Free market, branded imagination —
Harry Potter and the commercialization of
children’s culture

by Jyotsna Kapur

Just when it seemed that magic had become passé even in its last home, i.e., children’s culture, along came J.K Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. (Chris Columbus, 2001).^[2]After all, children’s mass culture in the late twentieth century had derived a great deal of merriment ridiculing the idea of magic as the old fashioned ingredient of nineteenth century children’s tales. They were now simply too tame and, should we say, childish, for a generation that had cut its teeth on video games and marketing campaigns designed to address them as a niche market.

Now mainstream films made for general consumption, like Toy Story (1995) mocked the idea that stories of toys coming to life had to be imbued with mystery. When the toys came to life in this film they asked: “Are you from Mattel?” “Were you made in Hong Kong?” Or there are toothpaste commercials that deconstruct the tooth fairy by casting a man in drag as the tooth fairy. In a commercial for Disney Land and a Visa credit card, the child cajoles its parents to use the credit card, putting on an “innocent” face so as to win a trip to Disney Land, which had earlier cast itself as a magical place.

In contrast, Harry Potter, an orphan who is left to the mercy of his upwardly mobile, suburban aunt, uncle and cousin finds out one day that he is a wizard. He also finds out that there is an entire world, a way of life with its own language and culture that lives by magic. This world coexists parallel to the world of the “muggles,” the wizards’ term for the “normal,” routine bound, monotonous, magic-less, everyday world. Did Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone then indicate a return of the utopian imagination in children’s literature and film? Not quite. Instead, Harry Potter is an excellent lesson about the limits of fantasy. Here that fantasy is produced as a commodity, driven by an industry that continuously raises the stakes for a film’s survival in terms of expected returns.

The film’s aesthetics make obvious the limits of the utopian imagination. The way the film was scripted and how it looks stem from the “mugglish” political economic realities of the film business at the end of the twentieth century. Ultimately we must ask a question as old as capitalism itself: What is the nature of magic that the market serves to its consumers? The cornerstone of free market ideology, as espoused by Hollywood, rests on a notion that consumer demand and not production relations determine product. In other words, it is not the producers who shape the film but those who consume it. What kind of magic wand could create such a vision? To unravel this riddle, we need to trace the historical trajectory of the selling of Harry Potter, that is, the transformation it underwent from a book that was not written as a film-to-be into a franchise, a pretext for selling other market-produced commodities.

In a rave review in Variety, Todd McCarthy reiterates the magic mantra that makes us responsible for the films we get:

McCarthy then goes on to enumerate the efforts made by the producers to give the audience exactly what it wanted. According to him the producers adhered as closely as possible to the text, hiring a director who would “obediently serve the material” without any danger of “idiosyncratic flights of fancy” that a more “high-powered and personal filmmaker (such as Steven Spielberg or Terry Gilliam)” would indulge in. The result in McCarthy’s own assessment is a film that “never takes on a life or soul of its own” but that still “will have no bearing on how many times youngsters and even adults will return to this high flying entertainment that looks poised to become one of the biggest-grossing films of all time.”

This review was published in Variety, a trade journal, but evaluating a film according to its box office returns has now also become a regular aspect of journalistic reviews. The phenomenon started in 1976, as Frederick Wasser reports, with a small company called Entertainment Data, Inc (EDI) which started to report box office returns from participating theaters.^[4] By the 1980s, EDI reports included about 80% of the nation’s theaters. Quick, accurate reporting fed the growing trend in mainstream newspapers such as the New York Times to report box office figures as a news item. That means that reviewers assume a critical review should consider costs and revenue. This discursive practice exemplifies writers’ blurring of commerce and culture.

Children’s film as a genre has led the commercialization of culture. It plays a central role in the construction of “consumption webs,” such that media, including film, and other commodities constantly advertise each other. Film launches become “events” designed to sell not only a movie, but toys, clothes, videos, record albums, computer games. A film’s release attracts so much attention that one would have to live in another world to escape it. A glance at the most successful high-concept or event films in the last decade shows the overwhelming importance of the children’s or family film in this category: Home Alone and Ghost (1990), Aladdin (1992), The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1993), The Lion King (1994), and Titanic (1997).

As Justin Wyatt has argued, since the high-concept film is a marketing concept, it is designed to maximize returns by eliminating ambiguity. Productions depend on easy recognizability that can be translated across a wide range of commodities. They get recognizability through dependence on stars or genre and by having scripts based on simple narratives with stock situations and simplification of character and plot.^[5] Janet Wasko has characterized this phenomenon as “cultural synergy.” Accordingly, in the preproduction stage, a film is conceived of as a brand. That is, companies promote their activities across a growing number of outlets. The activities and products related to a film can then be cross-promoted and distributed through media conglomerates across a range of media.^[6]

Clearly this process places bounds on the utopian imagination in children’s culture. Thus, exploring the production and marketing of Harry Potter will aid us in understanding how the role of the consumer is drastically confined within this cultural environment. In terms of film, this cultural environment in which films are scripted and promoted is dominated by centralized media ownership and the convergence of media culture and other forms of commodity culture.

