Why It Matters:
The Harry Potter Series
I. Mass Culture & Modern Culture
Modern popular culture comes with a paradox: it isn’t popular. What was once a homogenous landscape, where everyone was exposed to the same things and had the same choices, is now a fissured, segmented territory grab, where we all take ownership over distinctive portions of the entertainment map. You have the things you like, I have mine, and the points of overlap are far less common than they used to be.
American entertainment habits could once be lumped together under the generous umbrella of ‘mass culture,’ where everyone, or at least a vast majority of us, participated in a uniform scene. The same TV shows aired in almost every house, the same books were propped on almost every shelf, and everyone would go see the same movies at the theater, often more than once. Culture was indeed consumed massively, and while that sounds like a fanciful and romantic idea, it’s also old-fashioned. Popular culture now is fragmented. Here's an explicit distinction:
Fragmented culture can best be exemplified through its most prolific medium: television. As technology has evolved and digitization has become the norm, television has progressed past the traditional model Americans knew between the 1950s and the early 2000s. When things like satellite or subscription cable entered the picture, the TV landscape broadened, but it didn’t fracture. It took Netflix and multi-platform streaming for that to happen, and the result of the fracture is a culture of consumption habits as varied and diverse as the people who occupy it. At this exact moment, Netflix has The OA, Santa Clarita Diet, Thirteen Reasons Why, Five Came Back, and something called Samurai Gourmet all clamoring for your attention. The platform also puts up a new standup-comedy special every week, and of course still offers its thousands-strong slate of additional TV and movie options. Plus, Netflix isn’t the only streaming service of its kind. There are dozens now. They all have original content, and they all offer a unique array of classics to boot.
That last point is tangentially interesting, because it speaks to the fact that our entertainment choices within fragmented culture can now be unbound by time. The biggest decision consumers have to make these days, aside from the obvious “Do I want this or that?” is “Do I have to experience this now, or can I check it out later?” Cultural touchpoints like Game of Thrones, that seem to require appointment viewing each week, are now outliers instead of the norm. Movies are streamed, repackaged, or pirated at sporadic intervals, and things like rights negotiations and contract details make their public availability more unpredictable. Albums are released without warning and generate almost zero physical footprint. Books? Please. The last time it was important to read a book in the moment was when it was for a grade. What makes all this more complicated is the still-novel concept that past cultural items can be accessed whenever we want. Our computers are time machines. Want to watch the Cheers finale even if you weren’t alive when it aired? Queue it up on Netflix tonight, or tomorrow, or next week. It doesn’t matter.
II. The Mission Statement
Can a fragmented culture be restored to a mass culture? A cynic would say no. People like individualization, and creators understand that. Nothing is meant to be a crowd-pleaser anymore; movies like Raiders of the Lost Ark or shows like M*A*S*H* are things of the past. Instead, entertainment is directed toward niches, whether that’s 80s nostalgia (Stranger Things), superheroes (Legion), or—most common today—fans of a preexisting property (A Series of Unfortunate Events). As audiences grow used to the idea of studios, executives, and production companies catering to their needs, they’ll grow less used to the idea of adapting their own tastes to accommodate new segments of culture. It’s already difficult to follow up on a friend’s Netflix recommendation, so how could it possibly happen in the future, when things will be more customized and your comfort zone will be packed with more you-specific treats? Mass culture will only be re-achieved with the perfect piece of crowd-pleasing media, though the odds of such a thing being conceived, created, and consumed at a true cross-cultural level shrink by the minute.
The more challenging question is whether we want to return to a state of mass culture at all. Twenty-somethings can still remember a time when they walked into school, set their backpack down, turned to the student next to them, and knew exactly what to talk about from the night or weekend before: the Lost premiere, the Sopranos finale, Inception. It’s a fun, unifying dynamic to have a cultural item to discuss with everyone. Why had Oceanic flight 815 crashed onto that island? Was Tony dead? Was Leo dreaming the whole time? The conversations around mass culture served to define American consumers. After all, what does it say about someone if they—imagine this—loved the ending of Lost? Discussing culture across the aisle in your fifth-period chemistry class, across the dining room table, or indeed, across the top of the water cooler, is a romantic notion now. We miss it. To describe something as “a water cooler topic” now is to praise it as particularly penetrating and pervasive. We still lend value to that concept.
