It's not really about any of the things you think it's about
It has always been true that the best fantasy worlds hold a mirror to our own. By presenting us with a distorted but still recognisable reflection of reality, they're most memorable when exploring social or philosophical issues in the guise of harmless escapism.From the acerbic political satire of Gulliver's encounters in Lilliput and Brobdingnag to the suspiciously human issues challenging Kirk on the alien planets of Star Trek, we respond best to fictional versions of our own world that tell us something troubling or profound about it.
Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them is a superficial kids' film whose main pleasure derives from the impressive conjuring to life on screen of a menagerie of magical creatures within a universe of wands, wizards, spells and elves reassuringly familiar to millions of Harry Potter fans worldwide, despite its relocation to a different country and era. Its plot is straightforward enough, its characters likeable but hardly complex and it wears its most obvious themes clearly on its wizard's sleeve: the tensions between muggle and magic, the toxic ideology of racial superiority embodied in the film's somewhat predictable villain, a love of wildlife and the need to understand and protect it, even some slightly darker stuff about the psychological damage caused by parental abuse and religious indoctrination. Oh and standard Hollywood tropes of falling in love with inner decency rather than looks, following your true passion (baking), and the inexorable journey from hapless shmuck to fearless hero – surprisingly watchable thanks to the beguiling very unHollywood charms of Dan Fogler.
But for me, it's a film about ironing.
Bear with me here. While the issues the film raises above are all handled deftly enough, none of them is especially interesting or thought-provoking. My initial reaction to Fantastic Beasts was that it's proficient by-the-book fantasy which delivers on its key ambition to offer fresh material to an ageing and more mature Potter fanbase without retreading too much ground or relying on too many legacy storylines. I was pleasantly surprised by how few links with the original franchise there were, just one or two mentions in passing of a couple of familiar names. It's 'dark' in the same post-Twilight mode of the later films, acknowledging its audience's demographics to introduce an element of menace as counterpoint to the zoological cuteness of its core. And the 1920s New York setting and adult cast affords a welcome change of aesthetic and tone1. We're definitely not in Hogwarts any more.
But I initially wasn't wowed. I thought it had a few narrative issues too, with an unnecessarily slow and disjointed exposition that demands too much of the viewer in the first hour for too little reward.
It's also a film about paperwork. And tin cans. The soul-crushing tedium of a Fordist economy based on labour-intensive production lines.
The more I thought about it, the more I realised that the most interesting themes are subjects Fantastic Beasts touches on only tangentially, perhaps even accidentally. They're ideas that are for the most part unrelated to the main story, and explored in brief vignettes or trivial dialogue.
Let's start with a simple question. Why is there so much bureaucracy in the wizarding world? Why is a fantastical world of magical possibility so often depicted as prosaic and routine? One thing that Fantastic Beasts shares with the later Potter films is an obsession with administration – both worlds are governed by large ministries of politicians, clerks and apparatchiks. These buildings are cavernous, stultifying places, the realm of dogma and process and officialdom, the antithesis of "magic". The point is driven home by the existence of a "Wand Permit Office", a clever juxtaposition of the mystical and mundane.
No doubt this is intended as an amusing, ironic parallel with the muggle world. Even wizards can't escape the onerous demands of organising their society and managing their affairs. I also wonder if J K Rowling has a particular dislike of faceless bureaucracy, perhaps from her time as a single parent forced to interact with an uncaring civil service to survive. She does seem to take unwarranted pleasure in (sometimes literally) grotesque caricatures of any kind of administrative functionary.
And yet. In one scene, we see a basement office at MACUSA. (Every time I heard this it brought to mind the Yakuza crime syndicate, which may or may not have been deliberate). In this basement, there are dozens of desks but almost no wizards present. They're not needed. All the paperwork is magic. Forms are self-filling. Paper pushes itself.
I didn't think too much about this until a later scene in Tina and Queenie's apartment. Jacob is struck by the application of magic to various household chores – cleaning, ironing, cooking and so on. Why would Queenie and Tina bother with these tiresome tasks when they can just use their wizarding powers. This is magic at its most banal, yet in its direct, beneficial impact on the lives of its practitioners, its most powerful. Imagine laundry that irons itself. Imagine never having to cook because ingredients chop and assemble and heat themselves in mid-air before landing on a table that sets itself. This is heaven.
Fantastic Beasts is set in an era years before the widespread availability of common household labour-saving devices, the washing machine, vacuum cleaner, electric cooker and so on which revolutionised the lives of many women in the US from the 1950s onward. But thanks to their magical gifts, Tina and Queenie are like time travellers to a future world of emancipated women free to follow their careers, liberated from the drudgery of housework.
