The Harry Potter studio tour nestles behind
houses that look like those in Privet Drive (the street
where Potter is practically imprisoned by his repressive family, the
Dursleys). The most interesting thing about the tour
is not that everything
from the films is present, correct, and beautifully rendered – which it
is.
It’s not that the entrance hall is antiseptic, with an unprepossessing
café and
a temple to merchandise (where it wasn’t the prices that galled me so
much as the
baseball caps. Really?). Incidentally, you can also buy butterbeer - and
I don't know what they put in it, but it had me babbling uncontrollably
for at least half an hour.
Whilst you are
prepared to accept that you are actually walking down the skewed Dickensian
charm of Diagon Alley, where shop fronts spill over with intriguing magical
goods, you’re also constantly made aware that you’re on a studio lot. There are
barriers – the clinical sort that you get in amusement parks, not
velvet ropes. There are too many excitable people bursting to tell you exactly
how the sets were constructed. I watched a little boy cornered by one, who told
him that the books in Professor Dumbledore’s study are actually bound telephone
directories. “No they’re not! They’re magic books!” I almost said. It struck me
that explanations could have been left until the end, for those who wanted
them.
But more importantly, the proximity of
those all-but-pebble-dashed houses highlighted that everything in Harry Potter
is an extension of something in our, real world. You would have thought that
when, in one of the most magical moments in children’s literature, Harry Potter
receives a letter telling him that he is a wizard, he would enter into a world
that is entirely different and new.
The most interesting thing about the tour
is that it isn’t, and he doesn’t. Don’t get me wrong. Fans of the films (which
I count myself among) will thrill to the sight of the entrance to Hogwarts as
it suddenly appears behind a screen. The Great Hall is awe-inspiring, with
everything, down to the boars-headed jugs, lovingly crafted. It achieves the
thrill of wonder – and recognition – that the films, at their best, create. The
rest of the sets are exquisite, with a precise attention to detail that is a
joy to encounter. My heart thrummed with excitement at seeing copies of The
Quibbler, hand-make magic books, boxes of wands, the
Knight Bus, Buckbeak the hippogriff – at everything. I was both moved and
enchanted.
This, however, is not a different world.
Harry Potter’s universe, in both magical and non-magical parts, is a cartoon
place that draws its strengths from the way that it apes us. The sets on this
tour are all real places taken to their logical conclusion. The Gryffindor
dormitory, where Harry and his chums spend most of their lives, is the ideal
version of a dormitory: four poster beds, a large stove (on which, charmingly,
a pair of socks has been left to dry), trunks and a Manchester United duvet. 4
Privet Drive is the ür-Privet Drive. The gamekeeper Hagrid’s hut is entirely
folksy; Dolores Umbridge’s study is an exaggeration of a lady’s boudoir; the
Gryffindor common room is the quintessence of manor house comfort. The wizards’
world, made flesh by the films, is ours: distorted, yes; but ours all the same.
The wizards are meant to have little or no
knowledge of our non-wizard world – and yet they use some everyday objects and
don’t understand others. One can’t help thinking that if wizards were really
wizards, why would they need all this paraphernalia? Because in Rowling’s
world, wizards are not really wizards. (“What?” I hear you splutter.) There is
none of the terrible self-examination of Ursula Le Guin’s Ged, in The Wizard
of Earthsea, for example. What they can do with
“magic” is arbitrary, with little logic or consequence.
The Harry Potter stories distil these ideal forms into a powerful tale of good and evil,
accessible because of its derivative nature. But
there is nothing challenging, or truly uncanny here. The dark
wizard will always be defeated, because his power is ultimately meaningless.
That’s what the studio tour brings home: it’s extremely enjoyable, but as
passing as the oversugared taste of butterbeer.
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