Posted on 11/28/2005 12:03:59 PM PST by voletti
"There are dark days ahead, Harry," says Dumbledore, Harry's mentor and the avuncular headmaster of Hogwart's Academy at the end of the recently released film, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, "days when we will be forced to choose between what is right and what is easy." One of the most magical things about J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter books and now films, the last two of which have been just splendid, is the way they subtly weave lessons about ethical choice and character into their gripping plots. Indeed, the plots themselves pivot on the crucial choices of the major characters for good or for evil, choices that at once form and reveal character.
Attention to moments of choice and to the development of character, for example, in the latest Potter film and in the wonderful film version of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, can help to educate the moral imagination of young and old alike. As Karen Bohlin, a senior scholar at the Center for the Advancement of Ethics and Character at Boston University, urges in her new book Teaching Character Education Through Literature: Awakening the Moral Imagination in Secondary Classrooms the challenge for parents and educators is to "mitigate the range of negative narrative images and stimuli that feed the imaginations and aspirations of young people." The real danger in our culture is that many children grow up in a moral and spiritual vacuum into which the worst of Hollywood popular culture — film, music, and video games — marches to set up its own pedagogy, which atrophies the moral imagination and deforms desire.
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalreview.com ...
Harry Potter is the Debil!
What's a Debil?
The Barbie movies have also stepped into this void.
The next movie, if based on the book, will be a stinging indictment of government and political correctness.
I agree.
I still remember one iof Disney'sfirst animations I'd seen "The lion king". That had lots of moral education in it there!
In the movie "The Waterboy", Bobby Boucher's mother always referred to things she didn't like or didn't want Bobby doing as "The Debil." It was her pronounciation of Devil with her thick cajun accent.
Yes, of course.
Every time I see Dick Clark I now think of Satan thanks to that movie.
Harry Potter is great.
Harry Potter celebrates self-rightuous egotism. I was struck at the end of the current Potter movie with a cathedral scene in which the camera panned to sunlight bursting through the dome. My immediate thought was, "There is no God there."
This is the problem with Potter. It is godless. It lacks a foundation for morality. It is simply the challenge of one malcontent against another. In this moral morass there is no good or evil. There are only variations on self worship.
Thanks for the ping.
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