How JK Rowling’s blockbuster is steeped in 21st-century politics
There is a surprising amount of political engagement in ‘Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them’, says Robbie Collin
In the build-up to this summer’s EU referendum, the high street full of Polish shops was touted by some as a symbol of everything wrong with Britain today. In Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, it’s the happy ending.
One of the quartet of heroes in the latest film from the mind of JK Rowling – a period spin-off from the Harry Potter franchise, set in Twenties New York – is a first-generation Polish immigrant called Jacob Kowalski. He starts the film dreaming of opening a bakery of his own, and by the end he’s done it.
Not just Jacob, either: as the camera tracks along a Manhattan street, every other shopfront has a European name above the door. Muggles and magic folk alike are putting down roots and rubbing along, embracing the bustling contrasts just outside their doorstep. The dark wizard Gellert Grindelwald (Johnny Depp) – a magic-supremacist type fomenting segregation for his own nefarious ends – would hate it.
There’s no question that Rowling’s screenwriting debut is politically engaged in a way that you might not have expected from a film about a magical zookeeper. “The story was conceived three-and-a-half years ago,” she said at the film’s London premiere on Tuesday evening, “and at that time I was definitely drawing on what I found was the rise of populism politics and a desire to smash the status quo. Certainly those themes remain very strong today as we open.”
Rowling has first-hand experience of it. During the Scottish independence referendum she was a passionate and articulate supporter of Better Together, and doubled down as an EU Remainer.
“Nationalism is on the march across the Western world, feeding upon the terrors it seeks to inflame,” she wrote this summer in an essay called On Monsters, Villains and the EU Referendum. “Every nationalist will tell you their nationalism is different… yet every academic study of nationalism has revealed the same key features.
“Finding the present scary? We’ve got a golden past to sell you, a mythical age that will dawn again once we’ve got rid of the Mexicans/ left the EU/annexed Ukraine! Now place your trust in our simplistic slogans and enjoy your rage against the Other!”
For Rowling, that puts figures such as Alex Salmond and Donald Trump among the most prominent dark wizards of our time, and Fantastic Beasts doesn’t shrink from depicting the catastrophic consequences of divisive rhetoric. The biggest threat to peace in New York isn’t one of the escaped magical creatures, but the Obscurus – a destructive entity that feeds on the souls of young witches and wizards who suppress their true identities for fear of persecution.
Throughout the film, various shady characters attempt to harness the churning power of the Obscurus (the rotten fruit of social division, remember?) for their own ideological gain. The dashing magizoologist, Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) – the embodiment of the metropolitan wizarding elite – finds this morally repulsive. “That’s a parasitical magical force responsible for the death of a child,” he despairs. “What on earth would you want to use it for?” But others think otherwise, among them Mary Lou Barebone (Samantha Morton), who leads the Second Salem movement – literally a witch-hunt – to purge all magical types from the USA. The slogans on Second Salem flyers aren’t too far off the kind of things we’ve heard chanted at Trump rallies, but what’s really chilling is the group’s logo: a single magic wand being snapped between two fists. The original, Mussolini-favoured symbol of fascism, the “fasces” (from which the ideology takes its name) were bound bundles of elm or birch rods, suggesting strength through unity. It’s not just in the wizarding world that the lone stick is most vulnerable. Fantastic Beasts’ director David Yates has promised much more of this as the franchise goes on. In a recent interview with The New York Times, he described Grindelwald as a villain who “wants to win hearts and minds in a way that’s quite beguiling and sophisticated,” and teased his capacity “through sheer charisma and ability to inspire and hypnotise and carry the crowd, and take the world to a darker place. That’s where the next story is going.”