What Would Dumbledore Do?

• Canada.com
• Jay Stone
• link to original article

I met Robert Pattinson this May in Cannes. It was a top-secret kind of thing — I had to sign a paper saying I wouldn’t write a story about it until his new movie, The Twilight Saga: New Moon, opens in November — but I can reveal that the interview, which was held in the martini bar behind a beachside restaurant, was held to the background noise of a crowd of young girls who stood on the road, behind security barriers, and screamed non-stop. I don’t know how Pattinson finally got out: by sea would seem to be the only escape route. Otherwise, he may be there yet.

By contrast, Daniel Radcliffe, the star of the Harry Potter films that are competing for the same tween audience, is a less likely sex symbol: he’s short and nerdy. That’s not my judgment, it’s what Radcliffe himself said the other day. “If girls like short and nerdy, then I’m a sex symbol,” he said, adding, “Rob Pattinson is a sex symbol. He’s a genuinely sexy guy — he’s got the height.”

Pattinson, who coincidentally played Cedric Diggory in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, is six foot one. Radcliffe is five foot six.

Radcliffe can also get young girls to scream, but his is a more restrained hysteria. At the New York City premiere of his new movie, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, he walked past the adult reporters to talk to an 11-year-old girl named Danielle, who was reporting for Scholastic News, an online service for kids. Here is part of that interview, as reported in New York magazine:

Danielle: “I’ve seen the first and second movies and read the first and second book and they are so good. Especially the movies. I loved them, the movies.”

Radcliffe: “Thank you very much. You’re very, very kind. They get even better than that though, so when you get the time, or when your parents think you’re old enough, you must watch the rest. They’re very cool.”

Radcliffe’s sweet and patient answer is a telling indication of the audience for the Harry Potter films as compared with the more mature passions of the Twilight fans who find Pattinson’s Edward Cullen character too adorable for words.

However, young wizards-in-waiting do grow up to become young virgins-in-waiting, and Harry Potter himself is growing into that more adult world: the word is that the new movie is more mature and that romance is in the air. The wizard is getting older, and suddenly it’s not all quidditch and magic spells.

That crossover in audience appeal has put Harry Potter into a kind of competition with Twilight. The vampire movie has made $382 million US, and while that is dwarfed by the Harry Potter success story — 400 million books sold, $4.5 billion at the box office — a rivalry has sprung up among fans, at least on a tsunami of fansites arguing the merits of the two franchises. (Sample debate, from nerdfighters.ning.com: If the Twilight characters and the Harry Potter characters got into a fight, who would win?)

The studios behind the series are steering clear of talk about competition, except for the fact that the Twilight films don’t open near the dates when Harry Potter movies are introduced.

Rob Friedman, head of Summit Entertainment, which produces the Twilight movies, told the Wall Street Journal, “We are very cognizant of where they are, and we’ve always been wary of being in too close proximity to Harry Potter because we know our fans cross over so much and we definitely don’t want to compete with Harry for attention.”

If Harry is still the king, Twilight is the coming thing. But not all Harry Potter fans have matured into Twilight aficionados and there are new readers all the time. An indication of Harry’s enduring popularity can be seen in an ad from Bauman Rare Books, a New York company: a 1940 first edition of Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom The Bell Tolls sells for $2,600; a signed first edition of John Le Carre’s 1963 novel The Spy Who Came In From The Cold is priced at $5,500, but an autographed first edition of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, which was published in 1998, costs $13,500.

Harry has burrowed into the common culture in a way that Twilight has yet to accomplish. A group called The Harry Potter Alliance, which promotes social activism among Harry Potter fans, is asking moviegoers who attend the new film to wear name tags stating lessons taught by Albus Dumbledore, Harry’s mentor, and to tweet these messages to each other (a discussion of the character’s lessons can be found at whatwoulddumbledoredo.org).

In a press release, Andrew Slack, the head of the alliance, compares Dumbledore’s messages to those of Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama.

So far, no one has said that about Edward Cullen. He is a vampire, but Harry Potter may be the one who lives forever.

July 13, 2009