Explaining the Hedwig Flight Scene

[caliburncy at yahoo.com]

--- In HPFGU-Movie at y..., hertopos at h... wrote:
> --- caliburnCY at yahoo.com wrote:
> > <snip hopefully helpful explanation of the Hedwig Flight Scene>
> > Is it brilliant?  Hardly.  Is it superfluous?  Perhaps.  But
> > since we can't change it, at least understanding the intent
> > behind it will perhaps make it more watchable for everyone.
> 
> Actually, I really love that scene. It was the most beautiful scene 
> in the movie.

Well, personally, I liked it too, though my explanation does not make 
that clear (my first explanation--eons (okay, one day) ago--did, but 
this last one didn't).  I often try and make a very conscious and 
concerted effort (and generally fail, as is inevitable) to separate 
my personal opinions of things from my more objective considerations 
of merit, so it is probably hard to tell at times to what extent I 
personally agree with certain things that I say. :-)

So when I said it was hardly brilliant I meant that it is not exactly 
very original to have flight symbolizing "letting go"; in fact, a 
more "snooty" critic would be likely to consider it a teensy bit 
contrived.  And when I said that understanding the intent might make 
it more "watchable", I really meant more for anyone that was curious 
about what the heck the point was (which is admittedly a little 
vague) then I did for myself.  Personally I thought it was, even 
beyond the metaphor, rather visually striking--but I'm also a sucker 
for a good winter scene.

In fact, it brings up an interesting issue that is peculiar to 
speculative fiction (sci-fi and fantasy), which is the problem of 
literalism.  A couple people--I believe Cindy and Rita--said that 
they thought at first that Harry was sending a letter somewhere.  
This is a quite logical assumption, and exposes an issue that writers 
of speculative fiction can run into, which is that since there are 
all sorts of "implausibilities" in this genre of story, sometimes 
things are meant literally and the metaphors are therefore harder to 
identify.  For a quick and dirty example, in a typical novel, 
describing Mr. Anderson as "a mouse", is likely to be immediately 
understood as a metaphor, but in speculative fiction there is always 
the possibility that he really *is* a mouse.  So in this instance, 
some viewers watched the scene expecting it to serve some more 
literal purpose, and were quite understandably surprised when it 
didn't appear to do so.  So visual metaphors like this become a tad 
trickier to convey than they might be otherwise.

-Luke