Why Harry Potter is the man - James Christopher

The only real magic that Harry has ever had in his pocket is the fact that he is mortal. With that fact alone he triumphs over most other modern-day screen heroes – Bart Simpson included. Every film in his extraordinary childhood has disguised or hidden the truth of Harry’s ultimate mortality. There have been some close encounters with chilly and twisted wraiths (played by Gary Old-man and Ralph Fiennes) who ache to reveal the secrets of his past. But the real power that young Potter exerts over his millions of British fans is that he touches a real life chord in every single one of us.

He is the world’s most famous orphan. He has the most grisly relatives ever invented. He lives in a suburban hellhole in the kind of unimaginable solitude that kids spend the rest of their lives trying to forget. He is far more real and relatable to than any of his famous peers, the most famous resident of Springfield included.

Harry has no mum and dad and less love. His real mother, J. K. Rowling, is a boot-strap Thatcherite who gave birth to Harry in an Edinburgh coffee shop. His life in Hogwarts has been no less strange than hers. He took a wild punt on an opportunity that didn’t seem to be there. He ran at a brick wall on platform 9¾ in King’s Cross station and his world changed for ever.

BACKGROUND

• One eye on Harry

• Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix - Sunday Times review

• The fifth element

• Actresses are 'insane', says Daniel Radcliffe

• Potter magic at premiere turns out to be illusion

BACKGROUND

• Digital DNA could finger Harry Potter leaker

• Asda starts Harry Potter price war

• Early Potter reviews provoke Rowling outburst

• Harry Potter book leaks on to internet

• Harry Potter and the supermarket sweep

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

First review of fifth instalment: fails to cause stir of earlier films and feels like a chore

Related Internet Links

• Watch Screen Online - Harry Potter special

• Visit Times Online's Harry Potter topic page

• Order Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows online

Harry, weirdly, has always been a conformist. Like his earnest pal Hermione he has a knee-jerk instinct to do right, but absolutely no confidence. Like Ron, he is hopelessly wobbly when push comes to shove. But, for my money, he is as close to a strapping role model as young British punks can get. He is actually a classic archetypal Hollywood hero. Bart’s slick off-the-cuff philosophy is wonderful fluff. But the time will come when he will look as jaded as the Flintstones.

Harry doesn’t have the superficial luxury of eternal life. However wild and wonderful his adventures, the stolid truth is that he will have to square up to the real world one day. Every one of us has to do that when we leave the cinema. What’s magical about the Harry Potter stories are the little bits of wisdom we take with us.

We have revelled in Potter’s curiousity and desire to rebel. As his hormones have kicked in so have ours. He has paved the way for awkward teenagers and reminded adults what a prickly (and funny) business growing up is. His Freudian face-offs with giant carnivorous spiders at midnight and extistentially challenged trolls are the stuff of lore. We are surprised, delighted and shocked by the preposterous wonders of Hogwarts and its spooky staff. And we are forever terrified by the fiendish and surreal terrors he has to face at the climax of every film.

For some strange reason it seems to square with the everlasting neuroses of boarding schools, and Latin classes. Unlike the freewheeling anarchy of Bart Simpson, Harry is almost a visual reminder of dormitories, libraries and bell-ringing duties. In this respect he will forever be peculiarly British.

I guess the deep joy is that he actually has the courage to fence with his buttoned-up emotions. Ron (Rupert Grint) has made an equally lucrative film career by trying to loosen Harry up. He is far more well-balanced than Harry, simply because he has that wonderfully nutty family to sink back into.

Harry will never have that luxury. Ultimately he is an uptight and vulnerable loner who can share his deepest thoughts only with ancient souls such as Dumbledore, the head-master, and the intellectually inferior Hagrid, the school janitor, played by Robbie Coltrane.