Of course, the devil’s advocate might say that fragmented culture has created a personal entertainment experience unrivaled in history. There used to be two possible avenues for end-of-day entertainment: 1) reading, or 2) turning on NBC, ABC, and CBS. You either cracked open a book, or watched what everyone else was watching—pretty simple. But now, those two pathways have mutated into a totally bizarre interstate highway system. We can read comics based off our shows or watch shows based off our books or see movies that are sequels to fifteen other movies that came out years ago. On this highway, we can take any exit ramp we want and merge onto other highways and even hang a U-turn and watch something that aired literally decades previously. That’s the beauty of fragmented culture. We now operate as consumers outside of temporal or physical boundaries. We don’t have to watch anything live (save sports) and we don’t even need a TV to watch 90-percent of the movies or shows we want. We certainly don’t need a book to read a book, either.
Nonetheless, that tiny tug of romanticism still makes us wish for mass culture, at least in a small way. Game of Thrones is probably the last example of a massively consumed piece of entertainment, and it’s a fun case study of how modern consumption habits align with old-fashioned conversation levels. Game of Thrones’ greatest asset (sometimes to the detriment of its storytelling quality, but that’s beside the point) is how it makes each episode a conversation piece. You have to watch the show live to be able to talk about it the next day, because if you wait, not only do you run the risk of having the episode spoiled for you, but you potentially suffer the graver fate of missing out on the cultural moment. You want to be there. You want to participate. That’s rare and special. It might never happen again.
But still, that means there’s something about Game of Thrones that makes it an item of mass culture. What is it? It can’t be the subject matter—high fantasy as a genre is as far from massive as you can be. It can’t be the presentation—the show’s graphic nature is its biggest crutch and biggest flaw. So it must be something with the storytelling. What is it about these characters in this situation that makes for a universally thrilling story? Why do adults and teenagers like it? Why do men and women like it? Why do geeks and jocks like it? You can’t shove a Game of Thrones fan into a box—they don’t fit. There must be something about the show that makes it attract a diverse, mass audience, and it feels important to figure out exactly what that is.
All that is to say, here is the mission of Why It Matters: Explore the most essential items of mass culture and see how they work. Why were they popular? What impact did they have? What ripple effects did they leave behind? If we examine the success of the past, it gives us inspiration to determine what might be successful in the future. We don’t have to return to mass culture (…right?), but maybe we’d like to chase that unifying, stirring, all-together-now feeling again. Dig your paper cones out of the trash. We’re going back to the water cooler, and we’re starting with the most impactful book series of the past 50 years: Harry Potter.
III. Harry Potter 101
The sprawl of Harry Potter betrays the simplicity of its core story: A boy attends a school called Hogwarts so he can learn magic and defeat an evil wizard named Lord Voldemort. That’s really the bare bones of it, minus a few thousand pages of detail. The series was released as seven books between 1997 and 2007, debuting in the United Kingdom courtesy of the now world-famous JK Rowling. For our purposes, that’s context.
Sales figures of all seven Harry Potter books now total about $7.75 billion (for reference, the eight movies adapted from the novels made less—$7.21 billion). The series has sold over 450 million books total (that’s enough for every household in the United States to own about four copies), and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone is one of only nine books ever to be estimated at more than 100 million individual sales (that list includes the likes of Don Quixote, The Little Prince, and Alice in Wonderland). Now nearly a decade since the original series’ conclusion, there are nine Harry Potter movies (with at least four more in development), one Harry Potter stage production, and three Harry Potter theme parks worldwide. That’s just the data. We’ll discuss the midnight-premiere fanaticism later.