Of movies and “Muggles”:
political economy and the event film

In many ways the basic logic of commercial filmmaking has remained the same, i.e., to minimize production costs and maximize profits. However, the nature of the business has changed because of media mergers in the late twentieth century and new technologies, such as television, VCR, and the Internet. Janet Staiger and Justin Wyatt have shown how ownership shifts in the industry have increased costs and, therefore, risks in the movies business.

According to Janet Staiger, the studio system has given way to the package unit system of film production. In the newer form of production, a producer organizes a film project, secures finance and combines the necessary workers (actors, director, music composer) and physical elements (screenplay, sets, cameras, costumes, lighting). Package unit production has increased economic risk because making film as a commercial venture does not have the safety cushion provided by studios in the past.^[7] Moreover, since studios now function as distributors rather than producers, they are more likely to pick up projects with the minimum of risk.

Further, studios no longer exist as independent entities but are part of media conglomerates that have interests in television, the Internet, journalism, the recording industry, and cable. These media conglomerates seek balance among their various subsidiaries and thus seek projects that can cross over these various media and ancillary markets.

Wyatt has also highlighted media conglomerates’ dependence on market research, particularly of the quantitative and empirical kind, before making decisions about which film projects to undertake. These marketing executives tend to come primarily from advertising. Thus they rely on market research models developed for the sale of packaged goods and merchandise. Their reliance on quantifiable data makes it hard for them see the value in prospective undertakings that are more innovative, complex and emphasize the visual or aural (rather than narrative) aspects of cinema.

Producers now tend to look more favorably at script treatments for blockbusters. This preference for blockbusters derives from an innovation in distribution that began in the 70s with the initiation of “four walling,” a system ironically pioneered by a low budget film, Billy Jack (1971). Four walling depends on intensely promoting the film in all possible channels and saturating the market to create the highest possible public awareness in a film’s opening weekend. This includes leasing all the theaters in a particular region and extensively using TV advertising.

The logic is that if distributors can pack in audiences in the first week, they will reduce the risks of losing future audiences on account of poor word-of-mouth. As Dan Ackerman writes, this economic goal also depends on the fact that studios take 70% of their box-office receipts in the first week of a film’s release.^[8] In succeeding weeks, the studio’s percentage is generally reduced to about 30%. Fredrick Wasser cites MPAA figures to show that while U.S. spending on advertising increased significantly in the years 1981-94 movie advertising grew at nearly twice the general advertising rate (167). Increased costs like this further diminish the economic risks that producers are willing to take.

The Dursleys spend all their energies on their son Dudley, lavishing him with gifts. On Dudley’s birthday such gifts include a racing bike, a video camera, a remote control, sixteen new computer games, and a VCR. Moreover, they are all wrapped! To exaggerate the social satire, Dudley, the consumer, assigns value to commodities based on their market price rather than valuing them as gifts from his parents. When Dudley objects that he just got thirty six presents, one short of what he got last year Mr. Dursley responds,

Dudley, a bully and always greedy for more is seen “kicking his mother all the way up the street, screaming for sweets.(13)” In fact, the book can be read like a modern day socializing tale from a mother to a child, warning of the impossibility of finding happiness in market-produced commodities. By painting a picture of the consuming child as whiny, fat, and unlikable, Rowling caricatures the child consumer as a spoiled brat who has lost all imagination.

Before the children can enter this elite institution, as befitting their class backgrounds, their families have to put out a rather large sum of money for their children acquire books, uniforms and supplies, in this case wands. Harry Potter’s parents leave him a locker filled with gold, and he shares his wealth with Ron Weasley, one of five children whom everyone in the school understands to be poor. Teachers at the school are authoritative, and relations among students marked by hierarchy and competition. The children are in awe and fear of Albus Dumbledore, Prof. McGonagall, and Snape, all of whom are referred to as professors, wear cloaks when teaching, and sit at the high table.

The choice of locations and stars rely on selling Englishness as a commodity. A twelfth century castle, Alnwick on the Scottish border was cast as Hogwarts. A tenth century Anglican cathedral located in Gloucestershire was used as the entrance to Gryffindor Hall, Harry’s dormitory. And the elaborate banquet scenes were staged on a sound set made to replicate the dining hall of Oxford University’s largest college. In this era of spinoffs, British Tourist Authority has issued a Harry Potter movie map (available at www.travelbritain.com) detailing sites open to visitors. The 150 year old London Rail station has been marked with signs such as “No spells on platforms,” Owls must be caged at all times,” and “No Broom Parking” to direct visitors to platform “9 and 3/4.”

