How Bush Killed Harry Potter: An Exposé

Warner Bros' film, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, was originally scheduled to be released this November. The film was shot and edited and the studio released a couple of trailers, one a 15-second teaser trailer preceding The Dark Knight in theatres and just a few weeks ago, they released another teaser trailer, this time much more substantial and just under a minute and a half long. This second trailer depicted a movie that, many would argue, really does the book justice in a way that the first couple of Harry Potter movies (directed by Christopher Columbus) did not.
This one is no Disney movie but a very dark story of madness, murder, and magic. It is just these sorts of themes that some parents would rather their children not read about or watch in the movie theatre, particularly that last one. In fact, several fundamentalist Christians have denounced Harry Potter and even called for the banning of the popular series in libraries and schools because they "promote witchcraft" among children. Apparently, this discomfort among Bush's fundamentalist base translated contributed to a decision by the rating board in Los Angeles to give the finished 6th film a rating of R, attempting to limit the number of children who would see this film or at least censor the content of the film. In order to avoid retaining this R rating, Warner Bros is forced to return to the set, reediting what had been the final product and even refilming particular scenes. Because the studio is trying to play this off as the fault of the writer's strike (how dare they want to get paid for their work) which ended six months ago and isn't admitting to the ratings scare, we can only hope one day the original cut of this film will be released. This is one case where the director's cut of a film is of real interest.

Now, you might agree that some of the dark material of Harry Potter is of questionable value for young children or any children for that matter. I too think that Harry Potter is a very violent story that includes a great deal of murder and death that children might have difficulty dealing with. The question however is not so much whether this latest Harry Potter film deserved an R rating but whether the MPA is rating films in an equitable fashion. Many of us could give examples of films with very violent content or even sexual references and bawdy humor that received a very kind rating of PG or PG-13. So, my question is: Is it possible that Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is more violent and dangerous for our children to see than that latest very violent James Bond film, Casino Royale or The Dark Knight, both of which received a PG-13 rating?

I can't remember if I recommended it already or not but the Korean movie, Kim Ki-duk's film "Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter, and Spring", is a very good (Buddhist) tale. I think of it often. Was thinking of it while listening to an episode of Chinesepod today about monks (the movie is about a monk and his son/disciple and so is the children's story in the ChinesePod episode). I also highly recommend Chinesepod (did this already on my other blog, Yinyangwriter, last year.

Irrelevant Nonsense

I am so busy again...writing my novel and typing in another for revision and potential publication. Here's something amusing a fellow writer had on his blog. Apparently, I had the word "kill" on my blog 3 times too many and 1 "dead", thus the rating. Oooooooo...

"We Think a Brother did This."

I believe it was 60 minutes that I was watching last night where they had a story on how crime often runs in families and were making the claim that this was a genetic connection between relatives. Unfortunately, this was just one more case where the writers/producers of a story failed to work through an argument logically. Their argument is that because the children of convicted criminals often become criminals themselves, the family carries some sort of criminal DNA. Of course since many of the people we have convicted and imprisoned are african-american, this was really the old story claiming that black people are genetically criminal. Wow, how we have progressed as a society! Not. But, what is wrong with this argument? Surely, I can't disagree that there is some connection, given the statistics...afterall, I'm a mathematician. It is not, however, the statistics that I am questioning. It's the logic of the argument, the conclusions they are drawing from that data. Given the same information, it is very easy to make a completely different and not unreasonable argument about why some criminals have "criminal families." First, consider who most convicted criminals are, where they come from. Never was white-collar crime discussed in the story. We weren't apparently talking about Martha Stewart or Scooter Libby. And most prisoners in our society do come from disadvantaged, low-income communities with terrible school systems (which I have taught in). If you live in Crenshaw, CA or Camden, NJ, drug use and violence are familiar parts of your life. Okay, so here is where the crime is coming from and it didn't require any nascent criminal tendencies. When people have very little to look forward to in their lives and few positive role models in their community, it's easy to get pulled in by the bad crowd. Just go talk to any group of teenagers if you doubt that.

But then, once imprisoned, surely we cannot expect their children to be attending ivy league schools and starting fortune 500 companies or otherwise being well on the way to completing their American dream? By looking at the children or even the siblings of convicted criminals, we are immediately narrowing our focus to those people who are also living in an environment that has demonstrated itself to be conducive to criminal behavior. If your father is in prison, then you are growing up in a single-parent household and thus your mother is working her butt off to support you all the time and therefore likely not around, as much as she might like, to keep you from giving in to the temptations of the neighborhood. It's a well documented fact of psychology that people often unconsciously copy the behavior of "lost" parents, no matter how abusive. These kids are disadvantaged and abandoned because their parents are in jail. What's to stop them from following in daddy or mommy's footsteps? I think the producers of that story are focusing entirely on nature and neglecting to look at how "nuture" or environment plays a role in the opportunities that people have in life. And the truth is, it's not always a 'bruther' that did it.

Furthermore, where was the positive side of this? Knowing that relatives are more likely to commit offenses, why don't we use this to enact preventative programs...why not focus all the more on educating those children of our most lost members of society. Believe me, the children aren't lost. They are not doomed by DNA. On the contrary, they need us more than anyone.