Best Films of 2007 #7: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

As one of the few people on the planet who hasn't read any of the novels (yet), I was completely blown away by this film. Order of the Phoenix is probably the first movie in this list that starts the trend of an achingly melancholic meditation on our current state of affairs (this trend will not let up throughout the rest of this countdown), constructing a world in which our hero's sense of being alone becomes thoroughly palpable (the absence of his parents has never seemed so present, and this is emphasized even more as he loses his last real relative) even as he surrounds himself with an admiring group of proteges with whom he can face his personal demons. But this is also a film that realizes that a genuine politics emerges from personal relations (that theoretical mantra about the personal being the political all too often misinterpreted in the reverse manner, that politics impinges upon the personal, only reinstating a destructive desire to separate the two). After all, throughout the course of the film, we see a government official respond to a personal grudge by constructing a security state at Hogwarts, using controversy around this kind of domestic threat to encroach unjustly on lands that fall under the sovereignty of other peoples seen as sub-human (the entire centaur sub-plot). All this in a children's movie!

It's dark stuff, in other words, and a (good) sign of the times that we're educating our children in the often subtle and insidious ways in which our global and domestic politics actually operates. And in the image of our lonesome hero and his friends flanked by rows and rows of prophecies of the future (that resilient image of the crystal ball) as he steps up to fight wraiths who emerge from the shadows and yet who are all too familiar, we have a much more positive and complex image of conflict than is offered in some of the more deliberately "subversive" or "topical" films this year (see, for instance, the execrable The Kingdom, although more on that later). In the final reel of the film, Harry holds in his hands a prophecy which promises to unlock all of the epistemological problems and gaps that have led to this conflict, but he wisely tosses it aside in the realization that it is precisely the attempt to seal all knowledge and foresee the future in a single-minded way that gives strength to his enemies. That this happens just moments before a devastatingly brief death scene only punctuates how complicated this politics within the nexus of power and knowledge can actually get. In other words, the film offers an excellent example of a lonesome young hero, navigating the dark, labyrinthine depths of the current political climate, and making some of the ultimate sacrifices while doing so. In this sense, Harry Potter is not only a wonderful role model for children, but one to whom we can all look for guidance.