Chamber of Secrets: Page 253
Chamber of Secrets back in theaters, why we need to see better quidditch, the strangeness of Ginny ransacking Harry's stuff, and why the early books are a lot like mystery novels.
Welcome back! I’m experimenting with subheadings; that’s the big news for this week. Settle in and enjoy page 253 of Chamber of Secrets, in which not much happens, but I make a big deal out of it.
Last night, I went to see Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets in what I can only imagine was a limited-engagement 20th anniversary celebratory screening. I wasn’t old or proximate enough to see a Potter movie in theaters until Half-Blood Prince in 2009, so I must say, this was something of a cathartic experience. I wore my Hufflepuff sweater and everything. What a wonderful time it was.
So I was relieved when the number two came up in my random number generator. Two, of course, means we’re looking at Chamber of Secrets, and I’m fresh off a theatrical viewing, ready to analyze the heck out of page 253. Unfortunately, while Chamber of Secrets is an incredibly satisfying movie, it’s also probably the story — both book and movie — with the most plot issues, so we’ll have to devote some space to those as well. But let’s see where the page takes us.
Here’s the beginning of the page:
drier, and the evening before Saturday’s match he went up to his dormitory to drop off his broomstick feeling Gryffindor’s chances for the Quidditch Cup had never been better.
The big match is coming up: from what little we can understand of the complicated Quidditch Cup scoring system, it all rides on the match on Saturday. Obviously, as we remember, the match will end up being canceled by Professor McGonagall and her big purple megaphone, because despite Wood’s protestations to the contrary, you can cancel quidditch — but even so, the quidditch scenes in Chamber of Secrets got me thinking. As far as quidditch is concerned, the films didn’t do all they could.
We need to see better Quidditch
A little while back, there was that big rumor that a Harry Potter TV show was in the very early stages of development. We haven’t heard anything about it since then, but presumably if those rumors were true, that very early development has continued. Maybe the TV show is something we’ll eventually see. Maybe it’s all nonsense. But either way, the TV show is definitely something that should happen.
People are always talking about all the changes they would impose, and all the extra inclusions that a TV show, with ten hour-long episodes in each of its seven seasons, could allow the directors to make. But you know why we really need a TV show? Because we need to see better quidditch.
Obviously that’s not the only reason, but it is a big one. The movies struggled with Quidditch for a whole host of reasons, which led them to either eliminate quidditch scenes (“Weasley is our king,” most of sixth-year quidditch, etc) or add gimmicks in an effort to spice them up (Harry and Malfoy flying under the stadium in CoS, Harry disappearing into the fog and encountering the hundreds of Dementors in PoA, a montage of Ron suddenly becoming a superstar in HBP). Especially in Chamber of Secrets, the quidditch scene is simultaneously too much and not enough. It takes a lot of time, and is definitely different than anything we’ve seen before: there’s a rogue bludger more or less systematically destroying the stadium as it chases Harry. But it’s also a lot of the same thing. Harry chases Malfoy around. The bludger comes at them but Harry dodges it. They swerve around an obstacle. They bump each other. Repeat three or four times.
What is the scene missing? Any of the actual game flow of quidditch. In the movies, what little we see of routine gameplay is absolutely ridiculous. The chasers fly around, and the opposing team defends against them, for some reason, by flying the opposite of the direction they’re trying to go and hoping to grab the ball as they fly past. It’s so fast, abstract, and violent that we don’t get to see the finer points of the game: the chasers making smart passes, the beaters hitting strategic bludgers, everyone retreating into a defensive formation when the other team has the quaffle.
Besides the Golden Snitch, quidditch is basically wizarding hockey, with players’ bodies as bludgers. But in hockey, you can’t just hit each other and shoot the puck back and forth as hard as you can for the entire game. The vast majority of each game is strategy: setting up plays, making careful passes, slowly creating the perfect opportunity. The filmmakers obviously didn’t decide to go that route with quidditch, probably because each quidditch scene was only a few minutes long; quidditch scenes are basically highlight reels from each game, all action and no strategic background. But there’s so much more to quidditch than we see in the movies, and a Harry Potter TV show could finally show the sport in all its glory.
