sistermagpie (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sistermagpie) wrote2007-09-25 02:41 pm
sistermagpie) wrote2007-09-25 02:41 pm
Survivor: Malfoy Edition
I originally f'locked this out of habit, but figured I might as well leave it open. We'll see how that goes...
I have read stuff since DH about how people liked the Malfoys in it because they were on their own side and not either side. It made me think about why I found this story disappointing.
It wasn't that I was disappointed that they weren't on the good side, I don't think. It was just that the story as told was imo too weak. It seemed like they skipped around from one emotional state to another as needed by the plot, for one thing. Their first scene is imo fantastic, but I think the set up of Lucius looking so wrecked and his family so terrorized kind of calls for them to either go down with Voldemort or do something decisive (and probably risky) to try to get out from under his thumb--not having them do six of one and half dozen of the other and muddling through. They start off in truly dire straights and I kept thinking they would just continue down that road, only to be faced with them looking a lot better later on. This is not the way JKR usually writes her characters throughout a book.
It's the muddling through that I realized was a problem for me. After the book I thought the Malfoys were characters who had the survival ability of cockroaches with absolutely zero survival instinct.
It's possible--very possible given Peter and other things--that JKR doesn't respect these kinds of survivors--rats and cockroaches, iow. I don't think it would be out of line to say that she seems to write Peter and the Malfoys as low-lifes, and she might associate them with the kind of animals that scavenge in garbage etc. and which are therefore less than noble (in the opinion of some--not me). I never get the feeling that she cheers on these kinds of people, so especially with the Malfoys she never makes them active. On the contrary, her version of a survivor (and here I'm not including survivors who are warriors who've lived through battles like Harry or Moody) is basically a coward, someone who's never confident enough to leave or defy anyone (unfortunately for plot purposes, they will sometimes actively make their own situation *worse*--just never better).
We first hear about Lucius in either book 1 or 2, and I think what we hear was probably the basis for the years of Cool!Lucius fics. Because we heard this is a guy who was one of LV's intimate circle, yet managed to get himself out of Azkaban by claming Imperius immediately after he disappeared. No wonder we thought he was possibly a badder dude than Voldemort--he was the kingmaker, the guy behind the throne who didn't go down with the ship, not bound by ideology. For some of us--me included--that's a cool thing to watch. The one time Draco really made me smile in DH was when he was fighting with the DE saying, "I'm Draco Malfoy! I'm on your side!" I cheered him on doing that--go get 'em, Draco! Naturally he gets punched for it. But that was the moment where I fleetingly thought I'd like to read about this character in a different universe.
I was watching a number of Film Noirs this weekend and in one Dana Andrews plays a detective who accidentally kills a guy he's interrogating. Even though it was a freak accident he knows he won't get away with it, so he tries to cover it up. He comes back to the apartment to find his partner searching the place, saying the guy must have gone out while Dana Andrews was "checking bars in the neighborhood." Now, another director might have let us know beforehand that the body was hidden in the closet all this time for suspense: Will the partner check the closet? Otto Preminger has Andrews check the closet himself so that we can see the body slumped inside. In the commentary, it's pointed out that this moment really puts us on Andrews' side *because he's so competent at covering himself*--he's taking this big risk, opening the closet while his partner is right there, and then he just says, "Nothing in there," shuts the door and gets away with it. It's great. It's different than making us identify with him because we fear he'll be discovered. We've crossed into admiring his skills in protecting himself and getting away with something.
With the Malfoys, we really never see that--and no, I don't consider Narcissa's one desperate lie about Harry being dead enough, though that's as close as we get. The Malfoys start the book on the chopping block--these slippery folks ought to be looking for an escape getting more and more desperate, imo. Instead, if we didn't know already, we see here more than ever that Slippery!Lucius never really existed. They can't act against Voldemort even to save themselves. They're not schemers or thinkers beyond "What will keep Voldemort happy in the short term?"
