existentialism is a film

122. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (J.K. Rowling, 1997)
Genre: children’s literature
Rating: 1

Awful in every way. The whole book is centered on lame, even deplorable ideas. First, it divides people into the wizardly and the non-wizardly in a class system. That’s a fairly lame idea already, but other than deriding some of the snobby elitists among the wizardly class, it is itself ridiculously elitist, presenting its only non-wizardly people as an overblown, idiotic parody of middle class small-mindedness, conformity, and materialism, and making the elevation into the wizard class an unequivocally good thing. Second, it makes the magical into the mundane. Otherworldly and magical things, things beyond the everyday, are trivialized by transposing them into a world of magic shops and wizard schools essentially no different from non-magic shops and non-wizard schools. (It doesn’t help that all the magical things are stock elements, with absolutely no originality or imagination.)

Outside its center of lameness, the book fails in all its basic storytelling elements. It’s written in a completely standardized kids-book style, full of simplistic exaggerations, stock phrases, and twee comments from the narrator. Even if that style didn’t irritate me with its obviousness and simplification, it’s utterly indistinct here: the words have no verve. It does nothing of note to create suspense, excitement, pathos, vivid imagery, or anything else. And the dialogue is flat and unnatural, lacking any distinct voices.

Similarly, all its characters are cliches—the know-it-all girl, the goofy, good-hearted guy, the classist snob, etc.—that are given no definition or nuance beyond their stereotypes. Actually, they’re so vague that they lack even the definiteness of their stereotypes. The villains are given still less: Snape is mean and punishes kids unfairly, Voldemort is evil and kills people, and that’s it. And the characters’ personality and feelings are related in the most simplistic ways. Harry Potter himself is just a cliched cipher of wish-fulfillment, the mistreated kid with no friends who’s really the most special of all kids and destined for greatness.

The overarching narrative is still another cliche: a journey away from home, in which kids learn and grow, and a move into an upper-class world full of possibilities and glamor and excitement. Within that, everything is just more lame cliches of school life and childhood friendships. There’s also the kids being tested, doing some of that learning and growing, by foiling an evil plot. But the evil plot is painfully contrived (especially the ridiculous bit where all the characters conveniently get to show what they’re good at—blech), so undeveloped that it barely registers, and carrying no weight. It also revolves around the ultimate cliche of misdirection: the person you least expect did it! And he’s a non-character, defined only by being nervous and stuttering enough to be the person you’d least expect.

Finally, Quidditch is the stupidest sport ever.

Quote: “Where’s the cannon?” he said stupidly.

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