The key to Harry Potter’s success can be explained with a simple sentence, but the answer is still inherently complex. To say, ‘Harry Potter was popular because it appealed to all kinds of people’ is sort of a snake-eating-its-tail response. There’s a tiny bit of insight, but it really feels like we’re just rewording the question. Obviously Harry Potter appealed to all kinds of people. The books have been translated into 67 languages and there have been no-joke 298 different published editions. The series drew a diverse audience, both in demographics and sheer numbers, but that doesn’t explain why so many people were drawn into this kid-centric, rather geeky premise. It’s not an easy question, but there’s an easy place to start: the very beginning.
Mr. and Mrs. Dursley of Number Four, Privet Drive were proud to say they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.
That’s the first sentence of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, and it might be the single best sentence in the entire series, because it manipulates the audience into an essential reading perspective. The story of Harry Potter doesn’t begin with Harry Potter at all. It begins with two of the series’ minor antagonists, Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, Harry’s “perfectly normal” aunt and uncle. Of course, we don’t know right away the Dursleys are related to Harry, or how rotten and horrible they are, but since they’re the first people we meet, we look for a reason to connect with them, and therein lies our problem.
As soon as we align ourselves with the Dursleys, we are forced to wonder why this Harry Potter character is important enough to have a book named after him, especially if he’s not even going to show up for the first chapter of his own story. Of course, we will soon learn that Harry Potter is cosmically important to this story, but our connection to him is not yet an empathic or sympathetic one. The Boy Who Lived, as his introduction goes, is simply a mystery. By aligning us with the “perfectly normal” Dursleys from the outset, Rowling parallels our entry point into the magical world with that of the Muggles. In simpler terms, we are outsiders.
So, when Dumbledore, Professor McGonagall, and Hagrid lay Harry on the Dursleys’ doorstep, our feelings toward the series’ main character are marked foremost by a mysterious sort of thrill. This baby, whoever he is, represents our gateway to discover a world of magic and secrecy, and he would only be able to represent that if we didn’t first witness him and his wizarding fellows from that initial Dursleyish point of view. We might agree we’re normal too, at first, but by the end of the chapter, normality doesn’t feel as exciting as wherever these magic folks are coming from, and that subconscious struggle drives us to read onward.
IV. What the Critics Say
Of course, that approach would be moot if the story itself didn’t hold up with time, but Harry Potter has a remarkably spotless record. After 10 years, thousands of pages, and seven books, there is a rare consensus that the series never took a wrong step, either in storytelling (think Friday Night Light’s murder plot) or perspective (Norm’s uncomfortable complacency, in terms of both marriage and alcohol, on Cheers). It’s hard for a cultural item to age well, especially now when fans can use think pieces, the internet, or overexposure to tear everything apart. But Harry Potter hasn’t seen a significant “ah, yeah, we don’t really talk about that” in its popular footprint. That’s rare.
In fact, the series’ primary criticism seems to be that the books themselves, particularly the early ones, aren’t well-written. To be blunt, that’s nonsense. Take Sorcerer’s Stone. We’ve discussed how the first sentence is one of the most precise in the series, but the book as a whole is a masterfully efficient work. The story moves faster than you remember, with an almost impossible amount of plot surging forward on each page. Before we go through the trapdoor to reach the titular McGuffin, Harry has the snake encounter, receives his Hogwarts letter, meets Hagrid, learns he’s a wizard, goes to Diagon Alley, journeys to Hogwarts, befriends Ron, learns Quidditch, saves Hermione from the mountain troll, receives his invisibility cloak, finds the Mirror of Erised, smuggles Norbert the Norwegian Ridgeback out of the school, and ventures into the Forbidden Forest. The whole book is barely 300 pages of fatless, disciplined writing. It would’ve been easy to overexplain the mechanisms of the wizarding world, but Rowling, if anything, underexplains. Look at this description of Hogwarts as the first-years sail across the lake:
Perched atop a high mountain on the other side, its windows sparkling in the starry sky, was a vast castle with many turrets and towers.
