Tony Watkins » death

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Tony Watkins — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 12:20:42 +0000

This is the article on the book of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows which I wrote for Culturewatch. Warning: contains major plot spoilers.

Daniel Radcliffe as Harry in “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 2”, a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures Copyright: © 2011 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. Harry Potter publishing rights © J.K.R. Harry Potter characters, names and related indicia are Trademarks of and © Warner Bros. Ent. All rights reserved

Ten years after Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone blasted onto the best-seller lists, J.K. Rowling has finally brought the series to a spectacular and moving conclusion with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. It is one of the most satisfying books in the series, though not without its problems. Rowling has resolved many of the earlier mysteries and tied up many loose ends. Yet at the same time she has wisely refrained from bringing everything to a neat and tidy resolution; there are still mysteries – even some new ones introduced in the seventh book.

Since the confirmation of the final volume’s title, fans have feverishly speculated as to what the ‘Deathly Hallows’ are. I’m not sure whether to feel relieved or disappointed that I didn’t spend long hours poring over the first six books and debating possible clues and theories with other fans online. Looking over some of their speculations now, I’ve seen many extremely well-thought out and accurate guesses about the nature of the horcruxes, but nothing that comes close to the identity of the Deathly Hallows. Given the sheer number of ideas on this in cyberspace, it would be surprising if someone somewhere hasn’t made a lucky guess about some aspect of the Hallows, but it’s largely a new piece of the puzzle that we haven’t been given much inkling of previously.

Although each of the three Hallows plays a vital role within the plot development (one of which we are very familiar with since the first book), we never quite see them brought together to achieve their full power. And it’s a good thing too, because we learn that they would give their bearer immense power: they would make him or her the ‘Master of Death’ (p. 333). The temptation to gain this power had proved too much even for someone as great as Dumbledore. Although Harry spends a considerable proportion of this book feeling resentful that his old headmaster had kept secrets back from him, Dumbledore’s wisdom is proved right once again. Harry needs to know about the Hallows in order to achieve his ultimate goal of destroying Voldemort, but he must not be tempted to put all his effort into acquiring the two which he doesn’t possess. It’s questionable whether or not he would beat the Dark Lord in the race to find one of them – and to lose would make finding and destroying the remaining horcruxes immeasurably more difficult. Perhaps just as seriously, Harry would find the lure of such immense power impossible to resist. Not only has Dumbledore kept Harry ignorant of their full potential, he magically locks one of them away until such time as Harry must use it, once most of the horcruxes have been destroyed.

It is interesting to compare the three strongest wizards of the series with the tale of the three brothers who first received the gifts from Death. The first brother, ‘who was a combative man, asked for a wand more powerful than any in existence: a wand that must always win duels for its owner, a wand worthy of a wizard who had conquered Death’ (p. 331). Little surprise that this is the Hallow which the violent Voldemort desires so deeply: he is determined to possess a wand that Harry cannot resist. He plans to destroy his nemesis and live for ever. The second brother has interesting echoes of Dumbledore: ‘an arrogant man [who] . . . asked for the power to recall others from Death’ (p. 331). It is a surprise to discover that Dumbledore had been an extremely arrogant young wizard, though we know he has some dark secret from the Half Blood Prince. And it seems that a little of that arrogance had stayed with him. Dumbledore acknowledges how wrong he was to desire the Hallows, describing them as, ‘a desperate man’s dream! . . . Real and dangerous, and a lure for fools. . . . And I was such a fool. . . . Master of death, Harry, master of Death! Was I better, ultimately, than Voldemort? . . . I, too, sought a way to conquer death, Harry’ (p. 571). Harry rightly protests that Dumbledore had not wanted to conquer death in the same way as Voldemort. He had, after all, wanted to right the terrible wrong of his sister’s death by bringing her back from death. Nevertheless, he wanted the power for his own ends, not for the good of others. And he ought to have known that what he wanted was impossible, from the story of the second brother if for no other reason. Rowling insisted years ago that one of her rules for the books was, ‘Magic cannot bring dead people back to life. . . . there is no returning once you’re properly dead.’¹

‘The youngest brother was the humblest and also the wisest of the brothers, and he did not trust Death. So he asked for something that would enable him to go forth from that place without being followed by Death. And death, most unwillingly, handed over his own Cloak of Invisibility’ (p. 331). There is an obvious connection with Harry, the bearer of the Cloak. Harry does not consider himself to be wise – he has always looked to Dumbledore for wisdom – but, as Jesus said, ‘wisdom is proved right by all her children’ (Luke 7:35). Harry has learnt well from his mentor and now, with extremely limited information and an immense challenge, he chooses the right course of action – not the risky race for the Elder Wand but the annihilation of Voldemort’s soul fragments.

