I saw the last Harry Potter. I really enjoy these movies. They work well on deep mythic levels. Here, we even had a resurrection.
Clearly, a fictional series that succeeds this much has tapped a cultural nerve. This is a complex phenomenon, but I wanted to submit what I view as the primary component.
Joanne Rowling (surely we can admit by now she is a girl?) created an intact culture. The word “muggle” serves the same role as Goyim, or its countless equivalents in culturea the world over. We are told implicitly–it is explicit, but the full terms of the deal never discussed–by cultural relativists, most of our thought leaders, that the cost of global peace is the sacrifice of our identities. Consumerism is a gradualistic way of accomplishing that goal; the rejection of religion–normally the core component of any sense of identity–a more direct one.
To put it in a perhaps strange way, we need funny hats. We need funny shoes. We need some way of saying this person is this and not that. We have to be able to differentiate one another. “Emo” is simultaneously a recognition that our culture is dying, and a solution to that, by creating what we call a “subculture”.
Hogwarts is a subculture. It is quirky and appealing, and the fact that it “breaks the rules”, by existing unapologetically by its own rules, is cloaked by the fact that it is filled with fantastic and unexpected elements. Rowling shows great creativity in distancing them from us in this way.
We see, there, what we want, here, but cannot find. In my view, culture develops naturally and organically, if not STOPPED. There is the problem: all incipient cultural formations that exist outside of the leftist egalitarian creed to which so many of our thought leaders desperately cling–and that is the word–are opposed by them.
The war of one against the other is to be replaced, in their view, with the permanent victory of one class over another, with peace maintained by violence and thought control. Few lack the vision to see this clearly, but not all. Those are the nasty ones.
We also need this concept of Evil and the noble crusade. By combining all of these elements, Rowling surrepetiously–likely unconsciously for her as well, since whe appears sentimentally attached to purported humanitarian activities–inserts back into our shared mythic life medicine many, many people desperately need.