With The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, one of the public's complaints was the following: how could such a project be given the green light when the trilogy, so alive in the collective memory, had been released in theaters between 2001 and 2003 Creators Patrick McKay and J.D. Payne avoided certain reluctance by setting the action in the Second Age of Middle-earth, a fertile ground at the audiovisual level, far from Frodo Baggins and his fellowship of the ring. But, in the case of Harry Potter, it is more tempting to question the need for a television adaptation, as is being negotiated: the initial idea is that the HBO Max production covers exactly the same story and chronology of the films released between 2001 and 2011. And yet I would say that this is excellent news for readers of J.K. Rowling.
The movies allowed the fictional universe to become even more popular, introducing itself to potential readers and allowing those allergic to paper to learn terms like “wingardium leviosa” or the houses of Slytherin, Gryffindor, Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw. But, as we readers could see when watching The Sorcerer's Stone, it was a very fair adaptation. The cast headed by Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint was a success, considering the young ages of the actors. But the script by Steve Kloves and the direction by Chris Columbus were functional. They presented the iconic, endearing or argumentatively decisive elements of the novels but often their presence remained in the anecdote.
The audiovisual proposal, in fact, refused to have its own vision of the material and the text by J.K. Rowling to childish, superficial and inconsequential amusement. There was not that feeling of wonder when approaching Hogwarts or discovering the first spells of the students of the educational institution. Until Alfonso Cuarón stepped behind the scenes with The Prisoner of Azkabán, the film versions did not understand the combination of mystery, wonder and even terror that the novels evoked. I also understood that this reality was a world, unlimited, fruitful, with which to dream. And the saddest thing is that, after Cuarón, the stimulating look and identity was lost again: the Harry Potter saga on the screen was always the shadow of what it could have been, so obsessed that it was to be for everyone. audiences and faithful to Rowling's material.
A new adaptation, therefore, is good news because it implies that there will be another opportunity to squeeze the literary material. Why do we visualize the adaptation as a reboot of the saga when, in reality, it will have to start from scratch at an audiovisual level? The television medium, luckily, now has budgets and production teams with the ability to recreate new realities, atmospheres and with visual effects to match, at least without Warner Bros bothering. The most ambitious visual and economic fictions, moreover, tend to share one characteristic: they have an adult point. And, since the public that grew up with Harry Potter is already grown, it is a golden opportunity to dare to approach the material with less naivety.
In addition, a television series of eight or ten episodes implies entering a certain everyday life, especially if you want to structure the story taking advantage of the virtues of the medium and not focus its appeal on the main plot related to Voldemort. Hogwarts friendships, enmities and first crushes will be able to be addressed in more depth; you can explore the magical corridors, melancholic ghosts, risky classes and friends; and, namely, perhaps the houses of Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw, always ignored, can be better integrated. Turning each literary installment into a television season means being able to recreate a key experience: being one more Gryffindor student, the one that was the secret of the novels beyond whether Voldemort appeared or not.
It will also be interesting to see how fiction puts the public between a rock and a hard place. We live in a present of trenches, of ideological bubbles encouraged by algorithms and with a progressive vision that does not accept the gray, in which verdicts are issued with the speed of a fleeting click and with the forcefulness that using only 280 characters grants. In these debates with purist visions, there tends to be an increasingly clear position on the dilemma of separating the artist from the work. Can? When it comes to contemporary authors who can still be enriched by his work, they usually say no.
This very judgmental mentality becomes downright uncomfortable when it involves giving up Harry Potter because J.K. Rowling is by all accounts a transphobic woman, exhibiting an almost unhealthy fixation on the collective. Does this mean that if we had known about her ideology before reading the books, we should have given them up and missed out on the magical, immersive, adventurous universe that lies at the heart of her? Imagine the cultural, identity and defining sacrifice that we would have perpetrated. And that leads us to the following: who loses if we reject the resulting cultural product based on ideological and not artistic criteria, especially if the work does not reflect the transphobia of its author, relegated to the role of producer?
