Fantastic Beasts arrived in 2001 as a charity project; it was sold as Harry Potter’s textbook, complete with his and his friends’ scribbles. Newt Scamander, Magizoologist, is the author. As he begins it:
I look back to the seven-year-old wizard who spent hours in his bedroom dismembering Horklumps [giant mushroomlike garden pests] and I envy him the journeys to come: from darkest jungle to brightest desert, from mountain peak to marshy bog, that grubby Horklump-encrusted boy would track, as he grew up, the beasts described in the following pages.364
He reports tracking animals “across five continents” and “in a hundred countries” pursuing his passion.365 Presumably much of this has already transpired by the time of his film, as the book is published only a year later, and he already has a case of fantastic creatures.
For 2016, J.K. Rowling crafted her first screenplay. It’s based on the book, though adding a story and with it, a new continent of magic. In it, Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) journeys to America in 1926, carrying a briefcase filled with his beloved creatures. This suitcase that Newt has been “meaning to get fixed” has a special latch that makes it appear “Muggle Worthy” – he opens it to reveal ordinary British luggage with pajamas, magnifying glass, maps, handkerchief…and a Hufflepuff scarf.
“You’re an interesting man, Mr. Scamander. Just like your suitcase, I think there’s much more to you than meets the eye. Kicked out of Hogwarts for endangering human life with a beast. Yet one of your teachers argued strongly against your expulsion. I wonder, what makes Albus Dumbledore so fond of you?” With this comment, the Auror Percival Graves links this series to events back at Hogwarts (where young Dumbledore is teaching Transfiguration). The story has another Hogwarts link, as this backstory is basically what happened to Hagrid. With Graves’ first name, he seems doomed to misjudge the world and make bad choices, as Dumbledore, his father, and Percy Weasley all did.
When Newt accidentally swaps cases with a No-Maj (the American equivalent to the term Muggle), his beasts escape into New York City. This creates the story’s plot as Newt insists, “We’re going to recapture my creatures before they get hurt. They’re currently in alien terrain, surrounded by the most vicious creatures on the planet: humans.” There is a greater conflict as well, since Newt’s screw-up comes at a terrible time, considering how politicians are stirring up anti magical feelings. Wizarding president Seraphina Picquery (Carmen Ejogo) warns him: “Magical beasts are terrorizing No-Majs. When No-Majs are afraid, they attack.” He’s joined by witch sisters Tina and Queenie Goldstein along with Jacob Kowalski, the first Muggle main character in Harry Potter’s world.
Unlike the more contemporary Harry Potter, Newt’s story takes place almost a century ago. 1926 was the jazz age, a time of hedonism and fun, as the world became modern. Early motorcars and electric lights filled the New York streets. This seems a sudden shift in Rowling’s fantasy world, but it actually fits well into recent culture.
Right now, a lot of our most popular stories are set in the 1920s, from Downton Abbey and Boardwalk Empire to the forthcoming Baz Luhrmann adaptation of The Great Gatsby. 1920s styling has worked its way into science fiction too, especially in the gleaming world of Andrew Niccol’s In Time, Woody Allen’s time-travel idyll Midnight in Paris, and the soaring Metropolis-like cities of the Dark Knight series and Cloud Atlas.366
Fantastic Beasts shares themes with all these series. The Great Gatsby emphasizes the public face of propriety with everyone’s secret affairs and frustrations concealed underneath. Gatsby remakes himself with a fantastical backstory, presenting himself to high society as one of them, though he truly isn’t. In much this way, the wizards lead double lives. Of course, Newt’s friendship with a Muggle shows him letting a single person into his world, battling the constant pretense with a solitary friendship, much as Gatsby does with the protagonist Nick.