That these three central objects are related to mastery over death is not surprising, given the preoccupation with death throughout the series. Rowling acknowledges that, ‘My books are largely about death. They open with the death of Harry’s parents. There is Voldemort’s obsession with conquering death and his quest for immortality at any price, the goal of anyone with magic. I so understand why Voldemort wants to conquer death. We’re all frightened of it.’² Harry lives because of his mother’s self-sacrifice on his behalf – a magic that was beyond Voldemort’s comprehension – and he lives in the shadow of that event; the Dark Lord will stop at nothing to achieve immortality, including murdering people like Cedric in Goblet of Fire; and significant characters die because that’s what happens in war. Rowling’s treatment of death is not callous or morbid: she deals with it as a fact of life, the most unfortunate of all facts, sometimes coming with a growing sense of inevitability and other times coming quickly and unexpectedly. Death can come as a natural end to life or as a deeply unnatural end as a consequence of great evil. It is something that J.K. Rowling has had to come to terms to in her own life, but she still considers that the death of a loved one is her greatest fear.

The most significant death is, of course, Harry’s. Not that he quite dies, as Dumbledore makes clear in their touching meeting almost-but-not-quite beyond the grave:

‘But you’re dead,’ said Harry. ‘Oh, yes,’ said Dumbledore matter-of-factly. ‘Then . . . I’m dead too?’ ‘Ah,’ said Dumbledore, smiling still more broadly. ‘That is the question, isn’t it? On the whole, dear boy, I think not.’ They looked at each other, the old man still beaming. ‘Not?’ repeated Harry. ‘Not,’ said Dumbledore. ’But . . .’ Harry raised his hand instinctively towards the lightning scar. It did not seem to be there. ‘But I should have died – I didn’t defend myself! I meant to let him kill me!’ ’And that,’ said Dumbledore, ‘will, I think, have made all the difference.’

Harry’s offering of himself as a sacrifice in order to save others is a profoundly moving moment in the book. It has a particular resonance for Christians because of its potent echo of Jesus Christ willingly giving himself over to forces of evil which wanted to destroy him. In fact, Voldemort only destroyed the horcrux in Harry, but it nevertheless took Harry into some kind of intermediate state (an echo of Neo at Mobil Av station in The Matrix Revolutions) where that he was able to choose whether to return to life or to embrace death. His return to life (having apparently suffered no ill effects of his near death experience) can, I think, be seen as some kind of resurrection, or at least a close analogy to it. Until Rowling speaks about this in interviews, it is difficult to be sure whether or not she was deliberately making this connection with Christ’s sacrifice and resurrection (after all, death and resurrection are not unique to Christian faith). Is it simply coincidental that death’s waiting room is King’s Cross? My guess is that Rowling has been more like J.R.R. Tolkien than C.S. Lewis. Tolkien did not set out to write any Christian allegories, yet his Christian worldview shaped much of what he wrote, whereas Lewis was very deliberate in his construction of the allegories in The Chronicles of Narnia. Rowling shares the same Christian worldview, saying that she believes in God and attends church for more than weddings and christenings, though she also says, ‘like Graham Greene, my faith is sometimes about if my faith will return. It’s important to me.’³

Whether deliberate or not, Rowling has created an allegory that powerfully illustrates the central truth of the Christian faith (arguably a better one than Lewis’s in some respects). ‘Greater love has no one than this,’ said Jesus, ‘to lay down one’s life for one’s friends’ (John 15:13, TNIV). This is what Harry knows he must do. He packs away his wand and the invisibility cloak (remember the third brother in the tale finally took off the cloak so that he could greet Death as a friend) and steps forward, surrendering himself to Voldemort’s malevolence. By then returning to life, he has broken Voldemort’s power, not only over himself but over those for whom he died. His ‘resurrection’ encourages and empowers his followers, and enables him to finally destroy the great enemy (in fact, the enemy destroys himself because his power is reflected back at himself). It is, of course, like all analogies and allegories, imperfect. Harry himself is a very real human character, with faults and failings. He dies to rescue his friends and all good people from a great evil, but he does not die to rescue them from their sin, their rebellion against God, since God is almost entirely absent from the fictional world of Rowling’s imagination. Dumbledore recognises that he was not worthy to bear the three Hallows: ‘I was fit to possess only the meanest of them, the least extraordinary’ (p. 576). Harry also recognises that he cannot become Master of Death, and drops the resurrection stone hoping that it will not be found. But Jesus, in the real, historical world, died and rose again to become Master over death, breaking its power over those who trust him and promising, not a vague, shadowy, temporary return to the world of the living as the resurrection stone brought, but a real, physical and eternal resurrection. Rowling quotes from 1 Corinthians 15:26: ‘The last enemy to be destroyed is death.’ Harry is no longer afraid of death, the Dark Lord and the Death eaters are defeated, but Jesus Christ alone destroys death itself.

