And that’s how Ryan Gosling got laid one time.
RATING: 3/10 DVDs of The Fugitive.
Harry Plot Hole
I would call myself a so-so Harry Potter freak. I couldn’t recite the names of everyone on the Slytherin Quidditch team from a random Slytherin vs. Ravenclaw match on page 217 in book three (trust me, SOME KIDS CAN), but I can tell you the wizard who thought the world was ready for a cheese cauldron (Humphrey Belcher), the general gist of Gamp’s Law of Elemental Transfiguration (you can’t turn poop into food), and the best kiss Ron ever had (Auntie Muriel). In other words, I could not beat your niece at a Harry Potter trivia pub quiz, but I could maybe beat you. Relative to other Harry Potter people, I’m in it medium.
As it is for, I assume, plenty of other adults with emotional problems, Harry Potter is a reliable security blanket for me—during challenging periods in my life, listening to the (Jim Dale) audiobooks has been the only thing that gets me to sleep. It’s low-stakes and goofy, but also high-stakes and I care about the characters, plus there’s magic. Those are all of my needs. However, the best thing about Harry Potter, the thing that keeps me hooked year after year, is that the internal logic barely hangs together. None of it makes any sense! The best thing about Harry Potter is that I hate it!!!
My best friend and I have a decade-long text thread where we send each other new Harry Potter plot holes we discover (or forget and then remember again) and then become magnificent with rage over each one. And we discover new ones literally every day! If you could run a light bulb on Harry Potter plot holes, we could solve the climate crisis because Harry Potter plot holes are AN INEXHAUSTIBLE RESOURCE.
For starters, because it’s at the start of this movie, can we talk about the Deluminator? Both the book and movie versions of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone open with Dumbledore clicking his “put-outer” and sucking up all the streetlights on Privet Drive so Hagrid can land his flying motorcycle. First of all, how useful is this? How often do you specifically need to put out ten to twelve Muggle streetlights? Often enough that you needed to make a dedicated invention for it? A magic wand isn’t enough? And who fabricated the Deluminator? House elf slave labor? Or was Dumbledore up in his office—right in the middle of Voldemort’s rise to power—hunched over a soldering iron(?) fashioning a tiny hinge for his magic cigarette lighter that sucks up Muggle light-balls? Mightn’t his time have been better spent making, I don’t know, A GUN? Also, if Dumbledore forgets to put the light-balls back in the lamps, how do the Muggles get the lights back on? Does it work to just change the bulbs? Is he stealing the electricity? Or the concept of light itself?
(Then, in book seven, suddenly the Deluminator is also…a radio? That tells you when your friends are talking shit about you and kind of leads you to them anywhere in England? So, it sucks up balls of light and also helps you find your friends’ tent. HOW IS THAT AN INVENTION???? That’s like if I went on Shark Tank with a shoe that was also a dialysis machine, but I didn’t tell Mark Cuban about the dialysis thing until we’d already been in the shoe business for like twenty years. Why????????? People’s kidneys are failing, man!!!!!)
Anyway, Dumbledore walks past a cat sitting on the curb, just a regular cat like you might see in a neighborhood. WRONG! IT’S AN OLD HUMAN WOMAN.
Why is it that at no point in this entire book and/or film series does Professor McGonagall use her turn-into-a-cat power for anything helpful? She never uses it to sneak into the Ministry of Magic and eavesdrop, she never uses it to see Voldemort naked, she never uses it to give Lucius Malfoy cat scratch fever of the dick. They say it’s excruciatingly difficult to become an animagus and takes years and years of study (except that even flushable wipe Peter Pettigrew figured it out in, like, one year as a teenager, but okay1), yet McGonagall uses it literally exclusively to blow kids’ minds on the first day of Transfiguration class. Ma’am, you are engaged in guerilla warfare against a shadow army of fascists that can do magic. Turn into a cat one time?
It’s cute that they try to make pointy wizard hats a workable fashion choice in this first movie and then by number two they’re like, “Yeah, this is fucking stupid, no one would wear this, it’s so tall, I can’t get through a door.” The pointy hats are the most implausible thing in the whole series, and that includes someone whose last name is Lupin coincidentally getting bit by a werewolf.
Dumbledore and McGonagall arrive at the Dursleys’ house where they’re about to dump Harry, an infant, for eleven years. McGonagall is like, “Where’s the baby?” and Dumbledore is like, “Hagrid is bringing him,” and she’s like, “Uh, excuse me?” and he’s like, “I would trust Hagrid with my life.” R U sure? He is the most bumbling person you’ve ever met!
They leave the baby on the porch in the dark and go back…home? Where do Hogwarts teachers live? Do they have to, like, live in their offices? Are they allowed to get married and have children? Let the teachers live in Hogsmeade, at least! That way the students wouldn’t constantly have to see McGonagall in her tartan dressing gown, and the teachers could achieve some work-life balance. Can someone please start unionizing at Hogwarts? I nominate Madam Hooch—she’s not busy (how is “occasional referee” a full-time job??????).
Flash-forward eleven years: Harry is now a severely traumatized tween who is forced to live in an airless cupboard and do unpaid domestic labor for his abusive (and worse, FAT) family because Dumbledore, “the only wizard you-know-who was ever afraid of,” who lives in a castle, thought it was “safer” for Harry there, even though as far as everyone knew at the time Voldemort had exploded. And yeah, I’m aware of the freaking magic power of a mother’s love, but couldn’t Harry just put the Dursleys’ as his registered address and then go “on vacation” to Hogwarts all year? He lives there most of the year anyway! And as far as I can tell, magic is all semantics! It doesn’t seem to be a problem when he leaves Privet Drive early to go to the Burrow for the last month of summer holiday every year. And anyway, what about Harry’s emotional safety?
AAAAAAAAALSOOOOOOOO WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED TO ALL FOUR OF HARRY’S GRANDPARENTS? DID YOU KNOW THAT IF YOU DO THE MATH, LILY AND JAMES POTTER WERE ONLY TWENTY-ONE WHEN THEY DIED???? ALL FOUR OF THEIR PARENTS WERE ALREADY DEAD!?!?!? DO YOU KNOW ANYONE LIKE THAT IN REAL LIFE WHO DIDN’T LIVE THROUGH A WAR OR PLAGUE?
JUSTICE
FOR
NANA
AND
GRAMPO
EVANS
AND
MUNGA
AND
POP
POP
POTTER2
You know, it’s like actually insane to make Harry sleep in the cupboard under the stairs when you have an entire extra bedroom. And don’t you need the storage? I would NEVER give up my linen closet no matter how much I hated my shitty nephew! Take the master, Grayson! I expected better logic out of Aunt Petunia, being the only non-fat in the family.
Harry’s cousin Dudley has his parents totally cucked. He screams at them that he didn’t get enough birthday presents, and instead of giving him the present of a ride to the orphanage, his dad starts crying and takes him to the zoo. They’re in the reptile house when Harry just starts talking to a snake, and his only vibe is like, “Huh, I’ve never talked to a snake before.” Dude, you’re essentially a Muggle right now! It’s not like you live in the wizarding world where a cat is a person and sometimes a book will slice your jugular. This chill is psychopathic.