[HPFGU-Movie] Re: Harry and Sirius
Richard
hp at plum.cream.org
Mon Dec 5 03:13:23 UTC 2005
At 01:39 05/12/2005 , Sherry Gomes wrote:
><...> Both Lupin and Dumbledore are
>professors, teachers of Harry's not personally close enough. Suddenly, in
>Sirius, Harry has someone he can think of as all his. his thinking at the
>beginning of GOF the book, since the movie didn't bring this out, was that
>he wanted someone like a parent. Neither Lupin nor Dumbledore filled that
>role for him.
Why not? Sorry, I don't buy the "he's a teacher, he's not all mine"
argument. Neither from a lit-crit standpoint, nor from a 15 year-old's. (I
don't know why, but I feel compelled to admit that I know exactly what that
15 year-old felt like, I was there, in very similar personal - if less
dramatic - circumstances.)
Dumbledore is the next best thing to a parent Harry's had for the last four
years. He's been close, available and fairly open (as far as Harry knows).
He's in charge of the battle against Voldemort. Yes, he's busy, but Harry's
having dreams about ol' Voldy and he doesn't think that Dumbledore *might*
be interested? (As it happens, he is, as he later admits that Sirius told
him all about it). Dumbledore is in the best position to help Harry; he's
free, he's respected and he knows more than most about everything that's
been going since Voldy's downfall. Sirius is in hiding somewhere far away,
has limited access to current information and knows virtually nothing about
what's happened for the last 14 years. A month earlier, at the end of PoA,
he didn't even know Snape was a Hogwarts teacher, despite having visited
the grounds on several occasions. So he's not even particularly observant.
Rationally, whom does Harry contact? The one who doesn't know what's going on.
Emotionally, who is he close to? Someone he first met a month earlier, who
admittedly gave him his Firebolt as 14 years-worth of birthday presents,
who slashed the Fat Lady's portrait to pieces and caused the suspension of
Quidditch, who isn't in a position to tell him a great deal about his dad
other than in letters (not that Harry actually asks him anything about his
dad - and nor does Sirius volunteer anything - which is meant to be the
reason for their closeness).
Oh no, the old guy who's guided him through his adventures and kept him
safe, who's allowed him to break more than a few rules, who gave him his
dad's invisibility cloak and knew his dad very well, who bent the rules to
get him on the Quidditch team and provided him with his first broom, and
knows pretty much everything that's going on isn't a good substitute parent
or advisor. No way.
Oh, we (and Harry) forgot. The plot demands that Harry have as little
contact with Dumbledore as possible (the other way around is permissible).
>And Lupin drops out of his life in the whole year between the end of POA
>and the beginning of OOTP. Whereas Sirius has been in touch. Sorry, it
>makes perfect sense to me, and I don't think i've helped clarify it for you.
Sorry, but the only reason why Sirius is in Harry's life in GoF is because
Harry invites (or drags) him into it. Sirius writes to Harry only because
Harry writes to him first. Would Lupin have reacted much differently? I
suspect not.
To drag this subject back to the movies, though, I think both PoA and GoF
did a marvellous job with the relationship. As I mentioned earlier, there's
actually more dialogue in the film than in the PoA book around the
beginning of the relationship, and there's a subtle implication that
there's been more conversation between Harry and Sirius between the end of
the shack scene and moving into the tunnel (the book gives the impression
that we witness every moment from entering the shack up to and beyond
Lupin's transformation), which makes the birth of the relationship more
believable.
In GoF, the relationship is presented in more natural terms, as if it's not
to the exclusion of any other: writing to Sirius about the dream is
Hermione's idea rather than Harry's (with an implication that there's been
other Harry-Sirius correspondence that we don't know about because it's
inconsequential to the plot), there's only the one contact in the fire, and
Harry's "support group" remains more or less the same it's always been.
Building on this relationship in OotP, especially given Harry's alienation
from Dumbledore, becomes natural and believable, even without the dramatic
hospital scenes from the end of Book-GoF.
--
Richard, desperately trying to limit book-discussion mode.
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