Christopher Lydon, ‘J.K. Rowling interview transcript’, The Connection (WBUR Radio), 12 October 1999, quoted on www.accio-quote.com ↩
J.K. Rowling, interviewed by Geordie Greig, ‘There would be so much to tell her . . .’, Tatler,10 January 2006, p. 130; scanned copy at gallery.the-leaky-cauldron.org/picture/2464 ↩
Interview with Geordie Greig, ‘There would be so much to tell her . . .‘ ↩

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Russell Brand on death and significance

Tony Watkins — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 12:12:12 +0000

Fascinating extract fromt Jeremy Paxman’s interview with Russell Brand:

I came across this on Barry Cooper’s website where he makes an interesting connection with Jonathan Edwards. He also highlights this particularly interesting quote:

“Someone told me once that all desire is the desire to be at one with God in substitute form. So perhaps we can draw attention not to the shadow on the wall but to the source of light itself.”

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The Lovely Bones

Tony Watkins — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 22:02:19 +0000

Dir. Peter Jackson (Paramount Pictures, 2010)
This article was first published on Culturewatch, © Tony Watkins.

Warning: this article contains plot spoilers

When Susie was small, she was worried for the penguin trapped inside a snow globe. ‘Don’t worry, kiddo,’ her father Jack (Mark Wahlberg) reassured her. ‘He has a nice life; he’s trapped in a perfect world.’ Several years later, Jack could do with someone offering the same reassurance to him about his daughter (Saoirse Ronan) when she is abducted, raped and murdered. This tension between perfect and imperfect worlds runs right through Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones, based on the best-selling novel by Alice Sebold.

The Salmon family seems to be perfect. A loving couple with two delightful daughters, living in a nice suburb; what more could they want? Jack even constructs perfect worlds through his hobby of making ships in bottles, which Susie delights to help him with. The biggest tension in the family is whether or not Susie will wear her new knitted hat to school. But the evil desires of one man wreck everything, devastating Susie’s family. Ironically, Susie’s murderer also constructs perfect worlds: he makes dolls houses with obsessive attention to detail. But he also brings the same compulsion to building places where he can lure his victims to their destruction.

Jack instinctively wants to restore the situation somehow. ‘I’m going to take care of this. I’ll make this right,’ he tells Susie’s mother, Abigail (Rachel Weisz). ‘You can’t make this right,’ she replies. Jack becomes increasingly consumed with trying to work out who is responsible, since the police fail to identify the culprit, while Abigail begins to feel that she needs to put it all behind her and move on. Jack knows he cannot bring the near-perfect life they had enjoyed back again, but he longs for justice to at least put things into the right balance. Later, when he thinks he knows the identity of his daughter’s murderer, he sets out with a baseball bat, intent on revenge. Even this proves impossible, though, and he becomes a victim of violence himself.

Although none of them realise it, Susie is trapped in what seems to be a perfect world. She says, ‘I was alive, alive in my own perfect world.’ She is not in heaven, as she first assumes, but in limbo, an in-between state. She is still connected to the world by her memory of it and her reluctance to let go of her father’s love. This in-between state is an extraordinary environment, where Peter Jackson uses impressive special effects to create her surreal, dream-like existence. But Susie finally admits that, ‘in my heart, I knew it wasn’t perfect. My murderer still haunted me.’ Susie meets another of her murderer’s victims, Holly (Nikki SooHoo), who tells her, ‘This isn’t heaven. You’re not there yet. . . . You need to let go of earth. You’re dead, Susie. You have to leave.’

Susie is held back by her memories. Some are lovely memories, such as the snow globe and being given a camera. ‘I love the way it captured a moment before it was gone,’ she recalls. This is what memory does, too. The film suggests that Susie and her parents are both trapped by their memories of the awful event, and that people can only begin to really live again when they begin to forget, or at least to hold less tightly to those memories. Susie reflects at one point, ‘My murderer began to feel safe. He knew that people wanted to forget, that they needed to move on. But there was one thing my murderer didn’t understand. He didn’t understand how much a father could love his child.’