I do think that's Rowling's point, probably--many of Voldemort's followers are essentially people in an abusive relationship who can't leave--though she's not really getting into that psychology either. When the Trio shows up at the Manor Lucius and Narcissa are eager to turn them over to "please" Voldemort. But for me it's still a letdown that their imprisonment just kind of ends. Narcissa lies to Voldemort yeah, but frankly, imo, who cares? This is a story about kids so what the hell is up with somebody's mother making things better? It's fine for Harry's mum to save him when he's a baby but Draco spends a whole book in HBP sticking out a bad situation only to become more of a baby than ever in DH, and Narcissa's calculated moment of defiance isn't about survival so much as the short-sighted act of a desperate mother. (Short-sighted only because she just wants to get in to get to Draco; it's not a gambit for some wider agenda.) That seems to be all she stands for: Mother-love. There's nothing particularly Malfoy about it, imo.
It's hard, because obviously the writer can do whatever she wants, and presumably she *wanted* to have the Malfoys reduced to this, wanted them to survive without picking a side except each other, thought this was somehow enough of a "collusion" with Harry to let them wander off as confused about their position as anyone else. I know the obvious answer to anybody who thinks they should have been acting more in their own defense is that they were confused by fanfic and wanted them to be cooler than they ever really were. (And I'm sure there are many who will claim it was absolutely brilliant of JKR to do it this way and anything else would be painfully "unrealistic.")
But I assume these people (like all JKR's characters) are doing what they do, are being who they are. They started the series having slithered out of destruction, they end it the same way. Ever "slippery," they switched sides at the last moment. Only given the way it happens, it leaves me thinking: How do these people continue to survive? It's apparently not because they have any particular skill or cleverness for survival (on the contrary, they're kinda bad at this stuff), it's more just that they seem to have some sort of magical protection from the god of their universe--even if that god is never going to let them learn from their near-misses ever.
Somehow I keep thinking of that scene b/w Dumbledore and Snape about Draco's killing him, and Snape says "Why don't you just let him do it, then?" and Dumbledore twinkles and says something like, "Oh, I don't think his soul is quite so damaged yet" or something like that. I wind up thinking that's the answer to their whole storyline, that the author!god just twinkled and said, "Oh, I don't think their soul is so damaged--it amuses me to let them live." It's like we wind up with a story that to me seems like it could have been an actually compelling subplot and instead it's purposefully not.
I have read stuff since DH about how people liked the Malfoys in it because they were on their own side and not either side. It made me think about why I found this story disappointing.
It wasn't that I was disappointed that they weren't on the good side, I don't think. It was just that the story as told was imo too weak. It seemed like they skipped around from one emotional state to another as needed by the plot, for one thing. Their first scene is imo fantastic, but I think the set up of Lucius looking so wrecked and his family so terrorized kind of calls for them to either go down with Voldemort or do something decisive (and probably risky) to try to get out from under his thumb--not having them do six of one and half dozen of the other and muddling through. They start off in truly dire straights and I kept thinking they would just continue down that road, only to be faced with them looking a lot better later on. This is not the way JKR usually writes her characters throughout a book.
It's the muddling through that I realized was a problem for me. After the book I thought the Malfoys were characters who had the survival ability of cockroaches with absolutely zero survival instinct.
It's possible--very possible given Peter and other things--that JKR doesn't respect these kinds of survivors--rats and cockroaches, iow. I don't think it would be out of line to say that she seems to write Peter and the Malfoys as low-lifes, and she might associate them with the kind of animals that scavenge in garbage etc. and which are therefore less than noble (in the opinion of some--not me). I never get the feeling that she cheers on these kinds of people, so especially with the Malfoys she never makes them active. On the contrary, her version of a survivor (and here I'm not including survivors who are warriors who've lived through battles like Harry or Moody) is basically a coward, someone who's never confident enough to leave or defy anyone (unfortunately for plot purposes, they will sometimes actively make their own situation *worse*--just never better).
We first hear about Lucius in either book 1 or 2, and I think what we hear was probably the basis for the years of Cool!Lucius fics. Because we heard this is a guy who was one of LV's intimate circle, yet managed to get himself out of Azkaban by claming Imperius immediately after he disappeared. No wonder we thought he was possibly a badder dude than Voldemort--he was the kingmaker, the guy behind the throne who didn't go down with the ship, not bound by ideology. For some of us--me included--that's a cool thing to watch. The one time Draco really made me smile in DH was when he was fighting with the DE saying, "I'm Draco Malfoy! I'm on your side!" I cheered him on doing that--go get 'em, Draco! Naturally he gets punched for it. But that was the moment where I fleetingly thought I'd like to read about this character in a different universe.
