DD, the Dursleys, and Identifying with Muggles in Potterverse

Sydney sydpad at yahoo.com
Fri Sep 8 09:39:13 UTC 2006


No: HPFGUIDX 158018


> > Betsy Hp:
> > It's the use of magic that tilts it for me.  A wizard using his 
> wit or intelligence or basic decency to put the Dursleys in 
> > their "place" I'm fine with.  But when a wizard uses his magic 
> he's taking advantage of an extreme power difference.

> Tonks:
> If a person with an IQ of 135 takes on a person with an IQ of 100 or 
> 110 and uses their "wit" as you say, isn't that using a "power" that 
> the second person doesn't have? 

Sydney:

Oooh, I think the power differential is much bigger than that. It's
like Oscar Wilde making fun of a person with Down's Syndrome.  It
wasn't funny to me, it was just sad.  

I didn't think much of that scene, but then, I've never liked the
Dursleys scenes in general.  A lot of the pleasure I get from HP is
how you can pretty much always see the point of view of everyone in
the scene-- even if you don't agree with it, you feel it's coming from
a human place and you understand their goals, and that gives her
sequences a terrific improvisational vigor.  Even Voldemort I feel
JKR's put effort into getting into his head and trying to 'act' him
honestly.  The Dursleys are just plastic;  I wasn't surprised when JKR
said Vernon was the character she most disliked in the series.  She
never bothers to get into his head at all--  I mean, it's not like
it's ridiculous for a muggle to be afraid of someone who can do magic.
 I'd have an undercurrent of fear myself every time I dealt with a
wizard, I think.  But, I don't know, I just don't feel JKR really
engages with the fear as anything other than a joke, and that really
holds the scenes back, I think.

I think it's this that gives this scene the 'staged' quality that Snow
refers to.  I feel that way about all the Dursley scenes, actually. 
They're like actors who aren't quite sure who they are or what their
motivations are, and that's exactly when scenes get 'stagey'.

Actually, I should qualify 'the Durselys'.  I think Petunia and Dudley
are in for some revelations, maybe.  But the tone of their scenes is
pretty much set by Vernon.


Tonks:

  Think of 
> what Hagrid would have done instead.  Or what Hagrid has done 
> instead when he first met the Dursleys.  If you look at those two 
> examples, I think we can see that DD was a gentleman in this 
> situation
> And think of what a DE might do with them. That would be abuse of 
> magical power. So I think we have to keep perspective here.


Sydney:

I'd rather think of what Arthur Weasely did, which was respectful but
expressive of his disdain.  Arthur Weasley's takedown of the Dursleys
was so much classier to me.  He was geniunely indignant and addressed
the Dursleys as equals, saying, as one adult human to another, I find
your behaviour apalling. And I certainly hope I don't go through life
with 'hey, at least I'm not a mass-murdering psychopath!' as a moral
baseline.  I thought what Hagrid and the Twins did was absolutely
apalling and I really don't want to use it as a standard.  

Plus, it's all over now.  It's like the boss coming in after a project
has tanked and saying, 'well, you should have done this and that' and
having a go at a pipsqueak manager.  Sure it's nice to see the
pipsqueak manager squirm, but 9/10ths of me is thinking, gee, boss,
and where were you when all this was going on, seeing as you appear to
know everything and have all the power here?


Tonks:

> I think of Muggles as those humans who don't see or don't want to 
> see that there is a world outside of the world of matter as 
> experienced by their 5 senses.  I see the WW as similar to the world 
> of the mystic or the spiritual world.


Sydney:

See, I think to a large extent this is how Rowling sees it, and it's
fine on a symbolic level.  But then she has to go and make it an
explicitly genetic thing.  That's where I can't just pretend that,
yeah, I would totally just happen to have this vanishingly rare
genetic mutation!  You know, it reminds me a bit of the moment in the
new Star Wars movies when they test Anakin's blood for The Force.  At
that point, the entire spiritual structure of the series just
collapsed.  The Force wasn't something that was available to anyone. 
It was available only to the very few who were born with it.  It's
some form of creepy Hyper-Calvinism
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper-Calvinism) with an explicitly
genetic angle.  

In JKR's world she at least doesn't go that extra step and be explicit
about the spiritual symbolism of 'having magic'.  And I'm really glad
she doesn't, because frankly the implications aren't pretty.  It makes
the Death Eaters spiritually superior to even the best of muggles, for
one thing!


Betsy:

>So even when it's the Dursleys I can't condone it. Just like I
>couldn't condone the school bully getting beaten up by his father.

Sydney:

Wow, that's eerie... one of my 'formative experiences', I guess you'd
call it, is when I got into a fight with the school bully in Jr. High.
 I was, what, 12 maybe?  Anyways, it was the classic bully guy, the
kind everyone calls by their first and last name, and I think he was
teasing me and I challenged him to a fight.  Which was dumb because he
was this huge kid and I'm a scrawny girl.  I got a lot of points in
the ol' schoolyard for showing up.  I think I lasted about 10 seconds
and he laid me out with a punch in the gut.    The kid wasn't at at
school for the next two weeks, and we found out he'd been hospitalized
by his dad for hitting a girl.  So that was my introduction to 'irony'.

--Sydney










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