Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
Most people want to be remembered after they’re gone. Often this takes the form of relationships - people pass down family traditions and tell the stories of friends or generations past. Think the Weasley Family, Luna. The more ambitious strive to leave their mark on the world through great accomplishments - innovation, leadership, or art. Dumbledore and Voldemort both come to mind.
Then there’s Gilderoy Lockhart.
Lockhart is the third category - too self-involved to build connection through real relationships and nowhere near skilled enough to hold his own with the movers and shakers. Instead, he cheats. He’s not interested in the thrill of the chase or the joy of seeing the last detail click into place. Lockhart just wants to be rich and famous. I’ll say this for him - the man is good at it. Its a weird book to revisit in the Influencer era. Fame (content creation?) is now a valid career path, if still a rare one to be truly successful in. And just like the damage Lockhart does throughout the book - releasing the pixies and leaving, removing all of the bones in Harry’s broken arm to ‘fix’ it, using Harry’s notoriety to boost his own fame - unexamined awe of fame can do the same harm in real life.
I want to be clear here - I don’t hate influencers. Honestly, I don’t even hate Lockhart. But if you see someone has built a successful career on their personal brand and entertaining content, maybe don’t put them in charge of children or assume they have the best take on the latest controversy. Fame in and of itself is not bad. People who want to be famous just because they love the attention are not bad. But assuming that fame = expertise in all things is very, very bad. Let’s use politicians and doctors as an easy example. Both go to school for years and become experts in their respective fields. A surgeon might spend 12+ years in school and various residencies before being considered fully fledged. A politician likely has degrees in economics or business and then graduates from Law school before they ever make it onto the ballot. Do I trust my doctor to know the best treatment for me if I get sick? Absolutely. Do I trust her to have the best approach to foreign policy with Russia? Not really, why would she? And the reverse is true for politicians. Reaching the pinnacle of any career requires a level of specialization that by its nature will eventually cause you to skip even basic knowledge of some other topic. That’s fine. Not everyone needs to know all things. But its important to remember that just because someone has enough name-recognition to be interviewed on TV, it doesn’t mean they know anything more about a topic outside of their specialty than you do.
In my first review I called out JKR for being a bit lazy in her world building and perpetuating negative stereotypes. For the most part, I’m not upset about her authorial choices here. Lockhart is largely shown as an antagonist and unsympathetic. The most active harm he does - attempting the Obliviate charm on the boys and successfully pulling it off on the people whose stories he stole for his books - comes back on him in a beautiful twist of fate. That being said however, its played mostly for laughs. I respect why; we’re only two books in and this is still basically a children’s story. But it’s glossing over real trauma. Even if we ignore the final attempt that ends with Lockhart in a mental institution, what happened to his previous victims? Studies have shown that forgotten or blocked trauma will still surface in the form of PTSD or other physical symptoms. This implies that using Obliviate is more akin to using a date-rape drug than any of us want to believe while reading the books. I don’t have a lot to say about this at the moment beyond the fact that I think its important that 1) we acknowledge the harm being done and 2) we sit with the discomfort. Sit with it, and keep an eye out as we move forward. In book three we’re going to learn about Azkaban and the Dementors. The ending of book four is the commonly cited inflection point where the series takes the turn into a much darker and more adult feel. But as we start reading more overt darkness, we can’t forget how important it is to remember to see the little moments that are so easily overlooked.
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