That’s it. There’s Hogwarts, the most iconic setting perhaps in the history of children’s literature. The windows sparkle, it’s a castle, and it has a lot of turrets and towers. There’s really nothing else. Over time, we would learn that there are oak front doors, glass greenhouses, 142 staircases, and a few dungeons, but it’s surprising in retrospect how little detail Rowling actually gives us about what Hogwarts looks like. Despite this, even before you saw the movies, you knew exactly what Hogwarts looked like. You could picture the walls and the ceilings and the suits of armor and the paintings and portraits. You never missed the lack of description, and that’s the power of a confident writer. For someone who created a world as rich and detailed as the one we visit in Harry Potter, JK Rowling placed a tremendous amount of faith in the reader to fill in the gaps. That’s bold. If anything, we don’t give these books enough credit for their execution.
V. Hidden Reality
These mechanics underscore the central idea that the hook of Harry Potter wasn’t, as we would expect, pure escapism. The books didn’t present a revisionist or alternative reality that readers could visit and participate in and play pretend. Instead, the books operated on a sense of hidden reality, a world that was exactly like our own, except with one major, major secret uncovered. You didn’t have to be transferred somewhere else to explore the world of Harry Potter. Instead, all you had to do was go outside and wonder if there were gnomes in your garden, nifflers beneath the sidewalk, or a hidden wizarding marketplace down at the end of the alleyway (if you only knew the right brick to tap). This dynamic made the barrier of entry for the series very, very low. You needed toys and action figures and plastic lightsabers if you wanted to play Star Wars, but to play Harry Potter, all you needed was your household broom and a sense of wonderment that operated not on a foundation of “if only,” but rather, “what if.”
And so Harry Potter took off. The mode of discovery the books provided made them equally accessible to adults and children, and its hidden-reality world building created, with apparent ease, a rich collective imagination. Reading Harry Potter was communal. The books were traded and swapped and shared among family members. Kids took brooms out into the backyard and found sticks and tried their absolute hardest to float off the ground, just for a second. You looked twice and every cat, dog, and toad you passed—what were those markings around its eyes, anyway?—and of course, trips to the mailbox became momentous, life-altering, inevitably disappointing adventures. Then beyond the realm of imagination there were the release parties, the costumes, the black-robed lines that wound their way across the summer-night parking lots. The conversations whizzed and hummed: How far are you? Did you make it to the end yet? Have you heard about the next one, “Order of the Phoenix?” What does that mean? The cycle of Harry Potter’s relevancy barely seemed to cease. Its constancy was unprecedented, and its peaks, unduplicable. It feels confident to say that with the way things are now, nothing will ever come close to it again.
VI. The Creation of Young Adult
Lots of things have seen mass levels of consumption, but most of those things (Avatar, Jay Z’s rap career, Guy Fieri) don’t accomplish anything outside of their own success. When your legacy is just that you were popular, that doesn’t necessarily mean you left an impact. Of course, the whole premise of this writing is that Harry Potter and other such mass culture phenomena did accomplish something aside from their own success, but all the same, it’s important to make the distinction.
To boil it down, Harry Potter created a new section of the bookstore: Young Adult. Before the series, novels that targeted younger audiences either fell into the children’s book camp—Frog and Toad, Peter Rabbit, etc.—or the broader “books about youth” camp, where archetypes like Kerouac’s On the Road and Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye reside. Typically, those books approached their themes and subjects with the same moody existentialism that stereotypes teenagers to this day. Plot was pushed aside in favor of heady, super-serious “why” questions, and the finished product usually meant a lot of hard work on behalf of the reader, not to mention a constant sense of missing the bigger picture. The experience of youth-centric books before Harry Potter is like watching Mad Men: There are undeniable moments of profundity and brilliance that keep you coming back, but after each installment there’s nonetheless a feeling of exhaustion. Time for a break; what’s on HGTV?