Here’s an episode I will demand to see if the show ever gets made. It’s the day of the quidditch final in year three. The episode starts in the Great Hall at breakfast; we see a few miscellaneous interactions, mostly Gryffindors cheering Harry on. Then we go down to the Quidditch stadium (which will look completely different on my show, for what it’s worth; no more of these weird fabric-covered towers, but a proper raised bowl-style arena. There was a great illustration on PotterMore [RIP] that I weirdly love, which has been preserved by the internet). We see the Gryffindors in their locker room. This scene is pretty much a rip-off of the scene from Miracle: it’s Wood’s pep talk. Dead silence: no music until at least halfway through, no talking from anyone else, no sound effects. Just two minutes or so of Wood giving the speech about how it’s his last chance to win a cup.
They go out to the field, and the match begins. We get exposition from Lee Jordan’s commentary — which sounds far more like actual sports commentary in my version, by the way — that Gryffindor needs to win the match by at least 200 points to win the cup. Finally, we get to actually see how the match plays out. We see Gryffindor pull ahead early, and we see all the tactics; maybe just for the hell of it, we get to watch Wood call a time-out or two and talk strategy with the team. To break up the shots of the match, we see figures in the crowd as well: Professor McGonagall, Professor Snape, Ron and Hermione, basically all the other characters. We see Oliver Wood’s girlfriend, a character I’ve invented, feeling all the emotions of watching Wood in his last Hogwarts quidditch match. Wood is going to be a pretty major figure in my version.
Crucially, we actually get to see Harry spot the snitch with Gryffindor up 40, and we see his whole thought process; we see him notice the score, understand that he can’t catch the snitch yet, and watch his him think things through in real time. We see all the fights between Fred and George and the Slytherins, and Malfoy’s incredibly dirty tactics on Harry. And finally, we see the decisive moment: Harry flies into a crowd of Slytherins, allowing Angelina to score, then sees Malfoy taking off for the snitch. We get a close-up of the Firebolt accelerating as Harry flies after him. We watch him draw level, pull ahead, and knock Malfoy’s hand out of the way; he catches the snitch, and all hell breaks loose. The crowd storms the pitch and lifts Harry onto its shoulders. Dumbledore presents the cup. It’s an abject moment of triumph and joy.
This is the kind of thing we need to see. For a long time, quidditch is pretty much the most important thing in Harry’s life. Winning the cup in PoA is undeniably one of the most important moments of his adolescence. It deserves more than a passing mention: it deserves its own story. Give us a Harry Potter TV show — and give us better quidditch, and more of it.
The very strange ransacking of Harry’s stuff
When Harry gets to the dormitory, he finds Neville, who looks frantic. Neville urges Harry inside, and Harry finds that the contents of his trunk have been thrown everywhere. His bed has been messily unmade, and the drawer of his cabinet has been pulled out; his entire area is a mess.
We’ll find out later that Ginny was successfully searching his area for the diary. We don’t find out for sure where he had been keeping it, but the context strongly suggests that it was just sitting with his other books. So why on earth did Ginny completely rip his area apart and risk discovery, when it should have been a really easy find?
When Harry sees what has happened, he immediately understands that it must have been a Gryffindor who did it. Here’s a very simple logical progression that Harry could have followed after that:
Premise 1: A Gryffindor student searched my stuff and took Tom Riddle’s diary from my bag.
