MEDIUM!

Ten years later, it’s over. At least as far as we can tell.

The last of the Harry Potter movies, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, came out this week, closing the movie saga of the “Boy who Lived.”

A whole generation grew up with the bespectacled, magical boy with the lightning-shaped scar on his forehead, his friends, and a whole host of other beings, ordinary and otherwise, not to mention strange railway platforms, quidditch, and Hogwarts, a school of magic. (All with many Christian subthemes, I might add!)

Before movie doors opened on Friday at 00:01 hours, HPVII-2 had made over $30 million in tickets, breaking the record for midnight screenings, raking in $43 million. In the next 24 hours it had grossed over $92 million—a record for first-day sales, well on track to beat the opening-weekend record of The Dark Night—$158 million.  

If you haven’t read the book yet, you’re probably better off seeing the movie before reading it. Otherwise, you’re gonna be disappointed. I was.

Lots of things were changed in the movie. (I won’t give them away.)

But I don’t assign any blame for the change. It’s a function of the medium. There is no way all the nuances and subtleties of an exceptionally well-crafted tale (seven volumes of it—all intricately constructed, internally coherent, intentionally consistent) can be easily converted from ink and paper to light and celluloid. Just no way!

Each medium has its own advantages. In the film version, I thoroughly enjoyed seeing the development of the characters over the years, chubby-cheeked Radcliffe (Potter) growing up to become a stubble-faced  teenager. I reveled in seeing what quidditch looked like. And Hogwarts. And platform 9¾. And giants. And goblins. And dragons. …

But the nuances and subtleties of the story? Nigh impossible to visualize on screen, even if the producer had 4+ hours (2 movies) to depict HPVII.

One scholar noted, a long time ago: “We have all heard it said that one picture is worth a thousand words. Yet, if this statement is true, why does it have to be a saying?” Indeed, why a saying (that has words) and not a picture (without words)?

Texts have some significant advantages. Communication of abstract thought is possible. Complicated ideas can be conveyed. Observations can be recorded. (Imagine science before the age of writing. How would one keep a record of experiments?) Deep and reflective thinking always involves texts. And so all deep and reflective religions have texts: Judaism, Christianity, Islam, ….

It is also possible to generate uniform and infinitely repeatable reproductions of texts, all at inexpensive rates that make texts easily accessible. No wonder that soon after Gutenburg came on the scene (1400s), a Luther rose (1500s), nailed a text to a wall of a church, and set in motion the Reformation. Actually it wasn’t the nailing of his 95 theses that did it; it was the printing of those theses and their easy dissemination that caused the revolution!

Yes, there’s something special about texts ….

Maybe that is why God chose to give us a book, the Bible.

Open my eyes, that I may behold 

Wonderful things from Your law.

Psalm 119:18

This is my comfort in my affliction, 

That Your word has revived me.

Psalm 119:50

O how I love Your law! 

It is my meditation all the day.

Psalm 119:97

Your word is a lamp to my feet 

And a light to my path.

Psalm 119:105

You are my hiding place and my shield; 

I wait for Your word.

Psalm 119:114

Thank God for the Text.