When I was 12 years old I was a terribly lazy reader. I didn’t enjoy reading anything that wasn’t the sports section of the newspaper and I basically lied on book reports. (Not exactly the ideal start for someone who is now trying to write for a living.) In the summer before seventh grade, my only concerns in life were keeping my batting average up for my travel baseball team. My parents liked to buy me books on the off chance I had the desire to be intellectually stimulated. The result is a bookcase decorated with unread novels.
Until one day my dad bought me Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets (Yea, I read the second book first) and for the following eleven years JK Rowling’s masterpiece took over my imagination and at a socially unacceptable time, my life. Up until my senior year in college I was still secretly hoping to one day get a letter in the mail requesting I attend Hogwarts.
This week the trailer for the Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was released and it got me thinking. How much of my life has been dominated by Harry Potter? By the time the film series is said and done I’ll have spent 12 years reading and rereading seven books while watching eight movies. Over time I began to feel like I was growing up with these fictional characters though the precocious, awkward, and pressure-filled years.
I mean who doesn’t want to know magic, go to school in a castle, and fly on broomsticks? Trust me I know how ridiculously childish this sounds, especially for someone without health insurance. There are definitely more important things for me to be concerned about other than the desire to have an owl deliver my mail.
I don’t know exactly what it is about Harry Potter that released my inner nerd, but there was no stopping it. Barnes & Noble midnight book release parties were a summer routine. I never dressed like a Gryffindor student or walked around casually with a broom, but I was a lion in sheep’s clothing ready to devour the book. The beginnings of my insomnia could be traced back to routinely reading Harry Potter books till 5 a.m. and then going to bed trying to dream of being apart of that world.
When it was originally announced that Warner Brothers was going to adapt the books into live-action films I was more than a little excited. In retrospect it was inevitable, but at the time I didn’t think technology existed to accurately depict the magic of the books. As a budding daydreamer I wanted a role in the film and sparingly practicing my British accent at night with no one around. I thought I could play the role of Fred and George Weasley’s friend, Lee Jordan. He turned out to be black with dreadlocks. Needless to say, my acting career never got off the ground.
But the films were pure genius, creating a tangible onscreen product that realizes the potential of our imaginations. Everything from the all-star British cast to the rotating door of directors the films has been on point. Director Christopher Columbus (Home Alone, Mrs. Doubtfire) set the tone by establishing the setting and capturing the sense of wonder. The directing reigns were then handed over to the brilliant Alfonso Cauron (Children of Men) who introduced the dark element to the series making it edgier. Mike Newell (Donnie Brasco) took the helm to direct Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, the most epic and unpredictable book with the exception of the finale.
The last four films were put in the hands of the least established of all the Harry Potter directors, but David Yates has arguably done the best job. Yates has had to handle the most dense and complicated novels and has done so with accuracy and flair.
As I got older and older I began to realize that I was roughly five to seven years older and two to three feet taller than the average Harry Potter fan. In high school I was too busy trying to be Ferris Bueller to admit my Harry Potter fandom. The search for “cool” was too important. I wasn’t ashamed, but I just didn’t find the need to let everyone know that I spent time reading Harry Potter rumor websites on my home dial-up Dell computer.
When college came along the “nerd-chic” movement was starting to become a trend. So Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone stayed my in DVD player for roughly six months. Chicks still weren’t knocking down my door, but I clearly no longer needed to hide Harry Potter DVDs as if it were my porn collection.
Over the course of the next year the Harry Potter chapter of my life will be complete with the films ending in , but I’m sure it’ll never fully close. I’ll continue to reread the books everyone blue moon and watch the movies on rainy days. But this will be the last time I’ll experience the magic for the first time. It’s definitely bittersweet, but I’ll always relate my childhood/teens/early twenties with the worldwide phenomenon called Harry Potter. And there is nothing wrong with that.