It’s a terribly English thing to have your dreams and nightmares laid out like tracks through a dark fairytale forest. But there’s a true-grit, stiff-upper-lip nobility about the kids from Hogwarts, who dare to test the mettle of their nightmares. What makes Harry so profoundly different – and more admirable than Bart – is that at the end of every school year he has to square his dreams with the humdrum realities of a loveless life in a suburban nowhere. He really is a child of these times. Treasure him. Because he won’t be around for ever.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is released on July 13

Why Bart's where it's at - Kevin Maher

To appreciate the genius of Bart Simpson you have to see him for what he is. More importantly, you have to define him against what he is not – which, in this case, is an emotionally, physically and sexually repressed neoconservative class-crawling prig called Harry Potter.

While the latter is drearily obsessed with birthrights, social privilege and the perpetuation of the status quo, Simpson exists solely to interrogate and, in some cases, demolish these ideas.

In the grand cinematic tradition of Marlon Brando in The Wild One and James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause, Simpson is the truculent antihero who rejects tradition and ridicules authority – two things that the drone-like Potter works strenuously to uphold.

Think of how Bart decries Springfield Elementary School, and compare it with Potter’s reverence for Hogwarts. In an early Simpsons episode called Bart the Murderer an irate Principal Skinner catches Bart daubing the school playground with graffiti. However, instead of being penitent, Bart buys Skinner’s silence with cash that he earned from bar-tending for the local Springfield mafia. Can you imagine Potter with even a fraction of Bart’s nous?

Bart’s defiance often occurs on a much broader scale, and has implications for the American psyche. In the episode Bart-Mangled Banner, a photograph of Bart mooning the US flag is released to the press and causes such hysteria that Springfield has to change its name to Libertyville, while the Simpsons family is shipped off to a sinister detention centre. Again, the critique of the Establishment is savage.

Even in the realm of human sexuality, the prepubescent Simpson has the edge on Potter – although considering that the latter is actually a creepy desexualised teenage eunuch, this isn’t difficult. There’s a frankness to Bart’s as-yet unexplored sexuality that’s both endearing and sweetly unfussy. In the recent episode Little Big Girl the ten-year-old Bart falls for a pregnant 15-year-old called D’Arcy (voiced by Natalie Portman). In one scene Bart fantasises about life with D’Arcy in a backwoods cottage – he skates through the front door and finds her standing by the stove, holding a baby in one arm and wearing a raunchy top that gamely exposes her swollen belly. The implication here is that he, this time, has made her pregnant. The fantasy ends, Bart gives a wide leering smile and says, “Awesome!”.

Elsewhere Bart’s antiheroic behaviour extends beyond critiques of the media, politicians, social and sexual mores and religion (see The Father, the Son, and the Holy Guest Star), and instead to his own character. In an early episode called Bart Gets Famous, Bart rebels against the very idea of, well, Bart Simpson. He becomes famous, like Bart Simpson, for being on a TV show and using a catchphrase – in this case it’s “I didn’t do it!” instead of the original “Eat my shorts!”. Naturally, his fame fades as quickly as it came, but the process of character deconstruction and probing self-analysis, although witty and ironic, has been positively philosophical. And as for Harry Potter? Well, hey, he’s got a wand and glasses.

Ultimately, however, Bart works not just because of his rebellion. He works because of his conformity. At the end of every episode, after some act of defiance, he is softly subsumed back into the bosom of his dysfunctional family.

This is surely the great allure of his character – that his perpetual recalcitrance is met by constant forgiveness. If the status quo remains mostly unchanged at the end of each episode it does so despite the best efforts of Bart, not because of him. Which is surely the one important lesson that the obsequious and pusillanimous, sexless, school-loving toady-boy Harry Potter should learn?

The Simpsons Movie is released on July 27

Explore Film

• Film Reviews

• Trailers

• DVD

• Oscars

• Cannes

Editor's choice

• U2 at Nou Camp Stadium, Barcelona
• The 50 Best Movie Villains
• The 15 golden rules of theatre etiquette