But then comes Potter, and with it the contemporary, amorphous, broader-by-the-day Young Adult section. Before YA, books had to operate on a system similar to that of another fantasy touchstone: Lord of the Rings and its prequel, The Hobbit. The Hobbit is a straightforward children’s book published in 1937 (!). The plot is simple (a treasure hunt) and the conflicts are uncomplicated (classic good vs. evil). Lord of the Rings, published in three parts between 1954 and 1955, is a more mature, adult book. The plot is still simplistic—a hero’s journey—but the story branches off into many interwoven parts, and the characters are considerably less black and white than they are in The Hobbit. The themes—purity, temptation, power—carry more dimension, and the book’s ending (or endings, if you’re a whiner) is far from the clean state of happiness that concludes the prequel. To summarize, The Hobbit is a children’s book and Lord of the Rings is an adult book. That doesn’t mean adults can’t read the former and children can’t read the latter, but the intended audience seems rigid. The Harry Potter series, residing in the same genre, bridges those two intentions. That’s what Young Adult books try to do, and this strategy didn’t exist at a broad cultural level before Harry Potter.
We’ve seen tons of series try to replicate Harry Potter’s success, too, but where most of them fail is in that careful non-escapist/hidden reality approach we articulated earlier. Take the most prevalent two non-Potter examples in the YA genre: Twilight and The Hunger Games. While no-doubt popular giants in their own rights, each series contains a fatal mode of escapism that limits it from the kind of universal respect, love, and fervor that Potter conjured. Twilight lost steam because only so many people want to enter a gooey world where vampires and werewolves fight over Kristin Stewart, and Hunger Games faded because, at the end of the day, do you really want to spend more time with those characters in that society? Those books asked us to leave our world and enter their own, and the nature of that approach means people can just say no. The barrier of entry is too high. Both series had fans, certainly, but even at their peak, Twilight and Hunger Games were always polarizing, and in a reactionary cultural world seemingly designed to make things worse with time, that conflict spells doom for their longevity.
It’s likely that nothing in the Young Adult sphere will replicate the success of Harry Potter. Dozens of series came in the wake of the Boy Who Lived—Eragon, Divergent, Uglies—but they never struck the same mass-culture gold vein. Indeed, some of these series are worthwhile, but the Young Adult space of today is bloated with John Green books and their imitators (at best, easy-to-digest teen reads; at worst, Nicholas Sparks for high-schoolers) or unashamed internal rip-offs (There’s a Mortal Instruments series, a Dark Materials series, and an Infernal Devices series. There’s also Vampire Academy, Vampire Diaries, Blue Bloods, and House of Night). Young Adult sections are cheaper and dumber than they’ve ever been, and what’s interesting there is how the approach has gone from mass-market ambition to niche-market land-grabbing. The strategy now isn’t to bank on quality, it’s to bank on subject matter and hope the book’s reach exceeds its grasp. Literary agents will tell you that’s business. Everyone else will tell you it’s bullshit.
The Harry Potter series stands as a landmark of one of our final moments as a mass-scale, collective popular culture, a society that read things together, watched things together, and said things like that, “That sounds really cool; I’ll start tonight.” Remembering that era strikes a romantic and idealistic note, but while it seems impossible to imagine anyone sacrificing the freedoms that come with the modern entertainment landscape, there’s a small part of us that desires the community only something like Harry Potter can bring. Revisiting the series, then, contains great rewards, the greatest of which might be the ability to reenter the cultural space where we could tell someone what we’re engaged with and spark that instantaneous bond of agreement, that “me too,” that “I know.”
Most YA series are doomed to be forgotten, but Harry Potter’s legacy is assured. The series signifies the power of nostalgia in a segmented, individualistic cultural landscape. We might be past the age of checking the mailbox for green-inked letters or watching the skies for flying Ford Anglias, but those seven books still inspire us to imagine a world hiding right before our eyes, where werewolves can be teachers, giants can be friends, and orphans can be heroes. Even in an age where it feels like we share nothing, sharing in the past can be its own sort of magic.