Boardwalk Empire (2009-2014) features temperance lecturers, silent movies, and all the trappings of a world long vanished. Central is the politician Enoch “Nucky” Thompson, who ruled Atlantic City during the Prohibition era. Like characters in Downton Abbey, Nucky interacts with famed historical characters like Al Capone and Andrew W. Mellon to delight fans. All the while, he introduces them to a world as festive as it is dangerous. Salon’s Heather Havrilesk notes:
One of the unexpected joys of “Boardwalk Empire,” though, lies in the way the show revels in the oddities of its time, peeling back the layers of polite society to reveal a giddy shadow world of criminals and politicians collaborating to keep the liquor flowing. As the old system crumbles, it challenges the bonds between rivals and friends, and new alliances are formed as a more chaotic age dawns. Just as you think you understand a particular character or a situation, the ground shifts underneath you.367
The show focuses on the dual worlds – one of the respectable politician campaigning for votes from devout widows and one of gambling, bootlegging and murder. Everyone has two faces and follows two sets of laws – the police division determined to stop alcohol smuggling are dismissed as useless “dogcatchers” by the powerful mob. However, among their own, betrayal results in death. This parallels the Wizarding World, who maintain ordinary faces for the hapless Muggles, then sneak into goblin speakeasies. Wizards don’t follow the Muggle rules, for, as J.K. Rowling wrote in her North American history of magic lessons:
Unlike the No-Maj community of the 1920s, MACUSA allowed witches and wizards to drink alcohol. Many critics of this policy pointed out that it made witches and wizards rather conspicuous in cities full of sober No-Majs. However, in one of her rare light-hearted moments, President Picquery was heard to say that being a wizard in America was already hard enough. “The Gigglewater,” as she famously told her Chief of Staff, “is non-negotiable.”
Newt even smuggles forbidden goods into the US, though they’re magical animals, not liquor. Underneath, of course, the wizards have their own far different legal system and must answer for real transgressions. True, the heroes are out of school, but between the haughty wizards of a time gone by and a foreign American world of gangsters and new money, there’s a similar tension.
Harry Potter, of course, has “an exotic, theme-park quality” itself – especially now with the new theme parks. Like Downton Abbey, it’s a far-off magical world with clearly-defined good and evil. Years ago, some critics were positing that this world of simpler times was part of Harry Potter’s draw. Critic Abigail Grant explains:
The Harry Potter series, books and movies, give popular culture a change of pace and a break from the technological advance of present day. It partially takes us back in time with ceremonial robes, candlelit rooms, writing on parchment, and a devout recognition of history of the magical demographic. However, it is also quite modern: there is electricity, there is an attention to modern fashion, and there is a sense of dramatic popular culture as demonstrated by the excited fandom surrounding both Victor Krum and Harry Potter. Technology does certainly play a role in the portrayal of the Harry Potter world, but it is quite limited in comparison to the technological advances of “real life.”368
Likewise, the twenties blend modern and old-fashioned with an aesthetic far from our own society. The fabulous 1920s gowns and elegant hats are a draw for the new film, just as they are on The Great Gatsby or Downton Abbey. The film introduces the Magical Congress of the United States of America (MACUSA), the American counterpart to England’s Ministry of Magic (Ah, how Americans love their acronyms!). MACUSA has an Art Deco style, dramatically setting it apart from the old world in favor of color and glitz. Gold and light are everywhere, with gilded phoenixes adding to the glamour. Eddie Redmayne says of his character, Newt:
When he first arrives in New York, you see him walking down the street, and the way he’s observing the city is the way that he would observe a natural habitat. He’s kind of smelling it; it’s as if he were in the jungle. It’s totally alien to him to see somewhere that’s filled with such vibrancy and people.369
It was a giddy time, in which everyone knew the rules didn’t apply to them. Americans moved from farms to cities and the nation’s total wealth more than doubled between 1920 and 1929, creating a strange new consumer society. Radios spread across America. At the same time, the 1920s marked a massive transformation – the time was bounded by World War I and the Great Depression, periods of some of the greatest horror in American history. The horrors of the war propelled society into a frantic search for distraction – anything to drown out the shock and despair. One reaction, as always occurs, was backlash. An anti-Communist “Red Scare” in 1919 and 1920 encouraged anti-immigrant hysteria. Fascism and totalitarianism were on the rise, socialism was gaining popularity. There’s a hint of this in the film, as Seraphina Picquery worries, “This is related to Grindelwald’s attacks in Europe. This could mean war.” Already, like Hitler, Grindelwald is beginning his campaign by targeting the vulnerable. Charlie Bertsch, who teaches 1920s culture at the University of Arizona, explains:
That decade marked the realization that old ways of life were dying out, even for the rich, and the concomitant fear that this passing of “tradition” would result in a complete social chaos. The backlash against this overwhelming impression that a new era had dawned, from middle-American insularism to the resurgence of the Klu Klux Klan and the rise of fascism in Europe, reflected a futile desire to turn back the clock.370
Family values, too, loudly protested the glitter and partying, leading to a successful ban on alcohol in the United States from 1920 to 1933. In Boardwalk Empire, temperance is framed as a religious and moral issue, with one character pressured to join the police through an appeal to his values and respectability. Many middle-class white Americans maintained the illusion that Prohibition allowed them to control the unruly immigrant masses. Continuing the hysteria and scapegoating, the National Origins Act of 1924 set immigration quotas on Eastern Europeans and Asians. As women got the vote and took secretary jobs, many others sought refuge in tradition – flappers emerged but so did Bible-thumpers. This contingent, upturning society under the guise of morality, can best be seen in the film’s “Second Salemers.”
