Deathly Hallows: Page 597

Snape's film noir moment, the utter stupidity of the Carrows, Pius Thicknesse as Gerald Ford, and the failures of the Dark Mark as a communications device.

Hello there! Back again after a long time — baseball season is over, things are more relaxed, and I’m glad to be back on the page(s)! This week, we get right back into the wackiness of Hogwarts and look at a page whose action is pretty minimal, but sends us off in some interesting directions. Enjoy!

Page 597 of Deathly Hallows feels, right from the start, like the opening of a character-driven suspense movie, even a noir. Everything is dark and quiet; you can hear in the characters’ voices that they’re tense but also controlled, ready to fight but not in an irrational way. Everyone involved knows that there’s a standoff coming sooner or later, and because they know it, they’ve had plenty of time to get as prepared as possible.

Harry and Professor McGonagall are descending through the castle when they run into a familiar face, and that’s where the action of the page begins.

Snape’s theatrics

Here’s how the book describes the moment when Harry and Professor McGonagall realize that they’re not the only ones walking around:

They had descended two more floors when another set of quiet footsteps joined theirs. Harry, whose scar was still prickling, heard them first: He felt in the pouch around his neck for the Marauder’s Map, but before he could take it out, McGonagall too seemed to become aware of their company. She halted, raised her wand ready to duel, and said, “Who’s there?”

“It is I,” said a low voice.

From behind a suit of armor stepped Severus Snape.

Let’s break that down.

First, Harry and McGonagall are walking, then they hear someone else walking as well.

Next, McGonagall stops and asks who is there.

Then, Snape steps out from behind a suit of armor.

Put them all together, and it seems that Snape is doing what he’s doing purely for theatrical effect. He wasn’t trying to hide; if he had wanted to avoid being noticed, he could have just not walked and not come out from behind the suit of armor. He also, though, didn’t want to just stand in the middle of the corridor and let Harry and McGonagall casually run into him.

What’s left? Drama. He stands behind a suit of armor, and reveals himself (in overly formal language — “it is I” — that serves no purpose other than to sound dramatic) only at the moment when it’s most cinematic.

There are directions to go that will get way too granular — e.g. what exactly is the layout of the space where they’re walking, that Snape can also be walking, audible but invisible, then come out from behind a suit of armor? — but those don’t really matter, since the architecture is what it is and we just sort of live with it. The point, though, is that this isn’t just Snape acting theatrically; it’s J.K. Rowling writing Snape acting theatrically, because that’s the tone of this scene. Even the use of his full name — “Severus Snape” rather than “Professor Snape” or just “Snape” — lends the scene a feeling of tense formality, with the characters knowing they’re going to fight, but also knowing that they need to lend the whole thing an air of professionalism and courtesy before that fight can happen. I wrote at the beginning that this whole page feels like it comes right out of a noir, and you can almost imagine a Snape voiceover right before he steps out from behind the suit of armor:

Int. Dark Hogwarts hallway

PROFESSOR MCGONAGALL hears the footsteps. She freezes, lifting her wand and raising her hand for silence. She looks around.

PROFESSOR MCGONAGALL

Who’s there?

We cut to PROFESSOR SNAPE hidden behind the suit of armor. Half his face is lit by the window across the hall; the other half is hidden in the shadows. We see that he too is holding his wand. We zoom back to a shot of PROFESSOR SNAPE in the foreground with the suit of armor behind him. To his left, we see PROFESSOR MCGONAGALL in the background with her wand raised, ready for a fight. They do not see each other yet.

PROFESSOR SNAPE (VOICEOVER)

The moment I heard her say those words, I knew she’d found me out. I had always known the fight was going to come, and now, all of a sudden, here it was. But there was one other thing I’d always known: I wasn’t going down hiding in the dark like a frightened cat. It was finally time to put up or shut up, and I knew I was as ready as I could possibly be.

We cut back to a close-up of PROFESSOR SNAPE

PROFESSOR SNAPE

It is I.

He steps out from behind the suit of armor. We see the two of them slowly, carefully advancing on each other, both with wands raised. Two things are clear: they need to exchange pleasantries, and they’re going to fight afterwards.

The Carrows

Why does Voldemort place the Carrows at Hogwarts?

Alecto and Amycus Carrow seem to be complete idiots. They’re basically middle school meathead bullies; all they are good at is being chaotic and cruel. These are the Death Eaters that Voldemort chooses to place at Hogwarts, to basically be his boots on the ground while Snape takes care of the long-term issues. And honestly, putting the Carrows in this role seems like an unforced error on Voldemort’s part.