I was watching a number of Film Noirs this weekend and in one Dana Andrews plays a detective who accidentally kills a guy he's interrogating. Even though it was a freak accident he knows he won't get away with it, so he tries to cover it up. He comes back to the apartment to find his partner searching the place, saying the guy must have gone out while Dana Andrews was "checking bars in the neighborhood." Now, another director might have let us know beforehand that the body was hidden in the closet all this time for suspense: Will the partner check the closet? Otto Preminger has Andrews check the closet himself so that we can see the body slumped inside. In the commentary, it's pointed out that this moment really puts us on Andrews' side *because he's so competent at covering himself*--he's taking this big risk, opening the closet while his partner is right there, and then he just says, "Nothing in there," shuts the door and gets away with it. It's great. It's different than making us identify with him because we fear he'll be discovered. We've crossed into admiring his skills in protecting himself and getting away with something.
With the Malfoys, we really never see that--and no, I don't consider Narcissa's one desperate lie about Harry being dead enough, though that's as close as we get. The Malfoys start the book on the chopping block--these slippery folks ought to be looking for an escape getting more and more desperate, imo. Instead, if we didn't know already, we see here more than ever that Slippery!Lucius never really existed. They can't act against Voldemort even to save themselves. They're not schemers or thinkers beyond "What will keep Voldemort happy in the short term?"
I do think that's Rowling's point, probably--many of Voldemort's followers are essentially people in an abusive relationship who can't leave--though she's not really getting into that psychology either. When the Trio shows up at the Manor Lucius and Narcissa are eager to turn them over to "please" Voldemort. But for me it's still a letdown that their imprisonment just kind of ends. Narcissa lies to Voldemort yeah, but frankly, imo, who cares? This is a story about kids so what the hell is up with somebody's mother making things better? It's fine for Harry's mum to save him when he's a baby but Draco spends a whole book in HBP sticking out a bad situation only to become more of a baby than ever in DH, and Narcissa's calculated moment of defiance isn't about survival so much as the short-sighted act of a desperate mother. (Short-sighted only because she just wants to get in to get to Draco; it's not a gambit for some wider agenda.) That seems to be all she stands for: Mother-love. There's nothing particularly Malfoy about it, imo.
It's hard, because obviously the writer can do whatever she wants, and presumably she *wanted* to have the Malfoys reduced to this, wanted them to survive without picking a side except each other, thought this was somehow enough of a "collusion" with Harry to let them wander off as confused about their position as anyone else. I know the obvious answer to anybody who thinks they should have been acting more in their own defense is that they were confused by fanfic and wanted them to be cooler than they ever really were. (And I'm sure there are many who will claim it was absolutely brilliant of JKR to do it this way and anything else would be painfully "unrealistic.")
But I assume these people (like all JKR's characters) are doing what they do, are being who they are. They started the series having slithered out of destruction, they end it the same way. Ever "slippery," they switched sides at the last moment. Only given the way it happens, it leaves me thinking: How do these people continue to survive? It's apparently not because they have any particular skill or cleverness for survival (on the contrary, they're kinda bad at this stuff), it's more just that they seem to have some sort of magical protection from the god of their universe--even if that god is never going to let them learn from their near-misses ever.
Somehow I keep thinking of that scene b/w Dumbledore and Snape about Draco's killing him, and Snape says "Why don't you just let him do it, then?" and Dumbledore twinkles and says something like, "Oh, I don't think his soul is quite so damaged yet" or something like that. I wind up thinking that's the answer to their whole storyline, that the author!god just twinkled and said, "Oh, I don't think their soul is so damaged--it amuses me to let them live." It's like we wind up with a story that to me seems like it could have been an actually compelling subplot and instead it's purposefully not.
no subject
As for Lucius being an idiot rather than a schemer... see, I can totally see him as an idiot before, too (especially when you remember the sheer ridiculousness of movie!Lucius), though it's hard to imagine why he has power/influence except that it's literally all about breeding and they just happen to be Purebloods.
