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The Strange America of Fantastic Beasts
My father once brought home a CD of Gershwin’s Rhapsody In Blue. He saw it in the bargain rack, and knowing how much my mother likes the piece, leapt at the chance to surprise her with it. The thing is, it was in the bargain rack for a reason. Produced by some low-budget Eastern European orchestra, the recording was comically Slavic. Gershwin’s 1924 paean to New York didn’t sound American at all. The foreign accent was just too thick.
Replicating the American character in art is actually quite difficult. Leonard Bernstein, in his televised series of Young People’s Concerts, devoted an entire episode to American music and identifying the components of the unique American sound. Foreign actors, too, struggle to speak in an American voice; not every Brit can sound as authentically Yank as Hugh Laurie. And spaghetti westerns can often be more spaghetti than western.
What brought this challenge to mind was the latest movie in J.K Rowling’s Harry Potter series, Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them, written by Rowling and directed by David Yates. Rowling’s thin volume by the same title wasn’t a narrative, but an ersatz textbook for Hogwarts students, a field guide to magical creatures. The movie, in contrast, tells the story of its fictional author, Newt Scamander, who sneaks into New York in 1926 with a magical menagerie of rare creatures he’s been trying to conserve.
The movie is a hot mess of the kind only a fantastical magical beast could produce. The plot was (to be kind) convoluted, and in a genre that depends on maintaining internal consistency with whatever fantasy rules it establishes, this movie repeatedly and unapologetically broke them (beasts, after all, do not follow the rules). The escapes from action scenes were reminiscent of Adam West’s Batman, who would draw just the right tool from his Bat-Belt to escape certain doom. (It’s a wonder none of Scamander’s creatures was named deus ex machina.) In an epic case of cinematic malpractice, the resolution of the plot’s central mystery was that an explicit rule we’d been given throughout the film simply wasn’t true.
The characters, moreover, were universally unsympathetic, and with the exception of an underworld figure voiced by Ron Perlman, universally boring as well. In presenting a fantasy world, it is important to have a central character the audience can relate to, one they can sympathize with as he or she encounters the unfamiliar. Rowling gives us an Average Joe in Fantastic Beasts named Jacob Kowalski, a non-magical New Yorker inadvertently swept up in the action. But Jacob is merely a device, used either for exposition or comic relief. The protagonist we are actually supposed to identify with is Scamander, as he contends with the foreign and unfamiliar world of New York.
Rowling’s New York is well and truly unfamiliar — though not in the way she intended. Clearly much effort went into reproducing the look of 1920s New York streets and dress. But of all the film’s weaknesses, its portrayal of the city and its culture was the most glaring. Like the Slavic simulacrum of Rhapsody In Blue, Fantastic Beasts did violence to the character of New York and that of America more generally.
Some of the mismatched accent was in the detail. For example, America’s magical “Congress” operated more like a parliament, led by a “president” with greatly centralized power, than what you might expect to find in a place influenced by the non-magical federal system around it. More importantly, the tonal color of the film was oddly subdued and downtrodden. The musical Annie, set in the depths of the depression, could feature “The Sun Will Come Out Tomorrow” and a celebration of shopping on Fifth Avenue. Fantastic Beasts, in contrast, used somber music and a sepia-toned palette that didn’t suggest old photos so much as a city under a shadow. The film is set in 1926, an age historians call the “Age of Prosperity”. In real life, economic growth was booming, and possibilities seemed limitless. But the only children we see in Rowling’s 1926 New York are Dickensian orphans (noticeably more cheerless than Annie‘s). In real life, with the country in economic crisis a few years later, FDR could draw on American optimism and declare we had “nothing to fear but fear itself”. However, in Rowlings’s New York, ostensibly during a period of miraculous economic expansion, the city is characterized by a chilly anxiety that made The Dark Knight seem sunny.
The atmosphere of fear and anxiety appears to be a deliberate artistic choice. Setting the story in the US offered Rowling an opportunity to draw a distinction with the magical world in the UK. She could have pitched American magic as somehow less wedded to the past, say, suitable of skyscrapers in contrast to castles. She might have characterized it as a melting pot open to new ideas and cultures, considering that the city’s population was about 35% foreign-born in 1926. But alas, no. The filmmakers portray the US as a country under the spell of a strong xenophobic streak.
From the very opening, when a threatening customs officer interviews Scamander, we are treated to an America that is segregated, suspicious of anything foreign, and resistant to anything different. The non-magical world fears the magical, and the latter is all too willing to participate in its own segregation, lest it be misunderstood and draw negative attention. There are pointed references to laws prohibiting marriage between wizards and “no-majs”.
This American segregation is not incidental, but is the motive force of the story. The climate of fear causes some young wizards to repress their magical gifts, and that repression leads to the creation of a dangerous, uncontrolled dark force called an Obscurial that wreaks havoc on the city. The subtext is deeply anti-American. In seven books (and their companion movies), such a dark force never appeared. Its sudden and central appearance in America in this film suggests that such segregation, and the resulting repression, is not merely incidental to the US experience, but is a defining difference between the US and the UK. (Fun fact: the only other place the movie says the force has been seen is Sudan — that’s right, a country contemporary audiences associate with the backwardness of tribalism and anarchy of gang rule.)