The Lovely Bones is, of course, a deeply disturbing film because it confronts us with the desperately imperfect nature of the world we live in. It is not only a world in which terrible things can happen, but one in which justice is not always achieved. Even justice’s defective relative revenge is not always possible. It’s a world in which a young girl’s potential for joy and love and creativity can be snuffed out in a moment, yet an evil man’s desires can go unchecked. It is a desperately broken world – a perspective which is entirely consistent with that of the Bible.

The biblical account of humanity is that we enjoyed an idyllic existence at first, in perfect harmony with each other, with our environment and, most importantly, with God in whose image we were created. But we rebelled against God, exerting our free will to become autonomous from God, and seizing for ourselves the role of deciding what is right or wrong, good or evil. That rebellion twisted and corrupted the image of God within us, so that as well as being capable of great good, every one of us is now also capable of great evil. And the same urge to be utterly autonomous from God lives on in each one of us. It’s what the Bible calls sin: a fundamental bias against God and in favour of giving in to our own self-gratifying urges. The freedom to choose that we have misused so dreadfully is what has broken our world. Why didn’t God intervene to stop it? Why doesn’t he intervene now to stop evil acts? Simply because he cannot give us free will and withhold it at the same time. It is a logical impossibility and, as C.S. Lewis famously said, nonsense is nonsense even when you talk it about God. Why is our free will so important? Without it, relationships with each other and, more fundamentally, with God, would not be based on genuine love, but would be merely programmed into us. It may seem a costly price to pay, but genuine love is surely the ultimate good which we would not want to be without.

However, the Bible’s account of our world’s brokenness does not end with an explanation for why it is like this. Instead it goes on to tell the story of God’s plan to deal with our sin and rebellion. That could simply be a story of justice. Watching The Lovely Bones, we, like Jack, long for Susie’s murderer to face justice. But we forget that God can legitimately want the same for each of us. He would be perfectly just in judging us for our rebellion, our self-gratification, our abuse of others, our deception and violence (in thought if not deed), our exploitation and greed. Yet the Bible is clear that God wants us back in relationship with him. The Bible is the unfolding story of the need for justice and love, of God’s desire to eliminate sin and to show grace to sinful people. These two strands come together in the incarnation, death and resurrection of his son, Jesus Christ. This is the point in history at which God steps into our world and becomes a man. He is not remote in heaven, merely grieving over our brokenness and weeping for our pain. Instead, he came to live in our broken world, as one of us yet perfect. He came to die for us, taking on himself the judgment we deserve – an act of the most extraordinary grace. It is worth remembering that God himself has been the victim of the worst of human evil and violence, and he understands fully the pain it causes. The cross of Christ means that God’s justice is satisfied, the price has been paid for us, and – if we accept it – we can be forgiven and come into a relationship with God himself. It means that God’s kingdom breaks into our broken, imperfect world.

The limbo in which Susie finds herself is not a biblical idea, and there is no sense in The Lovely Bones of God having anything to do with it (Peter Jackson insisted on not portraying a particular religious perspective on heaven). Heaven is a place of perfection that Susie can move on to, but there is no hint that God makes is possible for her to do so. And while the film’s picture of the brokenness, senselessness and injustice of this life is accurate, there is no assurance whatsoever that God will one day establish perfect justice. But the Bible does insist that judgment is coming. We either accept Jesus bearing it on our behalf, or it falls on us. For those who do respond to Jesus’s offer, there is the promise, not of some surreal limbo world in which we are haunted by memories of this imperfect life, but of eternal life with God – an absolutely perfect world.

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Sunshine Cleaning

Tony Watkins — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 23:51:00 +0000

Sunshine Cleaning, directed by Christine Jeffs (2009).
This article was first published on Culturewatch, and is republished here by permission. © Tony Watkins and Pete Hartwell, 2009

The Lorkowskis are a dysfunctional family. Rose (Amy Adams) is a thirty-something single mother who works as a cleaner and is having an affair with her old high school sweetheart, Mac (Steve Zahn). Rose’s sister, Norah (Emily Blunt), is a slacker. She has no meaningful relationships, can’t hold down a job, and still lives at home with her father, Joe (Alan Arkin), whose many schemes to make a quick buck come to nothing. The biggest fracture in the family is the shadow of the suicide of Rose and Norah’s mother when they were young. It seems that none of them have never fully dealt with their grief, which hinders them from moving on in life.

Rose’s son Oscar (Jason Spevack) is the only member of the family who expresses himself freely – sometimes a little too much so. He becomes a catalyst for change in the rest of the family when he is excluded from yet another school. Rose decides she must get him into a private school, but she earns nowhere near enough money. So when she discovers she can make far more by cleaning up crime scenes than from her regular job, she recruits her reluctant sister, and together they go about cleaning blood-splattered walls, putrid mattresses and other residues of death.