Premise 2: Tom Riddle’s diary contains information related to the Chamber of Secrets
Premise 3: The only person who could have known that Tom Riddle’s diary contains information related to the Chamber of Secrets was someone who had already been using it enough to see that information themselves
Premise 4: Anyone who has been using Tom Riddle’s diary enough to see the information within for themselves is at the very least somehow involved in the current opening of the Chamber of Secrets
Conclusion: A Gryffindor student is at the very least somehow involved in the current opening of the Chamber of Secrets
I mean, that’s pretty easy; Harry basically gets there himself. This should be a bombshell: a Gryffindor is involved! They might be the Heir of Slytherin! After that, Harry could follow another pretty simple logical sequence:
Premise 1 (From previous argument): A Gryffindor student is at the very least somehow involved in the current opening of the Chamber of Secrets
Premise 2: two signs that might indicate who that person is are A) that person has been acting strange lately, and B) that person has demonstrated knowledge or understanding of the diary’s powers
Premise 3: Ginny Weasley is a Gryffindor student
Premise 4: Ginny Weasley has been acting strange lately
Premise 5: When she saw Harry holding the diary earlier that day, Ginny Weasley looked terrified
Premise 6: There is no reason to look terrified when you see a notebook unless you know that the notebook is somehow bad
Conclusion 1: Ginny Weasley knows that the diary is bad; thus, she has demonstrated knowledge or understanding of its powers
Conclusion 2: Ginny Weasley satisfies both signs of suspicion that might indicate which Gryffindor is somehow involved in the opening of the Chamber of Secrets
Premise 7: Of all the Gryffindors, none of the others that Harry has encountered has satisfied either of the two conditions, let alone both
Conclusion 3: Ginny Weasley might be involved in the opening of the Chamber of Secrets, and Harry should probably check that out
Here’s the upshot of all this: it is by no means impossible for Harry to figure out who has taken the diary (even though he doesn’t, because he never thinks clearly without Hermione’s help). But it’s only even a possibility because he knows the diary is missing. Why does he know? Because it gets taken in a spectacularly violent way. Let’s say Ginny had just walked into the dorm, taken out Harry’s bag, and found the diary with all of his other books; say she took it, left everything as it had been, and walked out. Would Harry have ever noticed it was gone? He’s already seen the memory inside it, and he thinks that’s all he needs. Maybe he would have looked for it again and noticed it wasn’t there, but maybe not, and “maybe he wouldn’t have noticed” is clearly better than “he was definitely doing to notice.” Also, even if he was definitely going to notice eventually that the diary was gone, Ginny still had an incentive to search without messing things up.
Say Ginny takes the diary without ransacking the place. Harry comes in, thinks nothing is wrong, and doesn’t notice that the diary is gone until two days later, when he happens to go looking for it. What changes? His search pool increases dramatically: he can no longer make the blockbuster “it had to be a Gryffindor” realization, because now he could have lost it out of his bag, accidentally swapped it with Hannah Abbot’s transfiguration notebook, or anything else like that. By searching Harry’s things so violently, Ginny has not only incriminated herself and her possession by Voldemort: she’s done it in two ways. She’s ensured that Harry will notice instantly that the diary is gone, and she’s also assured that he’ll know a Gryffindor must have taken it, because he’ll know when and from where it disappeared.
One rebuttal is obvious: Ginny wasn’t thinking rationally, because she’s an eleven-year-old girl with serious things going on in her head right now. But here’s the thing: Ginny is supposed to be under Voldemort’s control, and Voldemort doesn’t want her to be discovered either. She’s obviously the key to his plan. No one is more cold and calculating than Tom Riddle: even if Ginny was falling apart and couldn’t bring herself to search Harry’s things calmly, why on earth didn’t Riddle take over her operations, and force her to search tidily and efficiently? Either way, it doesn’t make sense. At this point, Riddle is in Ginny’s head and can clearly make her do things against her will. If he made her search Harry’s stuff and take the diary back, there’s no reason he would have wanted it done messily and noticeably when the diary was just sitting there with all of Harry’s other books. And if he didn’t make her search Harry’s stuff, but rather that was Ginny’s own free will, why did Riddle allow it? Why didn’t he intercede and make her do it in a way that wasn’t so messy and potentially incriminating?
I’m asking all the questions; unfortunately, I don’t have answers. This is just a weird quirk of the series. I wish it made more sense.
The early books are whodunnit-adjacent
Books one through four of the Potter series are interesting, in that they have a lot of mystery elements, but they’re definitely not “mysteries” in the traditional sense. Books two and four especially fit this description.