Mary Lou Barebone (Samantha Morton), leader of The New Salem Philanthropic Society, is dedicated to eradicating people with magical abilities. She feeds the people’s paranoia, warning, “Something is stalking our city! Wrecking destruction. And then disappearing without a trace. Witches….live among us!” Magic, as shown through the Harry Potter backlash, has always been feared by conservative religion, and the Second Salemers mirror this fear. In both eras, there’s a general suspicion of magic and the harm it can inflict on family values.
Outside Shaw’s political rally, her No-Majs shout “We want a second Salem” and hold signs saying “No witchcraft in America.” In the New York Ghost (the wizarding version of the New York Gazette), the biggest headline is “Magical Disturbances Risk Wizarding Exposure,” with a supporting article stating that President Picquery is to “address fearful American Wizarding Community.” Other articles fuss about “Wizarding Exposure” and “Magical Exposure.” As the public goes on what can only be called a witch-hunt, Newt and his friends are warned to keep all traces of magic under wraps. MACUSA’s central memorial to the Salem Witch Trials thus contrasts with the sugary and unrealistic Fountain of Magical Brethren in the Ministry in England. Here, it’s a statue to wizard persecution and the reasons to hide. The giant warning dial overhead likewise hints at the constant paranoia of their world.
The response to all this fear was actually escapism into the world of science fiction and fantasy, much like today.
The 1920s were a time of social change and wild financial speculation, and the entire world seemed gripped with futurist fever. German auteur Fritz Lang’s science fiction epic, Metropolis, was in theaters. Czech writer Karel Čapek invented the word “robot,” and group of amateur fiction writers in the U.S. founded influential pulp magazine Weird Tales, which started publishing dark, bizarre stories of undersea aliens by a young man named H.P. Lovecraft. And in New York, the Harlem Renaissance was in full swing, bringing poetry, fiction and jazz from the African American community into the mainstream.371
As cinema, recorded music and radio gained popularity, an entertainment-driven disconnect appeared, much like the one today.
The shocking changes in the Roaring Twenties are dramatized in another show with a truly groundbreaking fandom. As critic Laura Miller describes it, “Downton Abbey, the object of almost as much fascination as the Harry Potter books before it” is set in Northern England in episodes stretching from 1912 to 1925. “The drama, which debuted in the US in 2011, was the highest rated cable or broadcast show when its third series finale aired in February this year, reaching 12.3 million viewers and becoming the most popular drama in the history of the Public Broadcasting Service.”372
The characters’ main conflict comes from the fall of social divides in England – after the war, one of the earl’s daughters marries a chauffeur and the others consider businessmen over titled aristocrats. One manages the estate and her sister edits a newspaper. Their cousin becomes engaged to a Black man, then marries a Jewish one and moves to New York. With new kitchen gadgets and slip-on dresses, servants become redundant and look for other work as well. It’s the end of centuries of aristocrats and tenant farmers, with modern city life taking over.
Why are these stories fitting our lives today so well? “I think most of the stories are about emotional situations that everyone can understand,” Julian Fellowes, the series creator and writer, told the New York Times.373 Of course, there was also the uncertainty of a new way of life, much like the new social rules of today’s digital age. In this increasingly modern world, with new life-changing gadgets each generation, a great cultural divide is stretching, seen now with each generation of gadgets today.
In the 1920s, we also witnessed the beginning of youth culture and college hijinks – you could say that young people in this era were the first to experience a stark generation gap with their parents. Kids who had grown up with technologies like telephones, movies, and electric lights were accustomed to a radically different world than people who grew up with horse-drawn carriages and gas lamps. And so those kids began to create their own culture.374
Steampunk, science fiction set in the Victorian era or thereabouts, has become a cultural phenomenon as well, suggesting a desire to return to simpler times yet reimagine them – a tool for understanding our own culture. Retro stories of the twenties also offers much of this:
Both periods are marked by intense political crisis. In the 1920s, many people’s lives had been destroyed by World War I and the global disruptions of 1919. Then, the decade ended with the Great Depression. The 2000s began with the 9/11 attacks and ended with financial crisis and mortgage meltdown. Now, in the teens, we are living in the aftermath of both events, trying to figure out what just happened. Revisiting the 1920s could be a way of thinking through the upheavals of the last decade. And then, of course, there’s the wild popularity of the Hunger Games franchise, which are a callback to the hungry years of the 1930s.375
Desirina Boskovich, co-author of The Steampunk User’s Manual: An Illustrated Practical and Whimsical Guide to Creating Retro-futurist Dreams, notes that steampunk has gained massive popularity because of its fondness for mash-ups “in a culture obsessed with mixing and remixing, fanfic, memes, and ‘shipping.”
