stories ... if you want to do a whole novel with potential for theme, it's Wimsey). For Sayers as a member of that generation in England, Wimsey symbolized the nation after the war: scarred (Wimsey has PTS) but learning from mistakes and moving on (Wimsey sleuthing and eventually marrying Harriet Vane). England and Europe were hopeful that, while that hurt like hell, we have learned something from it and won't let it happen again. ... And then it did. Reportedly, Sayers couldn't write Wimsey much at all after WWII broke out. To a certain extent, a hope had died, a hope for which she had used him as a literary symbol. And the possibility of that hope dying could be a powerful motivator for somebody who had been in that muggle war ... like Jacob Kowalski. It would be a very interesting twist on the thematic level if a muggle decided to go over to GG's wizards-dominate-muggles side because, in addition to the ache to be with Queenie, he succumbs to a logic of "better this than another world war." And that's more of a possibility for an author who is a fan of an author who is known to have grappled literarily with the fallout of WWI.

And the other angle from which I find it interesting is the angle from which I thought Wonder Woman was so brilliant (well, one of the reasons; there were several, and I have a post on all that somewhere down the archives on the right, including a chiastic reading): the villain was re-world WWI to a much greater extent than there is any real-world villain in any of the other super hero films. The closest it comes is Captain America starting in WWII, and even there, when the villain arises, Red Skull is still from the super-human realm, not the real-world human; in Wonder Woman  (also "WW" ... have to watch causing confusion by using it), the final boss fight is won by blowing up a plane of real-world bombs; even in the fight with Ares, that sacrifice by Steve Trevor is what makes Diana's peace with believing in humanity enough to fight Ares, and it looks like the heartbreak losing him in that noble act in the real WWI is what powers her blinding-light defeat of the god of war. In Fantastic Beasts, with that vision playing so large in the end of film 2, there could very well be some more intense interplay with real world elements than we have been used to seeing in the material from the wizarding world (also "WW"... freaky), which could be really interesting. I definitely think it possibly she had an interest in doing a wizarding story set in the context of real-world European history, as evidenced in the blatant connection of putting the original famous duel in 1945 in the HP series.

Anyway, as I am seeing that, in spite of the other reason for a dearth of posting on this blog in recent months, which is hopefully high revenues and high performance in the task of paying rent and utilities because of a spate of editing projects recently (as opposed to the dearth of work last year at this time that resulted in the spate of blog posts), there has been a steady large (for my blog) number of hits, so that little intro is my attempt to provide at least something interesting on the new film because I know people are interested, including myself

1-4-7 Chiastic connections in the original Harry Potter series

 So, one of the other effects Crimes of Grindlewald coming out is that there is a lot more discussion of JKR's wizarding world in general, like me talking to a college senior who works at the Y where I work out who is really a delightful person to know (I'll miss talking to her when she leaves for in internship in central FL and then graduates; she says she plans to visit all the Universal stuff while in FL), and a Hufflpuff by the test on whatever the big site it, probably mugglenet, and thus obviously a huge fan of Harry Potter and of Newt (I told her I was offended for her sake and the lame money-grubbing sales promo for whatever it was that was up before the CoG movie that said "don't be a Hufflepuff"). So we wind up talking a lot about that (and Marvel films too) while I procrastinate in getting on with the next set or next exercise. And I try to mention/explain chiasm without getting totally boring.

So I wind up thinking more about the original series. And one thing that has always nagged me in my chiastic readings is lack in the area of 1-4-7 connections, especially heavy connections, since you would expect the opening and closing to be big thematically. You do have a material plot connection of direct "fights" with Harry facing Voldy alone in 1, 4, and 7, and the horcrux connections in those books (they saved him in 1, enabling him to regenerate in 4, but are destroyed in 7, making him killable). You also have some opening and closing connections that are part of the chiasm because they open and close the work but they don't have as prevalent a presence in book 4: a ride with Hagrid on the motorbike at the beginning of both, Hagrid bringing Harry to Hogwarts across the lake in 1 and bringing his body back to Hogwarts from the forest in 7, and Harry, Ron, Hermione, and Neville being the ones to gain Griffyndor the winning points in 1 and then each of the, killing a horcrux in 7 (well, Harry does it in 2, but it's in 7 that it fits  in the context of the project of killing horcruxes).