The objective of having the Carrows — or people like them — at Hogwarts is to crush dissent, to make sure that anyone who rebels against the pro-Voldemort orthodoxy gets punished. While they’re there, they can also reinforce that same orthodoxy; they teach Defense Against the Dark Arts and Muggle Studies, so they can teach their students that actually, the dark arts aren’t that bad, and muggles are the real problem.

The problem with having the Carrows do this, of course, is that most Hogwarts students aren’t stupid, but the Carrows are. How are students going to react when Alecto Carrow launches into a Muggle Studies lesson, saying ridiculous things in her ridiculous working-Londoner accent about how Muggles are like animals? It’s not subtle at all, and rather than being slowly taken in, students will just reject it out-of-hand.

If Voldemort was interested in playing the long game, here’s what he could do: find a Death Eater who can be dressed up to seem mainstream, respectable, and intelligent. Make this person the new Muggle Studies teacher. Have them start slow: at first, the lesson can be that wizards are naturally special, and muggles just have to get along without magic. Then, slowly but surely, build up: the teacher can start mentioning how muggles have persecuted wizards before, and how generous it is of wizards to let the muggles live without interference, rather than coming in and taking charge, and how some people think wizards should just be in charge. Start bringing out the statistics: “Some people who study this say that if wizards took our natural places at the top of muggle society, each muggle would immediately see an enormous increase in quality of life.” And so on and so forth. In small steps, you can make your way from ordinary Muggle Studies to genocidal nonsense, but done smartly, you can at least attempt to have the people you’re trying to convince actually accept what you’re saying.

The other problem with the Carrows is that they seem disproportionately likely to incite a response against Voldemort. Early on in the book, Lupin explains that Voldemort is winning by operating in the shadows. By letting his slightly more mainstream operatives (e.g. Snape, Yaxley, Umbridge, Pius Thicknesse) put his plans into action, he avoids overtly putting himself in charge. People aren’t quite sure what is happening, so rather than launching a rebellion, they’re stuck whispering their suspicions to their friends. The key to sustaining this dynamic — which Voldemort has cultivated masterfully — is keeping things clean and routine enough that nobody is going to do anything louder than whisper.

So, in a very similar vein, the disciplinary regime that Voldemort needs isn’t two fascistic bozos; it’s someone who seems mainstream and respectable, who talks mostly about maintaining an orderly learning environment for the good of the students. Someone who can cite research about how firm discipline has been shown in some cases to improve educational outcomes. Someone who can dish out harsh punishments as well as anyone else, but who can at least talk well about them, so that while bad, they don’t seem quite bad enough to break Voldemort’s whispered hold on the wizarding populace.

But instead of that, Voldemort has Death Eaters inside Hogwarts forcing students to practice the Cruciatus Curse on people in detention. Obviously, Voldemort’s reign is toppled in May, so we don’t see what happens when students get home at the end of the school year…but what kind of reception is he expecting, exactly? When little Johnny goes home and tells his mom “yeah, in Defense Against the Dark Arts, we learned the Cruciatus Curse,” how are his family and friends going to react? Or, worse yet, he comes home and says “I was late for class one day, because I forgot my book and had to go back to the common room to get it, so I got a detention…my punishment was 25 Cruciatus Curses.”

Voldemort is trying hard not to inspire open rebellion. Putting two nitwits into Hogwarts who have the students practicing unforgiveable curses on each other doesn’t seem like the best way to do that.

Snape’s wild few months

Maybe the question about the Carrows is sort of beside the point. After all, the guy who killed Dumbledore is the Headmaster, and it hasn’t caused any serious trouble.

Part of this is undoubtedly due to that atmosphere of repression that Voldemort has cultivated. The Daily Prophet isn’t going to run an editorial complaining about Snape; in fact, it has almost certainly shifted its coverage to be universally positive, acquitting Snape of Dumbledore’s murder and casting the blame toward Harry. If students and parents are unhappy about Snape’s appointment, what are they going to do? Attendance is now compulsory, and nasty things are happening to people who refuse to toe the line. So maybe that’s the answer to why Voldemort placed the Carrows at Hogwarts, as weird a decision as it was: He knew nobody would be able to do anything about it.

This brings up a question, though, about the mechanics of Snape’s wild Summer. After killing Dumbledore, he flees from Hogwarts, and the Ministry can’t catch up with him for a while. The next time we see him, he’s at a meeting of Death Eaters at Malfoy Manor. After that, he’s chasing the seven Potters — and after that, he’s suddenly the newly-announced headmaster of Hogwarts.

What happened there?

This seems eerily similar to the events of The Secrets of Dumbledore. Grindelwald commits all his crimes, then in the next movie, because of a sympathetic Chief Mugwump of the International Confederation of Wizards, gets acquitted and can suddenly do whatever he wants, including try to be in charge himself.