Is the humdrum, quotidian nature of magic a key motif of the film? Maybe not. But I couldn't help notice how many times we saw magical irons, self-drying washing and the like. Of course, this is a film set in 1929, before the ubiquity of electricity, afforded by the development of a national grid, and all the modern devices we take for granted; in this respect, the utility of magic in a domestic context is even more of a godsend for those fortunate enough to be wizard-kind. The gulf between them and the "no-mag"es has never been wider in a Harry Potter film.
And speaking of ordinary people, consider Jacob. Jacob Kowalski is a man condemned to a life on the production line in a canning factory, his dreams of owning a bakery crushed by a bank unswayed by his passion, utterly uninterested in his craft. In the muggle world, cans don't fill themselves. Humans like Jacob have to devote their lives to these kinds of repetitive jobs in order to survive, regardless of their talents or desires. When Jacob sees the wizardry in Tina's apartment, it's a tantalising glimpse of what his life could have been, were his world only infused with the same abilities.
For Jacob, the real magic is not powerful spells of disappearance, teleportation or battle. It's not even the extraordinary creatures he encounters in Newt's briefcase sanctuary. It's about liberation from a mind-numbing job to allow him to pursue his ambition to be a baker, an artisan, making pastries and confections from recipes handed down from his grandmother. (Note that Jacob brings this artistry back from Europe- a subtle dig at the relative values of the two continents perhaps?)
And this brings us to the one really interesting theme of Fantastic Beasts. In our modern world, men like Jacob are no longer employed in a canning factory. These site have been automated; robotic production lines have made the likes of Jacob literally redundant. The jobs have gone. The scene towards the end of the film where dozens of men pour out of the factory gates after clocking off is as alien to us now as any of the strange creatures or sorcery elsewhere in the film. In the present day, two or three supervisors would be leaving the factory, after a day monitoring the computerised machinery - the magic of the 21st century.
Jacob's plans to make doughnuts for a living are pooh-poohed by the bank manager, who chides him with the fact that the latest machines can churn out thousands of doughnuts an hour. What use is Jacob? At the time, this felt like merely a plot mechanism, to explain why Jacob is rejected for his loan, despite his undoubted skill. But as a comment on the relationship between man and machine, with magic as a metaphor for automation, it's a resonant line that brings into sharp focus one of the most interesting ideas in the film.
I watched footage the other day of Elon Musk's self-driving Tesla car. This still feels genuinely magical to me, even though most experts predict they will be commonplace in 20 to 30 years. The automation of factories is now unremarkable to us. But the development of more sophisticated AIs and improved robotics means this kind of 'magic' is about to transform our lives. We too, like Jacob, will be freed from even more drudgery - and also from our jobs (white collar professions too). Like the absent clerks in the Magical Ministry, and the workers in the canning plant, we will be 'liberated' from work because of automation. Magic isn't even really a metaphor for this; they're basically synonymous.
But we can't all be bakers. The scene I found the most disturbing in Fantastic Beasts was when Queenie uses magic to conjure a beautiful strudel from thin air. This is Jacob's only special talent, his one true gift, his his ticket out of the canning factory, a craft he's spent years honing with love and dedication. And yet, it is reproduced with a spell, like the ironing, washing, form-filling and so on - with no human intervention. Jacob would be utterly superfluous in the wizarding world.
Jacob tastes the strudel and declares it delicious. The irony in that moment was the darkest thing in the entire film.
Because this is what's coming for all of us. From the Luddites and Saboteurs in the 19th century to the striking miners and "left-behind" rust belt of the US in 2016, the challenge of adapting to a society with less and less need for human employment has been the story of the modern age.
So in this respect, Fantastic Beasts, despite its cutesy animals and superficial narrative has plenty to tell us about the world we live in, and it's unsettling. Like Newt's DemiGuise, it just takes some effort to see it.
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| Magic strudel |
1 One thing however did occur to me about this: Fantastic Beasts is set in New York, the world's financial capital, in 1926. I can't have been the only viewer expecting that one of the side-effects of a wizard unleashing all manner of mayhem on New York was to instigate a pattern of events that would inadvertently lead to the Wall Street Crash a mere three years later. The opening scenes are even set in a bank. But nope, nothing. Not even a hint of a connection. In fact, by the end of the film, all damage to the city's infrastructure is magically repaired (no need for builders, brickies, plumbers etc either in this world - sorry, blue collar workers) and the memories of all its citizens wiped. I found this puzzling. Of course it's not necessary to integrate all fantasy stories set in the past into real history (although many films have successfully managed it) but it seems to me like a missed opportunity.
In fact, the film shuns anything overtly political. While the uneasy coexistence of muggle and wizard would be an obvious analogy for racial tensions in American society, particularly during a period when discrimination against all minorities was widespread, any reference to actual racism is scrupulously avoided. The wizarding world is clearly colour-blind, evidenced by its black president - eight decades before Obama - and the mistrust of the muggle world is mostly built on a desire to get along with minimal interference rather than anything more sinister. With one notable exception, obviously, and he ends up defeated and carted off as a criminal (sorry for the spoiler).
