I can still remember the anticipatory gasp from all the little kids in the COMPLETELY FULL movie theater when the introductory title for the first Harry Potter movie appeared on film and that theme music started.
The whole thing was so evocative of the best moments from the first book that I was hugely impressed and much moved by the experience.
But as the books themselves got darker, the characters in them got older, and really bad things started happening to them (Voldemort and Death Eaters attacking them, their friends' parents being killed, various instances of Death Eater -sponsored terrorism, and family members being killed), I watched the movies "grow up" but also become more difficult to watch. In some ways, I've already had to deal with the emotions stirred up by the psychologically-challenging later books and movies.
I suppose what I'm trying to say is that I've already had to mourn the loss of innocence of the characters; I've also had to mourn the end of the series, when the
Deathly Hallows (book seven) came out. This last movie seemed anticlimactic not only because I knew what was going to happen--and therefore could only look forward to how the story would be represented on the big screen--but also because I'd already undergone that bittersweet ending (i.e., knowing that the HP series had reached its conclusion).
Now I've got a new perspective on HP and friends :tongue: because I'm reading backward and forward in time throughout the entire series, looking for connections across and between and among the individual books.
It's comparable to the ways I now read
The Lord of the Rings or
The Chronicles of Narnia: I can still remember the freshness of my first reading of particular passages (watching Gollum descend head-first from the Emyn Muil, for example, or Celeborn and Galadriel sailing toward the Fellowship in their gigantic swan boat), while the subsequent readings burnish each impression into an object of beauty over time that combines an initial reaction, the memory of multiple rereadings as that beauty sinks in, some literary analysis of the text as its own reality, some context of the text within history (the history of the real world), and some of the richness of the greater understanding of the text that I've achieved through reading more about the author and the work.
Yes, there's an ending; yes, I've mourned that ending. But now I can approach the series from a new set of perspectives, as I begin what promises to be years of rereadings--which in a way is a new beginning. :smile:
NCbear (who has blathered on a bit here, but who decided to leave this post "as is" because writing it helped me understand my own love of rereading a bit better
)
