There are certain movies who offer you some sort of solace, or have some memories attached or are just delightful to watch, hence you find yourself paying them a visit every now and then. Especially during the Holiday season, where there is an additional comfort in getting lost in a make believe world. Harry Potter movies hold such a place for me. I belong to the generation whose childhood was defined by Harry Potter. Witnessing Harry’s rollercoaster of a lifetime filled with friends and villains is always a joyride no matter the number of iteration. For giving us this epic tale, we also have the dark lord to thank.
The embodiment of evil
A ‘villain’, according to Wikipedia, is a cruelly malicious and wicked character who forms an important evil agency and helps in moving the plot forward. Not only is he essential to the plot of the Harry Potter narrative, the entire premise is based around defeating this evil force to ensure everyone’s survival. Lord Voldemort ticks all the checkboxes one needs to be called a super-villain, and way more. The Dark Lord is as villainous as they come. And in a way, Harry Potter is because Lord Voldemort is.
The earlier Harry Potter movies are in general delightful and magical as we enter into Harry’s newly found wizarding life. The scarier parts are driven by the ‘you know who’ narrative and people anxiously remembering his terrors. Everyone’s scared to utter his name even when he is dead and gone. It seems only a strike of fate that obliterated him - he after all is invincible and hence people still believe he will return. That is how the story establishes the villain to be this powerfully terrifying entity, forebodingly building up the intensity of anticipation of his possible resurrection. The movies get darker with each instalment, the melancholy proportional to the strength of the Dark Lord. The air of mystique around this character for larger part of the story is what drives the fear - what you know little of is what you fear the most. We get to know more substantial details of his past only in the penultimate instalment.
The details of the past once revealed only reaffirm his sinister self. He isn’t a rebel without a cause or a human with a sympathetic backstory – he is just evil. Interestingly, his hate for the non-magical ‘muggles’ and his obsession for ‘pure-blood’ wizards stems from his own muggle father, which in fact makes him a ‘half-blood’. Born as Tom Marvolo Riddle, he hails from a family that never was. His mother had tricked his muggle father into marrying her only for him to abandon them once he realizes the truth. She then dies giving birth to Riddle Junior, and hence he grows up at a muggle orphanage. It is almost reminiscent of Hitler’s obsession with the racial hierarchy with Aryans at the pinnacle, when he was nowhere near to the template himself; he despises his own brokenness. Tom is a loner at the orphanage too, and finds pleasure in torturing other kids with his mysterious and powerful magical abilities. Only when Dumbledore finds out about this kid and decides to take him in to teach him to channel and control his power.
At Hogwarts he is a brilliant pupil. He makes prefect of House Slytherin and ultimately the Head Boy of the school. However, channeling and controlling his powers was never on Tom’s agenda. While he is excelling at school, he has parallelly opened the chamber of secrets, murdered his father and grand-father and is already on the journey to splitting his soul into several horcruxes. After his schooling he disappears and years later returns with his army of loyal followers called the ‘death eaters’ and his dark reign thus begins, before the incident at the Potter household which nearly kills him.
An iconic fantastical villain usually has a distinct appearance and this holds true here in the best ways possible. Even as a child and an adolescent that we get to see in certain flashbacks - the first time Dumbledore meets this kid, Tom enquiring about Horcruxes, Voldemort manifesting in the form of young Tom in the chamber of secrets – Tom Riddle has an intimidating aura. The appearance of Voldemort in the movies is somewhat askew from that in the books, with some hard-core fans expressing that the book Voldemort was way scarier with his red, cat-like eyes and skull-like face. But as someone who watched the movies before reading the books, I was intimidated by the movie Voldemort alright. His reptile like being renders the look of nothing close to being human. His pale skin, the slits in place of a nose, his gliding, snake-like movements – all exuded great coldness around this evil, heartless, cruel, megalomaniac being.
Voldemort works because he is a well-written villain. He is an anti-thesis of Harry Potter and hence in the process of loving Harry you automatically begin to despise what lies diametrically opposite to him. The seeds of despising Voldemort are sown way before you ever see him manifest into a visible form or get a glimpse of his back story. Only next to Dumbledore, he is one of the most powerful villains in the Potterverse. His only goal in life is to keep increasing his power. Anything that doesn’t help him reinforce his strength is useless to him, all he cares about is himself. That’s why the theory of Voldemort having a daughter in the spinoff play ‘Harry Potter and the cursed child’ is highly questioned by the ardent fans because Voldemort is simply incapable of loving anyone let alone have a child. His seeming indestructibility, the power to drive the narrative of the entire saga, his fearful personality and absence of anything that will allow any sympathy whatsoever – he represents the epitome of villainy. Potterhead or not, ‘He who must not be named’ is arguably one of the most well-recognized villains.
Heroes teach us and so do villains
Harry and Voldemort are alike in so many ways, which is what keeps the story so tightly tied. But as Dumbledore says to Harry, “It isn’t how you are alike, it’s how you are not”. At another point he says, “It matters not what someone is born, but what they grow to be”. As we celebrate 20th anniversary of this magical world and commemorate the heroes for their bravery, friendship, kindness and more, it also important to remember the villains and the lessons we learnt in the fight against them. A number of villains - some with their reasons, some witnessing a change of heart, some revealed to be heroes in a villainous garb - teach us too, albeit in a different way. We have a lot to learn from the villain-in-chief too. Love is what kept Harry safe, and Voldemort could’ve never sustained his loveless life. Too much obsession will drive you crazy! His mad lust for power is what lead to his undoing. For me, amidst the countless values we learn along the way, the essence of this story is that we are the product of our choices. No one is born evil, and who knows, even someone like Voldemort with no redeeming qualities whatsoever could have turned out different with different set of choices. “It is our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities”.
See you next Christmas, Harry and Voldy.
Great share!!!