Well, of course he was always an idiot but the point is you can see where people thought he might not have been. (Not sure what ridiculousness of the movie Lucius you mean so I can't speak to that.) Because this is a guy who was in the inner circle, and seemed to be succeeding the first time around, and then the second Voldemort went down he supposedly made this about face. In the early books it probably was easy to imagine him being actually smooth.
Of course, he wasn't. But I think that's partly something JKR didn't want to write. Even when Lucius has supposedly gotten off he's *obviously* a bad guy. It's not like he's wormed his way into the hearts of good people and has a good reputation, at least it doesn't seem that way. It seems more like he's regarded as a low-life with money.
unless you consider slipping the diary to be an intelligent survival-oriented scheme... isn't it just ridiculous? what did he really think would happen? and in the end Voldy lost a part of his soul
But that scheme wasn't all that ridiculous. What he thought would happen was exactly what did happen--Ginny was possessed into opening the Chamber of Secrets and releasing the basilisk. Had Harry not saved her (and Lucius couldn't have predicted he ever could have done so when he gave her the diary) she probably would have been outed as the one who did it and Arthur would be disgraced and hurt, which seemed to be the idea. Lucius didn't know he was using a piece of Voldemort's soul, so he can't be said to be stupid for using it.
Not that I thought Lucius was a genius either, but I don't think the characterization of him being cool came out of nowhere, wrong as they were.
I dunno what my point is :> I feel like Lucius surviving post war-1 was more the messed-upness of that whole situation rather than Lucius' survivor instincts.
I agree it's basically the plot--and whether he died or not was always going to just be random. (Why do Colin and Lupin and Tonks die but none of the boys in Harry's year? It just happened that way.)
no subject
Movie!Lucius, of course, was outright campy (I thought), with his pimp-cane and long hair and acting 'cool' in an over-the-top way, heh. It's hard for me personally to see what potential/intelligence anyone ever saw in Lucius, but I see how theoretically it -makes sense- that he would be, in terms of his role in the narrative. The thing is, I feel like JKR goes for mocking people she doesn't like most of the time, and this mockery involves making them grotesque or laughable/ineffectual in some way-- even one of her better villains, Umbridge, is laughable (frog-faced, kitten-obsessed, pink-wearing, obsessed with totally silly rules, etc). The only thing that made me take Umbridge seriously for awhile is basically that she had lots of power over Hogwarts. But I think one of the things JKR is generally going for is how hard it is to respect these people in power or take them seriously (and to some degree I see echoes of this with Moody's over-the-top paranoia and Scrimgeour, though now I'm stretching it. Anyway, that's a tangent.
I feel like the Malfoys do have some sway because they're rich and flashy and aristocratic/Pureblooded-- I don't think they're uniformly despised, to their face anyway, though there's probably no love lost between them & the Wizarding world. My point was more, how much did people know what really went on? In a way, Lucius is a 'bad guy', or at least an annoying rich guy, whether or not he's with Voldemort. Maybe it wasn't that hard to manipulate the Ministry back then anymore than it proved difficult with Scrimgeour and Fudge-- they've always been corrupt, right? And the people were confused, and everyone wanted the whole war over with, I imagine, plus they were just wrong about some big things like what happened at Godric's Hollow. So it couldn't have been that difficult to grease the wheels. Of course, I have much mental resistance to thinking well of Lucius :>
But letting out the basilisk to hurt Arthur? It isn't that much better, though it's true I forgot he couldn't have known about the horcruxes (I believe at one point people thought maybe he knew). It's sneaky to a similar degree that Draco's sneaky-- I mean, they -are- sneaky and scheming, I just don't know how much real cunning and forward thinking I see. I remember when people thought maybe Lucius told Draco not to antagonize Potter (did he say that?) because it's politically incorrect, but I dunno how far removed Lucius is from that himself. But who knows. I probably can discuss Fudge more lucidly than Lucius, haha, 'cause at least there's no fandom baggage to fight against in my head. ^^;;
no subject