Afternoon vipers and thank you for your education and light shining services š
Iām not sure if any of you are familiar with Tortoise news, a slow news website with thoughtful digests. Iāve just come across this article that I thought you might enjoy.
Keep on Rowling
On 26 June, a full quarter-century will have passed since the publication of J.K. Rowlingās Harry Potter and the Philosopherās Stone ā a tale of wizardry, coming of age and good versus evil, launching a seven-book series that has sold more than 500 million copies.
The eight-film franchise that followed has taken $7.7 billion at the box office, while the first two Fantastic Beasts prequel movies have already clocked up close to $1.5 billion.
āAll was wellā: how apt the final words of the seventh and final Potter book must have seemed to those responsible for managing the Hogwarts empire ā until, that is, its creator and presiding spirit decided to take a quite remarkable stand.
Tomorrow, the third instalment of the prequel series ā Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore ā opens across the land, starring Eddie Redmayne as magizoologist Newt Scamander, Jude Law as Dumbledore and Mads Mikkelsen as the wicked Grindelwald.
With his sinuous menace, Mikkelsen is an improvement upon Johnny Depp, who played the part in Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (2018) but resigned at the studioās request after he lost his libel case against The Sun over accusations of wife-beating.
Set in the 1930s, the third movie ā directed once more by David Yates ā retains a sense of fun (enjoy Redmayne chiding his companions for not ādancing properlyā as he tries to keep an army of deadly lobster-like manticores at bay). But there is a darker theme in Grindelwaldās devious plan to go to war to annihilate the worldās Muggle (non-magical) population. Since Dumbeldore is prevented by a blood-oath from taking action against his former lover, it falls to Newt and his amiable gang to confront the magical forces of proto-fascism.
Just another popcorn outing for a billion-dollar franchise, on the face of it. Yet this is the first Rowling-inspired movie since the author intervened dramatically in the fraught debate on gender, trans rights and the reality of biological sex.
On December 19, 2019, after Maya Forstater, a consultant at the Center for Global Development Europe, lost her job over gender-critical posts on social media, Rowling tweeted: āDress however you please. Call yourself whatever you like. Sleep with any consenting adult whoāll have you. Live your best life in peace and security. But force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real?ā
In a single post, Rowlingās public profile was more or less transformed. As the benign overseer of Potter-world she had been a unifying figure, a national treasure almost universally beloved. Yes, she was definitely of the Left ā but never divisively so. Though well-known for her charitable work and personal munificence, she had never been perceived as a writer-activist or political artist: a Bob Dylan, a Joan Baez, a Toni Morrison.
Yet with her support for Forstater, followed by an even more controversial online essay about her personal experience of abuse and fears for women and girls in June 2020, Rowling provoked a backlash of extraordinary scope, scale and poison. She was ā and is ā vilified as ātransphobicā, bigoted and a traitor to the values of inclusivity that her own work was thought to embody.
Leave aside for a moment the tedious argument over whether or not ācancel cultureā exists. In February, the New York Times ran an ad campaign featuring a reader āImagining Harry Potter Without Its Creatorā. Last month, the avant-garde film-maker and enemy of censorship, John Waters, said that he would make an exception for the author: āI have a thing about who I would cancel: JK Rowling, Give her some Preparation H for that transphobia. Whatās the matter with her?ā To this day, Rowlingās social media feeds are routinely filled with rape and murder threats.
All this from trans activists and self-styled āalliesā who have the audacity to use the hashtag #BeKind. And all for suggesting that, in the debate on gender, the hard-won rights of natal women and the reality of biological sex should not be swept aside quite so brazenly by those persuaded that they are on the āright side of historyā.
It is sometimes argued that such attacks are scarcely relevant in the light of Rowlingās āprivilegeā and wealth (as if threats of murder and sexual violence are perfectly acceptable if the woman in question is a billionaire). But this proposition deserves to be turned on its head. What is truly outrageous is that so many other writers, academics and public sector workers who do not have Rowlingās means or status have been driven from their jobs or denied the right to speak by campaigners who will accept nothing less than total capitulation to their ideology.
In Rowlingās bold refusal to be bullied we see a thoroughly modern crossing of the streams of culture, politics and 21st-century notions of social justice. We also see another contemporary phenomenon ā which is the extraordinary political reach of todayās celebrities. Whether it is Jack Monroe advising the Office for National Statistics on how to measure the cost of living; or Marcus Rashford forcing change upon the governmentās provision of free school meals; or Martin Lewis being hailed as āthe real shadow chancellorā: cultural prominence translates into political clout as never before. It is no longer possible to disentangle the world of entertainment and art from the world of power, policy and political controversy.
Safe to say that Rowling could never have envisaged such a role as she scribbled the first drafts of her Potter stories in the cafƩs of Edinburgh, desperately trying to make ends meet and put food on the table for her daughter. The notion that she might one day have a book published was in itself amazing enough.
The idea that, thanks to a global social media network that did not yet exist, she would one day become a pariah to some, but a heroine to many others for her views on gender would have seemed nothing short of fantastical. How ironic, too, that the great writer of magical fiction should have ended up on the front line of reality, defending science and facts against their antagonists.
Nevertheless ā to coin a phrase ā she persisted; and continues to do so. Tomorrow, the 11th film inspired by those stories opens in thousands of cinemas all over the world. All power to her elbow.