Gotham. Sleepy Hollow. Bates Motel.
Guardians of the Galaxy. Fifty Shades of Grey. Kindle Worlds.
Lately, we really seem to be into creative takes on the old
classics. And Steampunk is like
the ultimate mash-up genre – both futuristic and retro. Plus, it’s
got room for anything and everything fandom’s little heart can
dream up: Aliens and AIs,
zeppelins and zombies, pirates and corsets, goggles and gaslights,
mad scientists and scullery maids. It’s romance, horror, science
fiction, fantasy, and adventure (and even occasionally a whodunit
or a spaghetti western). Basically, it’s the kind of structured yet
flexible framework that allows for endless reinvention, and it
rewards experimentation within the shared yet ever-evolving
universe of the alternate past.376
Indeed, comic-cons have produced steampunk Marvel and DC superheroes, steampunk Star Wars, and more. The shows Doctor Who and the film Through the Looking Glass seem to be leaping onto the bandwagon, incorporating gleaming gears into their time travel plots. Harry Potter has a similar cultural impact, with mash-up costumes, vids, and more fanfic than for any other work. In these projects, unsurprisingly, Harry travels through time, space, and reality to meet just about every fictional character. A Downton-Harry mashup, as Fantastic Beasts appears, isn’t very surprising.
The new film transplants many elements of the Potterverse like the magical newspapers, now reporting American politics, and the moving bricks, now concealing Prohibition-era alcohol smuggling tunnels. MACUSA is located in the Woolworth Building, while Queenie is a legilimens (meaning she can see into minds like Snape and Voldemort). Characters clamber onto the Squire Building and battle monsters in Times Square, blending history and the fantastical. Newt arrives on a boat, in a stereotypical shot of those arriving on Ellis Island at the time, clutching his briefcase of treasures…though they’re more unusual than keepsakes the historical immigrants brought. He casts spells against the classic 1920s New York skyline, jazz playing in the background. Newt also climbs into the inner world of his suitcase, echoing Hermione’s beaded bag and Mad-Eye Moody’s trunk from Goblet of Fire. Adding to the mash-up, he has something of a Doctor Who look.
It’s hard to ignore that all these eras had massive class distinctions. Boskovich adds that Steampunk too is class conscious as it takes place in the Victorian Era and the Gilded Age, just before the First World War. Lords and ladies spent millions, while hundreds of workers shoveled the coal. “Many Steampunk writers are drawing on this obvious metaphor to our current age and exploring pressing social issues.” As she concludes: “We live in an era of massive inequality and an exponentially increasing gap between the rich and the poor. While some movements like Occupy address the inequality head on, science fiction and fantasy have always provided a means for writers and artists to critique their society indirectly.” The Hunger Games too is critiquing such moments of history, with the severe disparity between the haves and have-nots. However, Americans don’t seem to mind the stories of the entitled, judging by Downton Abbey’s success:
Americans may have suffered class wounds of their own, but not at the hands of toffs, whether motheaten or freshly laundered. Most Americans don’t even know what a toff is and the finer delineations of the British social hierarchy – the way a person’s speech can immediately place him or her in a very precise slot, for example – are largely lost on us…Americans have always found British manners and formality amusing, especially from a distance, where it is a lot less intimidating. There are few distances more unassailable than a century. The geographic, historical and cultural gulf between modern America and Edwardian Britain gives the milieu of Downton Abbey an exotic, theme-park quality. Even if Americans might daydream about what it would be like to work as a housemaid at the abbey or swan around in Lady Grantham’s spectacular dresses while being waited on hand and foot, neither scenario is even remotely an option for us.377
At the time, there was rampant racial discrimination, and also sexism and homophobia. These issues are addressed in the shows, and addressed or sometimes reimagined in Steampunk. Many were disappointed, however, to discover the heroes of Fantastic Beasts were a white hero with his male and female best friends, just like in the original series. A Black female MACUSA president is a nice gesture, demonstrating wizards’ progressivism. (The first female US senator served in 1922, as a comparison. While two African-American senators served during the Reconstruction of the 1870s, another didn’t appear until 1967.) However, like Kingsley Shaklebolt, President Picquery is more an image of tokenism than a central hero.