But I have felt the exposition to be a bit thin on my part. So, I have finally thought of two that satisfy my desires for full and meaning chiastic connections ... tow that are nice and solid and that don't leave me feeling like I am grasping at straws and trying to make them look like tree trunks. The first is on the level of the material physics of magic in the WW but one with connection to theme, and the second is more strictly thematic and character-driven. The first is the connection of the twin cores in Harry's and Voldy's wands: in book 1 we have Olivander say "strange that this wand should choose you, when it's brother gave you that scar" ... and the line about expecting great things; in book 4 we have that conversation remembered in the weighing of the wands chapter, I think with mention of it still striking him as a bit off, and then in 7 we have the connection play a central role, AND we have the conversation with Olivander in which Harry remembers being wary of Olivander's slight fascination with the "great" things Voldy did. I have always followed John Granger's reading of magic as symbolic of the imagination, especially in that wonderful bit of exposition of "Diagon Alley" as looking at the world "diagonally" (imaginatively rather then strictly scientifically). And I have added to that my own idea of the wand as symbolizing language, the language through which imagination is expressed. Along those lines, some interesting things happen in 4 and 7 after the revelation of the connection in 1. The wands do battle and one conquers the other and makes it make revelations (the spells it has performed, the people it has murdered): language can be a tool of conquest (a theme done well in the Book of Eli), and  it's often done in one language game (to use Wittgenstein's term) overcoming another, dominating the conversation and dictating what terminology will be used (terminology that comes laden with presupposition choices and assumptions)  ... and making it communicate things other than what the person might want who originally developed it, just as Voldy doesn't want, and suffers from, his wand putting forth those shades. Then in 7 we see the wand be able to recognize the personality that formed the other wand/language/language game without having to concretely have that wand/language actually even present (in the fight in the flight to the Burrow), and if DD is right in King's Cross when he says Harry's wand recognized l and then in book 7, we see the two battle with borrowed or won wands ... in other words, taking up and using the language of others, language that is similar because those others are human, but different too because they are individuals. Nothing is written on the page about it, but one wonders if there is a bit of the "wizard learning from the wand" here ... the elder and hawthorn wands (which know each other from when the hawthorn disarmed Dumbledore of the elder on top of the tower) recognizing that the spell casters have a feel of connection to them, even though that connection was forged through the holly and yew wands  .. the elder and hawthorn wands couldn't "know" about the holly and yew wands, but still, the wizards imbibed something of the connected wands (holly and yew sharing the cor) and the fact that they had met (the wizards met through the wands meeting), and the hawthorn and yew could sort of feel it, sort of feel that their casters had met before and that one beat the other, even though the beating was done through other wands ... it had left a mark of "these two met before with certain results"  ... only a very latent feel that matches the very latent material path, ... but still ...

The one that excites me thematically is interacting with family. Something like the photos Hagrid gives Harry or Madeye's photo of the order are only images of the past. Even though they move, the eyes of those people are directed at the person who originally took the picture. Because they move, they may be able to have some sense of other people looking at them down the years, but you get no impression that they can recognize that as anything other than some more "people" out there looking at us. But the images of Harry's parents in the mirror ... they look into Harry's eyes and smile at him AS Harry, as their son whom they love. Whatever state they are as far as whether the mirror can see actual souls, they interact with him as who he is and as the people of whom they are whatever kind of echoes ... it's an actual encounter, not just an observation of a photograph with the occupants of the photo realizing they're being observed by new people (but not really making interaction). We'll leave aside the issues of Phineus and the other headmaster portraits being able to recognize who people are and interact with them in speech, as we're not trying to pin down a logic that explains the rules of a whole material system in the WW, but rather to look at one literary element (actual interaction with his family) as connected with chiastic structuring (I've always been a little worried when I hear of the search for a "unified theory of everything" in HP in the sense of figuring out all the details of all stories consistently and especially of finding a unified physics in the WW that accounts for all known occurrences of any magical action whatsoever ... I must state up front that I in no way accuse any commentators of anything devious, but "unified theory of everything" is a very, very, very apt way to describe an ideology ... ideologies are the basic nature and definition of things like Marxism and Fascism, systems of thought and political rule that never let art flourish on its own and discover meaning by its own proper path, because EVERTYHING must fit tightly into the logic, everything must be oriented to the state or whatever wields the power, and nothing can be left to chance [the wrecker of all but the best laid plans, to quote Voldy], the chance that art might find something that is out of step with rigid interpretation according to our state's logic ... but I also have to say that, while predictions aren't my forte [but I do admire it: when whoever predicted that it would be revealed that Snape had been keeping DD alive in book 6 because of the "stopper in death" comment from the first potions lesson, and then it was indeed revealed in book 7, my first though was, "damn, I wish I was that smart"], I can see how the making of them can be other people's way of actually looking for theme, the language that they speak for doing so, and not just trying pin out everything material in the series and ignoring theme ... I'm not saying I think any particular pundit does either looking for theme or ignoring theme when they are predicting or working on theories of how the material physics of the magic, just that these are the possibilities ... as with all things human, including my own expositions, I think it's always a mixed bag).

Then in book 4, we meet echoes that again directly interact with Harry (here's a funky idea: the echoes in the wand are a little bit of horcrux ... not even something as big as a "piece" of soul from the victim, but still something really from them, not in the way we think of "recordings" ... the can do what DD notes as peculiar of the diary Riddle, they can think and act for themselves .. but I'm sure somebody has thought of that one before in all of HP fandom and academia), and this time they speak and directly contribute to his safety and getting away alive. And then in book 7 we meet them even more real. It's through the stone and so it's not them as in life, but it is still them, the real them, not merely the residual horcux-like shades in Voldy's wand  (not to mention that the book 7 versions are cleaner for not being through the [by now] plague-ridden element of Voldy's wand ... if Bellatrix's wand felt fouls to Hermione, imagine living in Voldy's wand). It can only happen in the context of his possible death and them being coming to fetch him. Dumbledore warns against even the light form of the mirror's interaction as a potential for getting lost in it if you seek to have it as an ongoing thing in this life. But still, within a seven-book progression to being a loving person who will sacrifice self for others, a person willing to die and in the act of making a choice to go to death, there is a progression in levels of interaction with dearly departed family. And it happens in a chiastic development, in books 1, 4, and 7