A "Muggles"Dream Come True!

Media Meditation # 2

I am what you call a Harry Potter enthusiast! I have read every book in the series at least twice, camped out at Barnes and Noble’s prior to the book releases and attended the midnight showings of all the Harry Potter films that have been made thus far. Over the last ten years I have relied solely on my imagination to paint an image of Harry’s world in my mind, a world that I desperately wanted to visit and be apart of. This summer all of my wildest dreams became a reality when I went to the Harry Potter Exhibition at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, Illinois.

This exhibit is a traveling exhibit that showcases the costumes and major props from all the Harry Potter films. The way the exhibit was laid out made it seem as if you were attending class at Hogwarts, relaxing in the Gryffindor common room, visiting Hagrid in his hut, and even what it felt like to be in the presence of a dementor. As I walked through the exhibit I recognized things from the films such as the actual goblet of fire and the flying car, and discovered small things such as “Quidditch” flyers, candy wrappers and notebooks that were lost in the background of the films. The exhibit allowed the visitors to see how much detail went into the movies and made me appreciate the films production techniques even more. The atmosphere of the exhibit was also executed exceptionally well. The lighting, music and images appealed to the limbic brain very effectively.

The entire time I walked through the exhibit I just kept thinking “this is so cool” because I never thought I would get the chance to experience this emotional transfer first hand.

Now why is it that people like me become so obsessed with Harry Potter? A fantasy book series turned into a movie series which proves to be a technological shift. In the book Media and Society written by David Croteau and William Hoyness a study by Ien Ang is discussed to explain fantasy in the media. Ang states, “ Here it is not primarily a matter of the content of the fantasy, but mainly of the fact of fantasizing itself; producing and consuming fantasies allows for a play with reality, which can be felt as ‘liberating’ because it is fictional, not real. In the play of fantasy we can worry about their ‘reality value’…It may well be, then, that these identifications can be pleasurable, not because they imagine the Utopia to be present, but precisely because they create the possibility of being pessimistic, sentimental or despairing with impunity- feelings which we can scarcely allow ourselves in the battlefield of actual social, political and personal struggles, but which can offer a certain comfort if we are confronted by the contradictions we are living in” (Media & Society 295). Harry Potter allows readers and or viewers to escape from reality, relax and more importantly to be entertained. As Neil Postman states in his novel Amusing Ourselves to Death, “Television, in other words, is transforming our culture into one vast arena for show business” (Postman 80). We live in a culture that entertainment is always at our fingertips. Reading Harry Potter, watching a Harry Potter movie or visiting a Harry Potter exhibit are all forms of entertainment, which is why people like me love this world so much, it is entertaining. Harry Potter is also associated with Time Warner “one of the 6 companies that dominate the motion picture industry”(Media & Society 35). Powerhouses such as these have the money and power to “own vast portfolios of products, spanning the range of media formats and delivery systems” (Media & Society 35.) This gives them an advantage over their competitors and allows them to dominate the market place. This domination in turn sends Harry Potter media messages to fans from all angles, creating an unhealthy obsession with the product.

I highly recommend visiting the exhibit to anyone; I have never seen anything else like it. The exhibits next stop is Boston Massachusetts from October 25th through February 21, 2010.