What are we trying to figure out for the entirety of book two? Who is the Heir of Slytherin? That’s not far from “who is the murderer?” Likewise, in book four, a similar question pervades the entire thing: who is Voldemort’s spy? The most basic description of a mystery novel is that you try to figure out who did something, and both of those books definitely fit that plot structure.
But thinking back on the books, I definitely don’t think of them as mystery novels, and I don’t think I did even when I read them for the first time. Why not? There are a few reasons.
For one, Rowling writes in an interesting way, where despite being at the center of everything, the question that forms the Maguffin of the mystery doesn’t actually get that much attention. Look at Chamber of Secrets: how much time does the trio actually devote to “the heir of Slytherin”? A fair amount, sure, but there’s also the banality of everyday school, there’s quidditch, there are all the problems with Lockhart. Goblet of Fire is similar: you’re not thinking “who’s the spy?” You probably have a dozen questions, and that’s just one of them. When you read a detective story, you can’t stop thinking “I wonder who did it?” When you read Chamber of Secrets and Goblet of Fire, you’re not just thinking about who did it, because the story is broader than that. You’re thinking “what’s going to happen next?” Who did it is part of that, but it’s not all of it.
That lack of focus on the immediate “whodunnit” question leads to another, related factor: You don’t get the traditional detective/clue/suspect elements of a mystery. If that’s how these stories worked, when Harry discovered his stuff ransacked and the diary gone, it would act like an input into a computer program or a mathematical formula: the culprit must be a Gryffindor. The trio and readers would reevaluate the characters they’d encountered so far, reconsider their evidence, narrow down the list of suspects, and keep investigating. But Harry and Ron never really do that, and Hermione doesn’t get the chance. So what ends up happening is that we have a few clues that point to a suspect — a Gryffindor stole the diary from Harry, Ginny was terrified when she saw Harry holding it, we’ve seen a few references to her looking pale and being scared — but because the main characters never even sit down to think about the clues, we as readers don’t either.
The same thing happens in book four. If you really think about it, you can probably gather enough clues from the text to narrow down who Voldemort’s spy is to a few suspects: Moody, Ludo Bagman, and…I don’t know, maybe Cedric Diggory, if you’re really willing to stretch? The list is basically anyone who does things that impact Harry’s chances in the Triwizard Tournament without materially benefiting the person themselves in ways that we can see. If we can’t tell why someone is doing something, then Voldemort is one possible motivator. Bagman, for instance, might be trying to help Harry because he wants to get him to Voldemort; we learn at the end that it’s just a gambling addiction. You can likewise imagine an alternate reality — not the Cursed Child one, please stop — where Cedric was a Death Eater spy, and all of his actions, culminating in his manipulating Harry so that they both grabbed the cup at the same time with Harry thinking it was his idea, were under Voldemort’s orders in order to bring Harry to the graveyard. It didn’t happen, but it could have.
But I don’t think anyone read the book like this. We didn’t have suspect lists; we didn’t tally the clues and which characters they implicated. Basically, there was a mystery, but the story and the mystery weren’t the same thing. The stories have mysteries in them, but they’re not mystery stories. It’s a subtle difference, but a material one.
How do we see the difference manifested? In the Chamber of Secrets movie, this scene plays out a lot like in the book: Hermione says “it had to be a Gryffindor, nobody else knows our password. Unless it wasn’t a student.” That’s supposed to be a big reveal! A Gryffindor is involved! A Gryffindor might be the Heir of Slytherin! Who in the world could it be? But instead it gets completely passed over and forgotten. The one other notable clue — Ginny being terrified when she sees Harry holding the diary, which is what leads her to steal it back in the first place — isn’t in the movie at all. If the clues are so interchangeable that you can take one out and the story is pretty much the same, you know you don’t have a pure mystery.
And to be clear, that’s absolutely fine. Not everything is a pure mystery; that’s okay. I’m not critiquing; just noticing something about how the books work. That’s the kind of thing that happens in a page-by-page reread. But if all the clues pointing to Ginny are missing from the Harry Potter TV show, you can bet I’ll be annoyed.