We don’t know the finer workings of the Wizarding justice system — there are so many, many times we are frustrated by this woeful lack of information, it’s such a pain — so we’re not sure what the maneuvering looked like from the legal angle. We don’t know whether a grand jury ever indicted Snape, or whether he was ever charged or tried in absentia. (Sidebar — million dollar idea: a procedural comedy-drama about a wizarding criminal defense lawyer, ten episodes, 60 minutes each, it can’t possibly fail). We don’t know whether Thicknesse put on some sort of sham acquittal process after taking over as Minister of Magic.

Socially and politically, though…Snape being acquitted and returning to teach at Hogwarts has a real “Ford pardons Nixon” feel to it. You can even (sort of comedically) imagine Thicknesse giving a Gerald Ford-esque speech in which he cast Dumbledore’s murder as a blight on wizarding society, then announced that he was pardoning Snape to help put the rancorous division and enmity behind us. In fact, if you take excerpts of Ford’s speech and just swap in Wizarding references, here’s what they look like (they speak badly of Pius Thicknesse, but far worse of Gerald Ford’s decision-making and speechwriting):

“After years of bitter controversy and divisive national debate, I have been advised, and I am compelled to conclude that many months and perhaps more years will have to pass before [Severus Snape] could obtain a fair trial by jury in any jurisdiction of the [Wizarding world] under governing decisions of the [Wizengamot].”

“The facts, as I see them, are that a former [teacher at Hogwarts], instead of enjoying equal treatment with any other citizen accused of violating the law, would be cruelly and excessively penalized either in preserving the presumption of his innocence or in obtaining a speedy determination of his guilt in order to repay a legal debt to society.”

“In the end, the courts might well hold that [Severus Snape] had been denied due process, and the verdict of history would even more be inconclusive with respect to those charges arising out of the period of his [employ at Hogwarts], of which I am presently aware.”

“I feel that [Severus Snape] and his loved ones have suffered enough and will continue to suffer, no matter what I do, no matter what we, as a great and good nation, can do together to make his goal of peace come true.”

“Pius Thicknesse: Wizarding Gerald Ford” is not something I ever thought I would say or think, but you never what’s going to happen on these pages.

The Dark Mark again

I’ve written before about how the whole Dark Mark communication system suffers from some pretty serious flaws, but it’s worth mentioning again here.

When Snape announces that he was under the impression that Alecto Carrow had apprehended an intruder, he unintentionally flexes his arm, which leads Professor McGonagall to believe (rightly) that he surmised that information because his Dark Mark burned when Alecto pressed hers after finding Harry in the Ravenclaw common room. So far, the system is working: Voldemort tells everyone that one of the Carrows will push their mark when they find Harry, and sure enough, Alecto does. Now everyone knows about it. Well and good.

But now, there’s nothing else. There’s no conversation to be had. Everyone basically just gets this one very vague notification, and nothing else. This is another one of those instances in which muggle technology is clearly superior. The Death Eaters would be so much better off just carrying walkie-talkies.

“Alecto, come in? Alecto, do you read me?” *turns to Voldemort* “Sir, we’re getting nothing from Alecto, Amycus has gone quiet too — what would you suggest? Maybe a false alarm?”

As the scene goes, if you remember, Amycus gets stuck outside the Ravenclaw common room for a while, and he’s terrified; he starts yelling at Professor McGonagall about how Voldemort will kill them if it turns out to be another false alarm, because he doesn’t want to be disturbed from checking on all the horcruxes. But all the inconvenience could be avoided if Amycus could just send a follow-up message — “Hi all, just following up on Alecto’s message of a few minutes ago: I looked into it, and it turned out to be a false alarm. So there’s no need to interrupt any important business, just a momentary glitch, we’re now all set on our end — hope this didn’t inconvenience anyone!”

Sure, Voldemort might still be annoyed. But the real frustration doesn’t come from merely getting the buzz of the Dark Mark; it comes from getting that notification, then going all the way back to Hogwarts only then to find out that it was a false alarm. It’s the difference between getting a text that says “come home ASAP” before immediately getting another that says “oops, sorry, never mind, false alarm, my bad,” and getting a text that says “come home ASAP,” leaving your important meeting, driving all the way home, and hearing “oh, you came home? That’s too bad, I didn’t mean to send that.”

The Dark Mark is basically a pager, and it’s quite strange that Voldemort can’t give his army anything better than that. “Dark Mark: Wizarding pager.” It’s almost as weird, but not quite as weird, as “Pius Thicknesse: Wizarding Gerald Ford.”