Of course, legal segregation in the US ended generations ago. Cultural taboos against miscegenation have fallen. What hasn’t ended is mainstream American resistance to open borders, group preferences, speaking plainly about Islamist terror, and religious coercion regarding same-sex marriage. SSM proponents rountinely invoke the moral authority of the civil rights movement and insist that SSM is its modern-day equivalent. And in today’s cinema, magical ability is a useful metaphor for being gay. A wizard can pass for no-maj without the wider community being any wiser (though wizards have a knack for identifying each other); nonetheless, repressing one’s magical ability is sure to lead to bad consequences, as we saw from the poor treatment Elsa’s father gave her in Frozen. Rowling has revealed that Dumbledore, the pinnacle of wizardry in her universe, is himself gay. In Fantastic Beasts, anti-magic activists routinely slur wizards as deviants and immoral, borrowing the language of old-time religious crusaders against homosexuals.
Americans are tolerant of gays and gay lifestyles, but do not share European cultural mores. American resistance to such mores and opinions — on matters from religious freedom to firearms to climate change to Islamist terror to assimilation and group identity to the form of our government — is not about resisting foreign things. It is about the core of American exceptionalism: We believe our individualist ideals are objectively true, and worthy of defense, regardless of what the rest of the world may do. People from all sorts of different backgrounds are accepted into the American mainstream, and elite power, every day. We resist identity groups not because we dislike people of certain identities, but because we resist the idea that their respective group affiliations come before their individual American identities. That’s what allowed America to become the great melting pot, unique among the nations of the world.
But Rowling and Yates won’t have it. In the earlier films, Hagrid the gamekeeper was lovable in his naivete about his animals. He loved the beasts so much that he couldn’t conceive of them as dangerous; we were made to see both his love, and the danger he was blind to. Scamander, too, insists to the end that his beasts are no threat. Yet even as we see them wreak havoc in New York, there seems to be no true danger, and none of the characters experience the mortal terror Harry and Ron and Hermione did at Hogwarts. In this film, we are led to understand that Scamander knows best: The beasts — like the wizards — are not dangerous, but merely misunderstood. In the end, the suspicious Americans tell the Brit to take his foreign creatures and leave the country. The message is that the Americans, with their unfounded fears of wizards and magical beasts alike, do not care about saving and conserving and loving our planet’s diversity.
Which is the movie’s supreme irony. For today, among global tastemakers, it is America that is misunderstood rather than dangerous. While America is the most diverse and tolerant country on the planet, it is nonetheless loathed and rejected in its difference. Rather than celebrating America for its unique commitment to individual autonomy, the film presents America as a pariah nation on par with Sudan. A diverse world should have room for Congresses as well as parliaments, New Yorks as well as Londons. In rejecting American exceptionalism, it is the filmmakers themselves who promote conformity and intolerance. And in doing so, their depiction of America rings false. The real America is, truly, a fantastic beast — large and powerful, beautiful and noble, strange and wonderful and magical, yet miraculously generous and benign. What a tragic shame that Rowling and Yates did not know where to find it.
Published in Entertainment
Before making any snarky comments I’d like to say welcome back, Spengler, and hopefully for more than just this post.
Having said that:
New York is a foreign and unfamiliar world for me too.
How does that work? From what I know of the existing material, the magical world is kept mostly separate from the mundane.
I love this.
Great read, Spengler, thanks! And good to see you!
Ditto. And I haven’t even read it yet.
A wonderful review.
I haven’t thought it through as much as you have. But man, those characters were so bland. Like come on, Jo!
I’ve avoided Harry Potter up to this point, and this new series of movies doesn’t sound like an improvement.
Whyyyyy? (This makes me sound like a typical fangirl.)
You’ve shone some light on my discomfort with the film. It does not do the Potter films justice to have these as the successor. Wonderful visuals, good idea, bad execution to shoehorn politics into it.
I thought the secondary characters were a hoot, but the two leads were dreary.
It felt like the world’s longest Johnny Depp movie prolog.
And it’s good that it does. For that helps us to identify them as bigots who, for all of their alleged insights, are insufficiently self-aware to realize it.
Thanks for a thoughtful review.
I don’t remember. Something in a review of the first book turned me off. It might have been something as simple as too much enthusiasm from a reviewer I didn’t like.
I would love to hear it anyway, just for the contrast.
Seconded. I could have watched a whole movie about Queenie and Kolowski; Tina was a crashing bore and I have no idea what Eddie Redmayne was doing in his performance.
Also, welcome back.
Yeah, Newt and Tina were just boring characters. It’s unfortunate that they’re the lead characters. Kowalski and Queenie were more interesting. Colin Farrell was solid in his role, but the story just suffered from too many things.
Eddie Redmayne was only allowed 2 emotions/facial expressions. The I’m-an-adorable-nerd face and the I-must-be-left-alone-because-only-I-understand-these-beasts face.