The special effects, location or casting is not an integral part of the narrative. In this highly commercial film these visual aspects are the narrative itself. The plot is little more than a series of events strung together like movie trailers. From the quidditch match to adventures with the troll to the final confrontation with Voldemort, the narrative at best offers a mystery story. It has no mythic qualities of transformation.

The mise en scene tries so hard to render magic in the most realistic way possible that it plays no role in developing or revealing the inner states of the film’s characters and becomes an end in itself. This literal rendering of magic trivializes fantasy. It reduces fantasy to spectacles that look like video games. For instance, at Hogwarts school, pictures talk, ghosts roam freely, and staircases move by themselves. While these features may simply exist within a wizards’ school, these phenomena can also express children’s anxieties.

For example, a narrative could express children’s fears about finding their way around in the overpowering environs of institutions where traditions seem to have a life of their own, where elite schools are founded upon making the child feel small enough to want to conform. However, by presenting these phenomena simply as aspects of the school and not a children’s perceptions, the film turns the ghostly details into mechanical devices that a child seemingly can master, not unlike elevators or doors that children must learn to traverse. The film’s fetishization of technology comes to stand in for its absence of content. Such vacuousness was amply seen in the film’s self promotion. David Heyman boasted in the September 20^th, 1999 issue of Time that the primary costs of the film would be in the special effects:

In terms of race and gender the status quo remains ideologically intact, even in this magical school. The darker characters arouse suspicion. Snape and Quirrell are both darker while Quirrell even sports a turban. While in the book an Indian girl, Parvati Patel, goes to the wizards’ school, the film’s only noticeable student of color is the young commentator during the Quidditch match. The wise and ancient centaur, half man, half horse is cast distinctly as a black man. The gringotts who guard the bank are barely disguised Jewish stereotypes. Hermione Granger, Harry and Ron’s girl pal, is presented as irritatingly smart and well read.

The trivialization of fantasy most blatantly permeates the moments in which the narrative succeeds in sentimentalizing the notion of love. In the book, Harry learns through his life-threatening struggle with Voldemort that his mother had died trying to save his life. When a life is touched by a love like that it is indestructible. While Voldemort could now only leave a mark on Harry’s forehead, with his bare hands Harry could turn to ash Quirrel’s body, now occupied by Voldemort. This is a powerful fantasy of mythic proportions. But the film brings that image of power to the ground.

Apparently, the lessons the children learn in the book about friendship, intelligence, and love are not enough in themselves for the film version. Most important for the film’s closure is the victory gaining the house cup. The film ends with the school principal, Albus Dumbledore, announcing Harry’s house’s victory, setting the stage for a sequel. The ending also makes it clear that the film series will be a set of stories about a British boarding school and not a fantasy about another world.

How then are we to understand the enthusiasm that the film generated as a “magical” phenomenon that both adults and children were flocking to pay money to see? Part of the answer lies in the film’s marketing and self-promotion as fantasy. The other part lies in our desire to see magic, particularly in children’s culture. The film attracted crowds in the first days of its release as a result of two years of marketing. Also the events of September 11^th and the Afghanistan war made fantasy desirable perhaps as a way to forget and forget but also to find hope.

The film also provided a venue for parents and children to come together and share a cultural experience. There was generally an atmosphere of happy expectation around the film screenings making the film into more of a family event or a collective experience. The photo opportunities outside the cinema contributed to this sense of the film as a community event.

Large numbers of the audience, both children and adults, knew the book before going to the movie. Thus, watching the film became an active exercise as they compared the film to the book or in the very least, followed the book through the course of the film. In our highly industrialized culture, this foreknowledge approximates folklore in that we bring to these mass produced stories our own versions and interact actively with them. Children spoke back at the film, predicting its narrative, and staying around to discuss the film.

Despite the film’s limited imagination about Hogwarts as a private British elite school, the children I talked to had a more active understanding of it. They discussed it as a place which had different adult “muggles” from the teachers and administrators they encountered in their own schools. Hogwarts presents an appealing possibility of growing up with other children, living a life of learning and curiosity with adults who are wise and filled with character and magic tricks up their sleeves.

Fantasy, in this view, clearly had one and only one purpose, its translation into consumer behavior. The Defense Against the Dark Arts quite aptly characterized the threat this kind of marketing poses to our imagination:

AOL-Warner Brothers’ battle with fans reveals that victory over the human imagination is not easily won. Bringing children into the market as consumers can also politicize them against the market. We, parents and older friends, can either wring our hands at how corporations have taken our children’s socialization away from us, turning us into facilitators who must buy market produced commodities to keep our kids momentarily from adulthood. But in the long run, they will turn into adults who experience the anxiety, addiction, low self-esteem, and isolation so familiar to us from being consumers. Or we can collaborate with our children in resisting the branding of our imaginations. We can collaborate with them to reject the most fantastic market-produced myth of all: That is the myth of choice, that it is we who determine the products we get in the market.