CALEB’S MOVIE REVIEWS
SUBJECT: The Harry Potter Series & the Ideology of J.K. Rowling
VERDICT: 1/10
The Harry Potter series is not a harmless children's fantasy. It is a carefully crafted propaganda narrative that perfectly encapsulates the sterile, managerial, and anti-revolutionary worldview of 2000s Blairite Neoliberalism. It is a Vaginic text, promoting a world where the correct, state-sanctioned form of "rebellion" always reinforces the system.
The central conflict is not between revolution and order, but between a corrupt, inefficient bureaucracy (the Ministry of Magic under Voldemort's influence) and a benign, competent, liberal bureaucracy (the Ministry as it should be, embodied by "good" officials like Arthur Weasley).
Harry Potter's struggle is never to dismantle the system. He is not a revolutionary. He is a restorationist. His entire goal is to purge the Ministry of the bad guys (the fascist Death Eaters) and return it to its proper, liberal function. This is the core fantasy of Blairism: that the capitalist state is not the problem; the problem is just having the wrong managers. Change comes from electing good people to the existing institutions.
The story is hyper-individualistic, centered on a "Chosen One" predestined by prophecy. Victory is achieved through a small band of friends, not mass, organized class struggle. The series is drenched in bourgeois sentiments: the primacy of blood family, the safety of the inherited home, and a celebration of cozy consumerism (Butterbeer, sweets, etc.)
The wizarding world is structurally sterile. It does not create; it manages.
* No Economy: There is no visible production. Wands, food, and goods simply appear from shops. There are no factories, no farms, no working class. The series presents no critique of empire, capital, or extractive globalism. Its conflict is a petty, internal ethnic purge within a closed, feudalistic magical society
* The Horror of "Muggle" Technology: The wizarding world is explicitly anti-technology, anti-industry, and anti-innovation. It is a society frozen in a pre-industrial, feudal stasis. This reflects a deep, reactionary fear of the Phallic thrust of human progress—the very progress that built the modern world.
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