The premise of Sunshine Cleaning could have made for a tasteless, slapstick comedy. But director Christine Jeffs and screenwriter Megan Holley, with admirable restraint, avoid cheap laughs, yet still use black humour to draw us in to a surprisingly sensitive, bittersweet character drama. Rose and Norah (and, to a lesser extent, Joe) are complex, refreshingly real characters who find themselves working through major issues in their own lives and in their relationship to discover genuine happiness which has, so far, eluded them.

At the start of the film, the family seems to be held together only by care for Oscar; he keeps them talking to one another. The relationships between the adults seem very functional and lacking emotion, and they are all highly critical of each other’s way of living. Rose and Joe are exasperated at Norah’s indolence and failures, whilst Norah contends that Rose is deluded for believing Mac will leave his wife for her. Rather than supporting and encouraging each other, the sisters are thorns in each other’s side. And they receive little warmth from Joe, who seems to feel that his daughters have never appreciated just how hard it’s been for him since his wife killed herself. Perhaps it’s the strain on these fundamental relationships, or maybe the emptiness of life generally, which drives Rose to seek comfort in the arms of a lover, and Norah to seek comfort through partying and sleeping around. The problem is that none of these relationships fulfil their emotional needs, and their lives are diminished as a result.

However, their encounters with death, and with those experiencing tragic loss, enable them to see life in new ways. In one powerfully poignant scene, Rose and Norah arrive at a house to clean up after an elderly man’s suicide. Seeing the widow’s distress, Rose looks beyond the job to the needs of the living, and she simply sits with the lady, holding her hand. Rose reaches out with genuine empathy because of her own experience of loss. Her brokenness is what enables her to do something beautiful. Later, Rose is with some people she hasn’t seen since High School and she vocalises how much she appreciates the job. She is touched by the privilege of entering ‘people’s lives when they’ve experienced something profound and sad’, because, ‘in some small way, we help’. It creates in both Rose and Norah a sense of purpose in life. They want not only to excel at their work professionally, but also to help emotionally those who are left behind.

Dealing with death on a daily basis also enables the sisters to talk about their mother’s death – a profound moment of connection which moves them both to tears. It is a crucial part of a healing process for the whole family. This catharsis and their newfound sense of purpose empower them to deal with the mess in their own lives and repair their relationships, to redeem the pain of the past and find hope for the future.

Sunshine Cleaning also touches on spiritual questions concerning death and life. When Rose buys a van for the business, Oscar asks about its CB radio but misunderstands when the salesman explains that it broadcasts his voice to the heavens. Later, he climbs into the van, pulls down the handset and asks some deep questions: ‘What was I before I was born? What happens when we die? Can you see everything down here? If you don’t believe in heaven, where do you go when you die?’ Towards the end of the film, Rose does something similar, and she quietly sits in the van, using the radio as a chance to put into words what she would love to be able to say to her mother. There are questions about what happens after death, but no answers. Rose certainly doesn’t know, but she expresses a common hope that there is something more than this life.

The fear of death is constantly in the background in Sunshine Cleaning, and it’s something which many people prefer not to think about. In an age of rapidly developing medical technology, we begin to stop seeing death as something inevitable. But it is, and as this film reminds us, it can come unexpectedly and traumatically. However, the Bible affirms strongly that death need not be the ultimate tragedy, something to be feared, because of what God’s Son, Jesus Christ has done for us:

Because God’s children are human beings – made of flesh and blood – the Son also became flesh and blood. For only as a human being could he die, and only by dying could he break the power of the devil, who had the power of death. Only in this way could he set free all who have lived their lives as slaves to the fear of dying. (Hebrews 2:14–15)

Jesus sets people free from the fear of death because he died the death we deserve for our rejection of God’s rule in our lives. But it all depends on whether or not we accept what he has done for us. We can continue in our rejection of him, or we can accept this extraordinary gift – and then we can see death as the threshold to an eternity with God. This life remains full of pain and grief, but it need not be without hope. Rose and Norah find hope awakening in their broken lives as a result of death reshaping their perspectives and values. But it’s a limited hope. The hope Jesus offers is far more profound, bringing wholeness instead of brokenness, bringing a deep inner cleaning instead of the stains of our rejection of God, and giving us life instead of death:

When God our Saviour revealed his kindness and love, he saved us, not because of the righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy. He washed away our sins, giving us a new birth and new life through the Holy Spirit. (Titus 3:4-5)

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