Who killed Harry Potter? Was it the Hollywood studios which delayed the release of the sixth film adaptation by more than six months? Was it competition from darker, more adult myth-to-film projects like Watchmen and Dark Knight, which didn't have to kowtow to tricky audience demographics spanning kids, tweens and adults? Was it the millions of sneering Rowling-haters who, fuelled by a classic cocktail of sexism and jealousy, tirelessly trash the epic for being at once too plotty, not plotty enough, too sprawling, too formulaic, too uneven, too one-note, too conservative, too low culture, too Messianic, too long, too manipulative and too derivative, all at the same time?
Or was Harry Potter murdered by the director, David Yates? I loved his dark nightmare take on The Order of the Phoenix in 2007, with its muscular magic and twitchy paranoia. But I've just seen The Half-Blood Prince and it's one of the worst films in the franchise – right down there with Chamber of Secrets, the second offering, in its blunt literalism and flippancy. Two minutes after leaving the cinema all that remained were faint traces of disgust, exacerbated by reading reviews in which, in a well-worn act of misogynist elision, Yates's failings are somehow imputed to Rowling. So the film is dull because the book is dull; the film means nothing because the sixth book is a mere place-holder before the confrontations of the seventh book.
This is not true. I am a fan of the series. The first two and a half books are jolly tweens' tales about an orphan with a magical secret. But by the end of the third – when Harry sees himself conjuring a stag Patronus, is strangely convinced that it's his dead father, rushes to meet him and find nothing there – I realised I was reading something a thousand times darker than it's given credit for.
Who is Harry Potter? An abused child who's been in the closet, literally, since he was a baby. A child whose parents were murdered by Voldemort, another abused child, who was first mentored by Dumbledore, a closeted gay wiz who had to mercy-kill his own great love, Grindelwald, when he turned to dark magic. Harry's adult friends include Lupin, Tonks, Sirius and Alastor Moody, a motley crew who are all dead by the end of the series, along with many others including his pet owl.
Between the ages of 11 and 17 Harry has only made two good friends of his own age. So locked are the three of them in their incestuous friendship that Harry marries his best friend's sister and Ron and Hermione marry each other. The entire narrative thrashes uneasily with images of abused and dead children, traitorous fathers and the pathologies of obsession, masochism and sadism.
Harry is the ultimate victim in love with his tormentor: the only thing he wants to do, for seven books, is murder the man who murdered his parents. He dreams about Voldemort and from book five he becomes eerily convinced that he's turning into Voldemort. Harry is one sick puppy, a broken, damaged guy, Jesus meets Hamlet – and in the Half-Blood Prince his obsessions are so pronounced that he begins to creep out his own friends. Traumatised by the death of Sirius, he becomes infatuated with Draco Malfoy, the pale-eyed bully who's been set up as his foil and double throughout the entire series. He misses Quidditch to follow him, stays up at night looking for Draco's name on a magic map and accuses him madly whenever anything bad happens. He follows him as far as an enchanted wall in the castle and both freeze on either side of it, listening for each other's breathing.
In the climactic scene Harry finds Draco crying in a bathroom, hexes him so badly that Draco's chest is slashed open and he lies prone, twitching and groaning in a pool of his own blood. Needless to say, there's a massive and obvious gay subtext in this – but Yates takes all the heat out of it in favour of some safe same-sex flirtations which are nothing more than light relief in the book.
By the end of book six Hogwarts is over, Dumbledore is dead and the wizard world is riven with pain, violence, paranoia and fear. So how could Yates turn it into an episode of Friends?