They’re not very diverse, but the heroes are the underdogs. In Fantastic Beasts, Porpentina Goldstein, played by Inherent Vice star Katherine Waterston, is an employee of MACUSA who is in disgrace. Reportedly, she “stood up for the wrong person” and was demoted for trying to do what was right – a plot straight from the Potter books. Dan Fogler’s Jacob Kowalski, as the first No-Maj main character, is more marginalized than any of the original trio. A factory worker, he’s a reminder that it’s not just a world of wizards and lords anymore. Likewise, Newt is rather fragile. Eddie Redmayne says of his character:
Newt’s been damaged by human beings, and at the beginning of the film, he’s someone that’s pretty content in his own company and the company of the beasts. He enjoys his solitude, and he’s also spent a year out in the field. So he really hasn’t had to deal with people.378
He has a dazzling magical world in his suitcase where he can retreat, and presumably he does when the real world grows too threatening.
Credence Barebone., played by Ezra Miller, is the adopted middle child of Mary Lou Barebone (Samantha Morton). As she crusades against magic, he “appears withdrawn, extremely shy and far more vulnerable than his two sisters. Credence is defenseless against the abuse that comes in response to the slightest infraction of Mary Lou’s strict rules. But his loneliness also makes him susceptible to the manipulation of Percival Graves (Colin Farrell), who has taken a personal interest in Credence.”379 “We’ve lived in the shadows for too long,” he insists, frustrated with the double life that characterizes the twenties. Graves concludes, “I refuse to bow down any longer.” As a powerful Auror and the Director of Magical Security, he has the ability to change their world forever.
Like romance novels and other class-based period pieces, Downton Abbey resembles high school for Americans, at least according to critic Laura Miller:
In place of the captain of the football team, the Regency romance has a duke, and instead of a shy bespectacled girl, the heroine is likely to be a young lady of ordinary looks and no fortune whose inner merits the hero, alone of all others, readily perceives. Instead of a catty cheerleader as the heroine’s romantic rival, there is a society beauty, complete with a mean-girl clique that might as well have been lifted right out of a John Hughes film. The sexual mores of the characters’ social circle, instead of being founded in the Christian morality, male supremacism and class prejudices of 19th-century England, is merely a matter of prudish scandalmongering and mean-spirited, small-town gossip. The intricate, exclusionary subtlety of centuries of upper-class manners gets translated into the bratty snootiness of American adolescence.
Downton Abbey may not fit as exactly on to the familiar stock figures of the American high school but the rigid, claustrophobic social hierarchies of the high-school experience remain the easiest point of reference for US viewers. Lord Grantham resembles the highminded yet out-of-touch principal and his daughters the student body’s most popular belles, girls whose social and romantic lives serve as universal topics of conversation. Matthew Crawley is the new transfer student, who turns out to be a catch despite his modest background. The conniving O’Brien and Thomas are recognisable as the bullies who afflict so many sensitive adolescents, Mr Carson and Mrs Hughes function as the wise and seasoned teachers who can be counted on to intervene before things get too bad, and Daisy, with her string of hopeless crushes, speaks to many a formerly dreamy mouse.
It’s a class system, but one that’s long vanished in America and leaves as the Americans depart high school. Miller concludes: “For Americans, high school is rife with cruelty and unfairness, with an elite that benefits from the arbitrary blessings of birth (money, good looks, athletic prowess), but it doesn’t necessarily define you for life. High school is formative, but not conclusive.”
Thus, the twenties culture presents a situation all can understand, blended with a great deal of nostalgia for simpler times, whether high school or the pre-technological past. Further, old fashioned is becoming cool again. Desirina Boskovich explains:
We’re in the middle of a massive generational shift, originally led by a hipster vanguard but now becoming mainstream: what’s old is new again. Gen X’ers and Millennials are raising urban chickens, dipping candles, planting vegetable gardens in their front yards, canning jam, keeping bees, sewing their own clothes, and rediscovering the joys of an old-fashioned shave. Part of it is practicality; these are valuable skills to learn, practice, and pass on, based on the kind of folk knowledge that can get lost forever if it’s not carefully preserved. Part of it is just the zany, passionate joy of developing an expertise, and making something practical and beautiful with your own hands.
To many, this is Harry Potter’s appeal, as much as Downton Abbey’s and Steampunk’s – a return to a time before chattering cellphones and laptops, in the distant boarding school in a medieval castle. Now Newt Scamander can combine all these qualities in his own story, along with the glitz of the jazz age.