Frankly I think you are overthinking this movie. The anti-muggle sentiment among the wizarding world is well established in the books. Also the feeling of menace and tension exists because of the rising power of Grindawald. While not discussed much in the books or movies it is clear from the few scraps that we do have that Grindawald is a dark wizard of supreme power who plunges the whole world into a World War. The details are scant. I think the tone and atmosphere are crucial to the movie establishing this sense of rising tension and dread that will culminate in Wizard World War.
Interestingly, there is a popular theory going around that we HAVE seen this in the books, in Dumbledore’s young sister Ariana, who didn’t show magical talent and killed people in an outburst in which it seems she died.
That said, I didn’t like the tones of “Racist hateful society” either, but entertainingly it was only that way by decree of the government, and not the people themselves. Made it seem like the Wizards of America were under rather facist rule, which is only supported by the un-American nature of the Congress.
Glad to have you back & I agree about the whole homosexual wizard foolishness. I didn’t go see the movie, so I’ve no idea about America-at-the-pictures, but I do agree it’s not easy to get it. (I didn’t think much of Mr. Baz Luhrman’s NYC in Gatsby, which, for all its polished mediocrity, seemed like a caricature of the Swingin’ Twenties with some Dark, Bad Dickensian touches.)
I’m not sure who ever got the NYC of a previous era right. I’ll look into Elia Kazan again, come to think of it.
I’ve heard stories from people who grew up in the Fifties, as children of immigrants. It would be great to see those kinds of stories filmed; it makes for a strange, but compelling experience of becoming American. Never seen it, though…
My experience in customs included the offer of being tackled & arrested, mind you! It didn’t have anything to do with being foreign beyond the fact that only in America has this happened to me.
As for the movie, it could have made its points using the ’24 Johnson-Reed immigration act.
Then, I would add, Dickens didn’t often feel like showing the tremendous social & economic progress of Victorian London!
Of course, it remains that case that Rowling ain’t Dickens; & that getting big city America right requires more than a little sympathy.
At some point, when the last book came out, I read it. It’s not the sort of thing that takes a long time. The sort of thing I liked as a kid that I still like now is more like Hornblower or, I guess, on Ricochet it would be Patrick O’Brien’s adventure novels. Or the Sharpe series. Take out the element in which that adventure makes sense, then you can have yourself a Harry Potter. This is why I don’t like it or approve of it.
Yeah, this is the thing. I don’t know when I last saw it captured on screen.
I’ve seen manly versions of American success & failure–like action movies used to do–& I’ve seen romantic versions that women especially would like–Brooklyn did that exceedingly well, & I cannot recommend it enough!–but that seems to split into parts something that should maybe be portrayed together…
Have you seen Avalon? For the first immigrant (later Armin Mueller Stahl) America glows. For the next generation, not so much.
How realistic, I’m not sure; I didn’t live in NYC in the 30’s.
“anti-magic activists routinely slur wizards as deviants and immoral, borrowing the language of old-time religious crusaders against homosexuals.”
And by “old time” you mean, what? 2015?
I couldn’t disagree more.
This film isn’t meant to be an accurate depiction of 1920’s America.
It’s meant to be a depiction of 1920’s wizarding world America, as experienced by a contemporary of Albus Dumbledore. In the wizarding world, this IS a dark time. Grindelwald is coming into his power. My only complaint as a fan: ANYONE would have been better as Gellert Grindelwald than the horribly over-exposed character actor Johnny Depp.
This review is breathtaking in its ignorance of Harry Potter fandom. It would be like some nube to the Marvel universe bitching about the soundtrack of Guardians of the Galaxy.
We aren’t looking at muggle/no-mag 1920’s New York. If you don’t get it, don’t review the movie.
(It’s like a non-star wars fan (me) reviewing a star wars film: they all suck.)
Art needs to stand on its own. Until they start checking your Pottermore membership before taking your ticket money, any viewer gets to evaluate it on its own terms. I agree completely that a Star Wars non-fan can, and should, critique Star Wars movies. Either they stand independently, or fail as works of art.
If a viewer needs to know more about fantasy material set in the 1920s than actual history from the 1920s in order to appreciate the film, then the movie should be released on the Web for fans and not marketed to the general public.
I happen not to be ignorant of the fandom and the universe. But that knowledge doesn’t make the movie any stronger. Rowling made bad artistic choices. Among them was her decision to make the 1920s a dark time for American wizardry.
I did consider this, and the tight 1926 border controls are not unreasonable in light of the 1924 legislation. However, in the context of all the other ways Americans are portrayed as closed-minded and intolerant, it’s hard to credit the portrayal as more than another component of xenophobia.
It baffled me that Tina (Italian first name) had a Jewish last name. Makes no sense for the 1920s.
And Tina’s personality swung back and forth so often and rapidly between extremes of overconfidence and self-doubt that it was hard to understand how she might ever have qualified as an auror.
Yeah. I don’t expect writers to know what the twenties were like in America, but at least know the cliches! Flapper girls & philosophers! Jazz age! Roarin’ Twenties? This is a good example of cliches & the stories that give rise to them being better than nothing…